We are asked many times at Tubular, “What made you build a sales funnel CRM software in an industry that seems busy.” The answer is frustration. Frustration that CRM and sales software appears to be a control mechanism inserted into organizations without any particular division seeming to understand, or really care for, the organization objectives from adopting a CRM. From the thousands of conversations we’ve had with our clients since developing Tubular, we have learnt that many people shared our frustration. The most common question being…

Why are the existing CRM softwares so complex and difficult to use, and why does CRM implementation detract from the job many companies have to sell?

Those who follow the latest trends in sales will know that the traits which contribute to a successful sale tend to be resoundingly personal traits that can be attributed to the learned or natural skills of the sales person. Included are these traits:

• Confidence

• Tone

• Trustworthiness

• Authenticity

All of these personal characteristics are not features within a CRM. Yet stumble upon a CRM landing page and you are given the false impression that implementing a CRM will convert sales just by merely opening up an account.

Wrong!

A Sales CRM systems provide a platform to engage, prospect, nurture, and gather intelligence which a salesperson can combine with positive personal traits to build great rapport and convert leads, prospects and clients into sales.

So let’s take five points that sales CRM’s are incredibly useful for:

• Capturing leads
• Engaging
• Prospecting
• Nurturing
• Gathering intelligence

These are all activities which you would prefer to be doing faster. It’s a no brainer, but if you were to ask a company if they would rather spend one minute accurately prospecting leads as opposed to 20 minutes prospecting a lead, you would choose the faster option, as long as accuracy is not lost in speed. Speed and accuracy can be a deadly combination.

With that being said and as a huge inspiration for building Tubular.io, we continually asked ourselves,

Why is the CRM industry a throwback to 90’s-looking database industry, with little navigation providing an enjoyable User Interface (UI) or User Experience (UE)?

We set ourselves the following benchmarks.

1. Can we build a CRM where any analytical statistic relevant to a sales pipeline can be obtained in under 14 seconds, and in no more than six clicks?
2. Can we build a CRM with a minimalist interface that provides enough detail to engage, prospect, nurture and gather intelligence on a lead without looking like a Beethoven manuscript?

The answer is yes – but not overnight, and not without pouring hours and hours into updates and feature releases to ensure we never get away from our ethos. Updating your CRM should never be more than a few clicks away. After creating our benchmarks, we put ourselves to the test.

To test our benchmarks, we set up a list of tasks the people find a nuisance to perform in their CRM, the ones commonly forgone and that form organizational information silos. Can we create and complete these tasks in a matter of seconds? Can we make CRM software relevant and fun?

The following set of tests measured average number of clicks and average time it takes to complete each of the following tasks.

The Results

1. Creating a lead  

There are a number of triggers you can set up through Zapier to automate lead creation.

Adding one manually:

• Average No.of Click : 4
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:14

2. Add a task

In Tubular, tasks can be added to Leads, contacts or deals.

• Average No.of Click : 3
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:12

3. Add interaction/note

Within Tubular Deals and Leads portal – you can email, store notes and add tasks.

• Average No.of Click  : 3
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:07

4. Set reminder to follow up

Reminders can be added to deals, contacts or leads.

• Average No.of Click  : 4
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:14

5. Change lead status to “qualified”

In Tubular, leads are qualified and in your sales pipeline when they have a deal added to them.

• Average No.of Click  : 6
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:18

6. Attach a document

In Tubular, PDF’s and or Google Docs can be added in the deal flow.

• Average No.of Click  : 4
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:14

7. Generate a report

In Tubular, multifunction reports can be drawn up in the click of a button. The options available are endless to assist you in obtaining the financial and performance breakdown of your activity within your sales funnel.

• Average No.of Click : 3
• Average Time (mm:ss) 00:12

A unique interface!

In building Tubular, we realized that we had to keep a minimalist interface that provides enough detail to engage, prospect, nurture and gather intelligence on a lead without looking busy, or becoming too cumbersome for multiple divisions within a company.

How do you structure deal stages, deal tags, deal values, forecasts, forecasted weighted average, payment terms, emails, to-do’s calls and documents associated with a deal in one place – with no information overload?

The answer is yes, with the correct use of modals, drop-downs and infinite scrolling, you are able to remain concise yet provide detailed deal information to stay informed and on top of your sales pipeline.

Tubular is a UK based Sales Pipeline CRM that puts User Interface and User Experience at the heart of every feature. It has numerous awards for its UI/UX design, including being ranked in Capterra’s top 10 most user friendly CRM software.

The post Why UI/UX matters when choosing your CRM appeared first on Tubular.

Tubular was listed in two distinct Capterra Top 20 CRM reports:

The Top 20 Most User-Friendly CRM Software report
The Top 20 Most Affordable CRM Software report.

There are over 500 CRM software products listed on Capterra, so being named to not just one, but two Top 20’s is incredible.

A proud moment for all the Team, but most importantly for you our users.

We are proud to also follow this up with 5/5 from all our reviews too. If you have not tried Tubular, then sign up for 14 day free trial today.

You Rock!

​Keep selling !
Sean

The post The Top 20 Most User-Friendly CRM Software appeared first on Tubular.

Stats like these back up the predictions:

• 9 million active weekly users
• 2 million paid accounts
• 60,000 teams
• An impressive annual recurring revenue of $200 million (USD)

Great! Good news for Slack. But how can your business best utilize the app?

Firstly, stop seeing Slack as a messaging app. It’s a platform for increasing business productivity, which, when used correctly, will change the way you manage your business strategies and operations.

Here are some tips to create a killer Slack strategy.

1. Keep it transparent

The days of sales professionals guarding their leads as though their lives depended on it are dying fast—software now manages leads and promotes transparency. This prevents the classic case of Sales Agent A leaving company X, and taking their address book of contacts and leads with them (in all likelihood to your competitor).

Firms are waking up to the fact that sales funnels are collaborative. In the agency world, designers, copywriters, and account executives work together to submit prototypes, wireframes, and mockups to the client before contracts are even signed.

We recommend syncing the Tubular and Slack webhook, so your entire lead generation platform is online, and your team receives notifications whenever a lead comes in via a website, cold call, exhibition, or whatever lead generation strategy you have in place.

2. Strategize on a Monday

Keep your team focussed and incentivized by pulling in daily, weekly, or monthly sales funnel statistics.

This provides a great instant snapshot to see where your sales funnel has any potential bottlenecks. Recognizing the bottlenecks makes it easier to create and implement a strategy to improve them.

Organize group meet-ups on Mondays, so you have the rest of the week to implement plans and efforts to nurture clients through the stages of your funnel.

If you need any tips on strategies to prevent a bottleneck, book a call here.

3. Unify your tasks, to-do lists, sales pipeline reports, and internal communications on one platform.

In a day and age when marketeers own your email inbox, it’s worth using Tubular and Slack as a platform to keep internal communication, tasks, to-do lists, and sales funnel reports together.  This one act should streamline the huge volume of company email “chit-chat” that clogs up your inbox.

Imagine: no more inbox overload.

Book a free 20-minute session to discuss how best to use Slack and Tubular.

The post Leverage Slack and Tubular to Jumpstart Your Sales Pipeline appeared first on Tubular.

The old-school sales philosophy stated that you need seven contact points with a client before they consider buying a product.

This might be a sweeping statement, and lost in today’s world of analytics and Facebook impressions, but the message is clear: You need to create contact points between a client and business in order to be considered as the product or service of choice by a potential client.

Some companies have a winning formula, whilst some people rely on their memory needing a jolt before they recall, on the drive home, that they never got back to the client to submit a quotation or proposal. Deal lost!

Introducing Task Templates

Task templates have been introduced to streamline and allocate repetitive tasks to team members within your organization.

Here is how you can use task templates within your organization.

Say, for example, you work for a company that submits repetitive documents for tender submissions. Often, the documentation and submission of a tender is more time-consuming than pricing the actual product on tender.

This business has created templates to make sure the returnable documents of a tender are always compiled, saving organizational time.

The second example, involves a contact point template, a set of 4 follow up actions are allocated to a sales team in order to push a potential or existing client through the sales pipeline. You can manage your team by setting the days and time allocated to complete a task. Add comments, and mark tasks as done once they have been complete

Here is how you can can add  a task templates in five easy steps.

 1 . Click the Settings Cog and click on settings

 2. Click Tasks

 3. Create Task template name and click Add+

 4. Add Task name, days due, and assign to a team member.

 5. Save your new template

Once you have save your Task Template, you an add this template to a Deal in a single click. 

 1 . Within your view deal button

 2. Click beside tasks to bring up up your task template.

3. All of the tasks in will be loaded into your deal in a single click and pre assigned ready for your team to get going.

Back to work

The post Task Templates, closing deals just got quicker. appeared first on Tubular.

It is tempting to view travel time as a break from the office; as an opportunity to sit back in your airline seat and page through a magazine, read a novel or simply catch a snooze. The problem with this approach is that the business day does not stop simply because you are travelling – when you land there is sure to be a host of unanswered emails and messages demanding your attention.

Our team is highly-collaborative, we are constantly communicating with one another – whether we are in the same room, the same country or divided by an ocean – the flow of communication remains constant.

The Right Tool at the Right Time. After some trial and error, we have landed on the right mix of tools to keep our team synched and to support a continuous flow of communication and productivity.

Slack

Slack is a robust team communication app; we use it almost exclusively for all internal communication. After implementing Slack, our email traffic was reduced by nearly 70%. Not only does this make our inboxes much less foreboding, it also gives us more time to focus on the emails we do receive, which are now primarily from customers and potential customers instead of the guy across the room.

Buffer

Staying on top of social media posts is a challenge even when I’m not travelling but mix in several hours of zero connectivity and maintaining our social media presence was nearly impossible – until I found Buffer. I load all of our social media content for the day while I am waiting to board my flight; then Buffer posts all of it according to the schedule I established. Tubular’s social media activity is seamless, even when I am offline.

Intercom

I’ve talked before about Intercom before in an earlier Blog. We use Intercom for both internal and external communication and it is fantastic. Anyone with the application installed can communicate with a member of our team in real-time. If a team member needs to be offline, there is a simple delegation option that ensures messages do not go unanswered. Our team has even turned reacting to support requests into a contest because of Intercom – each one vying to be the first to address an open ticket.

Basecamp

The Tubular team is a huge fan of Basecamp and its founder Jason Fried; we have used it for at least five years to manage all of our project planning. I read Getting Real – The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Successful Web Application, written by Basecamp’s founder, and it truly shaped the way I developed our companies. I followed it like the Bible and it became my inspiration for joining the SaaS world.

As a tool, Basecamp is amazing. It ensures that everyone is aware of what everyone else is working on all the time. It completely eliminates the need for status meetings and maintains team momentum even when one of us is offline while travelling.

Planning to Work – A Mindset of Productivity

I never stop working simply because I am offline or away from the office – I continuing working on planes and while in cars. Treating a travel day as a business day has some unexpected benefits; rarely do I have several hours of uninterrupted time to focus on a project and I take full-advantage of those opportunities while I am traveling.

Inevitably, emergencies will arise when you are least equipped to address them so developing a plan for those that are connected to address those issues is essential. There is no worse feeling than reconnecting after a long flight only to find that you have 18 messages from a customer that is experiencing a tech support issue.

Never Play Catch-Up

With the amount of travelling I do, it would be nearly impossible to do anything other than play catch-up if I did not maintain a consistent level of work on travel days. With all of the cloud-based applications available, there is no need to wait until you are “in the office” to work – the office is anywhere you have a connection.

Our own experiences traveling for business inspired the development of Tubular – we built our application to be just as supportive outside the office as it is inside the office. The native application ensures that users always have access to customer data enabling them to quickly make decisions and update the team on status changes.

The emphasis is on usability because we learned from our own needs – the more barriers to communication that exists; the less the team will communicate.

In a globally focused business environment, travel is inevitable. However, working with the constant stress of snowballing tasks does not have to be – use the right mix of tools and strategies to maximize travel days and never get stuck on the catch-up wheel.

Sign up for a FREE Tubular Account today.

All photos are taken from my Instagram Account 

The post Tools & Strategies for Avoiding the Travel-Induced Catch-Up Game appeared first on Tubular.

Coming soon!

From next week onwards you’ll start to see our new smart notifications appear by your profile picture in the top navigation bar of the Tubular Webapp. Look out for the orange badge which will display the number of new notifications you have. Click on the badge and a list of your latest notifications will appear in a dropdown. 

We’ve included notifications for the following activities:

Deal Stage Update
Notification of stage updates within a particular deal and who in your team updated the deal.

Completed Tasks
Notifications whenever a team member completes a task with the associated deal.

New Comments
Notifications of who has added comments to a specific deal.

New Notes
Notification of who has added a note to a deal.

Likes
Comments that have been “liked” by other team members.

As well as notifications in the Webapp we have also setup push notifications on all of the above for both Android and iOS native Apps.

Never miss a beat when it comes to managing your sales pipeline.  

Create A Free Tubular Account

The post All New Smart Notifications appeared first on Tubular.

At Tubular, we are passionate about your sales team maximizing their sales potential. This week, you may have noticed since last logging into Tubular some awesome new features and visual upgrades that will assist your sales team in improving your organization’s sales pipeline

Lets get to the new features !

The 4 Key Metrics for your Sales team

In your Deal View you can now view the 4 key metrics, active deals, average deal value, success ratio of your customer, and average lifespan deal. All these new features provide you with key performance indicators to ensure your sales follow ups are prompt and relevant.

Contacts View

Our new contacts view, is now, awesome. By clicking on your Contacts you are able to view all your contacts pipelines, in addition to the 4 key metrics per contact.   All this information in one overview allows you to manage your contacts efficiently and successfully.

Organization View

We have also updated our Organisation view, It includes the addition of 4 key metrics and also a total pipeline value. In addition, a monthly success ratio chart is allocated to each organization. The improved view means you can now see a list of all associated contacts and your organisations pipeline list from a single screen.

 Slack Integration

We don’t just like Slack ,We love it ! Therefore, what easier way to interact and chat with your team at the same time as seeing your sales pipeline progress. To integrate with Slack add you web-hook into the interrogations tab in settings.

Cyfe Integration

Cyfe is an all in one Business Dashboard and with our new reports feature we offer you the ability see your sales pipeline in Tubular from your Cyfe Dashboard.

For more information on how to integrate the dashboard, all the information is available with the following link.

https://www.tubular.io/news/tubular-cyfe-integration/

Some of the integrations have been  developed from our customer feedback, we hope you find these integrations as useful as some our current customers.

The post New Features Release appeared first on Tubular.

This week Shira Abel from Hunter & Bard and Mentor at 500 Startups Interviews CEO Sean and his Brother Chris Miller giving advise and a bit of mentoring on business, marketing, and sales during this podcast.

Click Here to LISTEN

The post Shira Abel Interviews Sean and Chris Miller from Tubular.io appeared first on Tubular.

Cyfe is an all in one Business Dashboard and with our new reports feature we offer you the ability see your sales pipeline in Tubular in your Cyfe Dashboard.

Here’s how you can do it :

Step 1:

Create a Cyfe account and create your first dashboard. If you do not have an account you can create on here

Step 2 :

Go to the Reports Tab in Tubular and select the report via the filters to wish to be displayed in your Cyfe dashboard.

Step 3:

Once you have created your desired Report, right click on the “Export CVS Report” Button and click “Copy Link Address“

Step 4:

Open up your Cyfe Dashboard in a new tab and click on “Add Widget“, once this screen is open click on the “Sales and Finance“, then “Tubular.io“

Step 5:

When the next popup appears click on “Configure Widget” here you will need to paste the link you copied from your report. Create Widget Title, Choose your chart type from the drop down, your refresh rate and click save. In a few second your Tubular report will appear in your Cyfe Dashboard.

Watch this space as we add more and more of the features. We hope the release of our API in the coming months will open up all sort of possibilities and integration’s with Tubular in 2016 and beyond.

Thanks to Ben at Cyfe for helping us make the integration official !

The post *UPDATE* Tubular and Cyfe, perfect partners. appeared first on Tubular.

We were really excited to be featured on Betalist. BetaList is a community where makers showcase their startup and get feedback from early adopters.

A big thank you to all people from the community that signed up to and gave us valuable feedback.

The post Sales pipeline software on Betlalist appeared first on Tubular.