Exploring Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Imagine that your company's top goals are to increase sales and customer satisfaction.

Your company wants to use pre-sales documents to track the sales pipeline and follow up on customer contacts.

Sales team members use activities to manage their day-to-day responsibilities

This topic introduces four new documents for customer relationship management: the activity, the campaign, the sales opportunity and the sales quotation. We will look at how each of these documents can be used to support your customer relationship management.

Activities allow you to schedule and manage diverse events such as phone calls, meetings, tasks, notes or other interactions with customers. Basically everything you do with a customer can be documented in an activity, even e-mails.

Activities are used throughout the sales cycle to manage customer contacts as well as for internal business purposes, such as managing tasks.

Activities can not only report what you have done with a given contact, but what you plan to do. For example, you record a phone call and set a follow-up reminder to call again.

You can create activities many places within SAP Business One. There is a transaction for activities in the Business Partner menu, but they can also be created inside marketing documents, sales opportunities, and even business partner master data.

Inside an activity you can link it to other objects such as documents and attachments, as well as free form content such as e-mail messages.

One easy way to schedule activities, such as meetings, is to use the calendar. Just click on the calendar icon in the toolbar. The calendar provides monthly, weekly and daily views.

There is even a group view that can facilitate scheduling team meetings.

The calendar allows you to display, schedule and update activities by dates and users.

The activity types that appear in the calendar include: phone call, meeting, campaign, note and other. Tasks do not appear in the calendar.

To create activities directly in the calendar, click on a given date and time, and SAP Business One takes you to the Activity window where you can describe activities and link them to business partners and documents.

Even if you create an activity elsewhere, all time-based activities (phone calls, meetings and others) are automatically entered in the calendar.

You can create activities associated with more than one user.

You can define new recipient lists for groups of users that you use frequently.

You can also filter activity reports by users, employees, or recipient lists.

The steps for creating a list are easy. Just choose the option for a recipient list in the activity. Then select an existing recipient list on the Recipient List tab or use the User tab to create a new list. Once you've chosen all the users for a new list, save the list.

Activities can also be created and managed inside the business partner master data record.

From the Business Partner master, you can open a list of related activities as shown in the graphics or choose the option to create activities.

When you create an activity from within the business partner master record, the business partner information defaults into the activity.

• When you set up an activity in the business partner master data, SAP Business One has functionality that allows you to set an alert to be sent to the user for a specific type of activity - Phone Call, Meeting, Note, Other.
• You can also set a reminder and a time frame for when the alert should happen.
• The alerts for activities are controlled by the "Send alert for activities scheduled for today" checkbox. This setting can be set for individual users or made at the company level. When you set it in the Services tab of General Settings, a popup box will ask you if this setting is for all users or if it is limited to new users and users who follow the Company's Default Settings.
• The date used for the alert is the date you set on the activity.

Activities can be set to occur on a regular basis. Here we see an activity that is set up for a weekly meeting.

You can manage changes to a series or to individual activities within a series.

Each individual occurrence of the activity can be moved or canceled without affecting the series.

Use the Back or Next button to navigate to the individual occurrences of a recurring activity.

Campaigns are typically used for marketing to leads or existing customers through different media.

For example, you might wish to promote new products or upcoming sales events to your customers.

Using campaign management, you can create an email and send it to a distribution list that includes your customers' contacts, even an external contact list, using a well-designed email

Once you get a response you can record it in SAP Business One, create an activity, a sales opportunity or a sales document.

You can easily create a new campaign or run an existing campaign again using the Campaign Generation Wizard.

Using the wizard is an easy step-by-step process allowing you to generate a campaign based on diverse criteria.

Once you start the wizard, you need to identify the channel (such as email), the target group which you can define ahead of time in the Business Partners Setup menu, any items you wish to promote, and optionally an HTML template for email campaigns.

Activities are often linked to Sales Opportunities.

A sales opportunity allows you to manage the sales cycle for the opportunity of potential sales with a customer or lead.

For example, a customer inquires about certain products your company is selling, you can respond immediately by creating a sales opportunity, allowing you to track the prospective sale and notify others about the status of the potential deal.

As you meet with others and gather information, you can link any activities relevant to the opportunity.

You can also view relevant activities, such as a list of planned activities linked to the opportunity.

Opportunities are structured into stages which reflect the stages of your sales cycle.

On the graphic we see a sales cycle with 5 stages: lead, first meeting, second meeting, quotation and negotiations. This is a just an example Sales cycles and stages can be customized to match your company's sales process.

For each stage in the cycle, you can enter the potential amount of the deal and the system predicts the opportunity's probability of success based on some percentages you have set up in advance.

You can track information on what is happening at each stage.

And ultimately, you can track whether you have won or lost the deal.

Reporting is available for analysis of opportunities and for optimizing your sales process.

Sales opportunities give you visibility into your sales pipeline, for individual sales employees or the company as a whole.

Let us look at the sales opportunity process. You can use sales opportunities to record, track and analyze every step in your business potentials with a customer or prospect

• Step 1: Sales managers set up important information such as which stages a sale will pass through and the likelihood by percentage of closing the sale. This information will help in forecasting sales. The key to successful setup is to decide what you wish to monitor during the sales process. These will assist the manager in forecasting sales.
• Step 2: Sales people enter sales opportunities and manage them throughout the sales process. The more details entered in an opportunity, the more visibility you will have later when you report on the leads. Ongoing appointments, phone calls, tasks, and contact management can be coordinated through the opportunity via related activities.
• Step 3: Reporting on sales opportunities gives you visibility into the sales pipeline, won and lost opportunities, and sales forecasting.
• Sales stages can be adjusted later, if needed, in the setup transaction. All the sales forecasting will be adjusted automatically.

Before customers commit to ordering, they frequently want a sales quotation that they can review and circulate within their company.

The sales quotation might come out of a sales opportunity, a campaign, or activity, or arise independently.

The sales quotation documents an offer or proposal that you send to a customer or to a lead.

As used in SAP Business One, it is not a legally binding document, but rather used for information purposes.

One field that distinguishes a quotation from a sales order is the Valid until Date. This date specifies how long the offer for the specified items and prices is available.

You can modify the Default Valid Until Date field in the Administration module under System Initialization - Document Settings - Per Document tab.

When you create a sales quotation, its default Valid Until date is set to the number of months/days/weeks after the Posting Date that you specify in the Default Valid Until Date field.

You can change this default date manually or by using different payment terms.

When a customer accepts the proposal defined in the sales quotation, you copy the quotation to a sales order to begin the sales process. Sales quotations can also be copied to a delivery, A/R invoice or A/R reserve invoice.

• Activities document interactions with business partners such as phone calls, meetings, tasks and other contacts. You can set up a one-time activity or a recurring activity.
• Activities are automatically recorded in your calendar, in activity reports, and can be displayed in related business objects.
• You can use the Campaign wizard to create multi-channel campaigns for target groups.
• Sales opportunities help you manage the sales cycle for a potential deal with a customer or lead.
• Opportunities are structured into stages reflecting the sales cycle. For each stage you can predict probability of success and potential sales amount.
• Sales quotations document an offer of products at an agreed upon price to a customer for a set validity period.