Sales Pipeline Management isn’t the same as CRM even though most people put the two together. Actually they get confused by all the B/S they come across on the web. Unfortunately there are too many who know nothing about either publishing about both. So the world has this murky picture of contact management, sales force automation, customer service, and customer relationship management.
We’re at the very heart of the maelstrom, because we’ve built software which is really quite good at all of these concepts – for the right people. It’s also pretty crap at those things for the wrong people.
Lets look at the different dimensions you might want something to help with.
CRM is a big company concept.
If you’re a CFO or a CIO or a VP in a big company the right answer for you is salesforce.com, or Oracle CRM, or SAP CRM, or Sugar, or Netsuite or whatever. None of that stuff will be easy to make work, but that’s not our problem. Good Luck. CRM is designed to gather and consolidate information about what’s happening where the bigger business interfaces with customers. It does include contact management and some sales force automation, but in a proscriptive command and control type approach.
Contact Management is a personal need.
There are more options here than you can shake a stick at. Gmail, Wave, Buzz, Twitter, Facebook. Keeping records of names, addresses, conversations and todo items is Outlook territory, and that’s why Gmail such a good fit. There’s no real “management”, but that doesn’t matter when all we need is an address book and calendar.
Sales Pipeline Management is a Smaller Business Process.
Similar to the strengths of big company crm, but with the flexibility and ease of use needed by smaller teams, sales pipeline management focuses on upcoming deals. It helps users plan, act and review progress to a successful close. It helps them allocate resources and assign tasks. It helps them consolidate all their information – plans, tasks, correspondence, documents and notes – where it can easily be found, and shared. In the process it does a good job of contact management and genuinely enables management of customer relationships.
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