What is Pipeline?
What do you like best about Pipeline CRM?
Reasonably affordable and very easy to setup and use. Implemented quickly with very little assistance. Very intuitive to use. Custom fields work great and by far the best part of the product is the relationship between company, deal, and people records–far better than almost every other CRM I looked at. Makes reporting very strong. Also love the ability to do simple bulk personalized marketing email campaigns directly from the product. While the application lacks some functionality that we would like, it is very strong in other areas. Ease-of-use is a key benefit as is the intuitive way the system works. The core functionality and workflow mirrors our business very well. The addition of multiple sales cycles has been awesome. We don’t use task assignment functionality but could be useful in the future. Reporting capability is also very strong with the ability to reconfigure reports with a few simple clicks. Also really appreciate the effort to update the product. New features are introduced at a steady rate. Lastly, customer support is always friendly and as helpful as they can be. Love working with this product–very often the application has the ability to do what I want to do, or easily create new fields that will accomodate our needs.
My team and I use the email integration and deal flow management to manage large quantities of sales contacts on our sales team. It is a more comprehensive tool than Hubspot, which we previously used.
We like and need the capabilities that the Salesforce CRM provides; however, we ONLY need those capabilities for our Marketing and Sales departments. We do not require a full enterprise suite of services. After reviewing all of the Cloud-based CRM services available, it became clear to us that PLD provided everything we wanted and needed from Salesforce but at a fraction of the cost, and with a far more simple, user-friendly, intuitive ‘out of the box’ interface and experience. While considering Salesforce as our CRM solution, we realized that we were going to have to hire a Salesforce Specialist to help us ‘set up’ or tailor the Salesforce interface for our culture and needs. This was a huge additional cost and a large ‘time suck’. PLD came out of the box with very little tailoring required and allowed us to hit the ground running and apply its CRM capabilities immediately. The shortlist of attributes that we were looking for and received from PLD were as follows:
1) Cloud Based
2) Mobile Phone App interface with automatic phone mapping capabilities making it easy to find the next appointment on the go.
3) Interface with our Email client allowing us to maintain an email history germane to each client or Deal.
4) A good ‘Tickler System’ for timely follow ups and keeping track of all opportunries.
5) A very intuitive means for organizing Companies, Contacts, Deals and associating the right people with each Deal.
6) Good tools for organizing and viewing the CRM data base and Pipeline is a variety of customized ways.
7). Many more….
Hands down … ease of use. I was able to be up and running within minutes, and within a day or two, I was about 90% proficient in using it. It allowed me to enter and modify my teams deals/forecast without having to read anything, and even reports are easy to create, modify and execute instantaneously.
What do you dislike about Pipeline CRM?
Dislike is too strong of a word. There are deficiencies as with any product. Trade-offs. Like many of the affordable CRMs, there is a lack of true full integration with other products–or at least the ones we need. We really wanted easy two-way integration with our customer support ticketing system and also QuickBooks (sharing customer records and ticket info for example). We still have separate applications and multiple databases (e.g. multiple places store customer information). Additionally, it would be nice if there was more formal document management functionality.
The UI of Pipeline Deals is not very user-friendly, in my opinion. It took me a lot of “playing around” to figure out the workflow and different views available for me to use.
It would be nice if it was easier to organize Mass Email lists and campaigns.
I have no complaints but you will need to talk to my accounting dept regarding price. For something this good, pricing might be an issue.
What problems is Pipeline CRM solving and how is that benefiting you?
First, we needed to replace an old and functionally limited CRM. PipelineDeals is a huge improvement over our old system. We wanted something with good record structure and easy to use custom fields. PipelineDeals is strong in this area. Second, we wanted a CRM that our sales team would use. Biggest problem with all CRMs. Happy to say, the team likes the system and regularly uses it to help them manage their opportunities. The mobile app helps a lot with this and works well. Third, we needed a simple platform to do marketing email campaigns. This required a strong interaction between customer, deal, and people records. Very happy with how this has worked out. Great functionality and quick and easy to use.
Our sales team switched to Pipeline Deals from Hubspot, primarily for the deal-tracking capability (i.e. the ability to keep front and center the $$$$ we are collectively working toward.)
It has been a good CRM tool for us for several years. I can’t imagine managing our Sales and Marketing efforts without it.
Features
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Internal Chat Integration
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Pros
Cons
$29.00 /month
Yes, has free trial
No free version