Good customer relationships are essential for businesses to survive and grow. Whether it's established customers or new potential leads, strengthening relationships throughout the sales process and nurturing these relationships afterwards is important and is becoming more important every year as competition increases in most industries.
Processes in a company are constantly being streamlined and optimised by system support, and working with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is no exception. With IFS Applications’ CRM solution, it is possible to support and develop the work of creating and refining leads, nurturing existing customers, creating focus and targeting stakeholders where the need and potential is greatest, using various calculations. The IFS CRM solution means that meeting appointments, notes, important emails and offers are not distributed on all kinds of yellow sticky notes, on the email accounts of many different employees or in their memories, but are instead stored in one system, visible to everyone. IFS CRM should not be seen as a CRM system integrated into an ERP system. Instead, both should be seen as one complete solution, where the IFS Applications ERP solution contains everything. There is only one log-in, one system and one database, which means that you as a sales representative have access to data from the rest of your company, and the rest of the company can see what is happening in CRM.
With IFS CRM Panel's Outlook Plugin and Companion Apps, you can synchronise your calendar, get an overview of the day's tasks, set up meetings, quickly register leads and easily register a business opportunity on the go, whether you're in the car after a customer visit or want to register directly at the trade fair while the customer is standing in front of you. With IFS CRM Panel, it is possible to work directly with the CRM system and thus also IFS Applications from Microsoft Outlook. Setting up meetings, appointments for phone calls and other tasks that need to be performed or followed up on can now be done directly from Outlook. Furthermore, you can quickly get an overview of which activities, agreements and offers exist for the contact person the salesperson is about to meet with.
In addition to the many relationship-building activities, IFS CRM also supports a full Quote-To-Cash flow from first quote to final invoice. With IFS Business Opportunity, it becomes possible to register quotes that become part of a pipeline for the customer, where it is possible to follow the process and the probability of this becoming a sale. This can be done in a scenario where it is first raised to a Sales Quotation and then becomes an order, but it is also possible to turn it into a Customer Order immediately. Furthermore, it is also possible to use a Business Opportunity to create Service Quotations, which contributes to the company's pipeline now also containing the expected service orders that may come. For a more controlled process, you can set up a predefined sales process for a Business Opportunity to go through. This will consist of specific stages and actions to be performed at each of these stages. This ensures that the processing of a Business Opportunity is streamlined and goes through the necessary qualification process every time, as the salesperson is forced to go through these stages in the system.
Use the data and learn more about your customers and potential leads.
Pipeline analysis is critical in order to gain insight into what the future looks like. Are there enough offers compared to what is expected? Will these turn into orders in the near future, and if so, how are they distributed? Which customers are receiving the most offers? Which business opportunities are most likely to materialise, and are they the ones you're focusing on? The questions are many, and answering them requires analytical data-based tools, which are available with the IFS CRM Business Opportunity Pipeline Chart.
Overview and action-catalysing data is key for many salespeople and IFS CRM creates just that with IFS Lobby. IFS CRM comes with standard lobbies that present the salesperson or sales manager with exactly the data they need in the format they want - which helps ensure focus on the right leads, while ensuring that the sales department does not lose any cases or potential customers.
In summary, IFS CRM Panel provides easy access to the tool on the go, controlled processes that ensure better quality assurance, and not least a number of analysis tools that help ensure insight into the trends of different customers and identify the customers/leads with the greatest potential.
If you would like to learn more about the possibilities with IFS CRM Panel, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Bjarke Paulin Beske - bjbe@curit.dk or 30320255
