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Today we learn a few things from Nikolaus Kimla CEO and founder of Pipeliner CRM, a new software built to help salespeople improve their sales pipeline.
Q: Please tell us a little bit about your company – what is Pipeliner CRM all about?
The reason we built Pipeliner CRM—We knew that there must be a better way to help businesses leverage the profitable traits of salespeople — entrepreneurism, self-motivation, and action-orientation. We call these individuals “salespreneurs”. They are, after all, the people on the front line of the revenue stream. We understand the power of the entrepreneurial personality, and we’re building worktools that capitalize on the way salespeople make decisions and create processes. We’re designing our CRM system to appeal to the ways salespeople think and work. Instead of top-down, management-heavy CRM directives that make salespeople cringe and turn into box-checking automatons, Pipeliner CRM is built on the notion that salespeople naturally want to sell — in fact, they’re driven to it organically. Pipelinersales CRM is built to support a dynamic relationship between the sales team and the organization’s top-level business strategies.
Q: Please tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
Over the last 40 years I created six businesses, three of which are still going strong today. My experience in the software industry goes back over 20 years to the founding of uptime ITechnology. Through this work at uptime I learned software development from the ground up and the company has been a resounding success. Following the project of World Check (World Check was acquired by Thomson Reuters 2011), which uptime has completed developed and overseen the IT for more than 10 years and still working today on it, my attention turned to sales—for I felt that salespeople were seriously undervalued and unsupported in today’s business world.
Thus began the 8-year journey that ultimately resulted in Pipeliner CRM. Being both an entrepreneur and a sales veteran myself, I quickly grasped the concept that salespeople actually are entrepreneurs within the enterprise. They, too, are able to see and innovatively seize opportunities others never would; they seek to create their own incomes and wouldn’t have it any other way; they are capable of weighing risk versus reward, and instinctively knowing when to actively pursue an opportunity. I set out to not only change the way the world thinks of salespeople, but to actually empower salespeople as the entrepreneurs they actually are.
Three of my primary life journeys—as an entrepreneur, a software developer and as a salesperson and sales manager—finally coalesced into the development of Pipeliner CRM.
Q: What are some of the projects you are working on right now?
Series A and the Sales Education Academy as the company is rooted in a belief that the real way to strengthen skills is to educate. Currently we educate in our product, in an extensive Sales Reference Library, through ebooks, and our blog and are looking to greatly expand in this area of education.
Q: What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
With a distribution model based on partners and our go-to market strategy
Q: How do you bring ideas to life?
Through the exceptional team that I am able to execute them over and through the go-to-market-strategy.
Q: What’s one trend that really excites you?
The trend that I am seeing in our own business through the responses from partners saying that we have a wonderful tool.
Q: How do you go about marketing your business, and what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
Our most successful marketing comes directly from our mission to educate salespeople. By creating useful sales content, in the form of our Website, our Blog, our content Library, across our Social Channels and even in our Product– we are able to provide useful value. That value, in turn, creates the positive effect of traffic, engagement and ultimately conversion towards growing our business.
Q: Please share some tips or advice for new startups on how to attract the press and get media attention.
The best advice is to first identify the key media influencers in your particular industry. Then utilize a tool such as Pipeliner CRM to nurture these relationship though social media and traditional media avenues.
Q: What are three books you recommend entrepreneurs to read?
Two books that I have authored: Evolution in Progress: How the Entrepreneur is Changing the World and Salespeople Embracing It All, as well as Managing Performing Living: Effective Management for a New Era by Fredmund Malik
Q: What is your favorite entrepreneurship quote?
A quote of my own:
“Failure is the invitation to start again.” - Nikolaus Kimla
Q: How can our community get in touch with you?
Email: nikolaus.kimla@pipelinersales
Twitter @kimlanikolaus
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