As we continue our series on Pipeliner concepts, we’ll now cover another totally unique function: productProduct Product refers to anything (an idea, item, service, process or information) that meets a need or a desire and is offered to a market, usually but not always at a price. and price lists. Pipeliner is the only CRM offering that allows you to create an extremely flexible product list—one in which you can attach products to different pipelines and product lines.
Product Categories
Your products fall into product categories, and these must be created before anything else.
Pipeliner allows you to create these different categories, making products easier to find.
Creating Product Lists
After product categories have been created, you can then organize the products you have in your system.
Within product lists, you can assign SKU numbers and descriptions to products. Plus, Pipeliner allows you to easily import and export products from your lists. This can also be done over APIs.
Probably the most essential function of the creation of product lists is product correlation to different Pipeliner processes. A product may apply to all pipelines, or perhaps only to one specific pipelinePipeline Sales pipelineis a visual representation of the stage prospects are in the sales process.. It can also happen (and often does) that different company divisions have separate product lines.
Traditionally, only one pipeline was available within CRM. This was because many companies corralled salespeople into a single sales processSales Process Sales Process is a series of strategic steps or a set of activities aimed at driving sales growth through the alignment of personnel, market insight, methodologies, relevant business units, and technology.. For Pipeliner, this was conceptually the most significant barrier we had to overcome because a salesperson is not selling a process, but a product. Hence, (as we covered in our previous article), we created multiple pipelines, to which products could be assigned where they actually applied.
As an example, General Electric would not have a single sales process for its entire product line. Clearly, there is no chance that a jet engine would have the same sales process as a medical device.
Formulating Price Lists
Once products have been properly categorized and listed, price lists can then be created. A price list can be created and edited at any time.
For flexibility, forms and fields can be easily and rapidly customized for each product. You can also set up product line items so they can be instantly associated with particular opportunities.
Summarizing these functions, Pipeliner CRM enables rapid and flexible
- categorization
- organizationOrganization Organization is a cohesive group of people working together and formally bound by a shared identity (e.g., one team, company, club, etc.) and a common purpose (e.g., business growth, athletic victory, etc.).
- price-lists
- line items
