CRM account management features?

Todd,
Before looking at software, focus on your primary use case. Will you be doing email marketing, pipeline forecasting, or sales force automation (such as scheduling meeting, calls, etc).? What departments will you roll out in Phase 1? What are the business objectives of implementing the system? Once you frame in your requirements, THEN you can go to the marketplace and select a CRM solution. You list some basic CRM requirements such as managing/categorizing accounts, tracking conversations, setting reminders, and composing quotes. Here's the good thing. Almost every modern CRM system in the marketplace will do all of these.

If you are open to a hosted CRM product with enhanced features that comes fully managed and supported, you may want to look into Intelecrm. There are packages that fit nearly every organizational need, and costs range from $240-$3360/yr for unlimited users. Intelecrm has the same base functionality as Salesforce.com and SugarCRM (http://www.intelestream.net/en/whitepapers/sugarcrm-versus-salesforce-com-and...), while being less expensive and allowing unlimited users, which is a unique pricing model. Again, try not to get caught up in "vendor soup" until you flesh our your CRM requirements. In order to frame in your use case, we can perform a CRM Analysis at no cost: http://www.intelestream.net/en/contact/crm-questionnaire.html
Best,

Ray Stoeckicht
rays@intelestream.net

Hello Todd. My company is a software sales organization and we have about a dozen users of our CRM application in Sales and Marketing. Our needs include databases for Targets, Leads, Opportunities and Customers. We also have needs for email campaigns, activity monitoring, forecasts, alerts, reports...all of the classic CRM functions.

I chose to implement Sugar CRM 2 years ago and it has served the purpose rather well. It required quite a few hours to add fields, tables, data entry forms, email templates, report and dashboard templates, telemarketing lists, and all of the other mods specific for my business, I'm sure this is true of any CRM application.

Sugar CRM (we installed the on-premise version), at least for us, was a bit slow and clunky to use and I would say that we are probably 50% of the blame because we don't have a system admin to keep the app up to date nor did we have a very robust server. Because of this we are switching to ACT! but my expectation is that we may face similar challenges although the response time of the system may be faster as it is primarily client/server as opposed to web based.

Regardless of the CRM application that you choose, consider the time and effort involved in the initial configuration, database design, report generation. Also consider how easy is the app for telemarketing. In my experience, telemarketers are slowed down by CRM apps and prefer to work from Excel or plain old paper.

Regards,
Neil Swanson
VP Sales
Achieve IT Solutions

Sales quoting out of CRM systems can be problematic. You need to ensure that you are able to slave the service/product catalog in the quote system to the master service/product catalog in the back-office/ERP/OE/Billing system.

It would be helpful to know more about your company before presecribing a CRM solution, as there are many. Account mgmt functionality is pretty standard across CRM apps. Categorization and reminders would require some segmentation/lists/reports. Finally, if you're looking to integrate with a quoting system. you should consider the integration architecture of the CRM application you are looking to adopt... is it standards boased? SOA? Easy to import/export? Proprietary or not?

My experience is colored because I use Oracle and like Oracle CRM On Demand because it provides a true 360 degree view of your accounts, it is standards based, open and built to integrate with anything, and it's reporting capabilites are second to none, allowing you to see reminders, lists etc easily.

If you need a CRM with built-in sales quoting, NetSuite should be very high on your list. NetSuite is one of the very few CRM systems with built-in sales quote generation. To Eric's point, the reason NetSuite can do this well while the vast majority of CRM systems cannot is because NetSuite includes order management, billing, ERP, etc.

NetSuite also has strong account management capability that covers all of your requirements as well.

Rob

Todd, lots of good answers here already. I would echo Ray's comment in that you need to figure out what you want to do before you fit your CRM requirements to that.

If you talk to independent analysts and advisors like www.esresearch.com, they will tell you to get your sales methodology and sales process right first, then choose your CRM, otherwise you'll just be automating bad practice, instead of best practice.

For specific account management requirements, I think you may struggle with out-of-the-box CRM systems, as their account management methodology functionality is pretty sparse. Many specialist vendors can work with you to impart their AM methodology, and automate those best practices within your new CRM system.

I hope this helps.

Todd,

Many great suggestions on strategy from the others!

Some practical recommendations: I have clients that use Sage SalesLogix CRM that is designed as account centric. All the communications (emails, notes, scheduled events, history, digital attachments)can be viewed at the account level and you can drill down to the contact, opportunity and service ticket level if needed.

They use an integrated quoting system that allows the use of a master product catalog and ability to quote at a 'kit' level with optional explosion of the kits' items. As the others mentioned quoting can be very involved and different per business so make sure it can be modified to your business requirements.

The quote system should provide revision management and the ability to quickly view the pricing of items that were previously purchased (whether by the current or other customers). Quotes generally relate to a sales opportunity so you can begin to perform forecasting if that is needed.

Executive management dashboards that are configurable will allow you to make better informed decisions on the open opportunities, the scheduled activities of the sales force and the recently completed activities/communications. Sales call reporting is now dynamic.

You didn't mention any integration with an accounting/mfg/production system although my clients all have ability to see the past sales orders, line item details, products/lines purchases, AR invoices and aging balances per account. This greatly helps the sales force and CSR's get up to speed faster on account's prior activity.

The Sage SalesLogix system can be hosted or on-premise and you can use a Windows and/or Web user interface.

P.S. Once you have this sales history easily accessible make sure that you have an integrated emarketing system so you can keep current customers updated and stay top of mind with prospective customers. We have clients who create account queries of customers such as: those who have bought products in category ABC and purchases over $xxxx.xx over the last 90 days - who then can create targeted emarketing campaigns.

Hope you find greater business Success with CRM....

Todd,
Great advice here. Also check out www.crmsoftwareblog.com for some information on comparing CRM products. My expertise is in Microsoft CRM but I have used other CRM products. Microsoft's big sell is CRM is in Outlook. Tracking emails, tasks and appointments is easy. Microsoft CRM is very easy to customize for all fields that you like. I agree about getting your processes in place first. You can't automate what you don't have. Workflow is another intermediate tool that will help you. Microsoft continues to add functionality including a social media accelerator.

Hi Todd,

Have a look at http://www.borneosoft.com
You can track your account and set any event/reminder with flexible rules using its calendar management. And it also tracks sales progress. It also has features that you are looking for. It can generate quotation automatically for you. So you save a lot of work because as the information, such as products info, captured in the system, it will be used by the quotation without re-typing all over again.

You can also set RSVP using the calendar and you can track whether the participants are attending or not. The participants can simple click YES or NO in the email invitation.

There are many other productivity tools available, the best way to experience it is to register for the Free Edition. It has full feature but only for 2 users.

Unless I missed it, I didn't see any mention of a rather key consideration. After creating a clear roadmap of what your process(es) will look surrounding any CRM solution/system, you also need to have a clear idea of what your organization can afford. Various solutions have been proposed here, from open source ("free" - in dollars, expensive in time), to systems costing many thousands of dollars per user...

The best solution is no solution if you can't afford it. Typically many companies will find that they sacrifice certain levels of automation or a "perfect" match for something that is "good enough".