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SageCRM 2026 R1: Strengthening the Foundation for Future Innovation

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:49:17 GMT

SageCRM 2026 R1 is positioned as a Security and Compatibility release, focused on reinforcing the platform’s resilience,

reliability, future readiness and long-term sustainability.

This release prioritises strengthening the underlying technology foundations that customers and partners depend upon. The update delivers enhanced security hardening, upgrades to key third-party components and continued alignment with modern infrastructure standards.

Key Areas of Enhancement:

Sage CRM 2026 R1 includes improvements across several important areas of the platform, including:

Expanded security enhancements across the application stack

Updates to Microsoft Exchange integration

Performance improvements in charting and reporting

An upgraded PDF generation engine to support modern document standards

Enhanced application server security controls

Platform support for Microsoft SQL Server 2025

Supporting Long-Term Innovation

This release reflects Sage’s long-term commitment to SageCRM as a core component of its global portfolio. With a published roadmap extending beyond 2030, Sage continues to invest in modernisation, integration capabilities and future-focused innovation.

By prioritising platform stability and technology alignment in this release cycle, Sage is creating the conditions for the delivery of new functional capabilities and AI-enabled advancements in future releases.

If you would like to find out more about the SageCRM 2026 R1 release please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Increase Conversions and Call Efficiency with SageCRM Telephony Integration

Fri, 05 Dec 2025 12:11:38 GMT

SageCRM & Enconvo's Telephony System Integration

Are your teams losing time switching between applications, increasing hold times while they search for customer information, or struggling

to access complete customer records during live calls? Disconnected systems slow response times and cause frustration.

Enconvo's SageCRM Telephony Integration enhances how businesses integrate with customers over the phone. Incoming and outgoing calls

are transformed into intelligent, efficient touchpoints improving productivity, personalisation and CRM engagement.

Give your teams instant access to customer histories, account details, and key insights, all within one connected workspace. Each incoming

call triggers a pop-up business card with customer details sourced from Sage CRM.

Recognise SageCRM contacts Instantly

When a call comes in, Enconvo’s system instantly recognises the caller based on the phone number and displays a non-intrusive pop-up.

This real-time notification is fully customisable, pulling any available data from Sage CRM – whether it’s a client name, case ID, or even previous orders.

This allows users to personalise the call immediately, boosting professionalism and customer satisfaction.

With a single click, users can jump straight into the caller’s Sage CRM profile, ensuring full context is at their fingertips. Additional buttons can be

configured for key actions – like opening related tickets, triggering workflows, sending templated emails, or opening another integrated CRM.

Key Benefits

Click-to-Call: Launch calls from SageCRM via hotkey or mouse click.

Caller Recognition: Instantly identify incoming callers and show SageCRM details.

Customisable Pop-Ups: Choose which SageCRM fields appear – tailored to your sector.

Real-Time Screen Pop: One click opens the caller’s Sage CRM record.

Multi-CRM Support: Recognise contacts from multiple systems simultaneously.

Duplicate Handling: Manage multiple matches for the same number effectively.

Daily SageCRM Sync: Automated updates ensure contact data is always current.

Transfer Support: Caller info stays visible even after transferring calls.

Action Buttons: Configure up to 5 shortcuts – trigger workflows, emails, or open external apps.

Microsoft Teams Integration: Fully compatible with Teams for SageCRM-connected calling

More information?

If you want to find out more about the SageCRM integration with Enconvo's telephone system and and how this can benefit and work for your business or ask any questions, get in touch with Nick Rainbird on +44 1494 490409 or nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com or complete the below form with your details and one of the Enconvo team will reach out.

Tracking Multiple Project Bids made easy with SageCRM

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 10:32:26 GMT

Have you ever found yourself juggling multiple quotes for a single, large project where your customers are all bidding against each other? For sub-tier suppliers , managing these complex sales scenarios can feel like a labyrinth. This article will show you how to gain clarity and control.

This requirement is quite common in project-based or contract-driven industries. Think of a government agency, construction suppliers / manufacturers, or a large enterprise inviting multiple vendors or subcontractors to bid. As a supplier, you might be asked by several of those bidders to provide pricing. This creates a many-to-one relationship between your quotes and a single ultimate project.

This is a common pattern where your company acts as a sub-tier supplier, and needs to:

Quote to multiple potential prime bidders.
Track all activity against the same external project or end customer.
Ensure transparency, avoid conflicts, and consolidate visibility across sales engagements.

Why Solving This Problem is Crucial for Your Business.

In competitive, project-driven environments, clarity is king. Effectively managing multi-bid scenarios in Sage CRM isn't just about tidiness; it's about:

Enhanced Visibility: Gaining a holistic view of your involvement in a single major project, even across different prime bidders.
Strategic Decision-Making : Understanding your total exposure and potential revenue from a project, allowing for better resource allocation and forecasting.
Conflict Prevention: Avoiding accidental overlaps or miscommunications when multiple internal teams might be engaging with different bidders on the same ultimate project.
Improved Reporting: Generating accurate reports that reflect the true landscape of your sales pipeline and project involvement.

ERBS have created a Shared Projects module for managing all the above

A new entity called “ Project ” has been created within SageCRM and can be customised to capture the relevant project information as shown in the below example, Any relevant project related contacts, communications and documents can be linted to the project for reference.

Projects can be configured with a unique “Project Reference” or unique description or both to make them easily searchable.

Multiple opportunities for each supplier requesting a quote can be easily linked to the project and viewed.

Easily Duplicate Quotes

If an initial quote has been created from the first supplier request, you can then add in additional suppliers against the project and save time by selecting the “Duplicate Quote” feature within the original quote which will create a quote record against each of these suppliers with the same products and pricing. If the pricing needs to be adjusted for a supplier, the quote can easily be updated instead of recreated.

Lost Quote Auto Closure

We have also provided the facility to select either all or pick and choose which selected supplier quotes should be closed of automatically with a specific lost reason if one of the other suppliers wins the business. This cuts down on time having to separately close each of supplier quotes manually.

 More information?

If you want to find out more about this module and how this can work for your business or ask any questions, get in touch with Nick Rainbird on +44 1494 490409 or nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com

Bringing the Front & Back Office Together

Mon, 24 Feb 2025 08:44:49 GMT

Extend the power of your Sage Business Management Solution right across your business, giving end-to-end visibility, so you can make better informed business decisions across your business teams, whenever and wherever they work together.

Help your business flow.

Our range of sales, marketing and service modules help meet the needs of agile businesses.

• Create targeted marketing campaigns Help marketing teams reach the right people, at the right time.

• Accelerate and focus sales activities - work on the most profitable activities to grow a business, provide an excellent customer experience, delight
customers and outperform the competition.

• Harness the power of an integrated CRM solution.

• Automate processes within any business and do more for less.

Sage CRM is for every business, anywhere.

Owners or managers of companies already know the benefits of transactional systems – accounts or enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions – to ensure smooth business operations.

Connecting the ‘front office’ to the ‘back office’ – using a CRM tool - increases efficiencies and productivity across a company.

Sage CRM can help every business optimise their profitability, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction. It’s all about implementing & supporting customer-centric processes for employees

What Sage CRM does.

Ensure people work on the right thing, at the right time. Reduce data and work duplication with employees by updating a single, central database, not patching business processes together. Make better decisions by providing managers and employees enhanced visibility over their internal processes and knowledge of their outcomes. Become more customer focused by allowing departments to track key customer information and making it available throughout the business.

 Connecting the front and back office.

Making relevant data available when & where required. Sage CRM bridges information gaps between departments and enables teams to collaborate on critical information. It supports customer facing departments throughout a company, for any type of business. Sage CRM empowers business’ to market & sell effectively. Front office teams will be able to view a “complete customer” – including financial information – directly within CRM. All without demanding significant time and effort from employees in their daily roles.

 Integrated processes.

Integrating Sage CRM with an accounts system ensures each department is working with the same information and communicating in the same way. The result is greater insight into business performance, with more efficient processes, improved productivity, and communications.

Integrated to an accounts system, Sage CRM can:

• Organise accounts information into one reliable source.

• Show payment history, order status, quotes, orders, shipments.

• Maintain control and data integrity for each employee.

• Streamline processes for onboarding customers and suppliers.

 Putting a business on the path to growth.

Sage CRM extends the power of an accounting system right across a business, giving visibility of front & back-office data, to make better business decisions

Sage CRM is an affordable, easy to use and highly adaptable for any size or type of business. Across the world, thousands of customers rely on Sage CRM to realise efficiencies in front-to back operations, whatever their business model.

 More information?

This content has been taken from a PDF supplied by Sage. To receive the pdf in full, contact us.

And you can read the white paper here too

What next?

If you want to find out more or ask any questions, get in touch with Nick Rainbird on +44 1494 490409 or info@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com

Or head over to our website to find more about our training service, implementation and support and advice and consultancy …

Six reasons why Sage CRM is the ideal choice for growing businesses

Mon, 10 Feb 2025 08:40:24 GMT

1. Intuitive CRM your teams will want to use

At ERBS, we believe software shouldn’t be difficult to learn, hard to update or challenging to use. This is the approach we took when we created Sage CRM. It’s an intuitive CRM solution and one which you and your team can get started with and experience within minutes.

2. Give your teams the tools they need to succeed

Sage CRM supports your business by giving your sales, marketing, and customer service staff, a tool to help them get their job done efficiently. Your sales team can sell proactively, identifying cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, progressing opportunities from lead to close. Your customer service team can manage customer cases effectively, while your marketing team can easily manage their campaigns and generate a quicker return on investment.

3. Sell smarter and accelerate sales team performance

Your sales team drives the growth of your business, and they need to know they are working on the right leads at the right time. Using Sage CRM, you and your teams can review the stages of various sales deals, shorten the length of sales cycles, and increase revenue opportunities. With access to a wealth of information about their sales pipeline, key opportunities and account activity, your salespeople are equipped to sell smarter and more efficiently, accelerating your sales performance.

4. Gain valuable business insight

Owners or managers of successful businesses depend on up-to date information and analysis about sales, marketing and customer services activities and performance. Sage CRM supports management with access to important information about their business KPIs in real-time so they can see how a business is performing and take corrective action when needed.

5. Collaborate effectively across teams

Employees shouldn’t have to spend time updating various databases, stitching together information systems, and ensuring their files are up to date. With Sage CRM, you and your team can collaborate on and share up to date business information and put processes in place that help everyone become more productive and efficient.

6. Adapt Sage CRM to suit the needs of your business

Sage CRM is an ideal solution for companies looking to manage multiple areas of their business. Using Sage CRM you can plan events, oversee business projects, track competitors and more. You can easily establish standard workflows around key business processes and design follow-up activities around your unique business needs. This way, you can ensure your business is running as efficiently and effectively as possible. The adaptability of Sage CRM helps ensure you get the most from your CRM investment – today and tomorrow

More information?

This content has been taken from a PDF supplied by Sage. To receive the pdf in full, contact us.

Sage CRM meets the needs of small and medium sized companies around the world by being affordable, easy to use and adaptable. Sage CRM can help you improve your process & data flows across marketing, sales & service operations.

What next?

If you want to find out more or ask any questions, get in touch with Nick Rainbird on +44 1494 490409 or info@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com

Or head over to our website to find more about our training service, implementation and support and advice and consultancy …

SageCRM refreshed mobile interface

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 08:00:24 GMT

Here are ERBS we pride ourselves on keeping up with the latest software upgrades, new features and the innovation of SageCRM in general, and then forwarding on this knowledge and opportunities to you, our customers. So in this tradition, this blog is bringing you, our community, all you need to know about the SageCRM refreshed mobile interface.

With the release of Sage CRM 2024 R2, Sage has introduced a refreshed UI that enhances the visual appeal and puts user needs at the centre of the design.

Find out more

The Evolution of Sage CRM's Interface

Rebranding.

The journey towards the new Sage brand began with Sage CRM 2022 R2, where the rebranding process was first introduced. One of the most significant and immediately noticeable changes was the introduction of a new colour palette. The iconic combination of vivid green, black, and white now runs across all Sage products, giving the software a unified and recognizable appearance.

This isn't just about aesthetics; it's about aligning the interface with Sage’s core purpose:

By leading with black in the interface, Sage ensures its signature green "pops," creating strong visual contrast and improving accessibility. This shift is also about making the software easier to use, navigate, and understand for a wide range of users.

Have you noticed this rebrand and change in the usage of black vs the green? And how do you feel it has impacted your user experience, if at all?

Reimagining Usability and Accessibility

The introduction of new icon sets and chart colours in Sage CRM 2023 helped to make information clearer and easier to digest at a glance. These updates were designed not just with functionality in mind but with a commitment to providing an accessible experience for everyone, regardless of visual impairments or device preferences.

Giving the user a great experience is key and always has been a priority at SageCRM. And therefore catering for those with visual impairments and catering for those with device preferences, we agree, is very important to include.

Optimising for Mobile Devices

During the initial rebranding in Sage CRM 2022 R2, the desktop interface received attention. Sage conducted a review of the mobile theme’s usability during the development of Sage CRM 2024 R1 and Sage CRM 2024 R2 delivers a refreshed mobile experience.

The mobile interface now features a more legible font, updated icons, and a revamped colour scheme. They are designed to improve the accessibility and overall usability of Sage CRM on mobile devices with smaller screens where it is not suitable to use the responsive main desktop interface theme typically used within tablets. This ensures that users can navigate the system quickly and effectively no matter where they are or what device they are using.

Sage CRM 2024 R2 has also refined the names of mobile themes to be more descriptive, making it easier for Administrators to select the right theme when customizing and extending the user interface. This not only aligns with the documentation but also helps to clarify the system’s functionality, streamlining the user experience.

Sage CRM 2024 R2 provides customers with a UI choice that is optimised whether the users are experiencing Sage CRM within a desktop, tablet or small-screen mobile device. This ensures that users can transition seamlessly between different work environments. Whether they are at their desk or on the road, they can access the information they need without interruption. The new updates in Sage CRM 2024 R2 demonstrate a commitment to providing a consistent, high-quality user experience across all devices.

We think it is great that Sage have factored in the user’s experience and seen things from a user’s viewpoint when factoring in these changes and amends to the software. It shows real commitment to the customer and to giving high levels of customer satisfaction.

What do you think? Have you tried it recently or using the refreshed interface?

If you are stuck and need support, head over to the training page

What next?

If you want to find out more or ask any questions, get in touch with Nick Rainbird on +44 1494 490409 or info@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com

Or head over to our website to find more about our training service, implementation and support and advice and consultancy …

How can a CRM help your business from day-to-day communication to sales?

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 08:38:22 GMT

SageCRM, and Pipedrive CRM can help yes!

Here are 8 basic and clear ways that a CRM system like these 2 can help SME’s like yours. From customer service to sales to knowledge and streamlining, and also the automation of processes.

Customer service

1. Customer service – in today’s not so loyal word, good customer service is key. From tracking interactions and orders to understanding insights, to provide a better service to customers.

Sales

2. Create and track – creating marketing campaigns to upsell and cross sell take time if done properly, so you want them to be as effective as possible. Tracking campaigns helps gauge ROI, and a CRM does just this.

3. Sell more – don’t leave money on the table by not following up on leads. Use your CRM to sure contact and sales info.

4. Sales and more sales - Streamline sales opportunities, your pipeline and sales processes. Key for sales success.

Knowledge and streamlining

5. How do customers behave - knowing this and collecting data on this helps understand behaviours, preferences and trends.

6. Make better decisions – the best decisions are based on solid information and knowledge and a well populated CRM helps use product info, service info, marketing tracking and communications helps with this very thing.

7. Cross departmental info – CRMs allow all departments to be up to speed and informed which enables a better service for customers and a more streamlined service for the staff and the customers alike.

8. Keep it central – as per the above point too, a good CRM that is packed with info and detail enables data to be stored in a centralised place. Easier all round for all involved.

SageCRM Advice and Consultancy

If you are a Sage business partner looking for advice, support and guidance to demonstrate the benefits of both SageCRM and integrated SageCRM to your existing SageCRM, 50, 200, 1000 customer base we can work with you to provide you the following services.

• Presales Support services

• Business Requirements Workshops

• Functional Specification design

• System health checks & Audits

If you an existing Sage customer using Sage 50 or 200 and you are looking for advice, support and guidance on how SageCRM can help improve your business please contact us to have an initial chat to discuss your requirements further.

What next?

To find out more or to ask any questions, get in touch with Nick Rainbird on +44 1494 490409 or info@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com

Or head over to our website

What can Sage CRM do for you and your business in 2025?

Mon, 23 Dec 2024 09:44:54 GMT

As a Sage customer, you can choose from fully integrated CRM or Sage Sales, Marketing or Service modules to suit your business needs. But what else can a CRM do for you and your business?

• Gain reliable insight and act

Evaluate where your business stands, and make more informed business decisions you can be confident about.

• Understand your customers better

Deliver an exceptional customer experience to improve customer retention and drive revenue growth.

• Collaborate effectively

Avoid duplication of work, empowering your teams to work faster and smarter. With a single solution, everyone becomes more productive and efficient.

• Accelerate team performance

And you may of seen from our LinkedIn series/12 days of advent based Sage CRM tips, a CRM can also benefit you and help you and your business in terms of:

1. Helping you increase revenue - https://www.rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com/6-ways-how-crm-helps-increase-revenue

2. Gmail integration - https://www.rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com/gmail-integration-for-sage-crm

3. Making savings and by this we mean savings in terms of time and in terms of resource

4. Being a life saver when it comes to automation. For example, automating processes for following up, managing and understanding your sales process, making simple tasks happen automatically and more.

5. Manage, nurture and follow up with your sales process and sales pipeline. You can improve the quality of sales forecasts https://www.rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com/the-wisdom-of-overlaying-sage-crm-on-your-accounting-product

6. Editable grids to help you work smarter when it comes to data entry

7. Account management – helping you/the team assign key marketing and sales tasks

8. Integrating with your accounts system and having a central place to store all key information and data, by overlaying the two systems

https://www.rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com/the-wisdom-of-overlaying-sage-crm-on-your-accounting-product - a strategic approach to SageCRM

9. You can make decisions based on more accurate sales information

10. You can stay grounded in reality

11. You can plan ahead with confidence

12. You can protect your business

Please follow us on LinkedIn for all these tips and more.

What next?

Consider the gift of CRM this festive season ...

If you want to find out more or ask any questions, get in touch with Nick Rainbird on +44 1494 490409 or info@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com

Or head over to our website.

#crm #sagecrm #sage

Introducing SageCRM Ally

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 09:29:52 GMT

Introducing Sage CRM Ally: Your AI-Powered CRM Assistant

Meet Sage CRM Ally, the handy new AI chatbot in Sage CRM 2024 R2. It’s here to make your workday easier by giving quick, clear answers to your SageCRM questions.

Key Features:

Helpful AI: Get instant advice about Sage CRM features and fixes.
Version-Specific Help: Ally is trained on Sage’s official documentation, so you can ask about specific versions of SageCRM.
Privacy First: No sensitive information is stored ensuring compliance and security.

How to Use SageCRM Ally

1. Navigate to the Sage CRM home screen. Look for the “Ally” icon which should be located at the bottom right corner of the screen.

2. Click the icon which will launch the SageCRM Ally chat window where you can then enter your question. E.g., “How do I create a new company?”

Ally will respond with step-by-step guidance.

3. You even have the choice of Specifying the CRM Version, and you can start your question with a version number if needed. E.g., “In version 2024 R2, how do I export data?”

Why SageCRM Ally?

Ally saves you time hunting for answers, so you can focus on what matters, growing your business and connecting with customers. Whether you are stuck or just learning something new, Ally's got you covered!

What next?

If you want to find out more or ask any questions, get in touch with Nick Rainbird on +44 1494 490409 or info@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com

Or head over to our website.

#crm #sagecrm #sage

6 ways how CRM helps increase revenue …

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 09:44:31 GMT

How can CRM help increase revenue is a question the team here at ERBS get asked a lot when we initially chat with prospects and clients.

This isn’t just a question focused around SageCRM, but CRM as a whole. CRM benefits as you may know covers marketing, sales and service.

According to the FSB, there were at the start of 2023, 5.6 million small businesses (with 0 to 49 employees), 99.2% of the total business population. And they say SMEs account for 99.9% of the business population (5.6 million businesses). So this is a lot of potential competition for market share in your niche, so how can you increase revenue?

You can sell more or sell the same but at a higher price, to put it simply. But how exactly can you do this and by using CRM?

Here are 6 reasons, benefits or ways to increase revenue.

What can SageCRM do for you?

1. Enhancing Customer Retention

2. Identifying upsell and cross sell Opportunities

3. Improving Lead Management and Conversion Rates

4. Increase Sales Efficiency & Streamlining of pricing and Quoting

5. Enhanced Customer Experience

6. Better Decision Making with Real-Time Reporting

1. Enhancing Customer Retention

Retaining existing customers is often cheaper and more profitable than acquiring new ones. A CRM system helps track customer interactions, preferences, and purchase history, enabling personalised communication and timely follow-ups. This can lead to higher lifetime value and repeat sales, directly increasing revenue.

2. Identifying upsell and cross sell Opportunities

SageCRM enables businesses to understand customer needs, buying patterns, and potential product gaps. By analysing this data, sales teams can identify opportunities to upsell (offering a higher-end product) or cross-sell (offering complementary products) to current customers.

3. Improving Lead Management and Conversion rates

SageCRM track leads through the entire sales funnel, allowing sales teams to prioritize high-potential leads, automate follow-ups, and engage prospects more effectively. With better lead management and targeted engagement, the conversion rate improves, leading to more closed deals and increased revenue.

4. Increasing Sales efficiency

SageCRM automates repetitive tasks, such as data entry, follow-up emails, and scheduling, freeing up sales reps to focus on building relationships and closing deals. By improving productivity and enabling sales teams to engage with more leads, the overall sales pipeline expands, driving revenue growth.

5. Enhanced Customer Experience

SageCRM centralises customer data, which helps customer service teams offer more personalized, consistent, and timely support. Satisfied customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and refer new customers. A positive customer experience translates to brand loyalty, increased purchases, and referrals—all contributing to revenue.

6. Better Decision Making

SageCRM provide real-time access to important sales metrics, helping managers and executives make informed decisions about sales strategies and resource allocation. Data-driven decisions ensure that resources are focused on the most profitable activities, optimizing sales performance and maximising revenue.

What next?

If this all sounds like 1 or 6 reasons why you should be considering CRM going in 2025 and beyond to increase revenue amongst untold other benefits, get in touch with Nick Rainbird on +44 1494 490409 or info@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com

Or head over to our website

Gmail Integration for Sage CRM

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 09:36:40 GMT

You can now extend the reach of your Sage data by integrating with the popular email platforms, Gmail. Accelerator is no longer just Outlook Integration. Gmail integration either alongside Microsoft Outlook or as a strong alternative. The option is there!

With Gmail integration, there need be no more jumping between platforms to check communication history. Email context allows users to surface relevant contacts/companies/opportunities from Sage CRM giving your team full visibility into each customer’s journey.

Effortless Data Updates

Say goodbye to manual data entry. Accelerator Gmail integration allows you to convert emails into Companies, Contacts, Sales, and Cases. You can file emails, attachments, and log call information directly from Gmail, enhancing efficiency.

Create New Entities

Accelerator Gmail Integration empowers you to create new entities in CRM. Whether it's a new company, person, opportunity, or case, you have the flexibility to customize primary entities to your specific needs.

Effortless Data Updates

Filing emails to have that illusive 360degree view of a customer

Filing email communications in Sage CRM means a comprehensive appreciation of where a customer is at in their relationship with your business. It promotes better organization, collaboration, and customer service while boosting overall efficiency.

Log Phone Call Information

Keep track of phone call details effortlessly within Gmail, preventing gaps in customer engagement data.

Search Sage CRM Data

From within Gmail, search for any entity and review up to date communications including phone calls or emails sent. Search by entity type, review a calendar history of usage in Accelerator or finally bookmark items of priority and access quickly and efficiently.

Sage CRM Tasks

Creating tasks in Sage CRM enhances organization, collaboration, and efficiency, leading to better business outcomes. Without screen switching this can be done from withing Gmail in context

If you would like to find out more about the Gmail integration for SageCRM please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Credit: CRM Together - https://crmtogether.com/

SageCRM 2024 R2: What to Expect

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 15:25:52 GMT

SageCRM 2024 R2 focuses on making the system easier to use, improving productivity, and enhancing security. This release helps businesses work more efficiently, delivering a better user experience and supporting future growth. With a roadmap extending beyond 2027, we are committed to ongoing innovation that will keep your business competitive!

Sage's new release for SageCRM in 2024 is ready to integrate with your Sage accounting system !

Whats to come in this release:

The ability to view more folders in Exchange Online and change number of listed folders

A refreshed and enhanced integration with Mailchimp including:
Adding custom fields to Mailchimp audience
Changes to Mailchimp merge tags
Selection of Mailchimp email builder

Support for workflow for quotes and orders

Sage CRM Ally (beta) AI chatbot
Improve Sage CRM performance by disabling chatbot

Increased maximum field length

RESTful API enhancements including support for new Query Parameters and Operators

New English-language HTML Mail Merge templates

Refreshed brand and corrected names for mobile themes

Refreshed eLearning

Updated User Assistance

Supporting content on Sage City and Community

If you would like to find out more about the SageCRM 2024 R1 release please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

CRM and Marketing Automation: Key Differences, Benefits and Top Integration Tips

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 13:38:53 GMT

CRM and marketing automation software each have their own strengths. However, using them separately can sometimes result in fragmented data and less efficient workflows. This blog will teach you the benefits of integrating the two software types.

Marketing Automation vs. CRM: the Key Differences

Customer relationship management (CRM) software manages customer data and helps build relationships. Marketing automation software automates repetitive, time-consuming marketing tasks.

Both tools are similar in the fact that they help to drive revenue growth. However, they have different uses within the customer journey that help to achieve that growth.

Marketing teams often use automation tools in the early to mid-stage when potential customers learn about a brand. These tools help generate leads and move them toward becoming customers. Sales teams use CRM systems later in the customer journey to nurture leads, close sales and maintain relationships to encourage repeat business.

The below table shows seven key differences between marketing automation and CRM software:

5 benefits of integrating your CRM and marketing automation platforms

Handling CRM and marketing automation in one place can free up your teams’ time to focus on high-priority activities that turn leads into customers.

Here are five more benefits of marketing automation and CRM software integrations.

1. Unified customer profiles to spot patterns and trends

By combining an all-in-one CRM and marketing automation solution you can keep everything you know about customers in one place, making it easier to spot patters and trends. According to Adobe research , prioritising your customer experience (CX) like this can help you outperform others on key metrics like referral rate , customer acquisition and repeat business.

The happier you make customers while engaging with them, the more likely they are to keep buying from you.

2. Automated lead qualification, scoring and nurturing to keep your sales funnel moving

You can use a CRM and marketing automation platform to assess each lead's potential using predefined criteria and engage them with personalised interactions over time. Additionally, you can use CRM features to automatically qualify leads and prioritise them with a numerical value. After that, you can use marketing automation to trigger follow-up campaigns with your most qualified leads to convince those people to take the next step on their journey.

Automating your lead qualification and scoring processes within your CRM ensures that salespeople only receive high-quality leads.

Marketing automation ensures that prospects who are not ready to buy are still engaged with and guided through the sales funnel until they are ready.

3. Seamless data sync for more accurate decision-making

Keeping your CRM and marketing automation platforms updated on one system makes you more likely to have consistent data. Taking that, you can create more accurate reports and make better decisions. Additionally, taking this unified approach helps eliminate data silos so you can track and analyse interactions across all touchpoints with confidence.

According to our State of Sales and Marketing 2023/2024 report, 81% of respondents already use CRM software with automation capabilities. This can be accessed by completing the form below.

Which automation tools and technology do you use?

92% of respondents use at least one automation tool in their role.

What this means is many of your competitors could already be using an integrated system. To compete, you must have your own unified view of customer interactions and campaign performance.

4. Provide in-demand, personalised experiences more easily

Real-time CRM insights can give you a more detailed overview of each customer. Using this knowledge, you can better tailor sales and marketing messages. For example, if your CRM pinpoints a customer who keeps opening emails and interacting with blogs about your new accounting software feature. You could use these events to trigger a personalised email with a discount to increase their chances of upgrading their plan.

Increasing the relevance of campaigns like this can drive more sales. Research from Twilio shows that over half of consumers say they’ll repeatedly buy from brands after a personalised experience.

Over half, 56% of customers say they will become repeat buyers after a personalised experience, a 7% increase year-over-year.

While marketing automation drives these targeted campaigns, you can manage the resulting communications and relationship-building efforts directly within your CRM.

5. Aligned sales and marketing for enhanced collaboration

Using one integrated system to share and track sales and marketing efforts will provide an overview of everything that’s happening in one place, allowing both teams to see what works and what doesn’t.

Seeing what the other department does can help team members understand each others’ roles and collaborate more effectively.

When teams work together, they can create more consistent messaging, giving prospects a seamless experience as they transition from leads to customers.

For example, your marketers can use sales reps' notes about common customer pain points and questions to develop content. Sales teams can then use this more tailored content when interacting with prospects.

A coordinated approach like this means prospects get consistent, relevant information at every journey stage.

Over time, this strategy can increase people’s likelihood of engaging with you, trusting your brand and buying from you more often.

Sales Management Definition, Process, Strategies and Resources

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 12:05:30 GMT

What is Sales Management?

An effective sales management process ensures every aspect of your company’s collective sales effort works efficiently. Therefore it's important to have a sales manager who helps their team satisfy buyers and maximise profits.

Sales management is the process of developing a sales force, organising sales efforts and implementing sales techniques that allow a business to reach its sales goals. Having precise sales management processes allows you to stay in tune with your industry, making a huge difference between surviving and flourishing in a competitive market. Having a clear picture of what processes to monitor, you can pinpoint issues early on, coach people before it is too late and have a better overview of which tasks the team should focus on to increase sales and create better relationships.

The Three Key Aspects of Sales Management

There are three umbrellas to manage within the sales process:

The process will vary from business to business but operations , strategy and analysis are the three key starting points.

What is a Sales Manager and What Does a Sales Manager Do?

A great sales manager is the person who guides your salespeople and is responsible for:

Setting sales goals and quotas
Motivating and mentoring the team
Creating sales plans and workflows
Employing and onboarding new hires
Organising s ales training programs
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Pipeline management
Coordinating with sales enablement and marketing teams
Overall team management

Although the list above shows multiple responsibilities within a sales manager role, the three most important tasks at which a sales manager excels are: building the team, defining the sales process and reporting.

Sales Operations: Building the Team

The sales team holds a direct connection with the product and customer. Sales team members should be trained to develop their skills regardless of their sales experience and certifications, instead of being viewed as money-making machines. This is because it’s not enough for salespeople to be great sellers – they must also be great at dealing with your product and representing your organisation so that customers want to engage with it.

Set your team up for success by giving them ambitious yet realistic targets, which you can track to measure future success, ensuring the sales team you manage is closely aligned working as individuals yet collaboratively. A joined-up approach will result in fewer errors and greater achievements for the sales force and wider company.

To achieve this:

Set sales and development targets
Assign territories for team members to manage
Establish goals and sales quotas

Sales Strategy: Defining the Sales Process

Every business has a sales cycle. This is a series of tasks that help a company’s product reach its users. A sales pipeline, or sales funnel , makes it easier to organise these tasks and manoeuvre deals to completion.

What is a Sales Pipeline?

A sales pipeline is a visual way of tracking prospects and leads as they move through various stages of the buying journey. This can also be visual to help salespeople organise their work.

However, even a mapped pipeline cannot determine or control your results. This is why it is important to manage your activities. Seeing the sales process broken down into stages motivates salespeople to work harder on controllable activities, stay focused and conquer more challenges.

Sales activities that are within a salesperson's control include:

Lead generation, scoring and qualification
The number of sales calls, follow-up emails, social media messages and other outreach activities they undertake
Market research on new products, new segments and other relevant information
Product knowledge

Keeping salespeople accountable for performance is also an important aspect of the sales manager’s job – that’s where reporting comes in.

Sales Analysis: Reporting

Reporting helps you understand how your current strategy affects your company's success and gives you insight into what you can do to improve your efforts, whether it's hiring more salespeople or redistributing tasks.

Successful reporting involves using sales metrics or quantifiable indicators that tell you how each aspect of your sales operations performs and whether you are achieving your targets.

With the standard sales funnel, you should be able to measure the following four metrics:

Number of deals
Average deal size in your funnel
Close ratio, or average percentage of deals won
Sales velocity, or average deal lifetime before closing

Collecting this data will help you to find your target customers faster as you will see which types of customers move through the process in the shortest time and who spends the most.

A CRM sales management tool will help you gather this information in reports and dashboards to streamline your sales management process.

Who Benefits from Sales Management?

Effective sales management positively affects everyone within the sales cycle. Three key stakeholders are involved in the sales management process: the sales manager , the salesperson and the customer.

A sales manager oversees an organisation's sales team's processes and is typically in charge of talent development and leadership. Having an effective management process allows them to drive the company forward. They’ll have a clearer vision of where they stand amongst their competition and know how to stay ahead.

A salesperson represents their company and directly contacts potential customers whether face-to-face, via phone or solely online. Salespeople typically report to and work closely with their sales managers on performance goals. As with the sales manager, the scope and clarity that come from effective sales management boost confidence and give salespeople better visibility of their work.

The customer will inevitably have a better experience and be more inclined to purchase your product or services with an effective sales management process. Customers may even share their experiences online, providing social proof to help other prospects convert.

Use Technology to Manage Customer Relations

Having an organised sales funnel will provide a clear view of your sales management process and provide the available opportunities while forecasting revenue for the months ahead.

Although Excel spreadsheets can be effective, a CRM tool will give you a clearer overview of your current assets and pinpoint key factors in your company's future success. Incorporating technology in your sales strategy will help to ensure no deals fall through the cracks so you can maximise profits.

Cloud-based CRMs are great for helping your team improve collaboration, as they typically offer flexible pricing and easy access via the Internet. Before purchasing any CRM tool, answer the following questions to ensure you make the most suitable choice for your team:

Is it easy to learn and use?
How can I customise it to fit my needs?
Are there cross-platform integrations?
Will it notify me when I need to take action, and will those notifications come in real-time or at intervals?
Does it offer accurate sales forecasting and reporting?
Is it mobile-friendly? Can I access it from anywhere at all times?

Sales Management Tips and Tricks

The more time you put into your sales process, the more you should get out of it.

There are plenty of productivity tools to help ease the process of managing and closing deals. Sales managers often work with content teams to develop content marketing materials that build value around their products or services, making it easier for salespeople to sell. This is due to selling being an ongoing process as most people do not buy immediately. They need convincing and reassurance. Effective content is more likely to move the consumers along the sales cycle than a salesperson alone. Informative content often introduces products and services to potential buyers - especially when it appears high on search engine results pages, where many buyers start their journeys.

Sales Manager Resources: How to Start Managing a Sales Team

If you are wanting to become a sales manager or just want improvement in the sales manager role, you must understand the importance of the sales management process. This includes the planning and goal-setting tasks that come with it.

There are two key aspects most sales professionals consider first when moving into management: career types and compensation.

Sales Leadership Careers

The people who oversee sales organisations and manage sales teams typically have one of the following roles:

Director of sales
District sales manager
General manager
Chief revenue officer
Sales and account manager
Business development manager
Regional sales manager
Sales and marketing manager
Sales and marketing vice president
Sales supervisor
Vice-president of sales

Sales managers come from a variety of backgrounds. Some start as sales representatives and work their way up and others come from unrelated fields without years of experience. In order to apply for a sales manager role you must have strong communication, leadership skills and problem-solving abilities.

Key Takeaways

There is an endless amount to learn or improve on to achieve success in a sales manager position. Once you decide to build or improve your sales management process, you can start by:

Reading account management books, sales books or blogs
Making a Google alert for key terms such as "sales management" to stay up-to-date with the latest news in your industry
Experimenting with sales management software that will help you gain visibility into and stay on top of your management process
Reading the sales glossary below to brush up on your sales vocabulary

Sales Glossary

Activity-based selling: The theory that you can close more deals by focusing on the activities you can control, such as the number of calls or appointments made, rather than focusing on sales results or sales volume, or making a certain amount of money in sales.

Close/ closing: Bringing a prospect to the final buying decision.

Close ratio: Number of deals you close compared to the number of deals you have presented.

Cold calling: Getting in contact with a potential customer with no prior contact or relationship in hopes of setting up an appointment or informing them about your product or service.

Conversion: The act of turning a prospect into a customer.

Conversion rate: The percentage of prospects turned into new customers.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): A tool or piece of sales management software to manage your customer relationships and sales pipeline. Often also used as process management software.

Deal: An agreement to meet or take action with a prospect.

Demo: A sales presentation of your product or service.

Lead: Anyone who could potentially be a customer.

Marketing: The act of promoting your product or service.

Metrics: A collection of individual and organisational performance indicators and ratios calculated from collected data that describe a company's historical and ongoing sales processes.

Product: Something made to be sold to a consumer.

Prospect: A potential customer or person who may be interested in a company's product or service.

Sales quota: A fixed share of something that a person or group is expected to achieve or contribute to.

Retention rate: The percentage of customers who stay with a business.

Revenue: A company's income or earnings.

Sales cycle: The series of predictable phases required to sell a product or a service. Sales cycles can vary greatly among organisations, products and services, and no two sales will be the same.

Sales dashboard: A method of measuring sales performance from a birds-eye view. A sales dashboard helps measure key metrics, individual team members and sales activities.

Sales force: Division of a business responsible for selling products or services.

Sales funnel (or pipeline): A systematic and visual approach to selling a product or service.

Sales management: Process of developing and coordinating a sales team.

Sales management planning: Process of thinking and organising activities to achieve a desired goal.

Sales management process: Steps taken to attain a company's performance objectives.

Sales management strategy: A method to bring out a desired outcome.

Sales manager: Someone who's responsible for managing sales professionals and overseeing a company's sales process.

Sales meeting: A meeting with the sales team, often to discuss processes, products and services, as well as the potential benefits for the buyer.

Salesperson: Someone who typically works directly with customers to inform them and sell a product while providing customer service.

Sales reporting: The documentation of a company's activities.

Sales targets: Objectives or goals for a salesperson or company.

Sales velocity: Time it takes for a new deal to close, from the initial contact.

Service: An action performed to satisfy a customer's needs or problem.

Sage CRM 2024 R1: UI Improvements - Support for Bold and Italics in Multiline Text fields

Thu, 08 Aug 2024 10:33:05 GMT

Sage CRM 2024 R1 supports bold and italic formatting in multiline text fields. This new feature empowers users to emphasise and structure information more effectively, leading to enhanced readability and quicker insights into crucial details.

Users can now format text within multiline fields, such as the Problem Details and Solution Details sections within a Case record, using standard HTML tags. Specifically, users can apply the <b>, <i>, and <br> tags to achieve bold, italics, and line break formatting respectively.

This will enable users to improve the presentation of information for users accustomed to HTML formatting. By enabling users to highlight key points and structure content within multiline fields, we aim to improve overall data comprehension and productivity within Sage CRM.

Sage CRM 2024 R1: Using Tags in Reports and Groups

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 15:17:51 GMT

Sage CRM 2024 R1 has introduced a new user interface feature called Tagging!

Report Tagging can be viewed as similar to project tagging or dimensional tagging in account systems. If Tagging has been enabled on your CRM, you can quickly add extra information that can be used to organise your data without the need to add new fields. This means that all of the main system entities such as person, company and opportunity etc can be tagged.

Tagging in CRM is powered by an existing feature called Key Attributes and provides you with the option to decide whether Tagging is enabled in the user interface. The tags are also stored in a new key attribute category called 'Project' and added to the key attribute category list. The Project category type is a 'Multiple Instance Data Category' and that means that any entity can be tagged as belonging to multiple projects. The image above shows this company has been tagged with the codes "SS24" and "SS25". Within the Project Category, these tags are held in a field named "Tag Name".

Creating a Group Based on Tagging Data

The steps in SageCRM 2024 R1 show how to create a dynamic group and use Tags in the contents and criteria.

Navigate to the "Groups" tab in the User Help section.
Click on the "New" button to create a new group.
Select the option to create a dynamic group.
Define the criteria for the group by specifying the Key Attribute Data fields and their values.
Save the group.

NOTE: Carefully consider the data source (view) to be used. When creating a group based on tags used in a company context, ensure that the selected tags are referenced from the same entity.

By creating a dynamic group with the specified Key Attribute Data criteria, the group's contents will automatically refresh each time it is opened. This ensures the group always reflects the most up-to-date records that meet the defined project tag criteria.

Creating a Report Based on Tagging Data

How to create a report and utilise Key Attribute Data:

Navigate to the "Reports" section in Sage CRM.
Select the appropriate report category.
Click on the "New" button to create a new report.
Define the layout and content of the report using the report designer.

NOTE: Make sure to choose the entity that contains the Key Attribute (Tagging) Data that you wish to include when selecting the data source for the report. The report designer allows you to add the Tag fields to the report layout as required.

Additionally, you can specify the Key Attribute criteria in the report search conditions or use the Key Attribute Data fields in the reports filters to filter the report based on Tags.

Customer Centricity: How putting buyers first boosts business

Wed, 26 Jun 2024 10:09:23 GMT

What is Customer Centricity?

Customer centricity prioritises delivering exceptional value and experiences to build strong relationships, focusing on customers in all business decisions. It involves proactively gathering and acting on feedback, rather than just responding to support issues. This approach values existing customers and attracts new ones, enhancing profitability. For example, offering multiple contact options based on customer feedback can help outperform competitors.

If your customers are happy and get value from your product, they’ll keep buying and encourage others to do the same. If their experience is negative, they’ll soon turn to your competitors. This is why customer-centricity is a no-brainer!

REMEMBER: Your company’s success depends on how its customers feel.

The business case for a Customer-Centric approach

Benefits of Customer Centricity

Increased Customer Loyalty (reduced churn)
Improved Brand Reputation
Higher Average Customer Lifetime Value
Increased Customer Retention

Prioritising customer needs and providing exceptional experiences helps you build stronger, more profitable buyer relationships. Customers will grow to trust your service and have little reason to look elsewhere.

For a customer-centric transactional business, like a business-to-consumer (B2C) retailer, it shows in repeat purchases, upselling and cross-selling.

For a subscription-based business, like a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, it translates into increased customer retention and lower churn rates.

When customers feel valued, they’re more likely to share positive experiences through word-of-mouth and online reviews.

Generating social proof is one of the most effective ways to get new customers, with 90% of business-to-business (B2B) buyers trusting recommendations from industry peers, compared with 29% who trust vendors’ salespeople.

7 Ways to Build a Customer-Centric Culture

1. Collect the right customer data

Collect relevant data through various channels such as surveys, website analytics and social media interactions to gain insights into customer behaviours, preferences and pain points. This data will allow you to tailor your sales, marketing and product development efforts for the best possible outcomes.

TIP: Start by asking customers about their preferred contact methods. You can focus your outreach efforts on those channels to make sales conversations as convenient as possible. You could then add a forum or web form dedicated to feature requests.

2. Organise this data for easy access and reporting

Organise your customer data in a centralised system for easy access and reporting.

TIP: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is your best friend here. It allows you to store, analyse and leverage customer information effectively.

3. Collect feedback to measure your customer centricity

Monitor the impact of your customer-centric decisions to find repeatable wins and improvement opportunities. Keep an eye out for sales and retention rate growth, which will happen eventually, but direct customer feedback is a more immediate sign of how you’re doing.

TIP: Proactively seek customer feedback through CSAT surveys, web forms, sales conversations, and NPS surveys. Use this data to continuously improve your brand and product.

4. Collaborate with customer-facing teams

Work closely with customer success and account management teams to gather insights from the inquiries, complaints and feedback they receive. Use this information to spot trends and areas for improvement.

TIP: Receiving complaints about one feature suggests your product/ service doesn’t meet users’ expectations. Addressing the issue will help you keep sentiment high and customers on board. For example, creating posts with “you asked, we listened”, presents a customer-centric company and shows that it values users’ opinions.

5. Automate after-sales check-ins and content recommendations

A after-sales strategy encourages repeat business and brand advocacy. Buyers who experienced a high-quality customer support interaction were 82% more likely to buy again or renew their agreement when offered the chance to switch to another brand.

TIP: Use a CRM with email automation to trigger personalised messages at predetermined stages after someone becomes a customer.

6. Make your brand easily accessible

Convenience and communication are crucial components of customer centricity, so ensure your brand is easily accessible. This stops customers from getting frustrated and switching to a competitor or sharing their negative experience, as well as helping existing customers to get more value from your products, making them more likely to stay loyal and spread positive word of mouth

TIP: Boost your brand offerings with Chatbots, Live chat, Forums, Web forms and In-app messaging.

7. Put customers at the heart of your marketing

Doing so demonstrates authenticity by showing how your product benefits real people. It makes your product more relatable and helps existing customers feel valued, as they become part of your brand story.

TIP: Consider the following types of customer-centric marketing to get started!

- Case studies

- Testimonials

- User-generated content

Final Thoughts

REMEMBER: Becoming more customer-centric has no downsides!

By following this advice and prioritising customers, you can gain deeper insights into your target audience, strengthen relationships, and ultimately increase your profitability. As you implement strategic changes, monitor key sales metrics such as customer lifetime value, retention rates, and sentiment. You'll soon see these figures improve as a result of your efforts.

Quick Transactions

Tue, 21 May 2024 14:38:16 GMT

Generate quick quotes and orders all from a single screen. Sage CRM facilitates this process by enabling users to create a quote or order header, and then add individual lines using options such as 'Add new product,' 'free text,' or 'comment line.' However, each line opens in a new panel, which can be time-consuming.

To streamline this process, the Quick Transactions, a Qmulus Sage CRM add-on allows you to create and edit quotes and orders quickly and efficiently within one unified screen.

Keyword Search

Tue, 21 May 2024 12:38:14 GMT

Taking advantage of Sage CRM's Keyword Search feature

You can use Keyword Search to search across all text fields on a specific entity and entities associated with it. For example, if you perform a Keyword Search on cases, the search is also performed on associated companies, people, addresses, and progress notes.

Keyword Search uses an any words search technique. This returns records containing all words listed in a search term if the words appear in the record text fields or in the text fields of any associated entity record specified in the Keyword Search view

For example, a search for European software services returns all records containing the words European + software + services in any text field. These words can appear in any order within a record and across more than one text field. If the search term is not enclosed in quotation marks, matching records are picked up even where there are words inserted between the search term words within a record. If quotation marks are used, only records containing the exact phrase are returned.

To perform a Keyword Search, do the following:

1. On the top bar, click the Search arrow and click Keyword Search.

2. Enter your search term in What would you like to search for?. When performing a Keyword Search, you might know part of the search term. For example, you may have part of a company name, or you know that you're looking for someone called either Smith or Smyth, or you might know only the first few digits of a telephone number. See the table below for special characters that can help you narrow your search results in these circumstances.

3. Select an entity checkbox to perform your search on one or more entities. Alternatively, select Select All to search all primary entities. If you do not select any checkbox, no records are returned.

Simplified Data Retrieval: Being able to obtain specific details fast is crucial in today's data-driven environment. With Sage CRM's keyword search feature, users can quickly and easily find the exact record they're looking for, eliminating away with having to manually sort through multiple records. The keyword search option simplifies data retrieval, saving your team valuable time and effort whether looking for a contact's phone number, a certain project status, or meeting notes.

Click on the below link:

Screen recording of the Keyword Search feature in SageCRM

Sage CRM's keyword search feature enables businesses to unlock unmatched efficiency and drive sustainable growth in today's dynamic marketplace by giving instant access to relevant information, speeding up the retrieval of data, enhancing productivity, and offering flexibility.

Are you eager to increase the effectiveness of your CRM? Check out the keyword search function in Sage CRM now to see how it can benefit your company. 

Sage CRM 2024 R1: What to Expect

Tue, 09 Apr 2024 13:32:23 GMT

The main focus of SageCRM 2024 R1, is to continue to modernise the user experience and improve user satisfaction, while also enhancing security, increasing productivity, and laying the groundwork for future advancements.

Product vision

This release has executed well on its priorities of delivering interface and user experience improvements and pain point elimination.

-Enhanced security for better data protection including improved control of external URLs in dashboard gadgets.

-A new tagging system for easier record organisation and retrieval.

-Ability to highlight text in multiline text fields for improved readability and faster insights on key information.

-Improved favourites management with ordering options.

-A foundation for future advancements by adopting 64-bit Java for increased performance and scalability.

-Prevention of deletion of key metadata Ensuring that screens and lists can't accidentally be removed.

-Embedded chatbot for User Help Improving the access to help on using Sage CRM features.

-Refreshed eLearning

-Updated User Assistance

-Supporting content on Sage City and Community

If you would like to find out more about the SageCRM 2024 R1 release please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

7 soft sales skills that will help you close more deals

Thu, 28 Mar 2024 11:23:36 GMT

What are soft skills?

Soft skills are invaluable to the sales workplace and are often also know as the 'core' skills. These skills include communication and empathy and are relevant to most professions. Below are the seven top soft skills that will help sales representatives looking to hit quota and generate revenue.

1. Empathy

Empathy is crucial to build trust among your customers, you must prioritise your clients goals and emotions over your own to ensure their needs are met as according to LinkedIn’s State of Sales Report only 40% of buyers believe that salespeople are trustworthy. Additionally, empathy helps sales representatives to root deeper into leads' problem to find the core issue and create an effective solution. This ultimately will enhance the customers experience through providing relevant product or service recommendations to fit the clients needs resulting in greater customer satisfaction. By providing a personalised experience you can avoid rejections and overcome sales objections.

To develop empathy:

- Focus on how you pay attention to ensure you are actively listening.

- Be curious by asking questions and listening intently.

2. Persuasion

Persuasion is a valuable soft skill in sales as it can provide gentle reassurance to nurture prospects towards a confident purchase decision. For example, directing the lead to a relevant source (case study) so they can see the tangible benefits of a product in a real life scenario. Persuasion skills are useful at all stages of the sales cycle. This skill will help you to overcome early objections and help you to reassure customers that you understand their needs and can solve their problems.

To develop persuasion:

- Put yourself in your prospects scenario by considering what could be stopping them from progressing.

- Ask questions.

3. Adaptability

It is important to remember that circumstances change therefore you must always be ready to adapt your sales approach. To be an adaptable salesperson you must have the knowledge on your industry, business and target audience to reassure leads when something does not go to plan.

To develop adaptability:

- Get out of your comfort zone.

- Shadow a sales engineer or product manager as they have unique technical knowledge making them good to shadow.

4. Organisation

The increase in people working from home has led to further independence therefore making organisation in the workplace crucial. Sales reps often have multiple responsibilities from managing leads and hosting meetings to reporting, travelling and training. An organised salesperson knows which prospects need attention and take the time to check in and follow up where necessary. Implementing a CRM system makes staying organised easier by helping you know when exactly to follow up with a contact.

To develop organisation:

- Record and time your regular activities as you will begin to understand where your time goes and learn how to use it more effectively.

- Allow technology such as CRM softwares to help you by automating workflows and repetitive tasks.

5. Resilience

In sales, it is important to stay resilient as you can be doing everything right and find that you still can’t close a deal due to forces outside of your control. Resilient sales reps and managers take steps to mitigate poor performance. It is crucial to have support from your management to create supportive environments to address sales related struggles and rebuild confidence with each small success. Managers can also get a clearer view of their sales team’s processes using a visual CRM pipeline and may spot patterns that are easy to correct.

To develop resilience:

- Recognise the positives of failure so they become learning opportunities.

- Take notice of other reps' struggles to help you to accept that sales can be difficult and not everything is in your control.

- Stay optimistic as this is one of the must-have qualities top sales representatives possess.

6. Communication

As a sales rep you are responsible for turning prospects into customers. Effective communication is critical to sales success as it allows you to build the product and customer knowledge you need to reassure leads and sell confidently. Therefore, it is important to understand customers pain points and solve them by recommending suitable products.

Listening skills, clarity and tone are three areas of communication to focus on as a salesperson.

To develop communication skills:

- Vary your communication channels.

- Shadow top-performing reps and learn from their interactions with prospects how to use tone and language to make buyers feel comfortable and confident.

7. Storytelling

Great storytelling works in sales as it does in marketing: by appealing to buyers’ emotional decision-making process. Salespeople can use great stories to trigger emotional responses that make prospects believe more in products and, therefore, more likely to buy.

For example, a B2B sales pitch story could use the following structure:

- Status quo . “This is how your business is operating right now.”

- Conflict. “All of those manual admin tasks are pulling your team away from your customers and hindering their experience of your business.”

- Resolution . “Our automation software will take care of those menial tasks, so your team can focus their attention on personalised customer service.”

- Outcome . “With more attention from your team, customer sentiment improves and repeat business increases.”

To develop storytelling skills:

- Read and look for the narrative structure in the media you consume, from news articles to fiction, to understand how your audience feels at certain stages of your presentation and effectively tap into their emotions.

- Take inspiration from marketers by looking for the stories they tell in their content.

Spotler for SageCRM

Tue, 12 Mar 2024 15:41:21 GMT

Introducing Spotler

Spotler is the number one email connecter to Sage

Spotler is an AI powered marketing automation and lead generation software provider offering an all in one inbound & outbound platform, allowing marketing & sales teams get more leads, convert more traffic and run complete marketing campaigns. Spotler has one of the best integration with Sage CRM allowing sales and marketing teams to work form one platform and increase their marketing and output and lead generation activities.

Spotler is one of the only UK providers that will allow you to email non-opted-in data, even your purchased lists. Spotler mail+ is a email marketing software suitable for all organisations looking for a software to professionally communicate in a personal matter with employees, customers, shareholders, members, prospects and many other segments! This includes B2B, e-commerce, retail, government, non profit, education, health care and many more. Spotler Mail+ holds multiple features from email newsletters, audience management and segmentations, forms and surveys, SMS mailings, A/B testing, mailing reports, tagging and scoring, dynamic content, images editor to document management.

Features

Email editor:

Drag and drop to create emails from a library of pre-defined blocks or your on custom blocks that can be reused across emails and campaigns. Once the template has been created you can edit the design by adjusting the colours, paddings and alignment to your brand guidelines. The email editor also does all the HTML work for you, including optimising for all devices!

Gator leads:

Track companies and contacts who visit your website and increase and track the ROI from your paid ads. Help your sales team get new leads by integrating Sage CRM with our lead generation software enabling you to manage your website leads from within your CRM. From tracking their website behaviour to who the lead is assigned to in CRM. You can link records, see their lead score and link CRM records.

Send forensics:

Predict the deliverability of your campaigns before sending and monitor the reputation of your IP and sending domain.

Gator AI:

Increase the click rate of your campaigns and understand which contact will unsubscribe by removing them from the campaign. Spotler offers core marketing services from template design, automation builds, content production and SEO to create engagement across channels and touchpoints.

Data secured and GDPR compliant:

With Spotler mail+ all customer data is secured and the privacy of recipients is guaranteed. Additionally, Spotler is GDPR compliant saving you the time through guaranteed GDPR compliant email marketing. Spotler also guarantees that your data will be stored securely in Europe. Spotler uses a Dutch partner for hosting and storage.

Integrate Spotler Mail+ with CRM:

You can integrate Spotler with CRM systems, webshop software and customer data platforms. Through the synchronisation of data, segmentations and personalisation become even more targeted and communication becomes more relevant.

Features for Marketing and Sales

What you can achieve:

Gain insight into your campaigns performance and ROI from within SageCRM. Track the progress of your sales and marketing funnels and identify any bottle neck scenarios, report on your leads in your pipeline and their entire journey from marketing campaigns to website activity to sales opportunity. Keeping you on-top of your marketing results and budget in real-time.

Create powerful workflows:

Utilise automated workflows to welcome new customers on board when they sign up. This tool also sends out your brand-(RSS) content in blogs or white-papers to keep people’s attention. Finally, automatically trigger campaigns to your lapsed customers.

Track customers and prospects:

Want to know when visitors are landing on a certain page or a certain series of pages? Use Spotler's alerts functionality to tune to fit with the way you sell. The Live Feed lets you see your website visitors in real time, so if that hot prospect appears on your website, you can be on the phone to them while you know you have their attention.

Dashboards for Sales & Marketing:

Spotler's integration with Sage enables you to create multiple dashboards for all teams to access. From marketing funnels to sales pipelines, leads from specific marketing channels, or leads based on their position in the buying journey, you can ensure your sales & marketing teams are targeting the right leads with the right information. This integration feature will allow you to create dynamic groups based on your chosen criteria and send them to their own relevant campaigns automatically. Our ‘Send to Friend’ and ‘Web Capture’ functionality is also able to add new lead records to Sage CRM via referrals of your email marketing campaigns and new signups from your website.

We can sync your lead and contact records with the data from your marketing campaigns such as email campaigns, surveys or events. You’ll have a record of all your contacts and leads key activities in a dedicated history table in your Sage CRM database.

Real-Time Data:

With Spotler you can see website, social, paid ads, email activities in real time from your Sage CRM, allowing you to view your leads first interaction with your website to their entire website journey and their total lead score. All data collected is inputted directly into your CRM, including who owns the account and all notes collected along their buyer journey.

How AI is transforming CRM

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 10:55:04 GMT

What is AI and how is it revolutionising Customer Relationship Management?

The sales world is rapidly evolving and how a company manages its customer relationships is crucial to its success. Therefore, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are being adopted by organisations to stay organised and increase efficiency levels.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionising the way in which companies engage with their customers. This includes enhancing work quality, redefining machine interfacing, providing businesses with powerful tools to analyse data, automate processes, and deliver personalised experiences. AI functionalities will be integrated within various CRM systems for sales people, marketers and human resources departments to interact with the AI technology to enhance their productivity and deliver job responsibilities more efficiently. In this blog, we'll explore how AI is ultimately enhancing and impacting CRM.

With AI algorithms, manual data entry becomes simpler whilst reducing user effort. These AI-driven tools can populate notes and follow-ups automatically, eliminating manual data input. AI algorithms analyse data from a range of sources including customer interactions, emails, and social media. The relevant information is extracted to populate CRM fields. This automated entry saves time, maintains data accuracy, and minimises human errors due to the automation of data entries.

AI augments data quality. Learning from patterns and historical data, it offers intelligent predictions and suggestions. For example, AI can recommend tags or categories based on note or email content, streamlining tasks and enhancing data consistency. AI unlocks more effective data utilisation. It analyses vast datasets, uncovering patterns, trends, and overlooked insights. This information empowers decision-making, personalises customer interactions, and elevates overall CRM performance.

AI in Sales

Predictive analytics:

In sales departments AI will compliment lead generation, lead scoring and predictive analytics. AI can analyse vast amounts of data to identify patterns and trends, helping sales teams predict customer behaviour, preferences, and potential buying signals. This enables more targeted and personalised sales strategies, improving conversion rates and customer satisfaction.

Lead scoring and qualification:

AI powered CRM systems can automatically score and qualify leads based on various criteria, such as demographic information, engagement history, and purchase intent. This helps prioritise leads for sales outreach, ensuring that representatives focus their efforts on the most promising opportunities, analyse vast amounts of customer data in real-time to uncover valuable insights and trends.

Sales forecasting:

By leveraging machine learning algorithms, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of customer behaviour, preferences, and needs by replacing dead-end, web-to-lead forms with live conversations to qualify and pass leads to your team directly from your website. These insights enable sales teams to make data-driven decisions, identify opportunities for growth, and predict future customer actions more accurately.

Process automation:

AI is also beneficial in sales in providing automated personalised communications at any location including Microsoft Outlook, Gmail and LinkedIn. With this function you will never draft emails from scratch again! AI will auto-generate personalised emails grounded in CRM and external data, helping sellers to make introductions or send follow-ups in seconds.

Overall, AI enhances CRM for sales by providing actionable insights, automating manual tasks, personalising interactions, and optimising sales performance to drive efficiency, productivity, and revenue growth for organisations.

AI in Marketing

Personalised marketing campaigns:

One of the key benefits of AI in CRM is its ability to deliver personalised experiences to customers at scale. AI algorithms can segment customers into distinct groups based on their demographics, purchase history, and behaviour and tailor marketing messages, product recommendations, and communication channels to individual preferences. This helps marketers anticipate customer needs, optimise marketing spend, and make proactive decisions to stay ahead of the competition to deliver highly targeted and personalised marketing campaigns.

Predictive analytics:

Additionally, AI can forecast future marketing trends and outcomes by analysing historical interactions and preferences. This helps marketers anticipate customer needs, optimise marketing spend, and make proactive decisions to stay ahead of the competition.

Marketing automation:

By automating repetitive tasks like email marketing, social media scheduling and lead nurturing campaigns, marketers can focus on creating compelling content and strategies that drive engagement and conversions. This saves time and resources, improves efficiency, and allows marketers to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Customer service enhancement:

AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants integrated with CRM systems can provide immediate assistance to customers, answer frequently asked questions, and resolve issues in real-time. This level of personalisation enhances customer engagement, loyalty, and satisfaction to ultimately driving business growth, whilst improving customer satisfaction, reducing response times, and frees up human agents to focus on more complex inquiries.

Overall, AI enhances marketing teams' capabilities within CRM systems by providing data analysis, personalised marketing, lead scoring, content recommendations, automation, predictive analytics, and customer service enhancement. By leveraging AI-driven insights and tools, marketing teams can optimise their efforts, drive better results, and deliver a superior customer experience.

AI in Service

Chatbots for Self-Service:

AI automates routine tasks and processes within CRM systems, freeing up valuable time for sales and customer service teams to focus on more strategic activities. For example, AI-powered chatbots can handle routine customer inquiries and support requests, providing immediate assistance 24/7 AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants integrated with CRM systems can provide immediate assistance to customers, answer frequently asked questions, and resolve issues in real-time. This enables customers to find answers to their questions quickly and conveniently, reducing the workload and costs on service agents whilst improving customer satisfaction, reducing response times, and freeing up human agents to focus on more complex inquiries.

Sentiment analysis:

Additionally, AI can automate lead scoring, sales forecasting and customer sentiment and emotion from various sources, such as social media, emails, and customer service interactions enabling teams to work more efficiently and effectively. AI can analyse customer interactions, such as emails, chats, and social media conversations, to determine sentiment and gauge customer satisfaction levels. This allows service teams to identify unhappy customers or potential issues early on and take proactive measures to address them by understanding how customers feel about their brand and products. Businesses can identify opportunities and address issues before they escalate. AI-powered sentiment analysis also enables businesses to engage with customers in a more empathetic and personalised manner to analyse customer sentiment, service teams can proactively address customer concerns and provide personalised solutions, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Automated Case Resolution:

AI can automate repetitive service tasks, such as case triaging, data entry, and follow-up communication. This streamlines service processes, reduces manual effort, and allows service agents to focus on more complex or high-value interactions.

AI enhances service teams' capabilities within CRM systems by automating tasks, providing predictive insights, enabling self-service options, analysing sentiment, offering personalised recommendations, streamlining case resolution, facilitating knowledge management, and leveraging customer feedback. By harnessing the power of AI, service teams can deliver faster, more efficient, and more personalised support experiences, ultimately driving higher levels of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Ready to get started?

AI is revolutionising CRM by providing businesses with powerful tools to analyse data, automate processes, and deliver personalised experiences at scale. By harnessing the power of AI, organisations can gain deeper insights into customer behaviour, enhance engagement and loyalty, and drive business growth in today's competitive marketplace. As AI continues to evolve, its impact on CRM is only expected to grow, empowering businesses to build stronger and more meaningful relationships with their customers. Not sure where to start? Lets chat!

What is Qnect?

Tue, 06 Feb 2024 12:03:21 GMT

What is Qnect integration for Sage 50 & 200?

Qnect for SageCRM is a real-time integration that links SageCRM to various Sage account solutions (including Sage50 & 200). It helps to increase efficiency and accuracy in the management of customers, suppliers, products, quotes and orders at an affordable cost. View your customer or supplier financials, orders, quotes and invoices from your Sage Accounts system directly within SageCRM . Create customers and post orders from SageCRM directly into your accounts solution without retyping!

By combining SageCRM with Sage Accounts you can enjoy better business insight, greater efficiencies, increased productivity and have a single customer-centric view across your entire business.

What can we Do?

Qnect key features

Processing quotes

Since products and prices seamlessly transfer from Sage 200 to SageCRM, users can fully utilise the quote functionality within SageCRM via a web browser. This includes adding products, free text items, and comments to quotes, generating PDF documents, and effortlessly sending them to prospects/customers—all within SageCRM. SageCRM allows for quote production without linking prospect companies to Sage 200, streamlining data management and reducing clutter within Sage 200. By only storing actual sales customers and transactions in Sage 200, the volume of non-transactional data is minimised, consequently enhancing software performance and speeding up operations.

Processing orders

Customer orders can be initiated either from quotes or directly within SageCRM. Similar to quotes, orders can be accompanied by PDF documents, facilitating easy distribution to customers. Once a quote is accepted by the customer, it can be seamlessly converted into an order and posted directly to the customer's Sage 200 account by selecting the 'Post to Sage Accounts' button within the order interface.

Instant data accessibility

Data entered at the commencement of the sales process seamlessly transfers from SageCRM to Sage 200, eliminating the need for duplicate data entry. This not only saves time but also mitigates the risk of data discrepancies resulting from manual entry into multiple systems. Additionally, SageCRM enables the storage of information about phone calls, emails, or meetings, as well as the management of the sales pipeline, opportunities, quotes, and orders. Furthermore, it facilitates the recording and managing of customer issues and marketing activities.

Want to integrate CRM for your business today? It's that easy!

Companies globally are noticing the importance of an integrated CRM. By implementing this fast, SageCRM and Qnect will help you to bring together all aspects of your business including sales, finance, marketing and customer service.

CRM for commercial cleaning

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 14:28:48 GMT

How a CRM will help your commercial cleaning business

A customer relationship management system (CRM) can be a game changer within the cleaning industry. A CRM system will provide your business with tools to help with effective communication and high-quality customer service, enabling your business to track customer interactions ensuring no cases are left unresolved. Building a strong relationship between your cleaning company and its existing and potential customers is a necessity, the solutions offered by a CRM can help your cleaning company connect with customers at any stage of the sales cycle. An effective CRM system will increase customer satisfaction due to improved business efficiency by eliminating confusion and the overlapping of work tasks to ensure all operations run smoothly.

Enhancing your communication strategies with your customers will increase sales opportunities and potential leads. Implementing a CRM system will help with this as all your company data will be stored in one place. This works well for businesses that are dealing with ever-increasing amounts of data coming in from multiple sources, especially in the cleaning industry where it is likely you will have staff positioned in multiple locations. As a result, a CRM system will provide real-time data to ensure staff are up to date and streamlined communication is strong. Sales analysis and consistency in the process are essential to making better-informed decisions and will lead to better business outcomes and improved conditions.

Your cleaning company and customer base will determine how quickly you need a CRM system.

Below are some benefits of adopting a CRM system within a cleaning company:

Ability to centralise customer data
Improved task tracking
Increasing their customer retention rates
Automating most repetitive tasks
Increased sales opportunities
More free time to do less boring work

What key features should a CRM for a cleaning company include?

Scheduling

A schedule management feature will allow your business to effectively coordinate, ensuring accurate staff levels due to precise staff availability. This will ensure staff are organised through appointment reminders and daily schedules, ultimately enhancing efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Dispatching

Streamlining dispatching tasks will increase precision by eliminating confusion and the overlapping of tasks. Creating a smooth staff work environment with good communication levels will be projected onto the customer, providing them with a seamless service experience through increased staff productivity levels.

Inventory management

Inventory management is crucial for all commercial cleaning organisations. A cleaning CRM system will enable stock levels to be constantly monitored always ensuring high stock levels, allowing items to be ordered promptly.

Invoicing

Invoicing is another key element for cleaning companies. CRM systems include invoicing capabilities which ensure billing and payments are made smoothly and on time to both staff and customers. If this is not optimised your business may face reputational risk, therefore all transactions must be made accurately and on time.

Customer feedback

Customer feedback is crucial to all businesses. By implementing a CRM system, you can monitor and analyse customer reviews. This will help to enhance your service quality ensuring a seamless experience is provided and customer retention levels remain high.

The commercial cleaning industry is rising with many organisations demanding a more flexible and personalised solution; therefore, it is important to maintain a competitive edge by utilising CRM for your business. A CRM system can help to keep your business going due to the multiple automation functions that will save time whilst ensuring your business runs smoothly to maintain competitiveness.

Key takeaways:

A CRM is meant to help you operate your cleaning business in an effective, time-saving, and professional manner by providing estimating programs, bid management software, automatic invoicing, scheduling services, and more. You'll be able to keep track of client information and satisfy their requirements more easily than ever before, allowing your business to reach new heights. At ERBS we can provide you with the best CRM for your cleaning business.

CRM systems tailored for the cleaning industry are more effective for managing industry-specific tasks like scheduling, dispatching, inventory management, invoicing, and customer feedback.

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20 most important KPIs for sales teams to track

Tue, 16 Jan 2024 14:27:14 GMT

Sales KPIs are the most important metrics for your team. Done right, they can provide valuable insights to optimise your sales process.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure, but choosing the right metrics for your goals can be challenging.

In this article, we cover 20 valuable KPIs for sales teams to track so you can determine which ones are right for you.

What are KPIs for sales?

Sales KPIs (key performance indicators) are measures that sales teams use to track progress toward objectives and broader business goals. They help you assess the effectiveness of your sales strategy so you can determine whether your sales activities are working or if you need to rethink your approach.

Choosing the right sales KPIs

For the most accurate tracking, set specific goals and sales objectives and align your KPIs with them. A company with a goal like “sell as much as you can” will struggle to measure whether the team – and each rep – is achieving it.

Likewise, a sales manager only tracking “deals closed” will miss where the team is struggling if not also tracking activities, such as “proposals sent” and “demos held”.

Each company will have its own unique goals. Two companies may offer the same product, but one may focus on expanding its territories while the other aims to acquire more local customers.

Sales goals often fall into two categories:

Activity goals. Goals based on your team’s actions, like increasing initial calls for a specific buyer persona.

Performance-based goals . Goals based on results, like increasing annual sales revenue by 25%.

Once you’ve chosen your sales goals, make them even more effective and eliminate guesswork by creating a SMART goal (one that’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound).

The sales objective is the planned action to achieve that goal and KPIs are what you’ll measure to track progress.

As mentioned above, the right objectives for your team will depend on your sales and broader business goals. They’ll also depend on your team’s performance.

For example, setting ambitious revenue goals doesn’t make sense if your team can’t achieve them. Figure out which short-term changes will impact your long-term success.

It’s also important to note that your sales objectives will vary depending on factors like industry, location and company size.

20 sales KPIs for sales teams

While goals and objectives will be unique to each company, several effective KPIs can measure team performance toward objectives.

Here are 20 KPIs for sales managers to consider:

Monthly sales growth

Monthly sales growth helps sales leaders uncover problems quickly and remedy them. Setting monthly sales growth targets also motivates sales team members to perform well, giving them goals to work toward in four-week sprints.

Monthly sales growth = ((Sales for the current month − sales for the previous month) ÷ sales for the prior month) × 100

2. Average profit margin

Average profit margin focuses only on profits from sales revenue. It tells you whether sales efforts are contributing to company revenue and whether those efforts are sustainable.

Average profit margin = (Net income ÷ net sales) × 100

3. Average purchase value

Average purchase value is the average dollar amount customers spend on your products or services. It’s an ideal metric for companies focused on boosting revenue from current customers.

Average purchase value = Total sales ÷ number of customers or transactions

4. Customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Customer acquisition cost is how much it costs to gain a new customer, including all sales and marketing expenses, salaries and overhead costs. It helps companies set budgets to make sure acquiring new customers remains sustainable.

CAC = Total sales and marketing costs ÷ net new customers

5. Average customer lifetime value (CLV or CLTV)

Average customer lifetime value estimates how much revenue a company gains per account across the customer lifespan (how long they’re typically with the company).

Average CLV = Average customer value × average customer lifespan

6. Customer retention rate and churn rate

Customer retention rate is the percentage of customers who continue buying your product or service. It measures your sales team’s ability to nurture loyal customers and support recurring sales. Churn rates reflect the percentage of customers who don’t renew or buy again. This metric can signal problems with your product or offer; it can also indicate competition.

Churn rate = (Number of customers lost ÷ starting number of customers) × 100

Retention rate = 1 ÷ churn rate

7. Monthly sales bookings

The sales bookings KPI calculates the value of a won sale minus costs over a specific timeframe.

Monthly sales bookings = Total value of new bookings for the month − (average cost per transaction × total number of bookings)

8. Calls or emails per sales rep

If you’re measuring the performance of individual salespeople, cold calls or emails per day or month can help you track productivity.

9. Sales per rep

This performance-based KPI for sales reps helps managers set sales targets by telling you how many sales reps sell on average over a given period, so you know whether you are setting realistic targets. It’s important to note that reps and situations vary, so be sure to account for this when tracking this metric, this is

an important metric for measuring growth and comparing sales across periods

Sales per rep = Total sales over the period ÷ number of reps

10. Monthly demo calls

Keeping track of monthly sales demo calls helps companies predict how many customers will buy.

Customers in the demo stage are more likely to convert than customers in the early stages of a sales cycle. Knowing how many are meeting to learn about your product and then converting tells you how well this is happening in future periods.

Track monthly demo calls inside a customer relationship management (CRM) system. It supports sales funnel assessment and helps reps convert leads into customers!

11. Lead conversion rate

Focusing on sales-qualified leads helps determine your sales team’s win rate. You can also calculate it broadly to measure sales effectiveness and ensure marketing teams work together to convert leads.

Lead conversion rate = (Total number of sales ÷ total number of leads) × 100

12. Sales opportunities

Sales opportunities estimate the value of a lead based on the odds of closing the sale.

Sales opportunity = Value of sale × opportunity status

13. Sales target attainment

Sales target attainment allows you to track sales team performance compared to previous periods or against prior targets.

Sales target attainment = (Sales for the current period ÷ sales target) × 100

14. Quote-to-close ratio

The quote-to-close ratio compares the number of closed deals to quotes sent out. You can use it to assess the effectiveness of your sales reps by comparing it to historical trends or current targets.

Quote-to-close ratio = (Number of closed and won deals ÷ number of quotes) × 100

15. Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and annual recurring revenue (ARR)

MRR tells companies what they can expect to make per month from recurring revenue (i.e., subscriptions). ARR calculates the recurring income generated from longer-term subscriptions or contract accounts, such as companies with two-year deals.

MRR = Total number of paying customers in the month × average revenue per customer that month

ARR = (Total revenue from annual subscriptions) + (Any additional ongoing revenue) − (Cancellations)

16. Average revenue per account

Average revenue per account is important when creating marketing campaigns that speak to high-value audiences and use an account-based approach to selling.

Average revenue per account = MRR ÷ total number of accounts

17. Sales volume by location

Tracking sales volume by location reveals where the most significant demand for your products is and sets the stage for changing your sales strategy.

Sales volume by location = (Number of sales in target location ÷ total number of sales) × 100

18. Upsell and cross-sell rates

Effective upselling and cross-selling tactics are key to increasing revenue, as it is often easier to convince customers who already trust your business to buy.

Upsell rate % = Upsell revenue ÷ total revenue

Cross-sell rate % = Cross-selling revenue ÷ total revenue

19. Average sales cycle length

Understanding the average length of your team’s sales cycle can help you optimise sales processes online and offline. You can use it to compare how long each rep takes to close deals and how that impacts close rates and customer retention.

Average sales cycle = Length of all deals by the day ÷ total number of deals

20. Average response time

Average response time is a measurement of the average amount of time it takes your sales reps to respond to new leads who filled out a form or perform outreach to qualified leads.

Average response time = Total amount of time to respond to tickets ÷ total number of tickets

KPI benchmarks for sales teams

Your team’s benchmarks will depend on your industry and current performance.

Many sales teams, however, will start by measuring current performance against previous benchmarks.

Tracking sales KPIs using Pipedrive’s CRM sales dashboard

Pipedrive is a CRM that helps you manage your sales pipeline , monitor leads and automate your sales process.

Pipedrive’s dashboards provide real-time insights into which sales activities drive the most sales. They can also help you identify which sales reps are meeting their targets so you can reward them for their hard work.

You can set goals and create sales reports in the Pipedrive KPI dashboard to track benchmarks like win rate, number of deals in the pipeline and sales activities.

Creating Pipedrive KPI reports

Pipedrive reports provide insights into the performance of your pipeline, deals, leads and sales reps. You can also use the Insights feature to forecast projected revenue based on the deals in your pipeline.

Tracking KPIs by setting goals in Pipedrive

To track your KPIs within Pipedrive, start by setting goals so you can monitor your progress and forecast projected revenue.

Alternatively, you can set individual reps with goals to keep them on track, as shown in the image below.

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A guide to sales EQ: How to use emotional intelligence in sales

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 12:48:34 GMT

Even top sales professionals sometimes struggle to connect with prospects. Despite having the perfect product or service for the prospect, sales can stall for no apparent reason, leaving you wondering what’s missing in your approach.

Recognising your sales emotional intelligence (sales EQ) means you can understand yourself and your customers on a deeper level and transform your sales strategy to form deeper relations.

What is sales EQ?

Sales EQ refers to emotional intelligence – the ability to recognise, understand and manage emotions in yourself and others, which can be applied to the sales process.

People use intelligence quotient (IQ) scores to measure a person’s intelligence. However, it soon became clear that this view of intelligence was incomplete because it didn’t account for a person’s creativity or ability to cope with emotions.

Emotional intelligence is measured using emotional quotient (EQ), which has proven to be a valuable quality. Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence found that over 85% of senior leaders owe their success to emotional intelligence rather than traditional intelligence, employees with a higher EQ are also more likely to perform better at work and less likely to burnout.

A high EQ is also important in sales. In one study, trainers put front-line sales managers and reps through a program designed to improve their emotional intelligence and enhance their sales performance. As a result, total sales revenue increased by an average of 12% . Unlike sales methodologies that focus on a product’s features and benefits, sales professionals with a high EQ concentrate on the buyer. Sales reps can tailor their approach to the buyer’s emotional needs and decision-making process.

The four levels of sales intelligence

Sales intelligence typically refers to customer data used in the sales process, but Jeb Blout refers to it as different types of knowledge a salesperson can use. Jeb Blount, author of Sales EQ explains that ultra-high sales performance comes down to four distinct intelligences:

Innate Intelligence
Acquired Intelligence
Technological Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence

According to Blount, ultra-high-performing (UHP) sales professionals use each type of intelligence in their process, combining them to engage with prospects.

Innate intelligence

Innate intelligence refers to a person’s natural ability to recognise patterns and solve problems. Different factors can affect a person’s baseline intelligence such as genetics to upbringing (nature and nurture).

Acquired intelligence

People can still learn new skills and increase their knowledge, despite their level of innate intelligence. You advance your acquired intelligence over time by learning new sales frameworks, studying different markets and navigating unique selling environments.

Sales professionals with high acquired intelligence typically have a growth mindset, shown by a deep desire to continue learning and a willingness to challenge the status quo. These reps are adept at using sales training and coaching to enhance their techniques. They constantly evolve and look for ways to improve their sales process based on experience and feedback.

Technological intelligence

Technological intelligence refers to the ability to effectively use and integrate those tools in your sales and involves using CRM systems, social media, workflow automation and data analysis tools. Sales professionals with high technological intelligence can leverage these tools to manage customer interactions and gain insights that drive their sales strategies.

Technological intelligence is evident in the way sales professionals feel comfortable adopting new sales technology , adapting it to their unique situation and using it to optimise their sales process.

Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence brings the human element to sales. EQ is a pivotal part of building and maintaining strong customer relations. Sales reps with high emotional intelligence can understand the emotional needs and drivers behind a customer’s buying decision and adjust their sales approaches accordingly.

Sales-specific emotional intelligence is key to nurturing potential conflicts into opportunities and ensuring long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Integrating the four intelligences in sales

Sales professionals can apply these levels of intelligence to their sales by first recognising their innate strengths and where they could improve. Take the initiative and look for opportunities to enhance the different types of intelligence through ongoing sales training and other resources.

Integrating these four types of intelligence helps sales professionals create a more dynamic, adaptable and successful sales strategy that resonates with clients on multiple levels, leading to increased sales performance and customer loyalty.

Analyse your sales interactions. Listen to recordings of your sales calls and try to spot any changes. What emotions were at play? How did your mood and attitude affect the outcome?

It can be difficult to analyse our behaviour, so we actively seek feedback from colleagues, managers and even customers. Getting an external perspective can provide unexpected insights into your approach that you may never have considered.

Here are three ways you can increase your self-awareness today:

Listen to recordings of your sales calls
Look for any patterns of how you respond to specific scenarios
Enlist a sales coach or mentor to analyse your calls and offer advice

Empathy

Empathy is the ability to recognise and share the feelings of another. In sales, empathy means casting aside preconceptions and putting yourself in your buyer’s shoes. What are their needs, challenges and emotions? To cultivate empathy, focus on actively listening during your interactions with customers. Pay attention, not just to the words they use, but also to what they don’t say. What can you learn from their tone of voice and body language?

True empathy also means going beneath the surface to uncover deeper motivations. What would purchasing your product or service mean for the customer? What challenges would it help them overcome? How would it help them become a better version of themselves?

When you can answer those questions, you’ll better understand the customer and how to adjust your pitch to align with their needs.

Here are three tips for improving your empathy:

Practice active listening to understand your customer’s perspective
Use role-playing exercises to put yourself in the place of your customer
Ask open-ended questions that encourage your customer to open up

Social skills

Improving social skills means learning how to interact meaningfully with others so that you can persuade without being pushy and build genuine rapport, this can include effective communication, active listening and the ability to adapt your approach to different types of clients.

For example, how do you adjust your communication style when speaking to a detail-oriented client versus a more big-picture client? Are you able to read cues that suggest a client is losing interest? If so, do you know how to re-engage them?

Improving your interpersonal skills starts with observing and learning from each interaction. Pay attention to which approaches work best with different types of clients. Practice mirroring their communication style – if they’re formal, observe the same formalities. If they’re casual, take a more relaxed approach.

Here are three ways to improve your social skills:

Pay attention to your non-verbal communication and body language
Join public speaking groups or workshops
Attend events with a wide variety of attendees and start a conversation

Self-control

Sales can be a high-pressure environment, making self-control a crucial skill. Ultra-high performers must manage potentially disruptive emotions and remain calm, even in the most challenging situations.

Consider:

How do you react when a client is indecisive or continuously raises objections you’ve already covered?
Are you able to maintain your composure?
Can you patiently address each concern?

Developing self-control involves recognising your emotional triggers and creating strategies to manage them. A simple technique like pausing to take a deep breath before responding can reduce the tension and maintain control.

If you’ve struggled before with specific situations, reflect on how you could have handled things differently. Learning from these experiences is essential to improve your self-control in future sales interactions.

Here are three ways you can improve your self-control:

Identify your emotional triggers and plan how you’ll respond to those triggers
Practice pausing for a few seconds before responding to challenging situations
There’s plenty of evidence that a healthy diet, exercise and good sleep can help you relax, so maintain your physical health as much as possible

Understanding your buyers’ emotions

As you work on the above skills and improve your sales EQ, it’ll become easier to understand the customer journey and why they make decisions. For example, emotion initially motivates many customers to purchase justifying their purchasing decision with logic. According to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman, 95% of purchasing decisions are subconscious.

Logic then comes into play when customers need to rationalise their decisions, either to themselves or other stakeholders, factors like cost, functionality, return on investment and practicality matter most.

For sales professionals, recognising when to focus on emotional appeal and when to bring in logical reasoning can be the difference between closing the sale and losing it. Ask questions about the prospect’s wants and listen carefully to their answers, paying attention to any cues that suggest a more emotional or logical mindset.

After connecting with a customer on an emotional level about how a product feels or the status it brings, you can provide factual data or cost-benefit analyses for a more logical appeal.

Ensure your sales collateral caters to both emotional and logical aspects. Use storytelling and visual elements to evoke emotions and back them up with data, testimonials and case studies for logical support. Understanding and balancing the roles of logic and emotion in buying decisions enables the best sales professionals to connect more effectively with their customers, providing a satisfying and comprehensive buying experience that addresses both their emotional desires and logical needs.

Using sales EQ to convert more customers

Applying your emotional intelligence to your sales can significantly enhance your ability to move customers through different sales pipeline stages and overcome any roadblocks, use your sales EQ to create a positive and memorable first impression. Show genuine interest and use active listening to better understand the prospect’s needs, desires, and pain points.

When the customer objects, emotional intelligence can help you remain calm and composed.

Use empathy to decipher the deeper reasons behind that objection. Show that you understand and care about their challenges and present your solutions to genuinely support them.

After you’ve made a sale, your sales EQ will be instrumental in maintaining those customer relationships. Keep in touch with customers post-sale to establish a long-term connection and show that you’re still committed to providing the best possible outcome. Responsiveness to any after-sales questions (even if a deal was not successfully closed) or concerns builds a customer’s loyalty and increases customer retention .

Final thoughts

Integrating emotional intelligence into the sales process means salespeople can go beyond traditional strategies and create a deeper, more empathetic connection with their clients.

A heightened sales EQ means sales teams can engage more effectively with prospects, discerning their expressed needs and the underlying emotional drivers behind their decisions.

In turn, a deeper understanding of prospects leads to more productive conversations, more accurate client needs assessments and ultimately more successful deals.

A better understanding of the art of emotional intelligence helps sales organisations increase their immediate sales outcomes while building long-term customer relationships.

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Sage CRM 2023 R2: UI Improvements - Rectangular Pipeline Enhancements

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 11:39:43 GMT

Sage CRM 2023 R2 has introduced a new option called "Show stages with zero records." This option allows users and system administrators to hide the stages of a rectangular pipeline that do not include any records. This option controls the cases pipeline, leads pipeline, and opportunities pipeline. By default, show stages with zero records are set to yes. Previously, a rectangular pipeline always showed pipeline stages with zero records.

This new option allows users to declutter their pipeline view and makes it easier to focus on the most important stages. It can help to identify areas of the pipeline where there is no activity.

For example, if the user is a sales manager, they can use the "Show stages with zero records" option to hide the stages of the sales pipeline that do not have any opportunities in them. This will make it easier to see the most active pipeline stages and where the sales team is focusing their efforts. For example, if there is a stage in the sales pipeline for "Sale Agreed" but there have not been any sales agreed in the past month, the user can use the Show stages with zero records option to hide this stage from the pipeline view. This can help a business to identify areas of the sales process that need improvement

It can help users and system administrators to declutter the pipeline view, identify areas of the pipeline where there is no activity, improve performance, increase user satisfaction, and improve decision-making.

To use this new option:
Users should go to | Preferences.

System administrators should go to | Administration | Users | <user> | User Preferences.

Open multiple read-only tabs in SageCRM

Thu, 02 Nov 2023 14:46:47 GMT

In the latest release of SageCRM 2003 R2 which is to be available soon, has added the Multiple Read-Only Tab features. This allows users to open a read-only version of the current screen in a new browser tab. Users can now reference and compare information from different screens simultaneously, improving multitasking and workflow efficiency.

Having a read-only version of the screen in a separate tab allows users to review and verify data against the data they are currently working on. This helps to minimise errors and ensure accurate data entry.

Users can also preserve the context of their work by opening a read-only version of the screen in a new tab. This allows them to refer back to the original screen, retrieve specific details, or verify information without losing progress on the current screen.

For example, when working with standard entity records such as Company, Lead, or Opportunity, users may need to constantly switch between tabs to view the information provided in each tab. With the Multiple Read-Only Tab feature, users can avoid switching tabs by opening entity tabs in separate read-only browser tabs. This allows users to arrange the browser tabs on their monitor to view them all at once.

To use the Multiple Read-Only Tab feature, simply hover the mouse over the entity icon on the tab you want to open in a read-only tab. If the "Open in read-only tab" tooltip displays, click the icon to open a read-only tab.

6 Killer Reasons Why You Need Effective CRM usage to Maximise Your Sales

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 09:25:13 GMT

More firms than you would ever imagine both small, medium, and larger organisations, still have little or no visibility and control over their sales revenue.

They often fall into two camps, either they have no CRM system at all and rely on a myriad of spread sheets and disparate reports to attempt to manage the business.

Or they have a CRM system, but it has never been fully adopted by management or staff to effectively manage their customer engagement.

Often the CRM is little more than a glorified address book of contacts rather than a vital tool to track the business in real time and capitalise on the many opportunities currently being lost to deliver value to customers.

So, why not take a fresh look at what you are doing to improve the effectiveness of your management & sales team by reviewing these 6 points below provided by David Beard CRM Principal at Sage .

Do an honest self-appraisal and see where you can improve.

We would love to hear your comments on what you have done so far that’s working for you?

And what challenges are you facing now to take results to the next level?

We are all continually learning from each other and so develop better solutions together.

1. Future Visibility.

An accounting system only views past performance. What about indicators of next year’s success?
Contracts due for renewal, key contacts to follow-up, marketing activity to study for trends, sales pipeline dips indicating possible customer departures and much more.
Only “forward looking” customer relationship management (CRM) tools can give you this.

2. Proactive Sales Approach.

Are you leveraging customer information as well as you should? Proactively plan & accurately target your products & services, rather than just trying it randomly with a few people that are front of mind.

3. Protect Your Assets.

When a key staff member leaves, are they walking out the door with your business in their head, not retained in the company?
What would it mean to your business if you lost a key customer or contract just because no-one else knew what was going on?
What has a customer been promised, what is yet to do? A central CRM system collects, manages & retains a key corporate asset – information.

4. Increase Productivity.

Are you operating in an even more competitive environment? To keep up, are you trying to do more with fewer resources?
Shouldn’t you be more efficient by getting all your information in one place & taking advantage of CRM tools (email marketing, workflow, etc.) to improve your business volume without employing more staff or doing more hours?”

5. Improved Customer Experience.

In a world where customer experience is a key differentiator, how are you managing?
Can you make sure all your staff are ‘in the know’, ensure anyone can manage issues with ease & that no-one drops the ball at every customer touchpoint?
Putting CRM in everyone’s hands helps you commit to your company’s promise of quality service.”

6. Organisation = Efficiency.

Overwhelmed by spreadsheets, word documents, paper files, invoicing & a myriad of other systems?
How much more efficient could you be internally & would it look externally?
Putting CRM at the heart of your business can ensure prospects, sales, service & financial information is available to anyone, anywhere, at any time.

If this subject resonates with you and your experiences, then:

We will be running an Executive CRM Workshop in partnership with Peter at Linear Structure on Tuesday 21st 11:00am. More information to follow.

Streamlining Success: Why Corporate Training Providers Need a CRM

Tue, 17 Oct 2023 09:39:58 GMT

Corporate training is a dynamic industry that thrives on effective communication, tailored offerings, and efficient management. In this blog post, we delve into why corporate training providers can greatly benefit from a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Let's explore how a CRM can transform the way training businesses operate and cater to the unique needs of their corporate clients.

Efficient Lead and Contact Management

Corporate training providers often deal with a multitude of potential clients, businesses, and individuals seeking their services. Managing this influx of inquiries and interactions can be overwhelming without the right tools. A CRM provides a central hub to store and manage leads and contacts, ensuring that no valuable connection slips through the cracks.

Tailored Communication

Effective communication is key in the corporate training world. CRMs enable providers to segment their audience and send targeted communications. This means that messages and training offerings can be tailored to suit the specific needs and interests of different clients or industries. Personalisation enhances the chances of securing training contracts and building lasting relationships.

Streamlined Sales Pipeline Management

Corporate training often involves intricate sales processes with multiple stages, from initial inquiries to contract negotiation and course delivery. A CRM helps providers track each lead's progress through this complex sales pipeline, ensuring that all potential deals are diligently managed and pursued.

Seamless Appointment Scheduling

E fficient scheduling is essential to ensure that training sessions are conducted smoothly and resources are allocated optimally. Many CRMs come equipped with calendar and scheduling features that simplify the process of setting up and managing training sessions.

Data-Driven Insights

C RMs provide valuable insights into customer behaviour, preferences, and engagement. This data can be used to identify the most popular training programs, gauge industry interest, and refine sales and marketing strategies. Informed decision-making is a cornerstone of success.

Documentation and Record Keeping

A robust CRM system allows providers to securely store important documents, contracts, and training materials associated with each client. This ensures that all pertinent information is readily accessible when needed, enhancing professionalism and organisation.

Effortless Billing and Invoicing

M any CRMs offer integrated invoicing and payment tracking features, streamlining the billing process for training services. This simplifies financial management and ensures that providers receive timely payments for their valuable work.

Nurturing Client Relationships

S uccess in corporate training often extends beyond a single program. CRMs enable providers to maintain ongoing relationships with clients through follow-up surveys, scheduled refresher courses, and consistent engagement. Happy clients are more likely to return for future training needs.

Scalability

A s corporate training providers grow and expand their clientele and course offerings, a CRM system can grow with them. It can accommodate a larger database of clients and provide the necessary tools to manage increased demand, ensuring scalability and efficiency.

In conclusion, a CRM system is a powerful asset for corporate training providers. It streamlines operations, enhances communication, manages leads and clients effectively, and contributes to overall success and growth in the training business. By embracing CRM technology, providers can deliver a more personalised, efficient, and satisfying training experience to their corporate clients. It's the key to streamlining success in the dynamic world of corporate training.

Decreasing your costs of customer acquisition

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 11:20:24 GMT

As a Sage accounting customer, you can add Sage CRM to your business. Easily configured to the way you work, it can help you deliver excellent service, sales, and marketing capability for your business.

Making the most of your marketing spend

Last time , we discussed the value of ‘one view’ of a customer across your business. This time let’s focus on how CRM can target your marketing effectively and share information about campaigns across the business. It means that everyone in your business can share product or service offers with suitable customers, making sure you make the most of every interaction and opportunity.

Increasing your sales effectiveness

An effective sales process is key to driving up your revenues. By integrating CRM into your business, you can make it possible for your sales team to increase the time they spend with customers. Providing a consistent platform from which to manage customers, CRM helps to ensure that your sales efforts are directed in the right place. By integrating calendars and automating much of the administration associated with the sales function, you can focus on efficient customer contact and maximising your revenue potential.

In addition, by bringing all the information relating to sales into one solution it becomes much easier for senior management to see what is going on across the whole sales team. Common themes and patterns behind success or failure can be identified and the number of calls being made can be easily tracked. The sales funnel can be analysed for both individual salespeople and business as a whole. It is also becomes possible, with an integrated solution, to combine sales information from accounting, giving a much fuller picture of the shape of your business.

We would encourage you to read Sage CRM HQ's own piece on why it takes an entire company to deliver an amazing customer experience and use that thinking to help form your own internal planning.

Is Sales CRM Forecasting Really Such a “Dark” Art?

Tue, 03 Oct 2023 11:20:02 GMT

Many Sales Managers struggle with forecasting, it can be challenging to deliver accurate forecast figures month in and month out.

It’s a feeling often shared by their salespeople too!

What are some of the reasons behind the challenge?

One reason is the company doesn’t have a clear criteria to judge sales opportunities.

A lot is left to the individual salesperson to interpret how they ‘feel’ things are going on a deal as to whether it should be forecast or not; this historic intuition based or a “finger in the wind” approach causes confusion and a lack of confidence.

Other reasons include:

• Insufficient and Inaccurate data in the CRM

• Using Manual, Unscalable and Error-Prone Spreadsheets

• Lack of Real-Time Data (Win/Loss, Sales Funnel, Sales Cycle)

• Lack of Forecast Accountability from the individual salesperson

• No Formal Coaching and Training in Sales Forecasting

However, by aligning your sales team and processes with a more data-driven approach combined with a clear criteria everyone understands it’s possible to reduce risks and get more accurate results that positively impact the bottom line.

How important is your sales forecast?

When you consider the significance of the revenue forecast to a company, it is strange that often little attention is focused on how the figures are produced?

Especially when Senior Management will ultimately make future decisions on hiring, investment, expansion, and a whole range of other areas based on their confidence in the company’s sales forecast.

4 Areas for Improvement

Therefore, it’s worth ensuring the right foundation is in place to build upon.

Below are 4 key areas worth reviewing.

1. Map your sales process.

Have you clearly mapped out your sales process A-Z from lead generation to post sales recently?

Does it really fit your current ideal business model?

Often when we do this exercise with clients, they find it highlights processes that have developed over time but are no longer serving them effectively today.

You could start with questions such as…. Do we treat all our sales leads in the same way?

Or do some leads need to be treated separately and resourced accordingly, just as one example. Take care to examine the process and ensure it is fit for purpose.

2. Does your CRM actively support your sales effort?

A common issue we find is where companies have let their CRM dictate the steps or processes, they use.

Why does this happen?

Could it be that your current CRM reflects an initial set up by the I.T department implemented years ago?

Or alternatively have you adopted a standard software CRM Sales process with a dozen sales stages that is far more complicated than you need, causing confusion and inaccuracy?

Either way Senior Management need to invest the time to ensure that their sales process is accurately reflected in the sales stages they are using to win business effectively today.

Just as they would with all the other business processes…purchasing, accounting etc the sales process is no exception it needs real clarity to achieve accurate forecasts.

3. Is there a disconnect between your sales process vs. your buyer’s purchasing process?

Does your sales process effectively match each of the key milestones in the buyer’s decision-making process? If not, then opportunities may appear to be progressing nicely towards an order but in reality they have barely moved forward in your buyer’s eyes and in his process!

There can be a major difference.

A key element is the selection of the correct sales stages themselves – Each one should be simple to understand and clearly defined so everyone in the organisation is using the same forecasting criteria and it’s not open to ‘ personal interpretation ’ by the sales person.

4. What are our salespeople saying in front of potential clients?

Is the quality of information obtained sufficient to deliver accurate forecasting?

Whilst the correct sales process and supportive CRM will go a long way to gain clarity in your forecast, there is another element which is far more fundamental and impactful to your forecast and ultimate sales results: and that is what your salespeople are saying in front of clients .

You would be surprised the number of Sales Managers and Directors who have difficulty in answering the above question with conviction. Generally, not enough time is spent out with salespeople actively listening to their conversations with clients.

Ironically, the most dramatic improvements in forecasting accuracy and increased sales results we see, come from refocusing the sales team’s approach to their meetings.

By improving their communication skills, questioning and active listening abilities, they gain a heightened quality of information from clients. This allows more confident forecasting because it’s based on an in-depth knowledge of the client and a real awareness of the key business issues involved.

Tightening up on these areas will raise your accuracy and give you confidence in your forecast figures, it’s not a dark art but rather having a practical process in place that both sales and management can work with successfully.

Next time discover the top 5 forecasting pitfalls and how to avoid them.

Committed to Your Continued Sales Success!

Peter Holland

The value of having one view of your customer

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 09:41:51 GMT

Many businesses are turning to customer relationship management (CRM) to help them create closer, more profitable relationships with their customers. If you are a Sage accounting customer, you have the potential for integrated CRM in your business.

Last time , we suggested that CRM goes way beyond basic contact management, instead it provides a strategic platform for winning, keeping, and developing customers. In this blog, we want to build on that thought with the concept of ‘one view of your customers.’ We added CRM capability to our accounting products in response to the need to share information across the entire organisation.

A central source of information

As the number of ways your customers can interact with you increases, they expect to get excellent service at every point of interaction. This means that everyone in your business needs to know what’s going on. Integrating CRM with your operational systems creates a single view for everyone, from logistics to sales and service. This ensures consistency of service whoever initially deals with the customer.

Seamless end-to-end processing

As well as sharing information, you can create seamless, straight through processing. This means that, for example, quotations can be generated from within CRM by salespeople. Based on accurate and up to the minute pricing details pulled from accounting, salespeople can make promises to customers that they know they can keep. A tightly integrated solution also means that quotations can be turned directly into orders, without the need for rekeying.

The SageCRM HQ team has also produced an interesting, 15-minute, video about " Taking the First Steps " towards a CRM mindset which we think could help you start formulating your own ideas about where & how to put SageCRM into your business.

Rapidly Increase Your Sales with a Sharper Sales Process!

Thu, 14 Sep 2023 08:11:29 GMT

Can you show me your sales process?

Often when you ask sales managers this question they give you some sort of verbal description. They explain how their leads are produced, followed up by the sales team and orders managed.

However, ask them to provide a diagram of the process and you often get a blank look, it doesn’t exist.

Without an accurate visual there is no way to fully understand the process, making it difficult to explain to staff. It also leads to an even bigger issue, in the words of Lord Calvin, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”

So, your sales process must be properly mapped out to enable you to measure it and improve it.

This will involve investing some time, mapping out each of the steps and several departments will usually need to be consulted.

So why bother?

The fastest way to increase your sales is to improve your sales process.

If you can speed up the time it takes for a sales opportunity to pass through your system the more time you will have to dedicate to new sales opportunities, creating additional sales.

Simply put, you’ll be working smarter not harder with improved results.

Senior management often feel they do have a good understanding of the process and may be tempted to complete it themselves. But perception and reality can vary wildly. A company’s sales process tends to evolve unconsciously over time with different staff being involved and new activities being introduced. That’s why it’s a smart idea to involve the people actually doing the daily workload to be part of the mapping process.

Managers are often surprised to find that in reality people are duplicating actions or they have developed ‘work arounds’ because the current I.T infrastructure isn’t supporting them properly.

Let me share with you a recent example. Last year we worked with a large and well-established organisation that were looking to purchase a new CRM system. They had the foresight to map out their sales process prior to approaching vendors with their requirements.

What did this analysis reveal?

Firstly, they found gaps in the information being shared between departments. This was causing duplicative work and poor communication. Secondly, they significantly reduced the time to process membership applications by eliminating redundant steps in the approval process. This improved the onboarding experience for new members and greatly reduced the involvement and time required from senior management.

Due to the customer mapping out and providing the sales process maps early on within this task, it had saved a significant amount of time and eliminated the potential for mistakes during the development and implementation process.

It is possible to complete this sales process mapping internally. However, there is a distinct advantage in having an independent person assist. They provide a more objective perspective, being unbiased they can push back on any assumptions and challenge the established ways of working to reveal the reality of the situation.

Once you have mapped out all the steps accurately and validated them with your departments, there is one more step worth taking.

Ask your customers what they think of your process. Are you easy to deal with?

You might find the process works really well for you but there are a few areas you could improve to make it a superb experience for your customers!

Without a ‘Sales Process Map’ you’re in the dark and making improvements at best will be guesswork.

However, once you have it in place, it’s like a blueprint you can use continually to review, adapt and improve performance.

Ultimately, you will have gained an in-depth understanding of how you deliver value to your customers, and that’s an investment worth making!

Thank you to Peter at Linear Structure for this blog article. If you’d like some more input or examples of how you can map your own process effectively please drop us an email at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com and we'll be happy to share some additional resources.

The wisdom of overlaying SageCRM on your accounting product

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 14:53:23 GMT

Going way beyond simply contact management, SageCRM now comprises not only sales, marketing, and service automation; it also provides a platform for winning, keeping, and developing customers.

If you are a Sage 50, 200 or 300 accounting customer you have the potential for integrated CRM available to your business. Easily configured to the way you work, it can help you deliver excellent customer service, manage your contacts and sales activities, and create effective marketing campaigns.

A strategic approach to SageCRM

Making sure that your prospects and customers receive excellent service can no longer be thought of as simply the job of front-line staff. Increasingly it’s everyone’s responsibility and needs to be thought of as a companywide endeavour. To achieve this, joined up thinking is required across your whole business - sharing information and streamlining processes.

By sharing customer and prospect information with everyone, you can help to not only raise awareness of what customers want from you, but also make sure that everyone can deal effectively with customer queries as and when they arise. By integrating sales, marketing and service operations with back-office functions it becomes much easier to provide management with a complete view of what’s going on in every area of your business.

For many of the prospects we speak to, many of these tasks are still carried out using Excel or similar tools. We believe spreadsheets "just don't cut it" in today's modern business and we'd encourage you to keep reading below as to why.

Do you love spreadsheets?

You should as they’re a great tool for businesses. You can use them to create budgets, to build lists and to generate reports. But ...

No matter how skilled or creative you are with spread sheets, they can only accomplish so much - running a business solely on spread sheets will penalise a business in terms of limited productivity and lost sales. Don't believe me? Well, here are five compelling reasons for moving sales and marketing forecasts out of spread sheets and into SageCRM software:

1. You can improve the quality of sales forecasts

Sales forecasts based on information within a spread sheet don’t provide information like:

How many contact points (calls, quotes, or whatever) your business needs to generate a sale.
The number of leads or enquiries generated required to meet a target.
The effectiveness of particular sales and marketing campaigns and the response from different segments.
The number of customers who placed orders during the previous period or during the same period last year.

If you move key sales data into CRM, this type of information is easier to find out and report on.

2. You can make decisions based on more accurate sales information

I f different business teams can only access data from their part of the business, or if they are using inaccurate or out-of-date information, the productivity and efficiency of your business is at risk. A spread sheet provides a snapshot of a moment in your business and, unless someone takes the time to manually input new data, it becomes outdated. For example, a sales forecast for the next quarter won’t update when you reschedule a potential sale that is set to close. This is compounded when sales and management teams use different versions of a particular spread sheet.

3. You can stay grounded in reality

S ales people are by nature optimistic but this optimism can creep into their interpretation of spread sheet-based sales reports. As a manager, you may have faith in the judgement of your sales team, but sometimes you need to find a way of interpreting the logic underpinning sales reports. If you move key data into CRM software, you can generate predefined reports and charts, sense-check business decisions and gain a clear picture of the way a customer 'moves through your processes' & where that deviates from the norm.

4. You can plan ahead with confidence

A spread sheet won’t trigger a notification in your diary if you need to collate a report, send a client an email or arrange a face-to-face meeting. This makes finding out your next action for a customer or account more time consuming. Often, the only way to find out is through a flurry of emails, phone calls and meetings about meetings. Using CRM, you can review past meetings notes, address outstanding actions and plan your company’s marketing and sales initiatives based on current customer information.

5. You can protect your business

S pread sheets are personal, whereas CRM is collaborative. Often, only key people understand the quirks of complicated spread sheets and how the various formulae were derived or calculated. What happens if these sales managers or reps leave your company? Knowledge goes with them, and the spread sheets they leave behind become irrelevant or unusable. Keeping company, contact and opportunity data in a central database means you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time a rep or manager leaves.

Your most important business tools

CRM software can help you improve interdepartmental communications, reduce duplication of work, make informed business decisions and develop a more customer focused business. Spread sheets always will be an important business tool, but CRM can enable you and your team to do much more with your most important customer data.

A version of this post originally appeared on MyCustomer.com .

ERBS welcomes Partnership with Peter Holland from Linear Structure

Thu, 07 Sep 2023 14:04:42 GMT

Entegraty Rainbird Business Solutions are proud to announce partnership with Peter Holland, Managing Director, Linear Structure

We would like to introduce Peter Holland from Linear Structure who has been working with ERBS on multiple CRM implementations working as a consultant, coach and speaker, advising senior management on how to design and implement practical strategies that deliver results and maximise their sales team’s productivity.

Peter will be providing regular blogs, and insights to share within our customer base moving forward so we wanted to let you know a little more about the services he provides and how these could also work for your business alongside CRM.

As a Sales Coach and Consultant, senior managers typically see Peter when:

The sales team is not performing the way it should and results aren’t where they need to be to achieve the desired target. They are looking to create a team of high performing salespeople with consistent results.

Salespeople are meeting resistance and rejection because they are using old clichéd sales techniques and need to enhance their communication to engage successfully with today’s cautious and sceptical buyers.

They are getting commoditised and need to better demonstrate and differentiate their value above the competition to increase market share.

Struggling with high staff turnover they see the need to develop their sales managers into top coaches to maximise potential & retain top talent.

Senior management are frustrated with poor pipeline visibility and inaccurate forecasts and want improved accountability to strengthen their decision making ability.

Sales leadership feels the sales team is in a rut and need fresh ideas and outside perspectives to raise the sales bar to the next level.

Peter's role and responsibilities

Peter provides sales leadership coaching to companies and individuals, sales consulting to senior sales executives on a number of issues related to creating and maintaining a high-performance sales culture. Peter's clients experience significant growth and success due to his different approach.

He is a consultant by choice, after leaving a successful career he was driven to make a dramatic long term improvement to your sales efforts and believes this is best achieved by bringing fresh perspectives and impactful new ideas from outside the organisation. This commitment is to support you and your teams to implement the new approaches and achieve results, you can expect Peter to roll up his sleeves getting to work with you on live opportunities and projects.

Being recruited, he takes it personally and behaves as though his livelihood is directly linked to your organisations results. Sufficient time is taken to get an in-depth understanding of your business whilst providing a customised tailored service to address specific needs – No generic canned content.

Another key benefit is you will always get to deal with the principal, you’ll never get past to junior staff.

Peter's approach is simple, practical and communicated in plain language so you can implement improvements and achieve your business results.

You’ll get straight forward honest feedback, and he won’t shy away from telling senior managers or CEO’s where they are hampering the sales process and how they can positively enhance it.

Peter's clients over the past twelve years include of:

Does Knowing Your Sales Data Really Impact Your Sales Results?

Tue, 15 Aug 2023 15:46:19 GMT

Do your sales team complain about numerous admin tasks, such as having to keep sales opportunities up to date? Have you heard " this is wasted time when I could be spending more time selling!"

If so, this is not the right perspective and attitude and here is why.

If you are not aware of your sales figures, you are living without clarity on your sales wins and losses. It is important to reflect on what is and what is not working due to the constant dynamic shift within markets.

Having the basic accurate information which can be managed in a CRM system such as opportunity values, closing dates and correct stage in the sales pipeline are vital to determine where to prioritise your daily sales activity. Without these foundations you will be wasting valuable time and effort, if you don’t know what is causing you to lose sales, you will continuously make the same mistake.

Keeping the quality of your data up to date and regularly cleaned and managed in a CRM database will positively impact your results:

Improves the efficiency of your sales efforts as you know exactly where you are with each sales
You will be able to provide a clear data forecast for the foreseeable future also keeping you sales manager happy!
At a glance you can evidently see the opportunities that require more attention to move closer towards the desired goal.
Efficient tracking of each opportunity stage and prompted next actions will lead to increased profitability.

Take the time to review your sales pipeline, if it is outdated it is important to clean this data whilst making regular commitments to ensure all data is up to date. Inputting your sales data into a CRM system will not only increase your confidence within your work but increase overall productivity and allow for the highest quality information in your decision-making.

This blog was originally published here by https://www.linearstructure.com/

SageCRM 2023 R1 - Let's take a look

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 14:04:45 GMT

Sage CRM 2023 R1 is now available. Let’s take a look at what’s new and noteworthy in the newest engaging release for users

Refreshed Brand and User Interface

Sage CRM 2023 introduces a refreshed Sage CRM user interface to make it consistent with the new visual identity of the Sage brand, as well as improve the UI accessibility. The refreshed user interface features a new font, new set of recognizable and consistent icons, and a new colour scheme.

Customize the Sage CRM Login Screen

Administrators can now position custom logos as well as change the background of the entire login screen, offering better control over the look & feel of an individual installation for company branding and user buy-in for customers’

Easier File Editing

You no longer need to install a plugin to view and edit a file attached to a Company or Task, or created using the Mail Merge feature.

With Sage CRM 2023, A user can navigate to the document in the library of a primary entity. They will see a View/Edit File button. This will download the document and invite the user to then be able to edit the document before saving back into the system.. It’s a much faster and easier way to edit file attachments compared to the process in earlier versions of the software.

Editing a document created during a merge.

You can carry out a Merge to Word or Merge to PDF. You can then select the mail merge template you want to use and complete the merge.

At the point you can then click 'View/Edit the file'.

The file will be downloaded. You can specify the default download folder in Login and session preferences. At this point, you can open the file and make the edit you need and reupload this using the same file.

This improvement enables users to edit files using any web browser that is supported by Sage CRM and supports the retirement of Microsoft Internet Explorer 11.

Company AI-driven Narrative Tab

Sage CRM 2023 R1 uses artificial intelligence to generate and display a narrative report containing an executive summary and business insights for each Company. This new feature automatically analyzes the sales, customer service, and communication data and presents it as a short and easy-to-understand narrative report on a ‘Narrative’ tab displayed for each Company. By presenting the key information about a company as a narrative it becomes more memorable, persuasive, and engaging than data alone. This is the first time we have made use of any form of AI within the product

The narrative report takes into account the security policies existing in Sage CRM, so that the generated information is tailored to the user who is accessing the Narrative tab. As a system administrator, you can control what information is available to a user on the Narrative tab. This prevents unauthorized access to sensitive data and makes the displayed information more relevant and useful for specific audiences.

In short, this new AI-driven narrative approach is much more informative and engaging than static data alone. It summarizes intelligence without having to look across records and converting raw data into useful and actionable information.

File Upload whitelist replaces blacklist

Sage CRM 2023 R1 has changed the way in which files uploaded into the library are policed. In Sage CRM 2022 R2 and earlier there was a setting called "File extension restrictions" that allowed a System Administrator to blacklist the extensions of file types that were forbidden from being uploaded to Sage CRM. For example exe, asp, bat.

This file restriction list in Sage CRM 2022 R2 and earlier would only apply to the "Drop files here" and "Document Drop" library options. The blacklist didn't apply to email attachments. Now in Sage CRM 2023, R1 System Administrators can configure an allowlist or "White List" to list the file types that users can upload to Sage CRM. If a file name extension is missing from the allowlist, the upload of the file is blocked.

These limitations are enforced in Sage CRM 2023 R1 when a user uploads files on the Shared Documents tab or attaches files to a calendar task, email message, or communication using the "Add File" button or "Drop files here to attach them" area, or files emails against a record in Sage CRM using the "Import Emails" button. We've moved to use a "whitelist" approach rather than a "blacklist" approach as we think this provides a safer of controlling file uploads. This is because it only allows specified file types to be uploaded, and any attempts to upload files, not on the list will be rejected.

If you would like to find out more about the SageCRM 2023 R1 release please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Entegraty Rainbird Business Solutions

Qnect 200 2021 R3 for SageCRM Introduced Changes

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 08:13:19 GMT

What is Qnect 200 Integration?

Qnect 200 for Sage CRM is a real-time integration that links Sage CRM to the Sage 200 accounts solutions.

It helps to increase efficiency and accuracy in the management of customers/suppliers, products and quotes/orders at an affordable cost.

By combining Sage CRM with Sage Accounts you can enjoy better business insight, greater efficiencies, increased productivity and have a single customer-centric view across your entire business

The latest Qnect2 00 2021 R3 release comes with an array of new customer facing features which to:

Enhanced customer experience for Sage CRM
Bi-directional syncing of major data
Easier integration

Additional default fields on creation of Sage 200 company

New fields have been added when syncing Sage CRM companies to Sage 200. These include:

Credit Limit
VAT Number
Terms Agreed?
Default Nominal Code
Price List
Tax Code
Use VAT code as Invo ice and Order Default

Requesting a Company to Sage 200

Sometimes users who require a prospect to be converted to a Sage 200 customer so that they can process an order should not have rights to create the Sage 200 customer directly. Like the Request Order to Accounts functionality its now possible for users to be given Request Only rights for new customers. When this option is selected against a user they will not be able to link or create new customers but will be able to request that a company in Sage CRM is created in Sage 200.

When they select the Account(s) tab they have the option to request the company is created in Sage 200. This places the company on a Company Post Requests tab in My CRM. Any user who has the Process Company Post Requests option can then either click the company name link and process the company link to Sage 200 as normal or select the checkbox next to the record and deny the request if they do not deem it suitable.

Order Despatch Information

If an order has additional despatch information against it in Sage 200 this can now also be viewed with the Order Live View

Creating Sage 200 Contacts

As part of Qnect 200 changes to contacts now synchronise in both directions. In this latest release its also possible to create new Sage 200 contacts from person records in Sage CRM. Users who have the ‘Post Contacts?’ checkbox ticked against their user will see a ‘Post Contact to Accounts’ button against contacts not currently linked to a Sage 200 contact.

Creating Sage 200 Delivery Addresses

As part of Qnect 200 changes to addresses now synchronise in both directions. In this latest release its also possible to create new Sage 200 delivery addresses from address records in Sage CRM. Users who have the ‘Post Customer Delivery Addresses’ checkbox ticked against their user will see a ‘Post Customer Delivery Address to Accounts’ button against addresses not currently linked to a Sage 200 contact.

Additional Charges

Additional charges are now supported by Qnect 200. As standard Sage CRM does not have a line type of Additional Charges these have been implemented via the use of an Additional Charges product family.

Any additional charges added to Sage 200 will be available by selecting the Additional Charges product family and then adding the available product. When posting to Sage 200 the lines will be added as additional charge lines rather then standard product lines

Customer Alerts

Customer alerts set up in Sage 200 are now displayed in Sage CRM when creating quotes and orders

If you would like to find out more about the latest Qnect 200 release changes or how the Qnect 200 integration between SageCRM and Sage 200 can benefit your business release please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Entegraty Rainbird Business Solutions

SageCRM 2022 R2 - What to Expect

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 11:32:31 GMT

Sage have recently launched the latest improvements to Sage CRM with the release of Sage CRM 2022 R2 which is focused around two main areas: Improvements to User Experience and Feature Renewal (including a new Email and Contact Import feature.)

Improvements to User Experience, Branding and User interface Uplift

Changes to the user interface including the new Sage branding have been made to improve accessibility which include:

Updated on-screen messages and imagery to improve readability
Changes to menus, icons, and the overall colour palette

By leading with black within the Sage CRM interface this enables Sage green to 'pop' and provide the greatest amount of visual contrast to aid accessibility and simplify usage.

New Email and Contact Import Features

A New Email and Contact Import feature is available that replaces the Classic and Lite Outlook Plugins which relied on outdated software like Internet Explorer. Instead of using an additional install (plugin) within the email client (Outlook), the CRM server connects to the target email server directly and file emails against a

Company, Person, or Opportunity record in Sage CRM.

This feature is available for Exchange Online via OAuth 2.0 and will be available for Exchange On-Premise and Google Workspace from SageCRM 2023 R1

Users can select emails from their exchange online account that they wish to import from within Sage CRM using the the import email button and screen. You can use the search filter to only show the relevant emails to display, select and import also confirming the communication action type and status.

Contacts can also be imported from your Exchange Online account and you can store them in Sage CRM as Person or Lead records.

If the company associated with the contact exists in Sage CRM, the contact is imported as a Person record and associated with that company. Otherwise, the

contact is imported as a Lead record.

Set maximum password length

Password policies in | Administration | Users | Security | Password Policies now provide a new option Maximum length of password. It lets system administrators configure the maximum password length for the users the policy applies to. The value in this option cannot exceed 200 and must be equal to or greater than the one set in the Minimum length of password option.

If you would like to find out more about the SageCRM 2022 R2 release please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Entegraty Rainbird Business Solutions

SageCRM 2022 R1 - What's New?

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 21:53:49 GMT

Sage have recently launched the latest improvements to Sage CRM with the release of Sage CRM 2022 R1 which delivers a range of feature enhancements and usability improvements as highlighted below.

What's New in SageCRM 2022 R1?

Support for Azure SQL database

The new release has added support for MS SQL Server 2019 Express and MS Azure SQL Database.

Mass delete of historic communications

Ability to clear down redundant historic communications to improve system response and performance and to make sure the system contains only the data you need.

Update territory on Leads, Cases, or Opportunities

To swiftly and easily allow a System Administrator to reassign groups of Leads, Cases and Opportunities to new security territories without the need to run SQL statements and allow data to be updated and realigned as business needs change.

Auto-refresh of Calendar and Calendar List

To keep the display of meetings and calendar up to date and to have the calendar refresh at the interval that the customer determines.

Resizable table columns in the email (HTML) templates

To allow the users to layout emails and HTML documents in the way they want and to improve the layout of information in a tabular format in emails and documents.

If you would like to find out more about the SageCRM 2022 R1 release please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Entegraty Rainbird Business Solutions

Append Quote or Order ID to Merge Document

Sun, 16 Jan 2022 17:33:38 GMT

With the release of SageCRM 2021 R2 a system administrator can now configure Sage CRM to automatically append a quote or order identifier to

the name of a Word or PDF file generated by a mail merge. As a result, when a user completes a mail merge for a quote or order, the generated file name will have the following format: <template file name>-<quote or order ID>.<file name extension> e.g. ERBS_Quotation-QT-1 1.pdf as shown below.

Previously the merge document name would have a randomly generated number appended to the file name e.g. ERBS_Quoations1613960609.pdf

To configure this behaviour in SageCRM go to Administration | Data Management | Products.

Select the Product Configuration tab.
Select Change and set the following options to Yes:
Use Quote Format for Merge document name
Use Order Format for Merge document name
Save the changes

Select a template when sending quote or order

Now when a user selects the Send Quote or Send Order button, they are prompted to select an existing document template to generate the quote or order from. The generated quote or order is then attached to the new email message.

If you would like further information on the above new features or help setting this up then please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email me the support team at support@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com .

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Entegraty Rainbird Business Solutions

New Qnect200 & Qnect50 Sales Dashboards

Sun, 25 Jul 2021 10:24:22 GMT

If you are currently running the latest versions of the Qnect200 or Qnect50 module to integrate your SageCRM with your Sage accounts platform we are excited to let you know of a new set of dashboards which have now been released based on the customer sales order information to provide you and your sales and management teams additional insight information.

Qnect Sales Dashboard

This can be accessed from main dashboard tab under My>CRM and in the dashboard list you will see “Qnect Sales Dashboard” as shown below.

This will provide you high level information based on the order data that is created in SageCRM and also if the order data is imported into SageCRM from Sage200 or Sage50.

Total Sales in past 12 months
Top selling products in past 12 months
Top customers overall

Qnect Customer Dashboard

This is specific to the customer record and can be accessed within the company>dashboard tab as shown below by selecting “Qnect Customer Dashboard” and will provide the following information:

Total for Orders in past 12 months for the current customer
Products purchased in past 12 months for the current customer
Total Sales by Product Group for the current customer

The above Qnect sales dashboards are not installed by default currently, so please contact us for further information and setup of these dashboards on 01494 490409 or email me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Entegraty Rainbird Business Solutions

Telephone numbers as links in SageCRM

Sat, 08 May 2021 11:34:36 GMT

Starting from version 2021 R1, all telephone numbers in Sage CRM are now formatted as telephone links. This allows a user to tap a telephone link on a phone-capable device to call a phone number.

On a desktop computer, when you click a telephone link, you are normally prompted to select an application (for example, Skype, Chrome etc) in which you want to open the link. On the below Person Summary page you can see phone number fields are marked as Telephone Link fields.

The telephone links make it easier to work within screens, contact lists, and outbound call list within Marketing Campaigns so calls can be made directly and the links work with whatever device is being used.

Using telephone links to send a phone number to your mobile device.

You can also connect SageCRM to dial directly from a mobile device using Chrome. When you click the phone num ber in the SageCRM field you are prompted to select an application or device to make a call from. In this instance we will select the Samsung Phone.

This will send the phone number from the SageCRM record in Chrome to the mobile device to make the phone call when clicked on.

The browser handler for the link can now be associated with any software on the client machine that can consume phone numbers.

If you would like to find out more about the click to dial feature or require a demonstration please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Entegraty Rainbird Business Solutions

What's New in SageCRM 2021 R1

Sun, 21 Feb 2021 17:30:20 GMT

February saw the release of Sage CRM 2021 R1 which is a significant release, delivering interface & user experience improvements, pain point elimination, and enhancing integration capabilities for 3rd party solutions..

Over the next few weeks we will be publishing further details on the new enhancements and features above but you can also watch "What's coming in SageCRM 2021 R1" video here ....

If you would like to find out more about the SageCRM 2021 R1 release please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Entegraty Rainbird Business Solutions

Extending SageCRM - Account Manager Assignment

Tue, 12 Jan 2021 08:36:27 GMT

SageCRM provides you with the standard functionality to assign an account manager to different types of company records such as a Prospect / Customer/ Supplier etc. The assignment of an account manager can be completed when a user creates a new company record and the default "Current User" field action is set up as shown below where the company record is then assigned to the user that created the company record or this can be manually set to be assigned to the correct account manager.

Account manager automatic assignment for Sage CRM

What happens if you want to be more specific in the assignment of your account managers in SageCRM based on the address location? e.g. assign an account manager based on the postcode area, county or country value entered within the default company address of your record.

We have created a configurable account manager auto assignment module where you are able to define which account manager should be assigned to a company when a company record primary address is created or updated based on a specific postcode area or address county.

An example of this would be if the company primary address record has a postcode which begins SW3 this will be assigned to account manager Melanie automatically as specified below.

If you do not want to be as specific with the postcode assignment you can assign the account manager using a different address value such as the county or even province / country field the same way or use both.

The assignment information is all held within the assignment module in SageCRM so can easily managed and updated through SageCRM when changes are needed and only accessible to users with the correct security access rights. The account manger assignment rules will also run when the company primary address is updated also.

This feature can also be extended to update other additional company fields for example the territory field can also be automatically populated as well as the account manager field based on the postcode entered or updated for the company business address and set within the assignment module.

If you have a sales administration team who are creating new prospect company information this feature can also be extended to send an email to the assigned account manager of a newly created prospect record so they are aware of this record and can be used if you are not using opportunity notifications to manage the prospect sales process.

There may also be an instance when you may want to be able to overwrite the assignment rules of an account manager as a company record maybe within a shared area or territory so we have also provided an option to "Overwrite Account Manager" which disables the rules against a specific company so the account manager can be updated and assigned manually.

If you would like to find out more about the assignment module then or require a demonstration please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Entegraty Rainbird Business Solutions

Work smarter in SageCRM with Editable Grids

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 17:50:48 GMT

Editable Grids for Sage CRM

Moving between lists, summary & edit pages in SageCRM can be time consuming, would it not be more efficient to be able to edit information directly from the list screens such as your Opportunity list and companies accounts lists?

With the help of the editable grids module users can edit single or multiple records without leaving the page. For example users can update forecast revenue, close by dates, opportunity stages, custom fields and note fields directly from the list results screen rather than going all the way into the record and making the changes there.

The following types of fields can be configured as editable:

Text / Multiline Text
Currency
Integer
Selection
Date Only
Date/Time
Checkboxes

In the example above the currency field forecast (GBP) can either be entered directly or increase or reduced using the up and down buttons.

Date fields such as the Close by date will pop open a calendar gadget as shown below which can quickly be modified directly from the opportunity list and then also automatically update system fields such as updated date and updated by when a changed is made for tracking purposes.

Selection lists fields like the opportunity stage and status fields can also be marked as editable so these can be clicked on so the selection shows and changed.

Text and Multiline text fields used for notes and comments can also be made editable to easily update action statuses if required

The editable grid feature provides functionality to edit record data directly from a List Page in Sage CRM can be applied to multiple list screens, If you would like to find out more about this then please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email the me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Entegraty Rainbird Business Solutions

Improving your SageCRM users experience with the Mobile X Office365 Outlook Integration

Tue, 27 Oct 2020 17:19:44 GMT

Following on from our recent blog " SageCRM data on the go with MobileX " discussing the benefits of the Mobile X application for remote staff, providing quick and easy access to valuable customer, sales, communication and service data while out of the office. We wanted to follow this up and tell you all about the Mobile X Office365 integration feature which is provided with the Mobile X license and can be added as an Outlook Add-in to Outlook 365, Outlook 2016, Outlook for IOS and Outlook for Android and allows you to view, edit and create SageCRM data directly from within outlook.

Viewing information using Mobile X Office 365 outlook integration

You can choose to have the Mobile X add-on fixed within your outlook screen layout or click on the Mobile X for SageCRM button from the Outlook ribbon when you want to use this feature as displayed below.

Instead of logging into SageCRM to review customer information, if you have received an email from an existing contact who has a matching record and email address in SageCRM you can click the email within outlook and the email address will be automatically populated into the Mobile X search bar as shown below. Mobile X will then search the SageCRM database for the email address and display and matching contact record/s and display the contact summary information you have defined to show on the screen including custom fields. Last communication date, forecast value and the number of open Opportunities and cases is displayed. Opportunity, cases and communications records can be shown by clicking on the appropriate tab within the record. You can also edit and update the contact information from this screen by clicking the edit button, making your changes and clicking save. All changes are real-time back to SageCRM.

SageCRM users can quickly access the My CRM area of SageCRM through Outlook and view their calendar and tasks and view the opportunities, and cases assigned to them. Records can then be clicked on for additional summary information and edited where required.

Creation of new records

There will times where you have received an email from a new prospect or a new contact from an existing customer and you want to quickly add them into SageCRM. Currently you need to either log into SageCRM to add the new contact record or add them as a contact in Outlook and use the existing SageCRM plugin to create the SageCRM record. The Mobile X Office365 integration lets you simply select the email you have received and if no matching email address is found in SageCRM you can click the New Company/Person option. In the instance below you can see the New Person screen has been selected where the core information from the email has been auto populated into the entry screen. You can then enter any additional information such as Title, phone etc or if this is for an existing record select the correct company before saving the record.

The Mobile X Office365 integration also provides you with the ability to create new opportunity, case, phone, email, lead and custom entity records as shown below against a company or person record directly from Outlook. If you have had a phone call with an existing customer or prospect you can quickly enter this information directly in to the system by selecting New, Phone and populating the subject and conversation detail information and this will be saved back to SageCRM as a communication record related to this selected company and contact.

Filing of Emails from Outlook

The Mobile X for Office 365 integration also allows you to file emails from Outlook on windows/Mac/OWA/iOS and Android (via the Outlook app).

When you highlight an email in Outlook you can then select the File email button from the Mobile X menu and the contact email address will be searched for in SageCRM and bring back the matching results. You can then select to Add attachments also if they exist on the email or not and File the email which is then saved against the contact record back into SageCRM.

If you would like to find out more about the Mobile X App and Office 365 integration for Outlook then please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email the me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Entegraty Rainbird Business Solutions

Keyword Searching in SageCRM

Thu, 27 Aug 2020 08:35:00 GMT

What is Keyword Search

You can use Keyword Search in SageCRM to search across all text fields on a specific entity and entities associated with it. You can perform a Keyword Search on companies, people, cases, opportunities, leads, communications, orders, and quotes. For example, if you perform a Keyword Search on an opportunity, the search is also performed on associated companies, people, addresses, and progress notes.

Keyword Search uses an 'any words' search technique. This returns records containing all words listed in a search term if the words appears in the record text fields or in the text fields of any associated entity record specified in the Keyword Search view. For example, a search for crm services returns all records containing the words crm + services in any text field. These words can appear in any order within a record and across more than one text field.

If the search term is not enclosed in quotation marks, matching records are picked up even where there are words inserted between the search term words within a record. If quotation marks are used, only records containing the exact phrase are returned.

You can use a Keyword Search on its own. Alternatively, you can use a Keyword Search with other criteria on an entity Find screen to further refine the search results. If you enter a Keyword Search term and a value on a Find screen field, an initial search is performed using the Keyword Search term. The search results are then filtered using the values in the Find fields.

For example, you can perform a Keyword Search using the search term %finance to search for all person records where the term finance exists in an related text field such as job title or notes fields and refine this search using other search field criteria such as account manager on the Find Person screen. This means that a person Keyword Search is carried out on the term finance but only those records with a matching account manager value such as 'Nick Rainbird' are returned in the search list as shown in the example below.

By default, the number of returned records is limited to 200. So your initial Keyword Search can return no more than 200 records, even if more matches exist, and then subsequent searches are based on those 200 records only. In some cases, this mean less records are returned than expected.

When performing a keyword search, it may sometimes be the case that you know part of the term you want to search on. For example, you may have part of a company name, or you know that you're looking for someone called either Smith or Smyth, or you might know only the first few digits of a telephone number. A variety of special characters can help you narrow your search results in such circumstances and can be found within the online help link below:

Using keyword Search

If you would like to find out more about the Keyword search facility then please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email the me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Rainbird Business Solutions

SageCRM Quick Postcode lookups

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 16:29:06 GMT

Quick Postcode Lookup address validation for SageCRM will ensure your customer data is always accurate at the point of entry.

Are your SageCRM users fed up with typing new addresses into SageCRM when adding new customers, leads or additional address types?

With the postcode lookup creation you can easily find addresses, based on postcode, and have the selected address populate the SageCRM address screens.

When entering a postcode value the lookup facility will provide the user a list of matching address results based on the postcode entered.

When an address is selected from the results list the SageCRM address fields are auto populated with the correct address information which can be specified in the configuration setup. The Postcode Lookup facility is also aware of whether the address is a company or personal address and fills out the fields accordingly. Address fields are populated in the correct formatted case not all in UPPERCASE or a mixture of each in different fields.

The postcode lookup feature can also be extended to be added to custom entities where addresses also need to be captured. To get the best return on your valuable customer address data, it’s essential it’s validated and accurate from day one;

Please note the postcode lookup works on UK postcodes and as such is a UK only product and can only search on UK postcodes.

If you would like to find out more about the Quick postcode Lookup feature or schedule a demonstration then please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email the me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Rainbird Business Solutions

SageCRM data on the go with MobileX

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 12:58:43 GMT

MobileX for SageCRM is an alternative to the standard SageCRM App and is the most powerful mobile interface for SageCRM from any modern mobile smartphone device that can be rolled out with a simple URL..

Do your remote sales staff have access to valuable customer, sales, service and communication history data while out of the office?
Do the sales team have to wait to to return to the office or home office to be able log updates and new opportunities from customer meetings?

With MobileX solution for SageCRM you can:

Create and search for companies and contacts with easy navigation and edit this data on the go if you have the appropriate security rights
Dictate your call notes and emails there and then without needing to go back to the office or open full SageCRM
Add Files / Photos from your mobile device directly to a customer, person, opportunity or case record
Log and file emails from your mobile device and view communication history
View your Sales and Cases Pipelines that you can filter like the desktop version and also progress these records.
MobileX screens can be customised and the system can be extended with customer integrations.

Navigate, view and update your SageCRM data

With a single simple search you can search across multiple entities for your data or focus on a single entity. One search box to rule them all.

Summary data and more (Cases, Opportunities, Communications) are available from MobileX. You can even edit the summary data, logs calls,emails and even add files/photos.

Log Information on the go

Log phone call notes there and then into SageCRM. Start emails in MobileX to log them and send via your native mobile client.

Using your phone you can dictate into the text area making it even easier for you to log phone calls and meeting updates as demonstrated in the short video below:

View your Sales Pipeline

View and manage your Sales pipeline. You get a visual pipeline and also a break down of the number of opportunities in a legend that also allows you filter by the stages and then access the full opportunity.

Upload Files and Photos from your Mobile

With MobileX can you upload files and photos against an entity. Take a photo on your phone and upload to CRM!

Ideal for field services engineers to record before and afterwards on a site.

Office 365 Outlook Integration

You can also integrate MobileX with Office 365. This allows you file emails from Outlook on windows/Mac/OWA/iOS and Android (via the Outlook app). You can also create new companies/people, opportunities and cases from an email. This is ideal for people working from outside the office.

MobileX is the only mobile app for Sage CRM that can be extended to include custom entities and screens. Record customer visits, take notes on training and more. With MobileX you define how it works for your business.

If you would like to find out more about the MobileX solution or schedule a demonstration to find out how MobileX can provide your team with more insight when out of the office then please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email the me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Rainbird Business Solutions

SageCRM insights - Line Item VAT & Discount module

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 13:02:38 GMT

Welcome to this weeks SageCRM-Insights article where we are going to share with you one of our highly requested custom modules for managing Quote and Order Line Item level Discounts and VAT calculations. SageCRM out of box does not currently include the functionality to manage VAT application and line item level discounts but does let you set a discount percentage or amount that can be applied across the full quote or order record. So following requests from our customers and new prospects we have developed both a Line Item level VAT and Discount module for SageCRM.

Applying a line item level discount %

If you need to be able to provide a quote or order discount at the line item level for one or many products we have provided a "Discount %" field where a percentage value can be entered and will be applied to the specific line item product only. In the example below 10% discount will be applied to the cost of dinning chair .

The "Discount%, Line Item Discount, Discount Total" fields are automatically populated for the line item entry and the order summary screen.

This feature can also be extended so validation rules can be put in place so only discounts up to a specific threshold percentage can be applied. e.g. no more than 25% can be applied as a discount.

Applying VAT to a Line Item

If you need to be able to provide VAT costs on your quotes and orders we have developed a VAT module which picks up the VAT rate from the VAT% selection field at the line item level. (The selection list means you can have multiple VAT rates to select from which can be changed easily to 0% and 20% as shown in the below example).

The "VAT Line Item" and "Total Inc VAT" custom fields have been created and are populated automatically with the correct calculation at the line item level. At the quote or order summary record level the "Total VAT" and "Total Including VAT" values are also calculated.

This also means the new custom discount and VAT fields can be added to any quote or order templates you have in place.

To demonstrate these features we have put together the following short video so you can see both the discount and VAT modules in action:

If you are interested in adding one or both of these module to your existing or new SageCRM system please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email the me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Rainbird Business Solutions

SageCRM insights - Advanced Screen Customisations

Mon, 08 Jun 2020 20:17:32 GMT

Welcome to this weeks SageCRM-Insights article where we will be showing you four examples of how you can extend SageCRM to easily customise the appearance of CRM fields, screens and lists to suit the way you and your team work.

Highlighting of Required Fields

When a field is set to required (must be populated) on a screen, SageCRM identifies the required fields by putting an asterix * value at the end of the field by default. If you forget to fill in a required field a validation message will appear informing you not all required fields have been populated and will put a Red arrow next to that field highlighting the required fields that have not been populated.

To make it easier for users to identify the required fields on the screen from the offset you can utilise the mark required fields function where you can specify a background colour to highlight the required fields as shown in the below example so they are more visible from the start on the entry screen.

Phone and Email Required Field Validation on Company and Person Screens

When configuring a new or existing customer SageCRM solution a very common requirement is to make the phone and email fields set to required so this information can be requested and captured on entry as a minimum requirement. The phone and email fields do not work like other standard fields in SageCRM so you can not currently set these fields to be required at the field level. Thanks to a very talented developer we can now share with you a validation feature which provides this functionality so these fields can now easily be set to required on entry.

Changing the default colour for user appointments in the Team CRM Calendar

Team CRM mode allows you to work with tasks and appointments assigned to teams. To open the calendar in this mode, in the main menu, click Team CRM > Calendar. This can be sometime difficult to identify which appointments are for which sales person so t his customisation provides you the scope to change the default colours in which appointments assigned to a particular user are displayed in the Team CRM calendar so they are more easily identifiable.

Changing field Colours in a Grid or List

SageCRM provides you the ability to highlight different parts of the grid and fields returned in a list of results based on a criteria set to make information easier to identify and stand out.

This example shows how field highlighting has been added to a list of orders returned from a search. The relevant highlight colour is applied to the Gross Amount field depending on the Gross Amount value being over certain values thresholds specified below:

If the Gross Amount value is greater than £1,000 then display the value in Yellow,
If the Gross Amount value is greater than £10,000 then display the value in Green
finally if the Gross Amount value is greater than £20,000 highlight this in Red

We are also highlighting the Status field in this example as blue where the status ='Active'

The second example below will highlight any opportunity records where the close by date falls between one week ago and one week ahead in the opportunity close by column and will highlight any matching records in Yellow helping you any your team members stay on top of closing opportunities.

Hopefully you can see from the above examples how you can extend SageCRM to easily customise the appearance of CRM fields, screens and lists to suit the way you and your users work.

If you would like to find out more or can see the benefits of applying one or all of the above customisations to your SageCRM please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email the me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Rainbird Business Solutions

SageCRM insights - Integration with Sage Accounts

Wed, 27 May 2020 20:18:26 GMT

Welcome to this weeks SageCRM-Insights article where we will be looking at the benefits of Integrating your existing Sage 50 and Sage 200 Accounts systems with SageCRM.

Do your sales, customer service and finance team members struggle to obtain a single view of your customers?
Is direct access to your Sage 50 or 200 Accounts software required for team members which may not be easily accessible remotely to be able to produce quotes, orders and view customer sales orders, invoice and credit history?
Is your finance department being overloaded with additional queries around orders, invoices and payments for customer orders?

This is why combining SageCRM with your Sage Accounts platform you can enjoy better business insight, greater efficiencies, increased productivity and have a single customer-centric view across your entire business enabling you and your team members to work smarter.

The Importance of SageCRM and Accounts Integration for Sales and Finance

Put simply, knowledge is power. The more information a salesperson has, the better placed they will be to sell. If they know the month-to-date spend, year-to-date spend, last year spend and current credit status, they can decide how best to approach a client.

It will also save you a lot of admin time for your finance team. A saying that we use is ‘ capture once, use many times ’. Instead of having to manually input the data across both of your systems, the data will automatically be synced from your SageCRM system into the Sage accounts software. This will also hugely decrease the risk of duplicate data, incorrectly entered data and improve efficiency within the company empowering your teams to work faster and smarter.

Integrated SageCRM provides a real-time integration that links SageCRM to Sage 50 or Sage 200 and helps to increase efficiency and accuracy in the management of customers,suppliers, products, quotes and orders and these features include:

Creation of Sage accounts Customer and Supplier records from SageCRM
View account information, such as status, Balance, turnover and credit limit
Create Sales orders or invoices in Sage Accounts from SageCRM
Real-time views of orders and invoices from Sage Accounts
Synchonisation of orders, invoices and credits into SageCRM
Link many SageCRM companies to one Sage accounts customer
Create and view information about suppliers in Sage CRM
Products and prices are synchronised from Sage Accounts into SageCRM so you can utilise the SageCRM inbuilt quote and order functionality
SageCRM prospect companies do not need to be linked to Sage accounts to produce quotes.
This reduces the amount of data within Sage Accounts by eliminating the need to have prospect customers and quotes in Sage Accounts.
Only actual sales customers and transactions will be in Sage Accounts reducing the volume of data
Orders for customers can either be created from quotes or entered straight into Sage CRM
When the customer has agreed to a quote, an order can be posted straight into Sage Accounts against the customers Sage 50 or 200 account by simply clicking the 'Post to Sage Accounts' button when viewing the order
Batch Processing of orders to be posted from SageCRM to Sage Accounts

To summarise Information entered at the start of the sales process flows through SageCRM and into Sage 50 or 200 without the need to duplicate data entry. This both reducing time and the possibility of data issues caused by entering the same data into multiple systems manually.

If you would like to find out more about integrating your Sage 50 or 200 accounts system with SageCRM to provide a single customer-centric view across your entire business enabling you and your team members to work smarter then please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email the me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss this further.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Rainbird Business Solutions

SageCRM insights - Management Dashboards

Mon, 11 May 2020 18:01:06 GMT

Welcome to this weeks SageCRM-Insights article where we will be looking at the Interactive Management Dashboards that come ready to use with SageCRM, these include the Sales KPIs for Managers and Sales Metrics for Managers templates .

What is the interactive dashboard?

The interactive dashboard is a highly-customisable workspace where you control what information you need to see to be effective in your job. You can create multiple dashboards and gadgets by choosing the data source from SageCRM reports, searches, groups, notifications, workflows the web or ERP systems using SData. You can also define the actions you want to drive from your workspace such as opening the report results, navigating directly to a entity summary screen or a new or workflow action screen. Watch one gadget change as you scroll through another using record summary gadgets and drag and drop your gadgets to create the layout you want.

What is shown on the Management Dashboards?

First up is the Sales KPIs for Managers dashboard which displays key performance indicators (KPIs) to help you identify and measure your organisation's successful activities as well as those that are not performing so well. Metrics include monthly sales trends, actual vs. target, opportunities pipeline, open activities, at-risk opportunities, and closed deals leader board by sales rep.

The Sales KPIs for Managers dashboard includes the following gadgets with explanations:

Monthly Sales Trends . Compares the value of sales won this year with the value of sales won last year. It also shows the number of opportunities that were won this year.
Actual vs Target. Shows the opportunity revenue that’s been won as a percentage of forecasted sales.
Pipeline . Shows information about all currently open opportunities grouped by stage.
Open Activities. Displays information about calendar entries for a specific period such as demos, letters to be sent, and meetings.
At Risk Customers . Shows customers and leads who haven't been contacted in over 90 days, or customers and leads in a company that's greater than 90 days old who've never been contacted. These customers are considered at risk of leaving your company.
Won Deals Leaderboard . Displays the number of opportunities that each sales rep has won.

The Sales Metrics for Managers dashboard helps you measure progress toward organisational goals. Metrics include leads generated by source, deals lost to competitors, won vs. lost deals, average deal close rate, cross-sell deals, and top open deals.

The Sales Metrics for Managers dashboard includes the following gadgets with explanations:

Leads Generated by Source . Shows the number of leads in your system according to how they were sourced.
Deals Lost to Competitors. Displays deals that your organisation was bidding on but lost to a competitor. The report is based on the Competitor, Winner, and Reason for Loss fields in each opportunity record.
Won vs Lost Deals. Shows opportunities that each sales rep has won and lost in a specified period of time.
Average Deal Close Rate. Displays the amount of time between a new opportunity being created and closed. The information is grouped by sales rep.
Cross-sell Deals . Shows the number of cross-sell opportunities created during a specific time period by each sales rep. A cross-sell opportunity is one that's created when another opportunity closes. For example, if you sell a computer, a cross-sell opportunity could be to sell a maintenance plan for the computer.
Top Open Deals . Displays the number of current opportunities that are in progress and greater than a specified value. The information is grouped by company.

If you are not already using the management dashboards in SageCRM I would recommend setting up access so you can see these in action against your organisations data and provide you valuable insights. If you need help accessing or sharing the dashboards or you are interested in creating additional dashboard s then please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email the support team on support@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com where we can assist you with this.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Rainbird Business Solutions

SageCRM insights - Exchange Integration with Office 365

Tue, 28 Apr 2020 16:45:29 GMT

Welcome to this weeks SageCRM-Insights article where we will be focusing on the SageCRM Exchange Integration feature.

SageCRM Exchange Integration enables the automation of data synchronisation between SageCRM and your Exchange server at the back-end. There is no synchronisation to individual Outlook clients and the synchronisation runs in the background and continues even when Outlook clients are closed.

Appointments, tasks, and contacts can be synchronised between SageCRM and Exchange Server. This functionality is supported if the user is working in the Outlook client, Outlook Web Access, or using a mobile device that connects to Exchange. For example, if a sales manager schedules meetings for field sales people in SageCRM, the sales people receive information about the meetings on their smart phones without needing to synchronise or open their laptops and launch Outlook desktop client. This means that vital SageCRM information is available in real-time to users who are on the move.

The optional Lite Outlook Plugin can be installed on the client machine to allow users to add contacts to SageCRM from the Outlook client, file single or multiple Outlook emails to one or more SageCRM records, and attach SageCRM shared documents to Outlook emails.

What data is Synchronised ?

When setting up the Exchange integration configuration within SageCRM you can specify the sync options that you would like to have in place as shown below.

Calendar data

Appointments can be synchronised between SageCRM and the default Exchange calendar only. Appointments are not synchronised between SageCRM and any secondary Exchange calendars. The Sync Engine synchronises the following calendar items between SageCRM and Exchange if appointments are set to synchronise bi-directionally.

All single (non-recurring) appointments and meetings that have an End Date within the last 14 days or at any date in the future from the time the synchronisation occurs.
All recurring appointments where the end date of the recurrence pattern of the master occurrence is within the last 14 days or at any date in the future from the time the synchronisation occurs.
All single and recurring appointments that have already been synchronised and have been modified or deleted in either system since the last synchronisation occurred.
Private appointments in SageCRM become private appointments in Exchange and visa versa.

Synchronising tasks

If tasks are set to synchronise bi-directionally between SageCRM, the Sync Engine synchronises tasks that have been modified or created within the last 14 days from when the initial synchronisation was started.

Tasks are owned by one user only so synchronisation occurs between SageCRM and the Exchange mailbox of the task owner. Mass tasks (tasks generated against groups or lists) are not synchronised.

Synchronising contacts

If contacts are set to synchronise bi-directionally between SageCRM, contacts from My CRM | Contacts for users who have been flagged to synchronise. Updates and deletes to linked contacts are synchronised from Exchange to SageCRM.

Contacts are not shared by Exchange mailboxes, but contacts from many mailboxes can be linked to one person record in SageCRM. Click Add Contacts to manually add contacts from the Outlook client to Sage CRM. The Lite Outlook Integration Plugin must be installed on the Outlook client to use this functionality.

If you are interested in setting up the SageCRM Exchange integration feature or have any questions or queries on using the SageCRM Exchange integration feature then please feel free to call us on 01494 490409 or email the support team on support@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com where we can assist you with these.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Rainbird Business Solutions

SageCRM insights - Lite Outlook Integration

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 19:51:14 GMT

Welcome to the second instalment of our SageCRM-Insights articles where this week we will be focusing on the SageCRM Lite Outlook Integration feature.

Lite Outlook Integration lets you add contacts from your Outlook client to Sage CRM, file single or multiple Outlook emails to one or more Sage CRM records, and attach Sage CRM shared documents to Outlook emails.

Firstly when you install the Lite Outlook Plugin, a Sage CRM ribbon is displayed in Outlook and when selected you will be prompted to login to SageCRM to use these features.

Attaching shared documents

You can attach documents from the Shared Documents tab in Sage CRM to emails sent from Outlook by clicking on the Sage CRM menu when creating a new email and then clicking 'Attach Shared Doc'.

A list of available shared documents is then displayed where you can select the 'Attach' check box beside the document you want to attach to the email and the selected document will be added to your email as an attachment ready to be sent. If you then click the 'Send and File' button the email will be sent from your outlook and also filed into SageCRM as a communication record.

Filing emails using Lite Outlook Integration

You can file one or more emails that are in your Outlook folders to SageCRM. When you file a single email, SageCRM tries to match the email address on the Outlook email with an email address in SageCRM. When you file several emails at once, SageCRM looks for a match with the first email address in the batch of emails. If no match is found for the first email address, you must manually match the email batch to a record in SageCRM.

Click the below video link for a demonstration on working with the lite outlook integration and the process of filing emails against a company, contact and an associated opportunity, case, quote or order record.

Adding contacts using Lite Outlook Integration

The Lite Outlook Integration lets you add Outlook contacts to Sage CRM from the Outlook people bottom bar by highlighting the contact that you want to add to Sage CRM and click 'Add Contact' on the Sage CRM ribbon. Deduplication is carried out based on the match rules set by your system administrator in Sage CRM. You can then review and complete the contact details in Sage CRM and click Save. The contact is added to Sage CRM.New Paragraph

If you are interested in setting up the SageCRM Lite Outlook integration or have any questions or queries on using the SageCRM Lite Outlook integration feature then please feel free to call us on 01494 490409 or email the support team on support@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com where we can assist you with these.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Rainbird Business Solutions

SageCRM insights - Mailchimp Integration

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 17:10:19 GMT

I hope you are all keeping safe and well during these testing times and a big welcome to the first edition of our SageCRM Insights articles.

Over the next few months we will be sharing with you snippets of information and video content around the great features of SageCRM you may or may not be using currently.This week we will be focusing on the SageCRM Mailchimp integration.

MailChimp is web-based email marketing platform that helps you design emails (i.e. newsletters), create campaigns like this one, send them out, and measure results. The SageCRM Mailchimp integration provides you the facility to send emails to up to 2,000 subscribers and 10,000 emails per month totally free.

MailChimp campaigns let you send automated emails to groups of contacts from Sage CRM to tens, hundreds or even thousands of recipients without causing issues with your existing email sever or landing you on a spam/blacklist. MailChimp also implements safeguards to help your business remain in compliance and adhere anti-spam laws. For further guideline information click here .

You can create an audience (a list of campaign subscribers) in MailChimp using Sage CRM contacts.When you send a group of Sage CRM contacts to the MailChimp audience, a new static segment is created in the audience to record these subscribers. A Sage CRM contact can be included in multiple segments in the MailChimp audience.

Every night, MailChimp updates Sage CRM to remove unsubscribed recipients. The Opt out of E-Marketing checkbox on a Company, Lead, or Person record indicates whether the record has unsubscribed from a MailChimp campaign.

Once you've kicked off a MailChimp campaign, you can view how recipients have interacted with the campaign emails so you can follow up with appropriate actions.

By integrating SageCRM and mailchimp you can easily:

Provide timely and relevant information to customers and prospects with email automation.
Track how many people opened your email campaigns and see exactly what they clicked.
Track bounced emails and unsubscribes which can then be turned into a group to be cleansed in SageCRM.
Connect MailChimp to your Twitter and Facebook accounts to automatically post your campaigns on those networks at the same time.

If you are interested in setting up the Mailchimp integration or have any questions or queries on using the SageCRM Mailchimp integration feature then please feel free to call us on 01494 490409 or email the support team on support@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com where we can assist you with these.

Until the next SageCRM Insights instalment keep safe and we will continue to help you unlock your success with SageCRM!

Nick

Rainbird Business Solutions

SageCRM 2020 R1 - Document Drop ActiveX dependency removed

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 16:30:29 GMT

Document Drop is now available in all browsers. Sage have refactored the Document Drop feature to remove the ActiveX dependency and make the feature JavaScript-based.

Now Document Drop is available in all web browsers supported by SageCRM. Users can also drag and drop emails from Outlook in all supported web browsers. As a result,the following options have been removed because they are no longer needed:

Use ActiveX Document Drop on Internet Explorer in <My profile> | Administration | Email and Documents | Documents & Reports Configuration .

Allow ActiveX Document Drop in User Preferences .

Moving away from Active X allows SageCRM to provide controls for many browsers – future proofing for our customers and allowing us to open up the product to different ways of managing data to & from the local client

SageCRM 2020 R1 - Mailchimp Integration Enhancements

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 16:06:06 GMT

MailChimp integration has been enhanced to allow users more easily prevent and fix duplicate email addresses in groups sent to MailChimp. MailChimp identifies records in a group by email address. If a group sent to MailChimp contains two or more records with the same email address, the group gets rejected.

This enhancement includes the following:

Automatic detection of duplicate email addresses
A new screen displaying records with the same email address
A new MailChimp notification

Automatic detection of duplicate email addresses

To ensure that a Person, Company or Lead record being added to the system has a unique email address, system administrators can now use a new Detect duplicate emails option.

With the detection of duplicate email addresses enabled, when a user is adding or editing a Person, Company or Lead record and tries to assign an email address that is already assigned to another record in the system,an error occurs.

System administrators can access the Detect duplicate emails option in <My profile>| Administration | System | System Behaviour.

A new screen called Duplicate Emails lists all Company, Person and Lead records that have the same email address.It helps users to identify and amend records that potentially can cause errors if sent to MailChimp in the same group. To access the new screen, on the main menu, click Marketing | Duplicate Emails.

A new notification provides information about invalid and duplicate email addresses in a group sent to MailChimp, making it easier to troubleshoot issues. Users can click the number of invalid or duplicate emails in the notification to open the corresponding error group and correct the invalid email addresses or amend the duplicate email addresses to make them unique.

03a88824

SageCRM 2026 R1: Strengthening the Foundation for Future Innovation

Increase Conversions and Call Efficiency with SageCRM Telephony Integration

Tracking Multiple Project Bids made easy with SageCRM

Bringing the Front & Back Office Together

Six reasons why Sage CRM is the ideal choice for growing businesses

SageCRM refreshed mobile interface

How can a CRM help your business from day-to-day communication to sales?

What can Sage CRM do for you and your business in 2025?

Introducing SageCRM Ally

6 ways how CRM helps increase revenue …

Gmail Integration for Sage CRM

SageCRM 2024 R2: What to Expect

CRM and Marketing Automation: Key Differences, Benefits and Top Integration Tips

Marketing Automation vs. CRM: the Key Differences

﻿ 5 benefits of integrating your CRM and marketing automation platforms

Which automation tools and technology do you use?

Sales Management Definition, Process, Strategies and Resources

What is Sales Management?

The Three Key Aspects of Sales Management

What is a Sales Manager and What Does a Sales Manager Do?

Sales Operations: Building the Team

Sales Strategy: Defining the Sales Process

What is a Sales Pipeline?

Sales Analysis: Reporting

Who Benefits from Sales Management?

Use Technology to Manage Customer Relations

Sales Management Tips and Tricks

Sales Manager Resources: How to Start Managing a Sales Team

Sales Leadership Careers

Key Takeaways

Sales Glossary

Sage CRM 2024 R1: UI Improvements - Support for Bold and Italics in Multiline Text fields

Sage CRM 2024 R1: Using Tags in Reports and Groups

﻿ Creating a Group Based on Tagging Data

﻿ Creating a Report Based on Tagging Data

Customer Centricity: How putting buyers first boosts business

What is Customer Centricity?

The business case for a Customer-Centric approach

Benefits of Customer Centricity

7 Ways to Build a Customer-Centric Culture

Final Thoughts

Quick Transactions

Keyword Search

Sage CRM 2024 R1: What to Expect

﻿ Product vision

This release has executed well on its priorities of delivering interface and user experience improvements and pain point elimination.

-Enhanced security for better data protection including improved control of external URLs in dashboard gadgets.

-A new tagging system for easier record organisation and retrieval.

-Ability to highlight text in multiline text fields for improved readability and faster insights on key information.

-Improved favourites management with ordering options.

-A foundation for future advancements by adopting 64-bit Java for increased performance and scalability.

-Prevention of deletion of key metadata Ensuring that screens and lists can't accidentally be removed.

-Embedded chatbot for User Help Improving the access to help on using Sage CRM features.

-Refreshed eLearning

-Updated User Assistance

-Supporting content on Sage City and Community

If you would like to find out more about the SageCRM 2024 R1 release please feel free to get in touch on 01494 490409 or email me at nick@rainbirdbusiness-solutions.com to discuss these further.

7 soft sales skills that will help you close more deals

What are soft skills?

Soft skills are invaluable to the sales workplace and are often also know as the 'core' skills. These skills include communication and empathy and are relevant to most professions. Below are the seven top soft skills that will help sales representatives looking to hit quota and generate revenue.

1. Empathy

- Focus on how you pay attention to ensure you are actively listening.

- Be curious by asking questions and listening intently.

2. Persuasion

To develop persuasion:

- Put yourself in your prospects scenario by considering what could be stopping them from progressing.

- Ask questions.

3. Adaptability

It is important to remember that circumstances change therefore you must always be ready to adapt your sales approach. To be an adaptable salesperson you must have the knowledge on your industry, business and target audience to reassure leads when something does not go to plan.

To develop adaptability:

- Get out of your comfort zone.

- Shadow a sales engineer or product manager as they have unique technical knowledge making them good to shadow.

4. Organisation

To develop organisation:

- Record and time your regular activities as you will begin to understand where your time goes and learn how to use it more effectively.

- Allow technology such as CRM softwares to help you by automating workflows and repetitive tasks.

5. Resilience

To develop resilience:

- Recognise the positives of failure so they become learning opportunities.

5 benefits of integrating your CRM and marketing automation platforms

Creating a Group Based on Tagging Data

Creating a Report Based on Tagging Data

Product vision