Stand alone CRMs claim a “360° view of the customer”, so how does your CRM compare in the following every-day scenario:
Assume a customer calls, and your CSR needs to know:
An ideal sales solution that strikes the right balance between power and simplicity, because too much of one comes at the other’s expense.
We designed sales opportunities to look and feel like the very thing every opportunity hopes to be when it grows up - a sales order!
New Lead responder - A lead is 5X more likely to convert if you respond within 5 minutes, and you can do exactly that by leveraging our workflow automation to automatically send out email templates the moment a new lead is created, particularly leads created with web-to-lead forms.
Object of the opportunity - Products and services which make up the object of a potential sale, can be added and modified throughout the sales opportunity's journey onto its deal-won or deal-lost conclusion.
Longer selling cycles with selling templates - Make every sales person a hero by encapsulating your best-selling practices, when the selling cycle is long enough to support a more granular approach to selling.
Percentage of closing - Can be set manually or automatically based on pipeline evolution.
Sales helping drive procurement accuracy - Close % can contribute to demand planning, to further improve procurement accuracy.
Opportunity follow-up automation - Automatically send out sales templates based on a schedule, to automate what you’re probably already doing after a new lead and opportunity is realized.
Once you need to communicate quotes to customers, you’ll appreciate our BizDoc module (aka “Quote Builder”), which can be used to custom design quotes or whatever your business calls them (e.g. Estimates, Proposals, etc..).
All customer records can also be sub-divided into custom profiles you define, for example “Gold Customers”, “Silver Customers”, etc... Like all forms in BizAutomation your organization will be able to define which fields display for which roles by which relationship, including field layout. More setup in the beginning that will pay dividends for years to come by improving ease of use because this way employees need only see information relative to their particular role within your business.
Lead Management - Enter or import leads, which make up the first of three qualification stages in the quest for closing new business. BizAutomation provides everything you’ll need to manage opportunities against new leads.
Prospect Management - Prospects are qualified potential business, representing the middle ground between un-qualified leads, and actual paying accounts / customers. Keeping prospects separated from your paying customers and leads provides focused campaign processes designed to maximize closing probabilities.
Account / Customer Management - Automatically score customers based on performance without manual intervention. Assign ratings based on income over time. Use customer performance to influence picking priority, promotions, up-selling, and many other campaign ideas.
Contact Management - The people you connect with at the organizations which your business connects to (which can also be people). Send contacts emails, take notes, schedule activities, assign them to leads, prospects, or account opportunities, and much more.
Follow-up Management - Not all opportunities require extensive opportunity pipeline processes. Sometimes you just need to know when you last contacted a lead, account, etc.. and what status they fell into. This and more is available with BizAutomation’s follow-up management capabilities.
Vendor / Supplier Management - Vendors and Suppliers can also become customers if desired. For more on vendor management, see our Procurement, Inventory, and Warehouse WMS, sections.
Partner Relationship Management - Receive new leads from partners, and include them in sales opportunities and orders. Partners can also be included in sales commissions.
Custom Relationship Definitions - BizAutomation is all about easy customizations (the kind that don’t involved writing code), and custom relationships are a prime example. With them, you can custom define your own relationships and profiles using simple drop-downs.
Associations - The relationships that link to the organizations you do business with, such as sister companies, branches, subsidiaries, etc..
Billing & Shipping Addresses
Commissions management makes it possible to custom define your incentives program around the way you do business.
Sales Employees & Partner Commissions - Split Sales Opportunities and Sales Orders into both internal and partner resources ((a partner can be a reseller, dealer, etc..) so that each can receive a percentage of the commission.
Commission Base - Commission can be based on things like amounts paid to invoices, total order sub-total, or gross profits (gross profit definitions are custom defined too).
Multi-Dimensional Tiers - Meaning that you can set a range of items, quantities, amounts, etc.. and each can interact with the other in a multi-dimensional way, which really opens up what you can do. This way, sales person A can make more commission for selling the same tier of products as a more junior sales person with a different incentive package. This is but a single example, but in all cases the process is wizard driven.
Share commission reports with drill down - Everyone with a commission incentive has the ability to see their own incentive status, to find out how much they’ve made for a pay period, or how close they are to reaching a new milestone. Each commission amount can be drilled into, so that the source order, and invoice involved can be audited to confirm that everything is on the up and up.
Territory management is a great way to cut down on record clutter, improve security, and control access to organizations and everything that relates to them, including orders, opportunities, cases, activities, and much more, which can be segmented by custom defined territories.
Geographical separation - Employees can be assigned territories based on corporate hierarchies. So for example, if you have separate offices or teams responsible for different geographic territories such as U.S, Canada, Latin America, etc.., you can have the C-Level tier gain access to all records in all territories, where employees belonging to individual territories (or groups of territories we refer to as “Territory Scopes”) are shown appropriately segmented data.
Business unit separation - If you have subsidiaries or logical business units that are located in different markets, you might want to consider mirroring financial classes which reflect your entities within the territory scope definitions, so that people working in different business units and / or entities have full separation.
While this typically is an area you’d see in order management (it’s covered there too), like so many things ERP, they cross pollinate because pricing can have a profound impact on the outcome of a sales opportunity and is a key part of quote building.
Price Rules - The price rule wizard provides a matrix of variations, such as quantity range, product or product groups, and relationships (e.g. My Gold customers get a better price than Silver tier customers). Conflict management resolves the potential for two pricing rules that seemingly contradict from getting in the way of a sale.
Price Levels & Tiers - Set quantity or amount ranges that are set within the item records themselves. These tables can be easily updated using the update wizard.
Cost + Margin driven Price Formulas - If your organization uses this method of pricing, it can be set to dynamically update based on dynamic cost updates, or calculate from period based static cost. This method fluctuates profit margins during the price period rather than cost which is needed when contractually committing to price lists for a period of time.
Promotions Management - Impact the opportunity / quote with promotion rules that can layer on top of the pricing foundation already laid. Use date ranges for temporary discounts. Set rules such as “IF X happens, THEN discount Y”, etc.. Multi-currency can also drive pricing depending on base and alternate currencies (contact us for details).
Cost Transparency - Every line item within every order has permission enabled cost source, which you can use to show transparency within the order’s gross profits and sales commission calculations. Cost sources can include vendor costs from tables dynamically generated from individual purchase orders, or from directly linked dropship or Directship purchase orders.
A comprehensive solution that leverages data from other modules and helps streamline repetitive tasks via workflow automation.
Resolve cases faster by combining automated processes with easy access to the full details, context, and history of every case and customer interaction.
When a case becomes more involved that usual, you can create topics and automatically have case contacts receive email alerts, which they can respond to in a collaborative forum (similar to topic forums you might belong to).
If a support ticket involves an item that was ordered, you’ll be able to reference line items from recent orders, to make it the object of the case.
Where sales is all about conversions, marketing is focused on lead generation and campaign analytics. By measuring spend to opportunity ratios, you’ll learn ROI and how to best optimize future campaign budget allocations.
Comparing and contrasting marketing campaigns can be quite a chore. Go in blind, and you may end up wasting significant revenue on a poorly performing campaigns. BizAutomation enables the ability to track campaign ROI based on all the data you’re already feeding the system from all departments, such as leads, customers, orders and financial transactions such as invoices.
In the end, you’ll know which campaigns performed well, which were so so, and which outright flopped, using analytics such as what a campaign generated in terms of:
Create temporary or permanent promotions with our easy to use promotion rules wizard. Promotions can be applied to internal orders, as well as B2C and B2B Ecommerce orders using our BizCommerce platform. Promotions can also act as an additional layer of pricing control.
Slice and dice contact lists based on any number of criteria.
Broadcast messages to:
Automating, tracking, and enabling seamless communication flows between your employees and trading partners is one of the most important, yet underrated benefits BizAutomation can offer your organization.
Track & Manage activities across the entire business (permission enabled):
Google G-Suite and Office 365 Email & Calendaring:
Each contact related record (e.g. Customer, Contact, Order, Case, Project, Vendor PO, etc..) will have an audit trail of activities exchange with that record’s contact such as email in, out, tasks, etc.
Each contact related record (e.g. Customer, Contact, Order, Case, Project, Vendor PO, etc..) can have an audit trail of activity exchanges with that record’s contact such as email in, out, tasks, and other date driven events.
Convert and classify trading partner documents, such as Customer Purchase Orders and Vendor Invoices, using AI and OCR technology to help automate data entry, and all the typical quality control validation involved. The end result will be countless man hours saved, and a significant reduction in human error (offered as an add-on service).
Use BizAutomation’s workflow automation wizard to create IF / THEN events that send customized email template based alerts to other employees and trading partners.