New Pipejump sales app is Basecamp meets Salesforce

Ok, so I don’t normally write about online sales applications but one such app comes out of stealth today which made me sit up and take notice. Pipejump is a new sales cycle management startup with drag and drop features aimed at small company sales people and freelancers. It’s a kind of Basecamp meets Salesforce. It’s deceptively simple to use but actually pretty powerful in its simplicity.

Co-founded and developed by Applicake from Krakow (Poland) the venture is bootstrapped but, I understand, has already turned down some investment offers.

Users can move deals through from Incoming, Qualified, Quote, Closure and you can edit deals, track deal flow, set reminders for sales calls, move them around, pretty much you name it. Moving deals around is easy and the app will even ask you why you are moving a deal from qualified to unqualified. For example, when dragging a deal to the Lost panel, you get a nice little box to enter the reason for losing the deal. Other features like deal import from Excel will be added shortly.

The Ajax interface (it has great graphs for instance) is very intuitive and lets you manage incoming deals and focus on the right stuff, taking the essential process of sales calls and boils down to simple process. I can see some advantage over Salesforce, since Salesforce users tend to need some training. In my experience, sales people are not renowned for enjoying using complex deal tracking software – or enjoying having to train. But Pipejump is almost simple enough to use that anyone could pick it up.

Competitor SimpleSalesTracking has a far more complex interface and frankly, although being slightly cheaper, it probably has too many features. With pricing starting at $24 a month for a 100 deals, Pipejump looks like a serious competitor in the sales software market. They’ve also benchmarked themselves against Salesforce and claim it is “3.5 faster” than Salesforce in completing the most common sales tasks (screencast below).