By Darren Bayley
From time to time, especially during demonstrations, I get asked whether GCC uses Microsoft CRM internally and, if so, how do we have our own CRM set up for our day to day work.
Well the answer is yes we do use MS CRM internally and this Blog seems as good a place as any to go through how we have our internal systems set up, so today I’m starting with the Sales area in CRM.
Customer Record
We have the usual database items to be able to create mail shots, filter reports etc and we have also added a Tab for profile details to collect further information related to our market, ERP package, CRM package that the customers use and so on.
The profile report tab auto runs a report that gathers together all the information that a sales person needs for a visit to a customer. It lists the service contracts the customer has, statistics on the helpdesk calls etc.
The credit control tab and stock sold tab auto run reports that pull down the data from our ERP package Sage 200 for the customer you are looking at. These tabs show the current outstanding debt and can drill to invoice details, open sales orders and stock sold to the customer.
The consequence of using these types of reports is that we can link any SQL database to any other SQL database as long as there is a link between the databases. This then gives our sales team the ability to see data from other systems within CRM.
Opportunities
The opportunity screen has been modified to allow us to split an opportunity into the various product streams, changing one of the sub totals automatically changes the total revenue.
Activities, appointments and emails regarding this opportunity are then stored against the opportunity record allowing all staff to know what’s happening with an opportunity.
Sales Reports
We use the SQL reporting subscription method to automatically email out reports to staff. On Monday morning reports go out to the sales team detailing opportunities due to close this month, next month and one detailing activities done in the last 7 days and ones due in the next 7 days.
The above is an example of opportunities closing this month, as each opportunity should have a future activity then yellow highlight indicates that the activity has passed.
Mobile
We use iPhones and use them to connect back to our live CRM via opening a VPN on the phone. We could use an offline solution to a mobile or a blackberry (which we can demo) but prefer to use and show the free solution to customer and prospects so they can see what they would get without incurring additional costs.