Modern CRM Starts with Engagement | Pipeliner CRM | Practical AI

Jesús Hoyos (00:01.559)
Bienvenidos, to Tomando Cafe con Jesus Hoyos, Drinking Coffee with Jesus Hoyos. And today we have Don Araldi. He's the guy, the Pipeliner CRN. When I say the guy, he's the boss. They call me el jefe, Don. So I don't think they call you the boss. But welcome, Don. Don is, you know, we're gonna, you know, they have a...

Don Araldi (00:18.306)
Ha ha ha!

Jesús Hoyos (00:27.959)
I don't even want to call it CRN solution, but they have an engagement platform that focuses in marketing and sales, but not to record a transaction, but to engage with customers. They are based in the States. He's joining us from San Diego. They have customers in Mexico, in the States, and in Europe. I have a couple of briefings with them.

And I like what I saw. So saying that done, I would like you to, you know, to welcome you. And then you can tell me a little bit about yourself. Then we talk about coffee and then we start talking about, you know, Pyliner CRM.

Don Araldi (01:08.91)
Very good. Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it very much. My name is Don Araldi. I am the executive vice president of global sales here at Pipeliner. As Jesus mentioned, we are currently in 47 countries around the world and looking to expand further. I've been here at Pipeliner for six and a half years now as the head of sales, but know that

My background is much deeper than that. I have been managing sales teams for 40 years now. So I have a great depth of experience working with different CRM platforms throughout my career as I've worked for different companies. And so hopefully some of that knowledge I can impart and share with your audience and help them, you know, when the time comes for them to wade through the very crowded world of CRMs and understand what

What's the right path to take? What works best for what they want to accomplish? And it is important to note that Pipeliner is very different than most CRMs.

Jesús Hoyos (02:17.663)
Yeah, saying that.

You know, my question to you, you know, are you a coffee drinker?

Don Araldi (02:31.182)
You know, I'll share a fun story. I've never liked coffee. Just a personal thing. But the interesting thing is I love coffee ice cream. I love chocolate covered coffee beans. So what I learned was in order for me to enjoy drinking coffee, I had to put so much sugar and cream and flavorings in it that I ended up just drinking hot chocolate.

and figured it was kind of the same thing. It just don't have to add the cream and the sugar anymore. It's already in it. So that's kind of been my path. I don't...

Jesús Hoyos (03:09.389)
So, so, so, so why you drink them? You know, do you have an addiction to any particular beverage, you know, that is not coffee, you know, water?

Don Araldi (03:19.374)
Water. Although I am known, by the way, is Cinco de Mayo. So later on this evening, I'm sure you'll find me with a glass of tequila in my hand. If there's an addiction, that would be it.

Jesús Hoyos (03:31.424)
Okay.

Okay, yeah, I like I like tequila. I like my skull that could be another podcast. But right now, you know, I'm drinking coffee and this is you know, I forgot how many cup of coffee I drink a lot of coffee during the day. I'm drinking a coffee out of a town in Puerto Rico called Lattice. That's where my family's from. And the coffee is called the Lattice. The Lattice, but the Lattice is a small

you know, coffee, Hacienda, it's called Hacienda Lealtad. And I have it, you my own adventure cup. You know, I like mountain biking. I like kayaking. You know, I used to have a Jeep. You know, I like, you know, go to the mountains, you know, the river and everything. That's a present from my daughters. So, you know, coffee, you know, the reason of Tomando Cafe, know, con Jesus Soyo is because, know, usually when, you know,

Don Araldi (04:04.782)
We'll

Don Araldi (04:21.57)
Nice.

Jesús Hoyos (04:32.899)
When I'm traveling in Latin America, we should say, you know what? Let's go on WAC and go to the coffee place in the corner. And while we engage in a conversation, we go and get the coffee. And that's the whole idea about CRN, especially in Latin America, is about engagement. Who you know, how you engage, having a lot of patients in the process, understanding the customers.

The first time I started looking at your application, even though you call it Pyliner CRM and there is 200 million CRM systems out there, I saw it truly as an engagement platform where, yeah, you can do your marketing, but your cell functions are around managing the engagement. And yes, you have the traditional CRM functionality.

But you sort of started to put the art back into the CRM. That's the way I see it. And companies who have a traditional sales force where you have to go out there and reach out people, follow up, connect and everything. have a sort of a bunch of functionality that will allow you to do that versus let me.

let me enter the information so I can report my forecasting. Which is, yeah, we need that. But the way you have it, and you also allow to deploy different sales methodologies in the system. But you're truly engaging in making sure that the rep.

Don Araldi (06:03.768)
her video.

Jesús Hoyos (06:23.299)
can enter the data that's going to allow them close the deal based on the engagement that they have with the person, that relationship that they have. And a cell cycle, it could be complex. Different roles, influencers, detractors, sponsors that you need to maintain in the system to be sure that you understand how to manage that relationship versus, hey, let me manage the pipeline.

Yeah, you do that, but you manage, you know, the deal, you manage the people in order to eventually have a good pipeline. And, you know, I see, you know, we can talk about this as we progress in the the in the podcast. You know, you are because you're doing that relationship, that engagement, you also are celebrating the cell cycle. So it's a different approach, you know, from that point of view, you don't have.

you know, a customer service module, but you integrate with Sand Desk. So somebody who wants to do, you know, customer service, you know, they can integrate with Sand Desk. You have, you know, marketplace and, you know, everything that you need, you know, to put together, you know, your ecosystem. So again, this is more for the B2B, you know, when you're doing, you know, consultative sales, you know, versus, you know, buy this widget, you know.

Don Araldi (07:39.331)
Definitely.

Jesús Hoyos (07:47.555)
How do you approach that? What that means and why that approach to CRM?

Don Araldi (07:54.22)
Yeah, it's it's a really good question and I think what you'd see is. Traditionally. Any salesperson you talk to would probably tell you that they don't like serum. Why? And it's because of what you're talking about. It's it's historically has been a tool that most salespeople feel is designed for the management team. To manage their salespeople. Not a tool that's designed to help the sales.

person do a better job of selling, building relationships, and closing deals. And so our focus has been to try to change that environment, right? And make it so that the sales rep sees the CRM as a tool that's definitely going to A, save them time, B, point them in the right direction, C, help them build relationships and not allow things to fall through the cracks.

while at the same time giving management the information they need in order to run the business. And so that's always been Pipeliner's approach, which is if you want to be successful, we have to find a way to engage salespeople. And that salesperson to be successful, as you said, has to find a way to engage with his customers or his prospects. And so it's got to be more than just

checking boxes and filling out fields. There's got to be more to it. I do want to correct one thing you said, Jesus, if you'll allow me. While we don't have out of the box a customer service solution, and yes, we integrate with Zendesk, that's true. And that's what we choose to do in our own implementation because we've been using Zendesk for years. Our modules do allow you to create any customized solution in Pipeliner, which could include

Jesús Hoyos (09:26.371)
Sure.

Don Araldi (09:47.978)
customer support, customer service sort of solution. I just want to make sure we don't give people the wrong idea. It's what we call customer duties.

Jesús Hoyos (09:55.415)
Yeah, so not only you have your marketing and sales, your interior we send this, you have the capability to expand through configurations within the system. And would that also give me the option if I am into manufacturing, selling a particular brand of pharmaceuticals or something like that?

Can I make it my own? You know, especially for the vertical. Do you have verticals as well?

Don Araldi (10:33.336)
We are just starting to enter the world of vertical solutions. And what I mean by that is, historically, we have sold broadly across industry. But as you said, with a focus on organizations that sell B2B and sell in a consultative sales fashion, which means it's not transactional, right? It's almost hard to say anybody needs a CRM solution to do transactional sales.

Jesús Hoyos (10:58.595)
.

Don Araldi (11:02.188)
But from a consultative point of view, where we have a process and a drawn out sales process that we want a sales team to follow, that's really where we shine. And what I want everybody to know is that, people when they're looking at CRMs are thinking, I need something to manage my sales. as we, right, it is the wrong approach.

Jesús Hoyos (11:26.669)
which is the wrong approach, which is that it is the right thinking at that moment because you have to meet your numbers, but it's the wrong approach, you know, short thing and long term.

Don Araldi (11:31.811)
Yeah.

Don Araldi (11:35.245)
Yes.

Don Araldi (11:38.734)
And some of the things that management are thinking about is, my forecasting has been so poor and inaccurate. I need a tool that's going to help me forecast more accurately. And sure, they need that. But where I was going with this is trying to second a thought that you had early on in the introduction, which is, pipeline error is more about managing process than it is about being called a CRM.

Right? We don't get to choose how the marketplace decides, this software is an accounting package. This software is a CRM. They call us a CRM. Excuse me. But I like to explain to people that really what we do at Pipeliner is we manage processes. So whatever process you want to use Pipeliner for, we give you the ability to do that. And so there's a lot of flexibility in Pipeliner. Now that said,

If I'm going to a manufacturing firm, and you can assume that there are some commonalities from one manufacturing firm to another, wouldn't it be nice if I had a somewhat already set up solution for a manufacturing firm, right? That makes it easier for them to see all the things that they could be doing, right?

make the light bulb go off so they can get some ideas of how they could really take advantage of what Pipeliner offers. And so we are now just starting to venture into some verticals where we have enough customers, we've seen what they're trying to do with Pipeliner, and we're now building custom solutions for a vertical. Now that said, if I had a manufacturing vertical solution and I went to manufacturer A,

And then to manufacturer B, they're going to want different things out of that solution. And there'll still be additional customization that we do to get it exactly the way they want it.

Jesús Hoyos (13:42.125)
So let me ask you this because Pipeliner represents a pipeline. And a lot of the other vendors out there that have the CRM, new vendors, I'm not talking the legacy vendors. We already know the legacy vendor. We're talking the new ones out there. They have a contact. They have an account. They have an opportunity. There's some.

Forecasting and you know, and then you have you know, you you can view your pipeline on a list by stages can't ban view you know, and you can move and everything and and Maybe there is some some activity recording in there, you know, and there is 200 of those out there Okay, you know which I you know for me they are not CRM. They are just a glorified except file You know, we're really nice for again

You know, then as well in Latin America, you know, we also have a lot of CRN that are very specific to a channel like WhatsApp. OK. Or email or phone, you know, and they have, you know, full blown capacities to have a mobile app or they have some of the application in the mobile app. And you want to be able

to manage a process. So what is different from you guys and all the other CRM vendors that they say that they are CRM, but they are not really CRM, depending on the bracket of the industry, how do you guys position yourself?

Don Araldi (15:19.224)
Sure.

Don Araldi (15:24.066)
You bet. I think the way to say that more succinctly is they're leaving the R out of CRM. And we're putting the R into CRM. And maybe the easiest thing for me to do, Jesus, is to show you a couple of examples, if that might be helpful for your audience. And I can just jump in here and share my screen real quick.

Jesús Hoyos (15:28.259)
you

Mm-mm.

Jesús Hoyos (15:38.531)
Sure.

Don Araldi (15:52.014)
Okay, entire screen. Share. Okay.

Jesús Hoyos (15:58.947)
Okay, so for those who are listening to us on.

on the audio only. we have the user interface on Pyliner, and we have the traditional process to show this. Maybe you want to minimize the view in the corner.

Don Araldi (16:24.494)
I don't know if I just shrink that down there. Okay. All right. So one of the things, just as an example of our focus on usability for the sales rep is we don't want to force people to use a tool they don't like. Right? And, hey, Zeus, you and I have known each other just now for a month or so and had a couple conversations.

Jesús Hoyos (16:28.257)
Here we go. Perfect. You got it.

Don Araldi (16:55.436)
I guarantee you there are things that I like that you don't like and you like coffee, I don't like coffee. There's a lot of things that we like and dislike. And so one of the things we wanted to do is to make sure that we can appeal to any user in any organization. And what we did is we created five different graphical user interfaces that allow us to allow the end user to pick how they want to work with Pipeliner. And each one of these

For example, if I jump from the pipeline view we're in now to the list view, you'll see the list view looks very much like a spreadsheet. Sometimes that's easy for people to learn how to use because they've been using spreadsheets most of their life. And you see the columns listed on that spreadsheet. Each user can come and select what columns they want to see to make this most useful for them.

Jesús Hoyos (17:33.762)
Mm-hmm.

Don Araldi (17:50.112)
I won't spend a lot of time here, but there are many different views that people can use. This is the map view. And this is, you know, when I'm out in the field a lot, if I was heading to an appointment at this is Sharp as a hospital here in San Diego, and I've never been there before, I want to see where I'm going. Right. It's a simple little interface with Google Maps, but now I can see exactly where I'm going for this appointment, as well as a summary over here on the side.

So this is one minor little thing I wanted to show you that just gives people options as to how they want to interact with our tool. It's always the same data. It's just a question of what appeals to you aesthetically. But we were talking about putting the R back in CRM. And so I'm going to jump into one of these opportunities here in the pipeline to show you a quick example of something we do that

As a sales leader, think is drastically important for our organization and it should be for most sales organizations. You see here the option we call the buying center. Now the buying center is a graphical representation of who are the people that we're selling to at Sharp San Diego and what roles do they play and who's influencing who.

What kind of relationship do I have with these people? If I were to pick one like Nicholas here, then you can see I can define what role he's playing in the organization or this particular sales opportunity, right? He's the budget holder. well that puts that tag underneath his name. So everybody who comes to this page from my team will see that information. If I scroll down a little further, you see the green colored edge on his little business card here.

is indicative of a strong relationship. I have a strong relationship with Nicholas. Now compare that to Patrick down here, who's a naysayer. He doesn't like us. He's in favor of another solution. And you see all these red arrows coming out from Patrick. That's Patrick being a negative influence on other members of the team. He's trying to convince them not to work with us.

Don Araldi (20:09.58)
And I can go even deeper. When I look at Nicholas, I'm wondering, have we ever done any business with Nicholas before? And these little icons underneath Nicholas's picture will give me that information. Just click here and you'll see every deal you've ever worked on with Nicholas in the past. Want to know about one of them? Just click on it. You'll get a summary over here on the right. Right? Or I can open it up if I want to dive into even more detail. Maybe here,

This would show me every communication anybody on my team has had with Nicholas. That means any phone calls, any text messages, any WhatsApp messages, any emails, they'd all be listed so I can see the entire thread of communication my team has had with Nicholas or anybody else on this team of people at Sharp. And so, go ahead.

Jesús Hoyos (21:04.226)
So what we're seeing here, even though we're managing, again, the transaction opportunity, you quickly went to this bias center, which is like a 360 degree for anybody who is involved in here. And I can see that everything is like a click away. I'm not going from one tab to another. The system hasn't refreshed. I I stay in here.

Don Araldi (21:34.488)
Yes.

Jesús Hoyos (21:34.677)
You know, which is one of the adoption issues that we have a lot with the cost with in cells rep Why take me to another place? I want everything in one place And and I do like, you know the approach of of having You know the whole you know I guess mapping of the relationship, you know, will you rose the influences and everything is like a click away and and I want to take a note because a lot of this functionality

Don Araldi (21:54.178)
Yes.

Jesús Hoyos (22:04.353)
You that you're showing here depending on the CRM that you buy is not included on number two You have to buy at all Okay, so if everything that I see here is part of your you know, it comes with the system Okay

Don Araldi (22:21.804)
Yes. Yes, this is a built-in function to Pipeliner. It kind of shows you this little discussion we're having right now is really key for people to understand Pipeliner compared to many CRMs. And that is that our belief is if we're going to sell you a tool to help you manage your sales and your marketing and your relationships, it ought to include everything you need. It shouldn't be...

we only do some of that stuff and now you got to go buy two or three other programs to do the rest of it. Then we're selling you an incomplete solution.

Jesús Hoyos (22:57.047)
Yeah. Yeah. And don't, you know, again, playing the wasaboke here because you're not just focusing on the opportunity that you have for whatever, a quote with, you know, half a million dollars. You're focusing on the relationship that you have with the people, you know? And again, for those who are listening through the podcast and knowing YouTube, you know, there's a map.

Don Araldi (23:15.917)
Yes.

Jesús Hoyos (23:23.905)
with all these icons and graphics pointing at us and everything is in one screen, having gone to other places to see the information that I need. So this is very compelling.

Don Araldi (23:39.786)
And Jesus, this is just one example. And if I might, a manager of a sales team, one of the things I like to look at here is, hey, we've got this deal at Sharp. I'm on the detail screen now. And we'll see here that it's scheduled to close. We're expected to close on May 20th. Well, if I go to the buying center and I don't see a Nicholas who's the budget holder, I see

Jesús Hoyos (23:46.913)
Mm-hmm.

Don Araldi (24:09.826)
Dennis who's a consultant and Patrick who's a naysayer and Bill who looks like he's in purchasing, but there's nobody here who owns the budget. And I'm thinking we're a long ways from closing this deal, right? We're not even talking to the right people yet. So it's really useful information here. And the better that I see this built out on an opportunity, the more realistic that opportunity appears to be.

But the buying center, Jesus, is just one example of this sort of technology. Another would be if I go to the accounts. And accounts, just so people understand this terminology, accounts to us are just companies. They don't mean they're your customers. An account is just a company. And so lots of companies in here. I'm going to jump down to PIPELINER as an example.

And now the pages will always look very similar, whether I'm in an account page or a opportunity page, like we were just in with Sharp. But you see here, we have this concept of an org chart. Now, what do you get from most CRMs? You get something like this. Who are my contacts? Who are the people there at Pipeliner? It's just a list, phone numbers, email addresses. But what we do is we say,

Well, that's good, but it's not great. What would be great is if when I look at Pipeliner, I understood how is Pipeliner organized. You have a headquarters office, have branches and subsidiaries in different parts of the world doing different things. And for any one of those, you see these icons underneath again, I could say, show me the org chart.

And so now I see how PipeLiner headquarters is organized. You've got Nicholas, the CEO, I'm over here as the head of sales, the rest of the management team, right? Again.

Jesús Hoyos (26:05.773)
So what does it mean to set this up? Because traditionally, when you follow a sales methodology, there's many out there. There's a one, target account selling. And there's many others out there. Because there's a prep to do this, especially when you're going after name accounts, or you're going after existing customers.

Don Araldi (26:17.111)
Mm-hmm.

Don Araldi (26:35.267)
Yes.

Jesús Hoyos (26:35.329)
What's the process to start understanding who these people are, you your accounts and the different contacts and the different roles and opportunities to be sure that you start building that relationship? Why is the minimal setup that I need in order to start using this?

Don Araldi (26:55.234)
Well, this is again something that's baked into Pipeliner, just like the buying center. And in order to fill it out, we're not filling it out for you. This is something that you, the sales rep or a member of the sales team or the marketing team would be doing the legwork on this. But there are many different ways that I can put this information in. For example, if I have an employee of Pipeliner already in

Jesús Hoyos (27:09.943)
Mm-hmm.

Don Araldi (27:24.59)
my database, I can simply add them. Right? That's an existing contact. If I wanted to add a new contact, I can create that new contact here. But that's just the manual way of doing this. What we typically do ourselves is I would go into LinkedIn. As a matter of fact, I can even show you very quickly, because it's so easy. If we go to LinkedIn, and you see in my browser, I have this little widget here.

Jesús Hoyos (27:29.645)
Mm-hmm.

Don Araldi (27:54.488)
with the Pipeliner logo. And just for the sake of ease, I'm going to jump to my own profile here in LinkedIn. It kind of jumped off my page there. There we go. OK, so now if you're doing your research on a company, you say, Don O'Raldi is the head of sales there. That's the guy I want to sell to. And I want to add him to Pipeliner. Then all I have to do is launch that widget.

And it's going to ask me, what do you want to do with Dawn? And I'm going to say, I want to create a new contact. Now, when I do that, you'll see it's checking the database, and it comes back and says, well, Dawn from Pipeline is already in there. Are you sure you want to create a duplicate? Right? So, good. Now I know that I'm already in the system. I can just add Dawn to that diagram we were looking at. But if you knew I wasn't there, you'd go ahead and create this new contact.

It scrapes the publicly available information off my profile, creates a new contact in Pipeliner automatically. And then the next time I go into Pipeliner and I want to say, hey, let's add somebody here.

Jesús Hoyos (29:05.347)
and that widget comes with your solution.

Don Araldi (29:10.614)
Yeah, it's a free download you can get right from Google. It's a Google Chrome extension, and it's free. So, anybody can load that today. It won't do you a lot of good, unless you have a pipeline or account.

Jesús Hoyos (29:22.197)
No, no, that's you know, but that's what I was asking the question because you know, this is you know, just need to do homework. So, know, you do it the old way, you know, you have to do your research, you know, I don't know, putting in Excel uploaded, you know, do the manual, you know, things, you know, so you have options. But, you know, with a single click, I can just go ahead, you know, and log in to to link it in, you know,

Don Araldi (29:35.501)
Yes.

Jesús Hoyos (29:49.751)
bring that information into assistance. So, I can start to do my planning. I start building this, get a good couple.

Don Araldi (29:59.02)
And you may have noticed when I was there, you could do that, not just for a person. Right?

Jesús Hoyos (30:05.867)
You can do it for an account and you can add it in a Selene. Perfect. OK. Makes sense.

Don Araldi (30:08.662)
Yeah, an account, a lead, right? All available to you. And you know, another way that some people get people into the system is if you have our app on your mobile phone, we have a business card scanner, which will allow you to simply take a picture of somebody's business card and it will...

Jesús Hoyos (30:26.485)
OK.

Jesús Hoyos (30:30.403)
So you have a business card scanner. You have the plugin. We link it in. And you have the traditional manual processes to enter the data for the rep. now, let me ask you here, the elephant in the room, AI. And thank you for not mentioning anything related to AI in the first 30 minutes, but we're here.

Don Araldi (30:41.57)
Yes.

Jesús Hoyos (30:59.031)
There's a of people, a lot of CRN systems, AI fairs, AI enabled, AI agents. the reason we're here talking to each other because we started a conversation about how to have the basic CRN functionality to manage the relationship. And then eventually we start talking about AI. But what is your approach to use AI?

Don Araldi (31:21.026)
Yes.

Jesús Hoyos (31:28.867)
within Pipeliner CRM.

Don Araldi (31:31.692)
Yeah, great question. And definitely something that's on the top of everybody's minds these days. And we get inundated with commercials and ads and grandiose ideas. I won't mention names, but one particularly large CRM company with lots of commercials on TV these days are showing these amazing solutions you could build with AI, where you're a

where your CRM data is merging with a bank's data, merging with a restaurant's data, and giving you all sorts of insights into your potential restaurant customers. Well, that's fantastic. However,

Jesús Hoyos (32:16.899)
Restaurant. You're watching the TV ads.

Don Araldi (32:19.65)
However...

Yes, yes. And I don't say that to say that none of that's possible, but to do a project like that is a couple of years of work of cleaning different data warehouses for different organizations, trying to find a way to merge the data. Then you have to worry about, I merge that data and not have to worry about data integrity? Am I making my customers data?

data more public now, we try to stay away from all of that. Because while they're grandiose ideas, what we're trying to do is introduce what we call practical AI. We want to help sales reps get their job done now. We want their work to be less. We want it to be faster and easier. And so if we can find an AI tool that allows us to do that,

while keeping all of your data secure, then we're interested, right? Let me give you a couple of quick examples of that and you'll see for yourself. If I go back to that same file we were looking at before at Sharp Hospital and I go to my documents section, this is where I would see every file that's related to this particular opportunity. And it can be any sort of file, but I've got a contract here.

And in our contracts, have, I can't remember now if it's 15 or 17 pages of terms and conditions, and it's a lengthy document, right? I don't wanna read through it searching for something, so I can simply let AI do it for me. I'll just ask the document a question, right? And the AI will handle it for me. I'm gonna say how many licenses.

Don Araldi (34:15.15)
are included. And the AI is going to go read that document for me, find the answer, and report back to me. It might have taken me half an hour to go through that whole document by myself. And here, I'm going to get an answer in just a few seconds that shows there are 26 licenses, one business edition, 25 enterprise editions, for total of 26. Fantastic.

Jesús Hoyos (34:40.397)
So let me ask you this. You mentioned practical AI. And we're coming from a practical CRM to manage relationships to practical AI. When I click over there, is that included or do I have to buy tokens? If this is generative AI that you're using that is in your own ecosystem or here's a package of

Don Araldi (34:46.125)
Yes.

Jesús Hoyos (35:09.187)
tokens credits that I'm buying through you in order to do this because you're connected to OpenAI or something like that. what that means, and there is someone asking because any of the senior vendors out there, now they're saying that they're agent-first or agent-powered by something. I see that there is traditional

Don Araldi (35:16.726)
No, no, Yeah, that's a good question. That's a good question.

Don Araldi (35:35.288)
Yes.

Jesús Hoyos (35:39.331)
three layers of how you want to this. The practical slash embedded AI, that you can charge for it or you don't charge for it. It's conversational within the Serial ecosystem. Then you have AI where you call your agent, but it's within your ecosystem. It's another interface to bring data from the Serial system and other system.

You and there, you know, you connect to OpenAI, cloud, you know, whatever is out there. And then you have and then and then you can buy a platform, you know, that is going to talk to your sister. You know, what what are we looking here?

Don Araldi (36:12.664)
Right.

Don Araldi (36:19.309)
Yes.

So this is all embedded in Pipeliner. Pipeliner, first of all, as so your audience knows, is housed on Amazon Web Services servers. And we use Amazon Web Services AI tools to provide this sort of practical AI solution for you. So what that means to the end user is it's never leaving your safe, secure environment. We're not going out to

know, chat GPT or some other tool set to an exposing any of your data. It's all in your instance of Pipeliner on AWS servers. And there is no charge for our AI tools. They come embedded in the tool. They're across all versions of our software. We have four different tiers for different company needs, but it's included in all four tiers at no additional cost.

Jesús Hoyos (37:22.411)
How can you do that? Because you you know your users, you know the usage, you know, because, you know, pricing AI out there is confusing. And, you know, they probably, I have other two zero vendors who have said, no, I don't charge. But those vendors are private today and you guys are private too. You know, you know, and.

Don Araldi (37:49.911)
Yes.

Jesús Hoyos (37:52.227)
There's a lot of out there, zero vendors, say, yeah, I'm going to charge you because they need to report to Wall Street. What is the compelling event so you can maintain this practical AI without charging?

Don Araldi (37:59.821)
Yeah.

Don Araldi (38:09.582)
Well, there's a couple of things that affect that. Number one is, as I mentioned, the environment that we do AI in, we are already paying for our existence in the AWS world, if you will. And so because our AIs are not going out to other third-party AI tools, we're not licensing this. We don't have to pay chat GPT or any other

tool provider every time we go and access their tool and do a call through the AI. So we incur very little expense within the AWS environment where we are staying. And our choice has been, and this is always a choice for us, by the way, we release lots of software. We do almost a monthly release with new features and such.

that we decided that the AI tools should always be at no additional charge across all four versions of the tool. Now there are some things that we release where that's not the case, right? For example, we have a tool we call Online Forms. Now that Online Forms tool is amazing and it comes included in one of our tiers. For the other three tiers,

It's an optional add-on tool that you can purchase separately and add to your tool set within Pipeliner. But when it comes to AI, it was a universal decision across the management team that we wanted to offer this to all of our customers at no additional cost. Do we want to make profit? You bet. We can't continue to produce such a great tool with all the features and benefits that it has to offer.

Jesús Hoyos (39:56.899)
course.

Don Araldi (40:04.278)
and all the great support and service that we have if we're not profitable. So all those come into play when we look at what are we going to charge for an additional tool. But in this case, as I said, the AI tool set we thought was kind of a basic function the way we use it, this practical AI solution. And this is just one of them. I'd be happy to show you a couple more if you'd like.

Jesús Hoyos (40:30.485)
Yeah, we have another five, 10 minutes and I have one more question to ask, but go ahead and then we jump into my question and then.

Don Araldi (40:35.095)
Okay.

Don Araldi (40:39.894)
Okay, I'll show you another one that I really like. I'm going into what we call the feeds. And that's on this opportunity again at Sharp. This is a wonderful tool in and of itself. It's a chronological history that everything that's ever happened on this deal, every note added to the system, every phone call, every document added. You see down here, email is an email I sent out. It even tells me when they opened the email in Reddit.

Right? Every text message, WhatsApp message, everything would be here. One of the things I see all the time is my boss might say to me, I'll use this as an example, hey Don, this deal with Sharp has been sitting in the pipeline for months now. What's going on? I haven't heard anything lately. He doesn't want to sit here and read through all this stuff. But what I can do is I can go right to the AI tools and say that I would like to summarize notes and messages and stuff.

Jesús Hoyos (41:11.331)
timeline.

Don Araldi (41:36.702)
Right. Yes.

Jesús Hoyos (41:37.239)
Basic stuff and show me show me where we at

Don Araldi (41:42.05)
So I just now highlight like the latest, let's say last month or two of communication with this opportunity. And then I can simply say create. It's gonna read through all that material and it's gonna write a summary on this deal for me. And now I can email it right to my boss. Okay.

Jesús Hoyos (42:00.067)
Very practical, very common sense. No hype, no hype. Very practical, very common sense. This is good.

Don Araldi (42:03.637)
Isn't it? Yeah.

Don Araldi (42:08.952)
The other one that I'll show you real quickly is one of my favorites because it helps me with one of my weaknesses, which is I am not a very good typist. And so this is a combination of a great tool and AI in this quick little demo. So hey, we want a description of this opportunity. All right, well, I can just turn on my microphone and dictate. I can even choose the language I want to dictate in.

I'm only fluent in English, so let me do this in English real quick.

I just had a great meeting with the management team at Sharp Hospital. This will be the very first CRM that they will have purchased. Currently, they're using a combination of Excel spreadsheets and Outlook emails to try to manage their relationships and their pipeline, and it's not working well for them.

Their biggest concern is whether or not this CRM will be able to integrate nicely with their existing ERP platform. The project is budgeted. They're hopeful to have this in place up and running, fully trained by the end of Q2 2025.

And you can see it did a great job of taking dictation for me. But now I can highlight that and now we're going to bring in the AI. And if I wanted to, I could ask it to rephrase that, make a text correction. But what I usually do is because it could be a long paragraph here is just say summarize into bullet points. Much easier for most people to just read quick bullet points than to read through a long paragraph. Right. So it just created shortened bullet points for me.

Don Araldi (43:57.422)
Okay, just another example of a nice little AI tool. And there are many more that we just don't have time to show everything today, but.

Jesús Hoyos (44:06.101)
Yeah, so again, very practical, very practical from that point of view. Okay, so if you can close the chair.

Don Araldi (44:15.661)
You bet.

Jesús Hoyos (44:17.825)
This is very good. This is very good. Easy for the search rep to enter the data, summarize it, and share that data. Saying that, I I see already three or four things that they are very powerful for the day-to-day productivity of the search rep. So this is my question. If I am a company in Latin America,

I'm doing B2B, consultative selling, relationship selling, whatever that is. I have my own methodology, 1,500 sales rep. What will be my two or three top choices of things that I need to look to select a CRM like Pipeliner CRM?

Don Araldi (45:12.118)
Yeah, so first and foremost, what we've already talked about here today is, are you really getting what you think you're signing up for? Meaning, if you go to any one of these CRMs webpages and you look at the features that come in their CRM tool, they kind of look the same. And that's the danger, right? Because they're not the same.

I'm going to pick on one company right now. I'll use Salesforce as an example because it's a name most people are familiar with. And I use Salesforce for 18 years. So I'm very familiar. The problem I have with Salesforce is that in the end, it's really more of a framework for a CRM than it is a CRM. Meaning that the average person who buys Salesforce, which is much more expensive than Pipeliner,

But that's not the end of it. They also then end up buying anywhere from three to five additional applications from the Salesforce App Store in order to get that complete solution that they were hoping for. Remember I said at the beginning, we believe all that should be included. Not only that, but now they're dealing with Salesforce and three to five other companies when something's not working right in their solution. A pipeliner, one vendor.

You call us, okay? So that's, think, first and foremost, are you really getting a solution that's going to meet all your needs, or is it going to be constantly becoming more more expensive as you add this additional functionality that's not included when you thought that it was? That's the first thing. The second thing is you really have to decide what is most important to you. As you said at the beginning, Jesus, are we focused on

just producing a pipeline and doing a pipeline report every month so that my boss gets off my back? Or are we really trying to engage salespeople in a way that helps them to close more business? And that's critical. I think it's really critical because one is just another way of reporting. The other is...

Don Araldi (47:30.014)
a way of helping your salespeople become more efficient, more effective. And what you'll see for most of our clients is they're doing more with less. Their sales are increasing and their overhead is decreasing. Why? Because we can automate things. have AI helping. Sales reps now have more capacity to work with more customers, work on more deals.

because the system is helping them to do many of the things they used to have to do manually in a CRM. So that's another thing. Now, the last thing that I would talk about here, I mean, it's hard to put a priority when you say the top three, but customer support is critical. And I can tell you that for many CRM companies, when you have a problem and you need help, you might be waiting.

three to five, 10 to 15 days to get a response, especially if you're a smaller organization. You're not going to get the same support that somebody with a thousand salespeople is getting from that CRM company. At Pipeliner, we're renowned for our support and service. Our average support call is answered within 10 to 12 minutes. And if you want to, you can go live with our support team in a chat.

Jesús Hoyos (48:39.725)
Mm-hmm.

Don Araldi (48:52.992)
conversation, but the important factor there is it's people. You're talking to our people. These aren't bots. It's not an automated system that's sending you something and saying, hey, this will fix the problem. And then you open it up and read it and it's not related at all to what the problem was. So every engagement you have with pipeline is with a live human being. And I'll tell you that people love that. It allows us.

to put the relationship back in Pipeliner, right? Because we're now engaging like you and I are right now. We're having a conversation. I'm understanding your problem. I'm hearing your frustration and I take care of it, right? And we build a relationship over time.

Jesús Hoyos (49:39.373)
So in summary, if I look at this conversation, know, pipeline and CRM have a B2B relationship, engagement, relationship management, you guys are into that term versus the traditional CRM functionality.

through the conversation at the demo, we can see that you have a CRN that is around understanding the relationship and how to engage them. Second, I think you mentioned, I like that term, practical AI. AI that's gonna help me.

you know, do better in my day-to-day activities, you know, some really good examples that you put in there. I like the clicks of the activity. Summarize that. That's perfect. You know, we're humans, we forget. You know, this is perfect. know, forget I was sending that to my boss just for the rep. You know, and they're very visual, one click away everything in terms of visibility. And then, you know, summarizing, you know, you

Don Araldi (50:41.518)
Yeah.

Jesús Hoyos (50:55.905)
Why select a CRN like you guys pilot a CRN? Because you guys are investing in that relationship with the customer. And you do offer, you buy from me, you get what you need from me. You don't have to go to 20 places to do the things that you gotta do in order to manage that relationship. I want to summarize that.

for the readers. Saying that, I leave you to see. already, I've been putting out there the link of Pipeliner CRN. I'm gonna put in the description as well, the podcast and the YouTube. So you can look on the description for that link and you can try out Pipeliner as a trial. But.

What would be your last word here? What would be your compelling events so people take a look at you?

Don Araldi (52:01.39)
Yeah, you know, there's an age-old saying, you get what you pay for. And so when you talk about, you know, I think actually the number is about 1800 different CRMs in the marketplace today. There are a lot that you can buy for, you know, $10 a month per person.

Jesús Hoyos (52:10.402)
Mm-mm.

Don Araldi (52:23.598)
You're gonna get what you pay for and I would urge people not to just jump at the lowest price that they can find because It's always true in life, right? You're not gonna buy that brand new Mercedes sedan For the same price that you buy a Volkswagen Beetle, right? It's just they're both cars. Yep, but they do very different things and they do it in different ways at Piper I would tell you we're sort of a mid-range price point

We're nowhere near as expensive as Salesforce, but we're not the cheapest either. We think we're fairly priced for all the features and tools that we give you. And remember, when you're going to compare a pipe binder to anybody else, that you're not buying any third party products, as well as you may be eliminating some that you're currently paying for.

Right, maybe using MailChimp or SurveyMonkey or Calendly or any number of other tools to do all the things you want to do with your marketing and your sales and your pipeline management. then Pipeliner will eliminate those additional costs for you because it's all built into the tool. Are we the biggest? No.

But remember, there was a day not too long ago when people used to say, nobody ever got fired for buying IBM. When's the last time you heard IBM come up in a conversation? They don't exist. Today, everybody talks about Facebook and social media, but if you remember...

Jesús Hoyos (53:48.737)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Jesús Hoyos (53:58.691)
I heard that phrase a lot in my house. My dad's first job and last job was with IBM. So I know that feeling. that's a true statement. Don, again, thank you for coming and having that conversation today in Tomando Cafe with Jesus Hoyos. We know that you're not a coffee drinker, not all are coffee drinkers.

Don Araldi (54:06.048)
Yeah, yeah.

Don Araldi (54:21.078)
My pleasure.

Jesús Hoyos (54:27.683)
But we know we can have a tequila next time that we see each other somewhere in Miami or San Diego. What I want to tell people, again, the link, so you can take a look at a pipeline of CRN is going to be in the description. I strongly encourage you guys to include a pipeline in your list if you are about to select a CRN system. I mean, they are unique. They are different.

And I like what I see so far. you should consider it, especially during the B2B.

Don Araldi (55:05.1)
And hey, hey, Zeus, you know that link, important for them to know if they want to do a trial and they sign up for the trial, they have complete access to our support throughout their trials, not like they're out there on their own trying to figure things out.

Jesús Hoyos (55:18.957)
Yeah, no, perfect. This is something that I advise companies, know, go into a trial, do an MVP, you know, connect with the vendors so they understand what you need so they can help you to do that together. So you can go back and do your RFI based on what you learned. So that's one of the ideas. Again, thank you so much. And the people who are following or you know what you need to do, click whatever, you know, subscribe, follow, you know, whenever you're listening to the podcast. Done. Thank you so much. See you next time.

Don Araldi (55:33.102)
There you go.

Don Araldi (55:48.94)
Bye Jesus, thank you.