Founded in 2006, Pipeline CRM (formerly PipelineDeals) is a CRM for small and midsize businesses, empowering sales teams across a breadth of industries to build game changing relationships. Pipeline is built around a customizable user experience, sales focused features, and customer support and service. The vendor, headquartered in Seattle, boasts 18,000 users in 60 countries who use Pipeline to gain visibility into their sales, accelerate opportunities, and close more deals.
$29
per month
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a platform for sales with a community of Sellers, Sales Leaders, and Sales Operations, who use the solution to grow sales and increase productivity. The AI CRM for Sales features data built right in, so that companies can sell faster, sell smarter and sell efficiently. Salesforce Sales Cloud is used for, and supports: Buyer Engagement Sales Engagement Enablement Sales AI Sales Analytics Team…
The cost is much better and it is much easier to use. Salesforce was way too robust and I never want to hire a consultant to set up a CRM. PipelineDeals CRM has the best visibility of our sales efforts.
SFDC was just too expensive and "too much." Insightly was not comprehensive enough, and we found an awful lot of bugs (this was a year ago+). QuickBase is actually excellent, but it requires an advanced technical person to manage and use, such as a QB Developer, and we wanted a …
PipelineDeals is cleaner looking than Salesforce or Cbiz and offers comparable customization. But PipelineDeals will also now be able to integrate with MailChimp, which is very good for our purposes, and while we can't get all the customization we'd like out of it, we've been …
If you have a small business where you are trying to keep things simple, then PipelineDeals is a perfect fit. Once you get to where you are wanting to tie your marketing efforts and create marketing campaigns that are tied to leads, it starts to miss the mark
Obviously, for any business, there are two main areas to focus on — the sales path and the service path. Sales Cloud wouldn’t be suited for a company that’s primarily into support services. For those kinds of companies, Salesforce has a different product — Service Cloud. So, for anyone in the support or service space, Sales Cloud isn’t the right fit.
The customizations - We have an organization that operates differently from most companies, so we’ve had to implement quite a few customizations — and Salesforce allows us to do that quite quickly. Most of the time, delays come from dependencies on other internal parties rather than the system itself.
From my perspective as a consultant, one of the biggest advantages is that everything is in Salesforce — all the details, all in one place. The ability to customize it easily is a big plus; there’s really a lot you can do with it.
I wouldn't say no areas for improvement exist, but I will say that PipelineDeals takes customer input, shared product roadmap, and supports what they have very nicely. What they provide works out-of-the-box. Improvements can always be made with respect to pre-packaged integration with 3rd party services/solutions, and with extended attributes, but you also want to avoid something that attempts to boil the ocean.
We still need to include the production part. We started using Salesforce to sell the seeds — our inventory is in SAP — and from there we handle sales and track the process of planting, harvesting, selling, and then collecting payments. But we don’t yet manage the earlier production processes, like production planning. We handle allocation, but not full production planning, and that’s an area where we still have room for improvement.
If we can integrate and easily export and clean all of our data such that it can be used for multiple purposes, i.e. outreach to guests, sending out newsletters to subscribers, doing research and tracking progress, we will definitely renew
There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.
The user interface is simple and easy to navigate. Anyone who is overwhelmed with some of the more complicated CRM systems will definitely enjoy the simplicity of what PipelineDeals has to offer
Because I think it could be easier. We have different standards today since we’re used to interacting with consumer apps like Starbucks, where all you do is scan your card. Then, when you use Sales Cloud, there are still a lot of manual inputs. So my mission with AI is really about figuring out how to make that easier.
Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.
Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day." Points per Salesforce - 1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs. 2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers. 3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years. 4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed. 5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale. 6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com. 7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements. 8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training. 9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure
The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.
I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.
I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business
I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.
We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this
Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.
The cost is much better and it is much easier to use. Salesforce was way too robust and I never want to hire a consultant to set up a CRM. PipelineDeals CRM has the best visibility of our sales efforts.
So I've evaluated, implemented Microsoft Dynamics in the past. I've used Oracle CRM solutions. I've used Daylight, which is a very niche CRM system the last couple of years. And I've evaluated a variety from Legacy Microsoft Ones to Zoho and Sugar when making implementation decisions at other companies. But usually I've gone with Salesforce. I'd say it's better than most. The only one that I generally prefer, and last time I chose an implementation from scratch, I did Microsoft Dynamics. And the reason is for small mid-size organization, Microsoft Dynamics, if you already have Microsoft Office products, it's much better integrated to all of the Excel, Word, OneNote, Outlook email than what you get from Salesforce. And so that's the only one that if someone's a Microsoft organization and small sized company, it'll save a lot of integration things, a lot of security, a lot of login and access and IT management by just sticking within the Microsoft ecosystem. But outside of that, if you don't use Microsoft or if you're a large organization or have other needs that you want, Salesforce I'd say is better than all of the other CRM offerings out there. It's the easiest to use and the most robust and the most vendors and products for the ecosystem.
Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.
It's very scalable as it has a ton of features (but you do need an admin who understands how to leverage these features). Because of the various features, we've also needed to host onboarding sessions with our users so that they can familiarize themselves with the platform, which isn't always super user-friendly or intuitive.
Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.
