A CRM for something other than sales
June 25, 2014

A CRM for something other than sales

Brian Welk | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with PipelineDeals CRM

We're a media company that regularly invites individuals to appear on our radio show or to blog for our site, and we use Pipeline Deals to keep a database of all the people we've invited or who have worked with us or communicated with us in the past. We compile contact information and organize people based on industry and title and can easily browse in order to determine who to invite. We also use it to keep track of communications in a common place.

Pros

  • It allows you to create a high level of custom fields specific to your own needs. Our purpose for its use is not strictly sales, so to still be able to use it in a way that's organized and provides all the information we need about an individual is very strong.
  • Browsing through large groups is fairly simple. I can create custom filters to sift through the entire database and find a custom list of people whom I want to contact. It's very simple if you know you only want to find people of a certain type or who you contacted within a certain amount of time.
  • I like the ability to create tasks and events tied to specific individuals I'm in touch with as opposed to an unorganized To-Do list. It's easy to know when to follow-up, contact, etc.
  • The ability to BCC PipelineDeals so that all emails or communications are linked with that individuals specific file works well and could be very useful to many individuals.

Cons

  • Unlike Salesforce, PipelineDeals isn't as good about tying other people's contact info and communications to a single person, for instance creating accounts for a company and then having multiple people within that company. If this functionality exists and I'm not proficient with it, I'm not clear on the best way to keep it all organized and it isn't obvious.
  • It is strictly a sales CRM, so there are many features that aren't particularly relevant outside of a sales setting, such as dollars within a pipeline or Hot/Cold markers that aren't that great of markers or notifications for the things I require.
  • More organization and efficiency
  • Quicker operations
  • Deeper insights into databases, data
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 able to use it for many purposes.
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.
It's very suited if you are doing sales, and it can be applied to other use cases in terms of outreach, as I've been able to do, but it's not a perfect fit and it will require some customization to get the best use out of it, but that's likely true of any CRM.

Comments

More Reviews of Pipeline CRM