Pipeline Deals - The Sales Tool to Manage your Deals

I was  reading the latest issue of HBR, which focuses exclusively on Sales. One article, entitled Making the Major Sale, lays out an eight step process to help with large or complex sales. The third step is "Developing the sales strategy". In order to do so, it's important to have clear picture what is going on with the sales relationship - the Strategic Sales Opportunity Profile is the answer.

The Strategic Sales Opportunity Profile contains information about those contacted, notes , action items, and the like. Back when this piece was written, the Strategic Sales Opportunity Profile was probably just a simple form. But in the age of the Internet, it looks more like PipelineDeals.com.

Pipeline is "the sales tool to manage your deals". It's not a CRM and it is specifically developed for small to medium sized businesses.

One of the reasons I really like Pipeline is because it presents information in the "simple form" way. Each deal exists within its own Deal Notebook. All of the information - Deal Summary, Lists, People, Milestones, etc - are accessible from one page. It gives a quick snapshot of what's going on.

Of course, it also has some analytics because after all, the point of the tool is to give businesses a better view into their sales pipeline. Users get a bird's eye view of all deals when viewing the Reports tab. They also can look at the Deal Status and Deal Stage reports.

I only have one real problem with Pipeline and it's in regards to its pricing. The pricing structure is based on the number of deals you can manage - it's completely free up to 10 deals. The issue for me is that Pipeline does not distinguish between active and historical deals. So, if you had 25 deals in the system but were actually only managing 4, you'd need to pay the $12/month (which is still relatively reasonable). If Pipeline wants to keep users over the long-run, they are going to need to figure out how to "deactivate" deals and make them read only. Pipeline assures me that they are thinking that through.

Give PipelineDeals.com a try and let me know what you think.

Comments

[PipelineDeals.com]

Pipeline launched Deal Archiving this morning. Deal Archiving is available as a benefit for all paid plans.

This allows users to deactive deals and not have them count against their paid plans. Archived deals also do not show up in reports.

We think this will be a great benefit to our customers and definitely needed as Ken points out in the post.

[kyarmosh]

FYI...after following up with PipelineDeals.com, they also informed me that deals can be reactivated. Of course, those I assume would then count towards the total number of deals managed.

[Andy]

I also like the look of pipeline. My biggest beef is it doesn't come as a standalone application. That means I can only get to it if I have access to an Internet connection. So if there's a network problem, or I'm travelling - I'm potentially dead in the water. Those are the logical reasons - the emotional reason is I don't want to pay a monthly fee; which is of course exactly what the creators DO want. I also don't like having my data stored on someone else's machine. While it may or may not be the case that it's actually safer (from storage mishaps), it's now susceptible to being hacked. Plus lets face it, no matter how professional an organization is, people look at your data from time to time. Sometimes it's because they have a job to do and your data happens to be there, other times curiosity gets the best of people - it's just human nature to be curious. Bottom line - I want a standalone version I can run on my PC without being forced to use the web; and I shouldn't need to justify why.