Postcard from Dublin: Sage CRM Bootcamp
ERP shows you where your business has been. CRM shows you the way forward.
The Sage CRM Bootcamp at the home of Sage, Dublin Ireland, left us full of forward-thinking ideas to share. Here is a postcard of resources that we picked up on the journey.
As Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt put it, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”
It’s not the technical .asp pages and SQL Statements you long to discuss, it’s how you use the software to get at your business outcomes.
You want an integrated front & back of house – the sales team needs to know if a collections letter has been created for a customer before they visit, for example.
You want salesforce automation – say, a cleaner Opportunity Workflow to track new business, and the tools to understand what kind of sales process is yielding the best results for your business.
Resources from Sage
Sage has created a number of eBooks about topics from social businesses, to sales professionals to business owners and managers. Find these on the Sage CRM Blog by clicking here.
The Sage CRM Community Site has been updated with a new video channel, with the ability to filter videos by Sage CRM proficiency level, language, and whether you’re more interested in Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, or Management-oriented content. For example, this tutorial shows how to create an email template with merge fields and images.
What to Expect from Sage CRM
Sage CRM has a vision of growing into an “inherently mobile” product. This means that instead of a different user interface depending on how you use the product, that the experience will grow to be consistent across platforms, browsers, and devices.
Sage CRM is also introducing the ability to integrate a cloud CRM installation with on-premise Sage 300 ERP. Much of the new features and development such as the Sage CRM Builder (which easily creates new custom entities) are only offered in the cloud version of the product, so this link would make those appealing features more accessible.
The new user interface makes use of contemporary ‘flat design’, which presents elements in a minimalist style with no shading. Clients upgrading to Sage CRM 7.3 (on-premise) will be the first to experience this.