Custom Fields for People are here!

The much-requested feature of custom fields for People Profile pages has arrived! As of today, administrators can add up to 25 personalized data fields to track anything from favorite sports teams to credit scores for every person in their PipelineDeals database.

How does it work?

We took the familiar look of custom fields for Deals and added the same functionality to People. Account administrators can add up to 25 specific custom fields for People at any time.

It’s important to note that these custom fields apply to People only. They do not correspond to any custom fields you may already have for Deals. Because these fields are defined by the Account Administrator, they are the same for every Person and can be made mandatory. Administrators can get started by visiting the Settings Menu >> Admin >> Person Custom Fields.

Custom fields will display prominently on People Profile pages, right below the Notes section. 

Custom fields will also appear in CSV exports and be available for importing, as long as they are created in your account before you upload a contact list. 

Keep up the great feedback!

We designed PipelineDeals to be simple and easy to use. Our goal has always been to provide a smart alternative to bloated CRMs like ACT and SalesForce. They have hundreds of rarely used data fields, and a recent export from Outlook confirms they still list “Car Phone” and “Pager” as standard contact fields!

But simplicity is only the beginning of making PipelineDeals work the way you need it to, and we’re very happy to add this new element of customization. We also plan to support including these new custom fields in the People List View, so stay tuned.

Busy first week of February

We took a quick look this week to see just how active our users were during February. We are always interested to see just how much selling is going on in the world. While single data points can be misleading, we still thought these numbers were interesting enough to share. Just looking a deals, people and notes (we didn't look at companies this time around) we saw the following numbers:

569,543 total records updated in a week's time.

That breaks down as:

327,450 people records.
179,205 note records.
62,888 deal records. 

One very interesting thing is the degree to which People get touched relative to other elements of a deal. This is one number that brings home the fact that selling is a "people" business first.

February is turning out to be busy for business who use PipelineDeals. Perhaps we need to hire some sort of economist to see if this can be some sort of leading economic indicator of future business revenue. Or, probably not, let's just focus on how we can make the application faster and better...

Latest and Greatest from PipelineDeals

After nearly six years of building PipelineDeals, we continue to grow at an amazing clip. Last year, we surpassed 2,000 companies with paid accounts using our application to close more deals with less effort. We developed a huge amount of new functionality and launched a completely fresh iteration of PipelineDeals in December. We also hired our ninth employee and are currently looking for a tenth.

All in all, 2011 was good to PipelineDeals, and we look forward to more exciting developments in 2012. Of course we know that none of this would be possible without our awesome customers. So, thank you!

Feature Improvements in January

Those of you who have been customers for a while know that we regularly ship out fixes and enhancements to PipelineDeals. January was no different. Here are just a few of the most notable features that went live in January:

     •  Improved Company Profile Page that displays all Deals, enables filtering, and provides a
         complete view of all related documents
     •  Inline/workflow editing functionality on the People Profile Page
     •  Bulk action capability on the People List View
     •  Admin level option to prohibit team members from deleting account data
     •  Significant API improvements

Next up in February

We plan to keep on investing in our goal of making PipelineDeals the best sales tool on the planet. This month you can expect to see the following improvements make their debut from behind the curtain of code:

     •  New and improved Notes Report
     •  Custom Fields in People Profiles

Further down the road, but not too far

For the rest of 2012, we will be looking at building bridges from PipelineDeals. We are reaching out to complementary applications and firming up uses cases and business requirements for integration. We’ll keep you updated as we prioritize these projects, set time frames for launch, and start building. Please let us know in the comments what applications or services you’d most like to see integrated with PipelineDeals. Email providers? Social networks? Project management applications?

What else would you like to see?

We firmly believe that you, the customers, are the true owners of PipelineDeals. So, here’s another chance for you to help mold the direction of the application:

     •  What else do you want to see from PipelineDeals?
     •  What could we be doing better?
     •  What areas are we not focusing in that you think we should be?

We always welcome your feedback in our support forum, which we participate in every day, but we’d love to spark a broader discussion here on the blog. Let us know what you think in the comments. Or feel free to drop us a note to customercare@pipelinedeals.com.

Here comes the freshly updated PipelineDeals!

We have been talking about an update to PipelineDeals for the past few months called the Jupiter Release. Well, the has come to launch these changes for all to see and use. Starting tomorrow all new trial accounts on PipelineDeals will be launched on the new and improved application.

We will then begin migrating all existing PipelineDeals accounts, those who signed up before Sunday, Dec. 12, 2011. We will begin these migrations overnight on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2011 and continue the migrations in batches each night until they are complete. We will email you twice: once before the migration and then again after all your data has been successfully migrated. Please note that we will temporarily lock your PipelineDeals account while we migrate your account to the new version of PipelineDeals.

Quick video overview

We know your time is valuable and have created this short, less than two and a half minute video, summarizing the major changes to PipelineDeals:

What did we change again?

These are the major changes coming to all PipelineDeals accounts in the comings days:

     •  New People tab replacing Contacts and Leads (but don't worry - you can still flag people as
         leads and easily pull up a list of leads!)
     •  New Companies tab to help you track all your deals, relationships, and interactions with
         individual companies in one place.
     •  Ability to filter your lists of Deals, People and Companies using a simple sentence structure at
         the top of each tab.
     •  Ability to roll up multiple deals under a Company or Person.
     •  Enhanced design focused on making common actions faster and easier.

We look forward to hearing what you think! And if you have any questions, feel free to email us or give us a call at (866) 702-7303.

Thank you for using PipelineDeals!

Coming Soon: Jupiter Release - Company Tab

PipelineDeals will soon revolve around three primary things: Deals, Companies and People. Our customers have made it clear that they want to see a comprehensive view of a Company with all the data in one place. The soon to be released Company tab now makes this request a reality.

Introducing the Company list view on the Company tab

Adding a tab is no small decision, but based on feedback from customers and from watching how people use the app it was clear that we needed to make the change and promote the concept of a Company to its own tab. The Company tab will display a list of companies in your account. You can sort and filter your companies using the simple sentence structure filter up top. You can add a company or import a bunch of companies at once all on this view.

Another cool feature is you can customize your view a bit with the "Choose columns" link in the top right hand corner. As always you will be able to export as well with no hassle.

All company data in one place

Clicking on a company's name with take you to the company profile page. The company profile pages show you a global view of everything going on with that specific company. All deals, tasks and events, correspondence, people and documents will be found in one place on the company profile page. You and your team will now have a complete view of any company in your pipeline. You can also add companies you are targeting that you want to keep track of and try to sell into but don't have a specific deal or person at the company...yet!

New with Jupiter we will introduce three key company level metrics: total pipeline, won $ and last contact. In addition you now have the ability to merge companies to eliminate any duplicates in your database.

Companies can be seen by all

One decision we made is to make sure that a Company is seen by all team members in an account regardless of your role (executive, manager or basic). We wanted to share the Company profiles to help increase communication within a sales team and reduce any potential for duplicative efforts by different sales people. While all team members will be able to see that a company exists, the visibility permissions for the three different roles will stay intact for deals, notes, people and any task/events.

We will be working to make this Company feature richer in the months to come but we think the Company Tab and improved Company Profile Page in the upcoming Jupiter release will be a great start.

Stay tuned for more Jupiter specific updates next week. We are working our hardest to see that we roll out Jupiter for all accounts this year.