Building the future: Apprenticeships

I learned web development via an apprenticeship with Comcast, though it was not called an apprenticeship. On my first day at Comcast, my first post-university job, I was handed Agile Web Development With Rails and told to learn it. A month or two later, I was taking my first fledgling flights, contributing real code to the project. Each step of the way, I was guided by experts who had been honing their craft for decades.

What an exhilarating way to learn! I had two Bachelors degrees in Engineering Science and Electrical Engineering, but my coding experience was slight. And while I still believe my university education helped expand my mind and teach me to think, I truly believe that apprenticeship taught me the actual art of Computer Science far better than a traditional Comp Sci degree would have. Even more awesome, I was paid to learn, instead of the reverse!

Someday, PipelineDeals would love to be able to offer an official apprenticeship program. Why?

• We believe that an apprenticeship could be an excellent complement to (or even areplacement for, depending on the field) a traditional bachelor's degree.
• We like to think that we've tapped into a pretty great way of producing quality software; a way that's proven to work more effectively than the strategies (or lack thereof) often taught in traditional learning institutions.
• Creating an apprenticeship program around our process would help us improve it, and then produce workers who have tremendous insight and ability to work within & improve it further.

Interested in exploring an apprenticeship at PipelineDeals? Drop us a line at apprentice@pipelinedealsco.com.

We're excited to see other companies rediscover this often overlooked education path. P'unk Ave, a Philadelphia-based web development company, recently announced a six-month apprenticeship program that they'll offer on an ongoing basis. Apprentices will work full-time with P'unk Ave and be compensated $2000 per month. Bravo, P'unk Ave!

What are your thoughts on apprenticeship? Could it be an effective way to train eager learners the best way to sell something? If you've heard of other companies offering apprenticeships, we'd love to hear about them! Let us know in the comments.

Image credit: National Archives and Records Administration, cataloged under the ARC Identifier (National Archives Identifier) 558535.

New report to track and manage sales activity!

In our previous blog post, we mentioned some upcoming reporting improvements, and we weren’t kidding around. We’re very excited to announce a special new report that will help you track activity trends for your team.

We call it the Activity Scoreboard and it will become your go-to report to track your team’s activity.

This simple and powerful report will help you answer questions like:

• How many activities did my team create last month and how much business did we close?
• Did we make more cold calls this month or last month?
• Is our new employee picking up steam and contributing more?
• Which activity are driving more won business, Cold Calls or Face-to-Face appointments?

Here is how it works:

The Activity Scoreboard can be found in the Reports tab. When you visit the report, you will be presented with a simple sentence filter to change what the chart displays. The default view will show you all activities you have permission to see. As an Executive user or Manager, you’ll be able to view everything for your team for all time. The custom date range selector will make it easy to review any previous date range so you can compare previous performance.

On the right side of the report you will find the familiar Simple and Advanced Toggles as well as the option to select columns. Every activity category will be in the view by default, but you can remove non-essential categories if you want to measure specific types of sales activity. For example you could choose to look at a chart for your whole team’s Cold Calls, Re-Calls, and Appointments for the last month.

Below the chart, you will find a table for all the users in your account. This table will total the number of activities as well as the total value of Deals actually closed and lost for the filtered date range.

Finally, you can save your favorite filters using the the advanced option.

We hope this new report helps provide your team valuable insight into the sales activities that drive won business.

Happy selling!

Coming Soon: Reporting Revamp! Retiring Deal Milestone Reports

Reporting is one of the key features of a CRM. What’s the point of entering information if you don’t have the ability to analyze and view it?

PipelineDeals already offers some great reporting capabilities, and we’re excited to announce the first in a series of changes that will greatly increase and improve the functionality of reporting through the app.

The Deal Milestone Report has been with us since almost the beginning of PipelineDeals. Although it can be used to see the events you have coming up for each deal, we find that it is actually easier and more effective to use other parts of our site to work with your tasks and events. For example, if you go to the calendar tab, you can quickly and easily see all of your tasks and events for the month.

By clicking the checkboxes at the bottom of the screen, you will be able to see your colleagues’ tasks and events as well! They will be color coded to make it easy to distinguish who is working on what.

Another way to see a list of all of your tasks and events is via the To Do list. You can access this anytime you’re working with tasks and events, whether it be from the home page, a person, deal or company profile page, or even the calendar tab! Simply click “See all” and it will take you there.

Here you can see a list of all of your tasks and events. You can mark them complete, postpone, edit or delete them by clicking their name (1), see their relevant contact information by clicking the contact card (2), and even use the filter sentence at the top to view them based on a certain criteria (3), such as ones due tomorrow assigned to a certain coworker.

Since you can view your tasks and events much more easily and effectively using the methods described above, we will be retiring the Deal Milestone Report this Thursday, March 7th.

There are several new features and improvements on the way as part of our Reporting Revamp, so keep an eye out on our blog for more exciting announcements. Thanks for using PipelineDeals, and as always, please be sure to let us know what you think!