7 Reasons Why Sage CRM v7 is Right for You

• It takes more than great products to drive sales in today’s challenging economic environment. Acquiring and retaining customers is essential for business success and great customer service is the driving-force that differentiates one business from another. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) helps businesses attract and retain customers, and deliver an exceptional customer experience every time.

• Sage CRM manages every aspect of your customer interactions, provides powerful insight into the performance of your business and your staff, and drives user productivity. Sage CRM v7 will revolutionize how you manage your business and your employees manage their day.

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7 Reasons Why Sage CRM v7 Is Right For You

ACT By Sage linked to Sage Accpac ERP!

Extended Enterprise solutions or integrated business solutions are the need of the hour in this globalised and competitive market especially for small business units. Small business entrepreneurs should understand the benefits bought in by implementing integrated business solutions. Integrated business solutions help reduce the needless costs and increases profitability and in turn solidify customer relationship. Hence nowadays firms in the SME segment like finance firms, trading and distribution firms, retailers, etc, who have to maintain their contacts and inventory both equally, require an end to end integrated solution to get an overall view of their business.

ACT! By Sage, a world renowned contact management solution catered for business owners, sale professionals and company representatives, is the #1 selling Contact and Customer Manager in the world with 2.8 million users. When combined with a robust accounting package like Sage Accpac ERP which not only handles your financial worries but also takes care of your entire stock distribution together helps you attain optimum efficiency in your business.

Greytrix has developed an ACT link to Sage Accpac ERP that brings a complete 3600 views of your organization connecting your front end to your back office in real time. When your front office like your sales persons, customer support has a clear view of the customer transactional history with real time information on inventory status they are more efficient in serving the clients thus gaining customer loyalty.

ACT offers Sales opportunity management, data sharing and security, calendar and activity management along with an intuitive Dashboard features. With ACT! you always know exactly which opportunities are open, what stage they’re in, and what is the probability of closing them. Not only does this help your sales team, but also helps in accurate forecasting for your production and manufacturing units since it is combined with Sage Accpac ERP.

Sage Accpac ERP combined with ACT by Sage clears out the quote-to cash cycle. If a member of the sales team, for example, generates a quote based on out-of-date pricing information or stock availability, and subsequently converts this quote into a customer order, it is likely that this error will only be identified later at the order approval or shipping stage. The order will need to be passed back to the salesperson for correction and then re-processed by the finance department. As a result, order completion is delayed for the customer, administrative cost increased for the company and workload is unnecessarily duplicated for sales and finance staff. Clearly, where this scenario arises on a regular basis, it will impact negatively, and significantly, on overall customer satisfaction, as well as increasing transactional cost on an exponential basis.

Enabling users to view combined financial and non-financial customer information within a single application, regardless of where the information is generated or stored is another key requirement for front-to-back-office integration. 360 degree customer visibility is particularly useful for account managers, that may require access to a customer's purchase history or for customer service representatives that may need to update a customer on the status of an order. Providing these users with access to both financial and non-financial information eliminates the customer data 'blind spots'.

Many business organizations back out of enterprise solution evaluation due to the misconception that such solutions would be very expensive and time consuming.
With an affordable combo of ACT! and Sage Accpac ERP you can now have two world class solutions working in synch to better your business. Mail us at sales@greytrix.com to enquire how you can achieve this deadly duo at an affordable pricing.

Sage CRM- Marketing made Easy.

“Good marketing is no accident, but a result of careful planning and execution.” - CKP

Need for an end to end system in sales & marketing is always felt by the business owners who aim for consistent growth in their business. CRM helps you to target right customer at right time. SME can be benefited with CRM system in many ways such as:

• 360-degree view of your market & customer.
• Improve the output of marketing campaigns ,by wise distribution of marketing development fund.
• Timely identification of potential opportunities and plan accordingly.
• Cross departmental coordination between marketing, sales, and support departments for better results.
• Proper customer segmentation and prioritization.
• Improve customer service when handling customer queries.
• Reduced customer handling cost.
• Ability to measure, analyze and improve marketing activities.

Today, many SMEs plan, execute and analyze their marketing activities through CRM system. Once the marketing strategy is finalized next step is to plan the marketing campaigns and budget the campaigns. CRM helps the marketing department with historic data while planning the dates and budgeting the campaigns. While running a marketing campaign multiple departments get involved thus complicating the responsibility during execution phase, CRM helps the planners to set list the marketing activities involved in campaign with deadlines and facilities to allocate resource for each activity.

Since planning is centralized and execution is decentralized, communication of marketing plan on time is still an issue. CRM facilitate real time access to marketing action plan which gives clear idea to marketing personnel’s regarding their responsibilities & tasks, individually and as a team. Once the execution is completed successfully, collating the result is another cumbersome task, feedback from marketing campaign does not come directly to marketing department.

CRM helps to capture the feedback in form of enquires or leads and relate the same with the marketing campaign, this results in getting a clear picture on the ROI on marketing campaigns. The marketing module in Sage CRM completes the full circle in marketing starting from planning, execution, analysis, reviewing and reworking marketing activities.

How CRM can help an organization to get to the next level?

While the world is undergoing rapid transformation with regards to collaboration, social interaction and Web 2.0, CRM still remains the most important aspect of any growing organization and the foundation of successful customer interaction remains the same. CRM is not just an application or a package but it’s a set of processes within the organization which has to be combined and integrated closely with communication methodologies and customer focused knowledge base to server the one thing important to any growing organization: its customers.

A good CRM process is about understanding preferences of your customers and leads, so you can:

• Provide just in time services and support to your customers so that you are way above your competitors
  
• Improve your sales, customer and ordering interaction processes.
  
• Reduce customer frustration by being proactive in anticipating his needs and queries rather than repeatedly asking for same information.
  
• Improving customer relationships to have repeat customers by keeping customer service, sales and marketing information with regards to him on fingertips
  

A properly installed and implemented CRM system can contribute many benefits to your organization but four major area stands out where there is going to definite improvement on an immediate basis by deployment of a right CRM system

Prospects to Sales Closer Cycle

The more information you have with regards to a lead, the more advantageous your position will be over your competitors to close sales. A major wealth management company** in India using Sage CRM has made a 10 stage process from a lead to sales closure activity workflow with tracking in each stage as to the lead turning into cold and capturing of data. The managers always know which relationship manager is working on which prospect and always have the pipeline with various stages. All levels of management have escalations with regards to particular actions like a particular prospect not contacted even while he is in stage 9 for more than 2 days. Without making it complicated for sales person who would rather work on “making sales happen” than entering data, the work flow makes sales process automated and every relationship manager has the task cut out as to what the next step is going to be in each stage. This system not only gives powerful post analytics capabilities but acts as a sales assistant to help the company automate sales tasks – allowing the managers to spend more time focusing on strategic sales issues and new sales closers.

Just in Time Customer Service

Customer satisfaction is a critical success factor for all businesses. The right system allows your team to take a proactive approach to customer service. With up-to date customer information at their fingertips, your employees can resolve customer issues more quickly and successfully. A major IT software product** company is utilizing the power of Sage CRM by using Sage CRM’s self service portal to log on cases over web and SMS/Email gateway to immediately inform them of status updates. It is also serving as the “knowledge hub” where all critical documents and updates/patches of software are stored on a real time basis for their distributors. The turnaround time and manpower energy saved with such a system in place for your customers where you proactively give support to the customer and inform them of their status.

Better Forecasting and Decision Making

A well designed CRM system provides comprehensive views of customer across all major touch points including marketing campaign and sales activity. Sales forecasting and Sales Targets can be aligned within the organization to give better decision making power to top management. At lower levels, the decision making comes with better coordination and collaboration with different teams because of collation of the customer data at a single repository. A prime example for this kind of collaboration can be seen in an implementation of Sage CRM at Engineering Project organization** which is into waterproofing projects where sales people know the status of the projects and invoices done by operations and financial teams because of the integration with the ERP software and it helps them make informed decision at their end while pitching new sales to the customers.

Greater Organizational efficiency

With an integrated CRM system, you can gain immediate access to your organization’s critical customer information. A good CRM system also creates internal efficiencies by. One of the mobile distribution company** is utilizing Sage CRM to track purchase of mobile Sim cards and its activiation in CRM along with customer complaints through call center operations. The entire sales, cases, and financial data for that customer is at a finger tips of the entire organization. Each of the departments has a pre defined automated workflow processes which tends to reduce human error and decrease process time which in turn is providing consistency throughout the entire organization

In conclusion, CRM is a combination of a good software and process which will help you increase efficiency and customer satisfaction at your organization. There is a number of CRM software in the market which can help you achieve your goals. Sage Software has ACT!, Sage CRM and Saleslogix, which is meant for different set of customers according to their needs.

** For more information on companies mentioned in the article and how it is changing their approach towards customers either contact me at kumar@greytrix.com or contact Sage Software at www.sagesoftware.co.in

BY: Kumar Siddhartha, CEO Greytrix India Pvt. Ltd.