User Review
( votes)Now a days, most of the Organizations manage their Accounting tasks such as Invoices, Shipments, Credit notes etc from and within Sage 300cloud. The Accounts Receivable in Sage 300cloud helps to store and maintain Customer data in order to manage the invoices against them. However, as the business grows and builds relationships at a faster pace, it becomes difficult to stay on top of each customer contact, interaction, or opportunity using only a limited set of customer screens designed primarily for accounting needs.
At a certain stage, Business do require an alternative to maintain a large and diverse collection of customer data that could help to support countless dynamic interactions; rather than limiting it in a restricted set of fields of Sage 300cloud. This is when, CRM comes into picture. How Sage CRM and Sage 300cloud are completely different when it comes to managing and leveraging your customer data is further explained.
Sage CRM Supplements Your Accounting Data –
Sage 300cloud do have the capabilities to allow the User to handle the Customer data management for business with smaller needs. But as and when the Business starts establishing a dedicated approach of growth through Sales and Marketing; Sage CRM must be considered as a supplement and not as a replacement of your ERP system.
While there are huge number of CRM systems available in the market, companies using Sage 300cloud software must take advantage of Sage CRM with the help of integration to maximize the potential information shared between systems and the resulting efficiencies in sales, reporting, and operations.
Sage CRM manages relationships in the form of 3 stages i.e. acquisition, conversion, and sale.Whereas an ERP system alone would only capture transactions directly before (quote), during (order/shipment/invoice) and after (payment) a sale.
- Customer Acquisition–
Consider an example of Industry Tradeshow via which your Sales manager has acquired over 100 Business cards from people that stopped at your booth. Details of these people/prospects can be handled in Sage CRM in the form of Leads.
Here, Sage CRM will not only allow you to store the Prospect’s contact details but also the detailed information such as Products they are interested in, Company Statistics, Annual revenue, Industry they belong to, No. of employees and so on.
Sage CRM will also help to assign these account directly to a Sales representative who will thereafter manage the account with follow up activities (schedule calls, set reminders, send literature, etc) for each relationship and work toward the next stage in the customer lifecycle (arrange a demo, send a quote).
- Customer Conversion–
Once the list of Potential Customers is acquired, your sales team can begin to reach out to each lead and determine their interest in further developing a business relationship. In addition to individual follow-up, you may also choose to include them in an ongoing marketing campaign or send out an email blast specifically for the people that attended the tradeshow.
Sage CRM makes it easy to group the contacts based on variety of factors in order to proceed with the Marketing campaigns (also with the help of Mailchimp Integration) to direct the Marketing efforts to a targeted subset of the contact database. The Lead which then express interest in getting more information, seeing a demo or requesting an estimate can then be treated as an Opportunity which ultimately converts the prospect into Customer.
- Completing the Sale –
In this final stage, when the Customer approves the estimate, Sage CRM will “pass the torch” to Sage 300cloud to handle the next steps in the transaction and transfer all of the customer data captured in CRM to the back office without any duplicate data entry or other manual effort. This is one of the (many) advantages of an integrated approach to ERP and CRM.
For businesses that do not currently use a CRM system, their sales cycle is likely to start with the entry of a quote or order in the ERP system.
The strong integration between Sage CRM and other Sage ERP systems ensures that you never have to choose between having a powerful ERP system or a robust CRM system – and never have to enter the same data more than once.
At Sage Software Solutions (P) Ltd., we are home to world-class ERP software and CRM software that will solidify your business tech support fundamentals and enable you to build a customer-centric organization. You can also write to us at sales@sagesoftware.co.in.
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Disclaimer: All the information, views, and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the authors and their respective web sources and in no way reflect the principles, views, or objectives of Sage Software Solutions (P) Ltd.
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