Sage Blog

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is more than a strategy, more than a piece of software – it’s about people. You need to have everyone actively involved who is going be part of your company’s CRM solution and will ultimately help you achieve your goals. On most CRM projects some key members of your team will be experts you use to help implement your  strategy. Here at Sage we work with selected, certified Business Partners to give you experts in your local area to enable you to get the people you need to bring your plan to life.

Sage Business Partners

In case you don’t know, SalesLogix is our CRM solution that is available either on premise or as a cloud-based CRM system.  Our Business Partners are highly experienced, professional CRM experts who not only know how to install, configure and customise Sage’s CRM solution, SalesLogix, but can help you lay out your CRM plan and strategy.

We’re proud of our Business Partner community; they truly are experts in their fields, and it’s absolutely key that they are kept up to date with the latest information about our products and industry innovations. Our CRM solution lives in a world of innovation and we consistently deliver CRM leadership through our SalesLogix’s roadmap. The new innovations in SalesLogix deliver what customers are demanding in today’s world to help people to take advantage of the modern work world.

So, how do we keep our Business Partners up to date? And how do we make sure that the information our Business Partners glean from customers is fed back into future product development? One way is through our SalesLogix Boot Camp.

Our global CRM community

The SalesLogix Boot Camp is a truly global event that delivers the knowledge our Business Partner’s need to help our customers’ in their CRM journey as well as sharing the latest innovations and customer feedback. I was lucky enough to attend this year’s event in November in Arizona, along with people from Spain, France, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Italy, Holland, United Kingdom and America.

CRM – the hot topics

Getting together a group of CRM experts from across the globe gives a great opportunity to discuss not just our roadmap and CRM vision, but also the key topics affecting the community from mobile, to analytics, and of course cloud.

But our Business Partners agree that the most important part is talking with our customers, and hearing firsthand about the things they want. Overall the feedback was they want an affordable, flexible CRM system that “works the way I do” on “the devices I use” – so we are focussed on enabling our customers to work more efficiently in a way that suits them.

Celebrating success and innovation

We’re an innovative bunch in the SalesLogix team. As a team we’ve introduced the new HTML5 Mobile client which can happily work on a variety of mobile devices such as iPhone, Andriod and BlackBerry. We encourage the same attitude in our Business Partner community and it was great that Europe dominated the nattily named Business Partner Customisation Competition aka Geekapolooza. The winner was Alberto Chiesa from Gianos Consulting (Italy) with an application he wrote over 4 nights, followed by Mark Cooper from Qgate (England) and 3^rd place for Domenico Catrambone also from Gianos Consulting.

What’s in the future for SalesLogix?

So, with all this talk of innovation and customer insight what does the future bring for SalesLogix? The consensus from our Business Partners was that “SalesLogix Version 8 looks cool.” So what’s coming? Well, sorry, you’re going to have to wait and see! Version 8 communications will start early in 2012, but let’s just say our Business Partners are excited and even the English guys were whooping and clapping!

Of course, not all the talk is of CRM at these events. Most of our Business Partners were able to join us for dinner followed by karaoke. They’re a talented lot our Business Partners. Not only can they help you with your CRM system they can do a pretty mean Elvis rendition too! What more do you need?

Check out #slxbootcamp for more of our antics.

Duncan Wood, Sage Saleslogix Expert

Follow Duncan on Twitter

The business partners that came along from our part of the world were (in alphabetical order):

• http://www.bond-solutions.com/
• http://www.cbssolutions.com/
• http://www.collierpickard.co.uk/
• http://www.datel.info/
• http://www.dmcsoftware.co.uk/
• http://www.empath-e.com/
• http://www.gianos.it/
• http://www.managedsaleslogix.com
• http://www.pinnacle-online.com/
• http://www.qgate.co.uk
• http://www.seelogic.co.uk

How often during your day-to-day operations, do your employees duplicate or even triplicate data entry into disparate business applications?

New customers need to be put into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for sales and aftercare, right? But you also need them in your finance system so you can bill them.  Employees get put in your HR and Payroll solution and then the HRM cost is input separately into your journal? Suppliers in your Sales system and your purchase ledger….the list goes on, as do the associated personnel costs.

Integration Generation

Different business applications manage customer information; front-office employees use CRM applications that support customer-facing activities, such as sales, marketing and customer service. Whereas back office employees use ERP systems that support transactional reporting and compliancy activities, such as invoicing, account receivable, cash-flow management and financial reporting.

While front-office applications have historically been developed around the idea of cross-organisational collaboration, back-office applications, by contrast have been insular in nature. This may possibly be  due to the legacy of the systems or perhaps the need for increased security within finance operations that has lead to reluctance in opening this data up to the rest of the business.

The lack of cross pollination of data from front to back office has historically lead companies to run business applications that have struggled to address key business needs. This is particularly true where  customer related processes cross from front to back office processing such as sales order processing and supply chain management, leading to silo’s of information, administrative inefficiencies and process duplication.

Today’s CRM and ERP systems have gone someway to address these common problems experienced in medium and large sized businesses –enhanced integration, workflow management, exceptions monitoring, mandatory fields and data moving from one part of the application to the other have all provided capabilities that increase front to back office integration, for example:

• Consistent data across ERP and CRM applications.
• 360 degree customer visibility, regardless of whether the customer data originated in the ERP or CRM.
• Straight through processing – which enables a user to initiate a transaction, and then automatically trigger all the business related processes.

The Sage integration advantage

I’ve been lucky enough to work within the team at Sage that looks at these challenges and develops solutions, such as Sage ERP X3 to address them. Front-to-back office integration is essential for companies – regardless of their size – to bring together disconnected employees, applications, data and develop business processes in order to help drive revenue, serve customers more efficiently and reduce cost.

Our approach to assimilating business management software is to focus on improving and simplifying the integration experience for all of our users. This is achieved by developing ERP products that, out-of-the-box, are compatible with market leading Sage CRM solutions. We also have our own integration contract. This technology, known as SData, is a common interface that enables desktop, server and web-based applications to communicate with each other and is used across the Sage organisation around the world.

The Sage ERP advantage

Using SData, our flagship ERP products now provide out-of-the box integration with Sage CRM solutions.  This equips businesses with a low cost, low complexity solution that in the short term gives the user consistent customer data across their front and back office environments, provides straight through processing and a 360 degree view of the customer. And in the long term will provide a decrease in administrative costs, increased customer satisfaction and the opportunity to build a sustainable competitive advantage.

Julia Commons, Sage ERP Team

Visit our ERP pages for more information.

Roger Foster from the Chartered Institute of Marketing guest blogs today about nurturing your existing customers and how the customer is king (but money talks).

It’s remarkable how many good ideas die on the kitchen table or how company’s sales and marketing executives run around like headless chickens looking for new customers whilst totally ignoring their existing client base. These they leave to the mercies of other predatory organisations that will offer them love and support at the time when they need it most.

Roger Foster, South East Regional Director

New business does not necessarily mean new customers.

In these difficult times be sure to love and nurture your existing customers, make them feel special. Reward them for their loyalty and be sure that you quantify that reward to them, subtly. But most of all be sure that you have identified all possible opportunities within them. Only then should you go prospecting for new customers.  Remember it’s up to ten times more expensive to gain new customers than to extend your trading with existing friendly ones.

By embracing the five marketing areas below you’ll significantly improve your chances of success with your existing customers and it will give you a framework for prospection for new ones.

• Segment your existing customers and apply your findings to new ones
• Ensure your brand values and positioning is applied consistently in all communications with existing and new customers.
• Review your channels to market and ensure you have all possible outlets covered
• Produce an integrated communication plan to embrace all these areas.
• Most importantly ensure that you continually train your staff to respond to changing commercial and economic conditions

You’ll be surprised how much success you’ll gain and, if smartly applied, you’ll see improved profits.

The customer is king but money talks

The customer is king but it’s money in the form of profit which rules. That’s why you are in business. The Chartered Institute of Marketing in partnership with Sage CRM Solutions is running an event The customer is king but money talks where we will clearly explain how to get more profit from social networking sites and intelligent application of CRM. We’ll also have a representative from Lloyds bank to explain how to get the most out of your bank. Paul Fifield will demonstrate the strategic approach to marketing for profit and Robert Craven, from the Directors Centre will give ten tips on how to improve your company’s profit.

You’ll leave the event invigorated, enthused but more importantly with a toolkit that you can implement immediately which will improve your company’s performance and profitability. The event will be run at the National Self Build and Renovation Centre in Swindon on the 31st March and there will be plenty of opportunity to look round the centre and network during the day.

Roger Foster, South East Regional Director, CIM

Roger will be taking part in the The customer is king but money talks on the 31 March in Swindon.

Why E-marketing and CRM are more effective when used together

CRM expert, Duncan Wood

I have been recently working with Dan Ogden of Swiftpage on our presentation “CRM and eMarketing – the targeted marketing dream to create more qualified leads” for next week’s Technology for Advertising and Marketing (TFM&A) exhibition and thought it would be good to share some of it here; of course it’ll be even better to pop along and see it in person on 1^st March at 3pm in the CRM Theatre!

Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise

Customer Relationship Management, or CRM as it is more commonly referred to, is a pretty well understood term and business strategy. However, CRM software can be somewhat of a battle to implement within the enterprise especially if it is only about one particular aspect of the business. The simple truth is that people only naturally champion things that they believe in. The challenge for any CRM project is to find the business objectives of people across the enterprise and provide the tools to make it easier. I think the combination of E-marketing and CRM is a highly potent cocktail of business value that can deliver such tools.

Why CRM?

The main reason people use CRM is to help them manage and improve relationships with both current and prospective customers and suppliers. Once CRM is embedded into an organisation’s integral business processes then a highly illuminating insight is revealed about what works and what doesn’t work in a business strategy. Hopefully with reflection on these insights an organisation can achieve its CRM goals which normally centre around increasing revenue, higher profitability and increase customer satisfaction. The improvement normally comes down to changing and tuning business processes in one or all of the Sales, Marketing, Customer Service areas of the business.

Why E-marketing?

The E-marketing toolset is a fabulous, low-cost way of creating and nurturing relationships within your marketplace. One of the historic problems with Marketing has been cost, potentially stifling creativity and the ability to learn from the audiences responses. E-marketing changes all of that. It allows you to deliver on the theory of best practice Marketing by designing, testing and measuring your ideas on specific target segments of your audience – all done quickly and at very little cost. The solution provides a fantastic way to find profitable relationships and deliver the content a customer is actually looking for in a timely fashion.

Why together?

I love the phrase “data is just data until you do something with it”; CRM and E-marketing together create a mutually beneficial relationship which is why our CRM software, Sage CRM, Sage SalesLogix and Sage ACT! all integrate with Sage E-marketing provided by Swiftpage.  From the CRM point of view E-Marketing helps both the Sales and Marketing departments work closer together and more efficiently – overall it could be one of the key benefits that makes the difference between the CRM project being successful or failing. From an E-marketing point of view CRM provides the critical insight and data to making successful targeted marketing campaigns.

In summary, having a single place where both CRM and E-marketing live provides benefits to the whole ecosystem both inside and outside the organisation using it.

If you’re interested to hear more, and why not register for TFM&A for free online and say “hi” to Dan and I.

Duncan Wood, CRM Expert

It’s the most wonderful time of the year

It’s the busiest time of year for the world’s leading gift distributor (no…we don’t mean Amazon). With lists to check (twice), worldwide flights to arrange and a busy team of helpers working flat out right up until Christmas Eve there’s some pretty smart software keeping everything running like clockwork.

Santa's SalesLogix CRM

Our customer gets requests via letter and, these days, email and has to manage a vast database of information including names, addresses, ages, delivery schedules and the all important naughty or nice lists. So it’s important that he has a hard-working customer relationship management system, Sage SalesLogix, to help his festive workers fulfil all their orders in time.

Purchase lists, product information and gift history are all centrally recorded in one constantly updated system. And there’s a mobile link, so it’s available wherever and whenever it’s needed to make sure there are no hiccups with deliveries.

Now this particular customer is well known for carrying out his business without attracting too much attention to himself, but we did manage to get a few words from him: “Ho, ho…every year, more children and more gifts, it’s a big old responsibility, but things have never run so smoothly. Now I know exactly who has asked for what and when I can deliver it. So everything’s ready for December 24.”