CRM Overview

CRM is a customer relationship management solution that provides an efficient method for managing the entire sales process within SyteLine, from customer lead origination and sales opportunity tracking through converting prospects to customers and placing the order.

The features in CRM provide an integrated solution between your front and back offices. It delivers productivity gains by streamlining sales and customer service processes, decreasing the cost of sales and cost to serve, and ultimately increasing revenue.

CRM allows you to manage your marketing, sales, order, contact, and customer management activities:

Marketing - Using the Opportunities form, your marketing organization can track all elements of a marketing or sales campaign, including its effectiveness. You can also manage all tasks associated with an opportunity using the Opportunity Tasks form. Use the Competitors form to keep contact information and basic company information of your competitors. Create campaigns with the Campaigns form, and add items to the campaign with the Campaign Items form. Use the Campaign Types and Campaign Statuses forms to add further detail to your campaign.

Sales - Using the Prospects and Leads forms, your sales representatives can assist prospects and customers from initial interest through order placement. They can quickly convert a prospect to a customer. All associated information is automatically transferred to the new customer and opportunity records. They can also organize prospects and customers by Territories. Use the Sales Teams form to create and manage sales teams for customers, prospects, and opportunities. Use the Sales Contact Interactions form to keep track of communications with sales contacts. The Sales Contacts form allows you to keep basic information on your sales contacts. Use the Sales Forecasts form to keep track of sales forecasts and the Add Opportunities form to add opportunities to a sales forecast. Create sales periods with the Sales Periods form. The Prospect Interactions form and Customer Interactions forms allow you to keep track of communications with prospects and customers.

Order Management - The Opportunities form also allows you to track estimate orders assigned to prospects or customers.

Customer and Sales Contact Management - On the Customers form, CRM tab you can maintain territory information, the SIC code, company revenue and number of employees for each customer. You can also cross reference your sales contacts with customers and prospects.

CRM Recommendations Including Order of Events

We recommend that you use CRM in a test environment first so that you become familiar with how it works before using it in your live environment.

Order of events:

Identify the base values for the various fields on the CRM forms. Several of the CRM forms each have dropdown fields for which values need to be defined. Some are required, and some are optional. If possible, the dropdown values should be set up before importing CRM data or entering any data into these forms (with exception to the Customers form/table which most likely already has data). Those forms that have these dropdown values include: Leads, Opportunities, Opportunity Tasks, Prospects, and Customers.

When defining the values, it is important to think about how you will use CRM and how you want to track progress on leads and opportunities, as well as tracking other information such as where the lead or opportunity came from, what was the reason for the win or loss, and what types of tasks might there be when working with an opportunity. You also need to decide if you want to track your data by territory. Your Infor Business Partner or the Infor PSO team can assist with defining these values based on the needs of your organization.

NOTE: Although the system won't prevent you from changing the values later, it may be undesirable as it would invalidate any existing records with those values. Scripts could be written though to update any existing records prior to changing the values.

The values that need to be defined include:

Lead Statuses (required - Leads form)
Opportunity Statuses (required - Opportunities form)
Opportunity Sources (optional - Leads and Opportunities forms)
Opportunity Stages (optional - Opportunities form)
Opportunity Won Reasons (optional - Opportunities form)
Opportunity Lost Reasons (optional - Opportunities form)
Opportunity Task Types (optional - Opportunity Tasks form)
Territories (optional - Customers and Prospects forms)

Enter/import your Sales Contacts. You can import contacts from Outlook or set them up manually. If you have the data defined in another database, you may want to create import scripts to import the data. We recommend you contact your Infor Business Partner or Infor PSO to assist with this process.

Set up any existing Prospects and then cross reference them to your Sales Contacts, using the Prospect Sales Contact Cross References form.

Cross reference any of your existing customers to the contacts you imported or manually set up. Use the Customer Sales Contact References form to complete this.

Enter any existing leads, opportunities, opportunity tasks, and quotes that you already have and want to begin tracking. If you need to import these, we recommend you contact your Infor Business Partner or Infor PSO to assist with this process.

Begin using CRM.

Technical Points

When importing/exporting sales contacts from/to Outlook, this is not a synchronization. Records are duplicated if they already exist (in either direction). So, if importing from Outlook, and the contact exists already in CRM, importing it again creates another sales contact record. If exporting to Outlook, if the contact exists already in Outlook, exporting it again creates another Outlook contact.

When importing/exporting sales contacts from/to Outlook, Outlook must be open. When importing, highlight all contacts in Outlook to be imported. Click the import button to bring over those selected contacts. When exporting, either the selected record in SyteLine or all records will be exported, depending on if you select the Export or Export All button.

The ability to assign territories is used for tracking purposes only, such as reporting. It does not limit users to only the data in their assigned territories (data is not filtered by territory).

You can create your own reports with CRM data or export the data to Excel. Your Infor Business Partner or the Infor PSO team can assist with creating reports if this is desired.

There are pre-defined query forms available under the CRM>Queries folder. These forms allow you to query your campaigns, competitors, sales contacts, sales teams, sales forecasts, prospects, leads, opportunities, and opportunity tasks based on the data of your choice.

You can generate events against the forms. This can be helpful for things such as managing the progress of opportunities and tasks, following-up on leads or opportunities, etc. For more information on the SyteLine Application Event System, see the Guide to the Application Event System on our support site. If needed, your Infor Business Partner or the Infor PSO team can assist with creating events to meet the needs of your company.

The following chart displays how the CRM components are related to each other:

CRM Overview

Licensing

CRM Recommendations Including Order of Events

Technical Points

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