8.                  Sales

Microsoft has paid special attention to implementing a sophisticated set of features for managing the sales cycle with CRM. The basic premise is that a large number of unqualified leads are subjected to a series of marketing campaigns and workflow activities until the point where they qualify as a sales opportunity. At this point the original lead record is qualified and promoted by converting it to a customer record (an account and/or contact) with an associated opportunity record.

Opportunities relate to a customer record, which can be either an account or a contact record according to the nature of the business. Information on the products that interest the prospect are stored against the opportunity record together with a value and estimated close date for the deal.

The sales cycle then concentrates on a sales pipeline allowing for Quotations to be made against an opportunity which are converted into Orders and finally Invoices as the sales cycle proceeds. Sophisticated sales workflow involving a series of sales stages can be defined to ensure that the sales pipleline is progessing smoothly.

The sales cycle involves four main entities:

·        A lead is a unqualified marketing contact.

·        An opportunity is a qualified sales opportunity associated with a potential customer.

·        An account represents the company details for a potential customer.

·        A contact represents the contact details of a company but may also be a customer for consumer sales.

Activities and workflow can be defined against any of these entities although CRM is designed to use the opportunity sales pipeline for monitoring and progressing the sales cycle. One area of systems analysis for CRM installations is to determine the best practise for storing notes and activities consistently against the different entities associated with each potential sale.

Note:    Some organisations do not require the opportunity phase in the sales cycle and progress directly from a lead to a completed sale.

The sales pipeline can be monitored by creating a series of sales stages for each opportunity and assigning a probability of success to each stage to help in forecasting sales.

8.1.              Leads

A lead needs to have a company name (even though it may represent a contact and not a account) and it is easy to send emails or create a follow-up activity by pressing the appropriate button on the toolbar when viewing the lead record.

Leads can be created in CRM from a text file using the bulk import facility and associated with a marketing list. The bulk import feature is discussed in the chapter on importing data.

A quick campaign (see the marketing chapter) can rapidly create activities for organising sales activities such as scheduling outbound phone calls or emails or sales literature fulfilment. At some point the status of the lead is updated and the lead may be promoted to an opportunity at which point an associated customer (account or contact or both) record is created and the lead is deactivated and made read-only.

Note:    Deactivated leads can be reactivated from the actions menu.

There are several predefined fields in the default CRM database used for profiling leads, for example the annual revenue, industry type, and lead source. New attributes can be easily added to the lead entity and the validation set so that values must be entered by the user when a new lead is created. This can help down the line in analysing the success of marketing efforts and is recommended practise.

Leads are converted to Opportunities (or disqualified) using the Convert Lead button on the form menu. The lead can be converted to the corresponding new Account, Contact, and Opportunity records or converted to an opportunity against an existing customer record.

Leads that fail to progress through to the sales pipeline should be disqualified rather than deleted. This means that the data is available for analysis later. Qualified leads are also deactivated (made read-only) in the database and converted to the corresponding customer and opportunity records. A link to the original lead is available from the opportunity entity trace back over the history if required.

8.2.              Opportunities

Opportunities are integral to monitoring the sales pipeline and must have the following fields:

·        Topic.

·        Customer - either an account or a contact.

·        A currency and pricelist.

Associated products are added to the opportunity which affects the total expected revenue for the potential sale. Security can be applied to allow or deny the salesperson the ability to modify product pricing and offer discounts or add their own write-in products with individual pricing.

The sales pipeline value is determined by the probability and the estimated revenue and close date and a number of sales workflow stages can be specified to provide a strong structure to reflect business processing surrounding the sales pipeline.

The individual products specified against an opportunity must come from a product price list item. Prices are specified for each product against a pricelist (for each currency) and a base unit which must be specified together with the quantity and price. The options to alter prices and add discounts depend on the specification of the product and the user's security settings.

System Calculated prices only use pricelist information and the recalculate button can be used to refresh the prices with the latest pricing information from the product catalogue.

8.3.              Quotations

A new quotation is made by selecting the Quotations pane from the Opportunity record and creating a new Quotation. This automatically copies the products already associated with the Opportunity into the Quotation.

The pricing information stored against the quotation products can be changed and write-in products specified or added that do not use the existing product codes or pricelists.

Once the Quotation is complete you should use the option on the Actions menu to Activate Quote and the use the Print Quote button to merge the quotation to Word 2007 using your organisation's quotation word template. You can then distribute the document to the prospect (remembering to attach a copy of the document as an attached file on the quotation).

Additional options on the Actions menu allows you to Get Products, perhaps from an opportunity created for another customer, or Lookup Addresses to specify the delivery and invoice address.

A version number is applied to each Quotation and best practise is to Activate the Quotation before sending to the prospect. Select the Revise Quote option from the Actions if you need to modify an existing quote and note that the Revision ID for the quotation has been incremented.

If the Quotation is accepted by the customer then the Actions menu provides the Create Order option to convert the Quotation to an Order (the quotation must be activated before it can be converted).

On the other hand, if the quotation is not accepted, use the Close Quote option to indicate that the sale has been lost and indicate the appropriate reasons.

8.4.              Orders

Orders have similar functionality to Quotations and allow modification of the final order information if required. The Action menu is used to fulfil an Order when it is complete and needs to be dispatched to the customer. Alternatively, the order might be cancelled (and the appropriate reason entered) or simply deleted.

Other options available for an Order include looking up addresses (as for the quotation) and recalculating or using the latest product prices from the appropriate pricelists.

Finally, an Invoice can be created from the fulfilled Order record.

8.5.              Invoices

Invoices also allow recalculation of the pricing information using the latest product pricing and can be cancelled or deleted. The actions menu also allows the status to change to Invoice Paid which completes the Invoice so it can no longer be updated.

Care is required with invoicing as multiple Invoices can be created from a single Order. Also Invoices really need to be frozen at the point where they are dispatched to the customer and not updated after that. Also, there is no report or mail merge to print out Invoices and perhaps Invoices are best tracked and monitored in your accounting application.

Some of the accounts integration products stop invoices from being created within CRM and take completed orders to add into the accounting package and then copy the invoices back into CRM.

Note:    The author has such software available for Sage and QuickBooks at http://www.redware.com/mscrm and Microsoft have their own offerings for Dynamics accounting software.

8.6.              Sales Administration

Some additional entities play a role in the organisation of the sales process in CRM:

·        Competitors. Competitors can be defined in the Sales-Competitors area with links to the products they supply and notes on their strengths and weaknesses.

·        Sales Literature. A set of documents can be uploaded into the Sales-Sales Literature area and tracked against products and competitors, as well as an abstract and keywords, to help in searching for the required literature where there are many related products involved.

·        Subject. A hierarchy of subjects is defined in the Settings-Business Management-Subjects area to allow a consistent hierarchy to be applied for organising products and sales literature.

Sales Territories can be defined and allocated against each customer. Territories are created in the System-Business Management-Sales Territories area and have a manager and a number of member users. Each Customer is assigned to a particular Territory and owner allowing sales pipeline analysis by territory (and territory manager).

8.7.              Sales Pipeline

The sales pipeline is an essential tool for sales and marketing management and shows the predicted level of orders currently coming through the sales process. Sales pipeline reports use the opportunity data comprising the probability, estimated value, and estimated close date to predict sales forecasts.

The forecasts and actual results might be monitored at different levels:

·        Customer or Opportunity Owner.

·        Owner Business Unit.

·        Owner Business Unit Manager.

·        Customer Sales Territory.

·        Customer Sales Territory Manager.