Sales management
The sales management feature is usually the most popular feature in a CRM application. Sales management is for helping your sales team make sales to new and existing customers.
We call the feature that is used to keep track of each sales opportunity in the CRM application an opportunity or sales opportunity. In non-integrated CRM, once a sale is made and an order is taken, the sales user will need to use the ERP application to process the order, resulting data being entered twice, and a disconnected process.
A sales pipeline is a snapshot view of how your sales opportunities are progressing. Some opportunities may be newly created, some may be in progress, and some may have been completed, either by a sale coming through, or they may have failed. The sales pipeline will give you a view of this:
SageCRM Sales Pipeline
In non-integrated CRM, the sales pipeline only shows how you are progressing with a sale until the order is placed in the ERP, because the CRM will not know what happens after the business process moves to the ERP.
Sales opportunities have items in them for sales, and in CRM we call them products. Products may be services, or they may be physical things, with an inventory associated with them. For example, a company that sells services may not have an inventory, but a company that sells physical items will be likely to have an inventory of their items.
This is a key integration point, because the inventory is stored in ERP, and is not usually available in a non-integrated CRM application. Getting the inventory into CRM is a useful integration feature.
Sales management workflow
We call the process used to manage the business process for how sales opportunities are tracked in your company the sales workflow. As sales is such an important part of any business there may be several different sales workflows depending on what is being sold. The following diagram shows a part of a sales workflow state diagram from SageCRM:
Part of a Sales Workflow state diagram from SageCRM
A sample sales workflow could contain the following steps:
Getting a lead: This may be linked with the contact management workflow discussed previously.
Qualify the lead: This is the action of confirming that the lead is a real potential customer, and that you have contact details for the customer.
Call the customer: The next step may be making a phone call to the customer to attempt to make a sales meeting.
Meet the customer: Following the phone call there may be a meeting to present a demo, or discuss a sale.
Send quote: At this stage you may need to send a quote to the customer as you get near to a sale.
Take order: The end of a successful sales process is the taking of the order.
Of course, the sales workflow is different for every business, which is why workflows in CRM are flexible and customizable.
Integration opportunity for sales management
There is significant opportunity for sales management integration with ERP.
In a non-integrated CRM application opportunity management is useful, to a certain point, in the sales pipeline. Very soon, however, your sales team will want to send a quote to the customer or take an order from the customer to progress the sale. But quotes and orders are natural functions in the ERP application, not the CRM application.
This is because quotes and orders need information such as stock available, pricing, tax, and payment terms, all of which are in the ERP system and not in the CRM. Once an order is sent out, the next steps in the fulfillment cycle are shipping and invoicing, again which are in the ERP application.
The integration opportunity is to link the CRM sales opportunity business process with ERP sales quotes and sales orders business process, so that the sales user can seamlessly complete an end to end sale from within the CRM application.
Similarly, products in a non-integrated CRM application do not have inventory, or the detailed pricing that an ERP application has. (Products tend to have simple pricing in non-integrated CRM, but ERP applications can offer advanced price levels such as discounts, sale prices, bulk order discounts, and other features.)
When opportunities are integrated with sales quotes and sales orders, the line items that appear on the opportunities can be linked with ERP inventory items.
An integrated workflow means that sales users can use CRM and be linked seamlessly with sales fulfillment in the ERP.
Workshop
Briefly outline the sales process in your business where sales are initiated and brought through to completion. Identify the teams who do this work. Outline the benefit of linking the CRM sales process with the ERP business process of quote and order creation. Are there other benefits by allowing sales users to view inventory, or any other information?
