Late yesterday, Mike McDerment CEO of Freshbooks gave me advance notice about a partnership his billing management company Freshbooks has inked with deal management vendor Pipelinedeals. I didn’t have time to think about it until now and in the meantime, Stowe Boyd has saved me the time and effort of having to plough through Pipeline’s features by cranking out a shortish review. Thanks Stowe.
I’m not quite as picky as Stowe about the use of language in the application though I can well understand why terms like ‘Calendar’ could readily be substituted for ‘Date Book’ without anyone quibbling. One area I’m 100% with Stowe is on the need to include potential customers in the deal process:
And of course I believe that a deeper take of the social dimension would enrich the tool, greatly. For example, imagine if you could invite the potential clients into the sales process? They could access the various docs you were providing them, for example, and you could discuss things online, using the project note capabilities. This model is more or less what people do after a project starts — with tools like Basecamp — so why can’t it start earlier? At the very least, I would like to have an email account associated with each project, so I could add a bcc to emails that I am sending off to potential clients, for example.
Looking at how contacts are organised in Pipelinedeals, it doesn’t look to be that much of an issue, provided the developers can screen off sensitive documents or include some simple workflow to allow inclusion or exclusion as the occasion arises. And yes – email would help, as would IM.
It’s a logical step for team based service businesses to use some sort of deal management and glancing through the feature set alongside reading Stowe’s overview, I get the impression Pipelinedeals has ticked most of the right boxes from a salesperson’s perspective. And that’s important because to date, CRM (of which this is a subset) has done a miserable job of taking the sales person’s perspective. Net-net, CRM has not been the roaring success it’s been hype up to be.
The partnership makes sense, because once you have the order, you want to get billing. But consummating this marriage will require care.Pipelinedeals talks about the steps the two companies are taking to bring these services together. I’m hesitant. The 4 step process is business savvy but the integration part is where the crunch work will happen. This is where we find out whether SaaS can be made to work across different applications.
The key will be in providing the user with a seamless experience. The worst thing they could do is to retain the individual interfaces – which are different – and only provide what amounts to a second application launch capability, even if the account data gets shovelled from the deal management into the invoicing app.
The other consideration will be price harmonisation. As services proliferate and people buy into more of these, the overall cost to the user will rise as they pay for each discrete service. Bringing the two apps together may make logical sense for everyone concerned but it will expose the cost issue. How the two manage this will be interesting and informative.
Nevertheless, congratulations to the two vendors in recognising that there is power and value in bringing different requirements together in a non-competitve, collaborative manner. One to watch.
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