DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Posts Tagged ‘Salesforce automation’

Another successful implementation for us and this time the customer is…. US! You know the old adage about plumbers with leaky taps, well our own CRM was a long time coming but well and truely worth the wait. I have used a number of CRM’s in my Sales career including the usual suspects such as ACT!, Filemaker and Salesforce and SugarCRM. This is by far the most exciting CRM I have used to date. Thats right – I said exciting!

So what’s all the fuss about? Well for me good technology is technology that makes my life easier. If you know me, you may know that I am the first person to feel the urge to shout expletives or feel the urge to throw things at your monitor when things don’t go my way. It’s therefore refreshing when something comes along that works right away.

Now before I give a 100% thumbs up rating, I should add here that the engineer that installed the system had a few ‘challenging moments.’ The installation is for an experienced software engineer and Microsoft prefer that they are CRM certified.

But lets down to the business end of the application… Firstly, as a user you have some choices to make. Do you want to view the CRM in a seperate environment such as a web browser or would you prefer to view all of your information in Outlook? This comes by way of an Outlook tool bar which not only tracks important email in CRM but also gives you access to everything that I can think of a singular, familiar interface. I haven’t tried it, but I expect I could spend my entire day within outlook without ever having to leave.

I expect there are few people out there that don’t have some experience in outlook and familiarising yourself with Dynamics CRM is no more difficukt than reading your email. A full history of clients is easily accessible and the ’story’ of our client contact can be accessed within a few clicks.

One of the real beauties however is the ease with which data was imported and campaigns could be put together. CRM easily merges with word and outlook which makes a direct mail, or personalised email news letter with a follow up call acheiveable within a few screens in the quick campaigns wizard.

Workflows can be automated and configured from within the application and custom fields can be added by your average line manager rather than the ‘IT guy.’ All of the usual reports can be accessed as standard and addition reports can be authored easily.

We have only had dynamics CRM live in our office for a few weeks but already we are starting understand mor about our customers that we imagined possible in such a short space of time.

Beyond all this, there’s an enormous amount of functionality that I haven’t yet had the opportunity to play with so expect to hear more in the coming weeks. I may even do a quick video on this in the next few weeks. If you want to know more about how CRM can fit your team, feel free to get in contact.