The Pinnacle Sales Performance Solution consists of many benefits, features and sub-systems to provide its comprehensive solution for independent sales representatives to be successful.

Custom Solution
The Pinnacle Solution is a software engine that can be fully configured for the specific needs of the customer, enabling or disabling any of the features and sub-systems. Pinnacle can offer a free trial membership, month-to-month commitment, and 30-day money-back satisfaction guarantee, direct billing, customer support help desk, referral program, multiple membership levels, custom company branding and web pages, custom leadership co-branding, custom company success tracks, custom company email templates, custom information pages and downloadable company documents.
 
The Pinnacle solution also includes a complete back-office for the company administrator to maintain the company’s content, membership and related information with no technical expertise required.

Mentoring & Coaching
Pinnacle includes a personal mentoring support system for mentors to help the sales reps accomplish their goals. Mentors can view their sales rep’s calendars, meeting plans, goals, prospects, customers, classes, assessments, certifications, projects, and those they mentor. They can create a mentoring history with unlimited notes and can also request to be automatically notified for specific accomplishments. Mentors can view a four-generation chart of mentorees and can email all those they mentor. The Mentoring Calendar can display all the sales rep’s activities for easy review by their mentor. Mentors can also make assignments for those they mentor.
 
Goal Management System
Pinnacle provides a goal management system for sales reps to better track and accomplish their business objectives. Complex goals may contain multiple tasks with detailed notes. Each goal and task includes projected vs. actual completion dates and variance reporting. Sales reps may join a success track, which is a set of goals predefined by the company or any other sales rep for a specific business process. Each goal in the success track may include detailed instructions with links to information pages and other support resources.
 
Calendaring System
Each sales rep can have multiple public and private personal or group calendars. They can also view multiple company calendars for conference calls and other company events. The Pinnacle calendars go beyond a regular appointment calendar to include dated information within the Pinnacle system like goals due, classes, assessments and certifications completed, sales events and sales activities, and project and task due dates. Available time slots may be identified and taken by authorized users. Appointments may be recurring and may include automated email reminders at a predefined time beforehand.

Meeting / Party Planning System
A sales rep can create a detailed meeting plan (or party plan) for any appointment on their calendar. A host / hostess can be specified and trained for the meeting and an invitation can be created for emailing to the guests. The invitation may be created from 25 different themes. The meeting planner can include an unlimited number of guests and keeps track of the guest’s RSVPs. The host also has secured access to the meeting planner to edit the invitation, guest list and unlimited meeting/party notes. The meeting planner also tracks guest attendance and sales if applicable.
 
Training and Development System
Pinnacle provides a very robust Learning Management System. Pinnacle provides interactive multimedia training with multiple lessons, downloadable lesson documents, lesson quizzes, and student notes. Pinnacle also includes course evaluations for users to rate the quality of the courses on a scale from 1-5 for the course content, presentation, presenter, and usefulness. Each course receives a 1-5 star ranking for users to review the detailed ratings and comments by other users. Users can print certificates of completion for completed courses and certificates of achievement for passed courses.

 Company specific training can be produced and organized in company folders. Pinnacle also includes a public course catalog with over $50,000 of corporate training courses included for free in the monthly membership. Public courses include professional, personal, academic and technical courses like Computer Basics, How to use Windows, How to use the Internet, Microsoft Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and FrontPage, QuickBooks, and hundreds of others.
 
Assessment & Certification System
Pinnacle provides an Assessment Engine for defining custom assessments and certifications. They may be skills assessments, diagnostic assessments that provide a decision tree of situational questioning, prescriptive assessments that recommend training courses based on the answers, or certifications on product or process knowledge. Assessments and certifications can specify the number of times it can be taken, the wait time between retakes, if the user can view the answers, the passing grade, and how to calculate the final grade. The questions may include multimedia audio or video clips. Users can print certificates for passed certifications.

Marketing System
Pinnacle provides a suite of marketing tools to help the sales rep find qualified prospects. The sales rep can view the company’s published marketing strategies. The company can define multiple lead capture web pages in multiple languages that are professionally crafted to deliver a specific marketing message to a target niche. Each lead page starts with a unique selling proposition and the key benefits the target audience desires, followed by the product features to build rationale, established credibility with affiliations, approvals, certifications and testimonials, risk eliminating statements, and a compelling reason to act now. A sales rep can promote the lead pages directly in email to personal contacts or in advertising to attract qualified prospects. The sales rep is automatically notified when the visitor starts viewing the lead page and when they request more information. The requesting visitor is automatically added to the Sales Management System as a new prospect. Newly acquired leads (i.e. prospects) may be distributed to sales reps by the company or any other sales rep. A sales rep can view the traffic statistics to see how many times a lead page was viewed and responded to.

The company can also define presentation websites in multiple languages for each specific solution they offer. The presentation sites may consist of multiple web pages to present detailed information about the value proposition. A specific presentation site is sent to a prospect by the sales rep, who can track when the visitor starts viewing the presentation site and exactly which pages they have viewed.

Pinnacle provides an Affiliate Management System to manage business partners that service the same target market and provide customer referrals. The sales rep can keep track of all the affiliate’s contact information and the agreed upon terms for compensation. Each affiliate has his own links to the sales rep’s lead pages that they can promote to their audience on web pages, customer email lists, newsletters, etc. The system keeps track of which affiliates referred which prospects. The affiliate can also login to a secured back-office to view the referral statistics.

Pinnacle fully supports permission marketing with the delivery of valuable information in newsletters to people who have requested it. Marketing newsletters can be created on specific topics related to the company’s value proposition. Each newsletter has a lead page to promote the free subscription to the valuable information. The system will automatically distribute the newsletter back-issues on a predefined schedule to the new subscribers. This permission marketing technique will help a sales rep develop a warm market of potential prospects that aren’t quite ready to purchase yet.

Sales Management System
Pinnacle provides a professional Sales Tracking and Reporting system that tracks the progress of prospects within the steps of a sales process. It goes well beyond a contact manager that just tracks contact information. The company can define multiple sales campaigns with specific steps in the sales process. The system will keep track of which step the prospect is at and the date achieved. Each step of the sales process may include detailed information for the sales rep like sales scripts, training or reference documents. The sales rep can keep track of the next event that the prospect has agreed to like a phone call or a meeting. The sales rep can keep unlimited notes for each prospect to document all interaction. They can also attach important documents to the prospect like applications, proposals and agreements. The sales rep can send personal emails to a prospect and can select from email templates created by the company or any other sales rep. The sales rep can create follow-up events to keep track of the prospect’s important dates like birthdays, anniversaries, expired contracts, etc. An inactive prospect is either closed (yes), dead (no), or in fallback (stalled/maybe).
 
The sale rep and their mentor can easily view a summary of all their active prospects on the Sales Board Report. This report displays the total number of prospects and their potential and current value for each step of the sales process. This report gives a birds-eye-view of how well the sales rep is filling the sales pipeline, how well they are moving prospects through the pipeline and for which steps of the sales process they may need help. The sales rep can also view reports on their scheduled sales events, stalled prospects, prospects on the first step, closed prospects, sales activity notes, and prospects distributed to others. 

Customer Service System
After a prospect is closed, they are automatically added to the Customer Service System. Sales reps can keep unlimited notes to document all interaction with the customer. They can also select a predefined set of goals for themselves to accomplish with their new customers. The sales rep can create follow-up events to keep track of the customer’s important dates like birthdays, anniversaries, maintenance checkups, etc. The sales rep can send personal emails to a customer and can select from email templates created by the company or any other sales rep. They can also attach important documents to the prospect like contract renewals.

Personal Resource Center
Sales reps can create custom resources to be used by themselves or any other sales rep. These custom resources include Success Tracks that are predefined sets of goals for a specific business process. Success Tracks may be goals for the sales rep personally or they may be goals to be accomplished by the sale rep for a customer. The sales rep may also create custom email templates with replaceable tags for personalization. The email templates may be for lead page introductions, presentation site introductions, or general emails to prospects. The sales rep can create custom information pages that can be referenced within the steps of a success track or can be referenced directly by a unique URL. The custom information pages are fully functional web pages and can include links to other information pages and other Internet resources. The sales rep can also upload their own documents to be accessed within the steps of a success track or directly by a unique URL.

Collaboration / Communication
Pinnacle provides several collaboration and communication tools to assist the sales rep and their support team. These tools include online discussion boards and online chat rooms on any topic, telephone conference lines for up to 96 callers, electronic suggestion boxes that allow the sales rep to see the status and response to their suggestion, and company defined surveys to collect information from the sales field, customer base, or target market. The surveys can be dynamically created by the company and they automatically calculate the survey statistics.

Project Collaboration System
Pinnacle provides a complete Project Management System for multiple people to collaborate on a shared project. The project may have multiple phases and can have unlimited tasks assigned to the various members of the project. Each member can view the status and notes of all tasks and phases in the project. The system tracks the projected vs. actual completion dates for the project, phases and tasks. Time and expenses can also be tracked with each task and rolled up to the phase and project. Each Phase and task can have unlimited notes and attached documents. Each Project and phase has its own discussion board and chat room. The projects can be assigned a specific security level to control access. A project manager can view the “What’s New” report to see a summary of all project activity. 

Support Information System
Pinnacle provides several tools to deliver support information to the sales rep. These support tools include a company document search engine like Google that allows the sales rep to search for any information by keyword. The sales rep can also search the company’s knowledgebase of questions and answers with a similar Google-like search engine or they can browse questions and answers by topic. Company documents and questions and answers can be assigned a security level to control access by, independent sales reps, employees, managers, and executives.

Pinnacle also provides shortcut links, similar to Windows shortcuts, for quick access to any information including goals, classes, assessments, prospects, customers, affiliates, support documents, attachment, projects, tasks and success tracks.