customer story

How 8th Light scaled their business with Pipeline CRM

8th Light is a custom software consultancy headquartered in Chicago with offices in London, Los Angeles, and New York City. Dedicated to crafting software that is beautiful, durable, and shows pride in workmanship, the company hires exclusively through an internal apprenticeship program. 8th Light also hosts the annual Software Craftsmanship North America (SCNA) conference.

8th Light

Software Industry

Chicago, IL

The Value of Simplicity

“I had about two minutes with Salesforce before I flamed out,” says 8th Light VP of Sales and Marketing Margaret Pagel. She liked some of the features, but what she really needed was a reliable repository for the company’s lead, prospect, and client account data, including critical technical information for projects.

“I switched to Pipeline CRM because it has the features we need,” Pagel explains. “People are comfortable using it. The ramp-up time to understand how to use it is about two minutes.”

With Pipeline CRM, compliance is “100% better,” and 8th Light has a single source that employees in various teams and geographic locations can access whenever they need client information.

“We’ve recommended Pipeline CRM to other software companies,” says Pagel. “It’s a great fit because our business is not complicated. Whether you’re a one-man shop or a 1,000 man shop, you’re providing a service. It’s pretty simple, and PipelineDeals allows us to manage it very efficiently.”

Support for Rapid Growth

8th Light has the enviable challenge of being a strong brand in high demand. They’ve grown from 10 employees to around 100 in less than four years.

Pipeline CRM has helped 8th Light manage this growth by making it easy to see what needs to be prioritized and run monthly reports for board meetings. Recently, Pagel began consolidating metrics from other sources into Pipeline CRM in order to enable robust sales projection and forecasting. New data fields include estimated revenue from prospects and leads based on various lengths of engagement, estimated number of people to be allocated, and which of the company’s offices will facilitate the project.

“On any given day, someone can look and see where we are in our prospect pipeline. We have projections on people looking to do business with us against the real dollars we’re bringing in, and we can see how many people we would need to allocate compared to how many people we’re bringing into our apprenticeship program.”

Pipeline CRM is simple, clear, and concise. It’s not bogged down with a lot of extra noise. It was very difficult to get compliance with previous tools. Now we’re capturing all the information we need in one system that’s easy to access. That in and of itself is transformative.

Margaret Pagel, 8th Light VP of Sales and Marketing

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How 8th Light scaled their business with Pipeline CRM

The Value of Simplicity

Support for Rapid Growth

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