Aptean announces the launch of Pivotal 6.5 CRM
Aptean have announced the launch of Pivotal 6.5 CRM, in this latest release they have redesigned the sales automation user experience. This lets individual users personalise their own user experience in several ways. The majority of work has been enhancing the mobile experience for customers and delivering secure access to the platform from any device, desktop, laptop or mobile from any location.
Matt Keenan, vice president, CRM Product Group, Aptean explains the thinking by saying “Aptean believes that CRM solutions struggle when they try to be ‘all things to all people.’ With that in mind, we’ve rethought the traditional look and feel of CRM to meet the needs of today’s hyper-connected, mobile sales users, … Pivotal 6.5 delivers real solutions—specialized sales capabilities, including customer, contact and opportunity management—and real results that will provide the productivity and efficiency that salespeople require both in the field and in the office.”
Mapping comes to CRM
One of the improvements that Pivotal have brought out in the new release is mapping functionality, so that sales staff are able to locate and map a route to a customer from within the CRM without moving between Apps, saving time. It therefore comes as no surprise that one of the early adopters for the new platform is Caliper Corporation a mapping software specialist who would be well placed to test the software. They upgraded to Pivotal 6.5 in 2015 and Bryan Martin, senior vice president, Caliper Corporation commented “Pivotal is the most critical tool that our salespeople use … The new mobility features will enable our team to access Pivotal in and out of the office with the same user experience each time.”
In all there are seven key components to Pivotal:
- Sales Force Automation
- Marketing Automation
- Service Automation
- Partner Automation
- Social CRM
- Mobile CRM
- Pivotal CRM Platform
They have listed only two other major enhancements to the platform though, enhancing the mobile experience so that users are able to create emails, appointments and tasks as well as seeing their calendar from within the mobile platform. The second allows users to create their own dashboards, adding graphs and searches that are instantly updated and reusable. These seem a small set of feature improvements for a major release and it a shame that more details were not available.
Pivotal has had most success in financial services and the discrete and process manufacturing industries, it has been growing in stature recently and although it was not on the Forrester Wave report for CRM in 2010 it was named a “Strong Performer” in “The Forrester Wave™: CRM Suites For Midsize Organizations, Q1 2015”, released on March 25 by Forrester Research, Inc.
