CRM Blog

CRM is proven to improve productivity, streamline processes, improve the customer experience, and provide a holistic view of customers and prospects. But many CRM implementations have failed to achieve these goals due to inadequate CRM user adoption.

One of the greatest benefits of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is the native integration with Microsoft Outlook. This new CRM Outlook client has been fully rewritten. This means that not only will there be synchronization between CRM and Outlook but now you can have full CRM functionality and visibility from within Outlook.

This will be a next-generation Microsoft Outlook experience giving the user familiar Microsoft Office functionality. A new contextual CRM Ribbon delivers consistent Microsoft Office navigation and increase user productivity. Your CRM information can now also take full advantage of native Outlook functionality including previews and conditional formatting.

Now CRM can work the way your users work, all in Outlook. This will make it a lot easier for the users to learn how to use the CRM system and will assist in maximizing your CRM user adoption.

Join us for our webinar on the Microsoft CRM system in Outlook as we look why we believe the new CRM for Outlook will increase user adoption:

• - CRM Inside your Outlook
• - Your CRM views in Outlook
• - Converting Emails to Leads/Opportunities
• - Tracking emails in CRM
• - Conditional Formatting of data

Webinar Series (each Wednesday at 11am PST)

Accent Gold is excited to be hosting a webinar series over the next two months underlining the much talked about new release of the Microsoft CRM system. Please register below.

The next version of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, officially named Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011, is being eagerly awaited by business partners and end-users alike. It will offer a whole range of more than 500 new features, changes, additions, add-ons and enhancements that promise to strengthen Microsoft CRM’s position as a frontrunner in the CRM market.

Join us for our webinar series as we explore the above points and hope to provide you valuable insight about this much anticipated CRM solution. We hope that our Microsoft CRM system review will help you on in your CRM evaluation. We will be hosting this series every Wednesday at 11:00 am December – February. See below dates for upcomming Webinars.

Whether you need CRM training in Jacksonville, Florida or CRM Consulting in Phoenix, Arizona, please don’t hesitate to call us! We would love to help you find the best CRM system for your company.

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If you are using the Community Edition of SugarCRM 6, you might be wondering if you should upgrade to the Professional Edition. Click here to see a Feature Comparison Chart.

Below is a list of features that you would gain by upgrading to Professional:

REPORTING

1. Matrix Reports. Create powerful reports across modules with the ability to group by multiple attributes. These are very powerful reports that truly help you discover your ROI.
2. Dashboards. Monitor key business metrics across Marketing, Sales and Support.
3. Customer Profiles. These provide a better understanding of who your customers are. Reports and dashboards show customer profiles by industry, geography, company size, product assets, revenue and other important attributes. By gaining a better understanding of customers, companies can better manage existing relationships and build new ones.
4. Marketing Analytics. This allows you to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns from the initial offer to a closed sales opportunity. Managers can asses the effectiveness of marketing campaigns relative to budget, channel, expected revenue and win rate to gain a full picture of how marketing programs impact the sales pipeline.
5. Sales Trends. Sugar Reporting gives sales managers the insight needed to adjust to changing business conditions. On one screen, sales managers can monitor the pipeline of sales representative by sales stage, view how many calls each rep has made over a given time period, and monitor closed and expected revenue for the quarter. Managers and reps can also take advantage of the strong reporting and charting capabilities to create personalized dashboards that update whenever information changes.
6. Case Reports. Monitor customer problems and how well your customer support team is solving these issues. Case Reports can be used to measure open cases by time period, support representatives, priority and entitlement. With Sugar Case Reports, managers gain a better view into the satisfaction of its customers and the performance of the support organization.

MARKETING, SALES, AND SUPPORT

1. Forecasting gives sales representatives and managers the ability to generate accurate forecasts based on sales data in SugarCRM. Managers can create, assign and edit quotas for their team, roll-up forecasts across individuals and teams, and measure forecast accuracy relative to commit amounts. Sales representatives can take advantage of scenario planning tools to generate high, medium and low forecasts, utilize worksheets to develop accurate commit amounts, and track their sales progress from the Sugar homepage.
2. Plug-ins for Microsoft Office integrate your CRM data with the Microsoft’s leading productivity tools. With a few simple clicks, Sugar users can sync email, contacts and calendar information into Sugar modules, export data into Microsoft Excel and merge CRM data in Microsoft Word.
3. Quotes & Contracts. With Sugar Quote and Contract Management functionality, sales reps can generate accurate quotes with support for multiple line items, currencies and tax codes. Quotes and contracts can be delivered to customers via email, Word or PDF. Strong version control functionality ensures reps can more easily manage multiple versions of quotes and contracts.
4. Mobile. Stay in touch while on-the-go with Sugar mobile functionality. Sugar offers wireless and PDA access that is hassle-free so you can continue to work away from the office. Sugar mobile solutions translate to less downtime and greater productivity.
5. Data Merge. Pull information directly from LinkedIn, Hoovers and JigSaw directly into Sugar 6.
6. Knowledge Base. The Sugar Knowledgebase helps customer support and engineering teams to better manage and share structured and unstructured information. Knowledge Base allows user to create frequently asked questions (FAQs), manage files, and search and rate content – all in an easy-to-use interface.

PLATFORM

1. Workflow Management streamlines critical business processes within your organization. Using Sugar templates, administrators can create custom business processes based on Sugar Objects. Users can also define alerts, actions and triggers to become a more responsive to customer demands.
2. Team Management allows companies to create and manage teams based on job type, division, geography or other attributes. Once roles are assigned, administrators can assign access rights to a given role to ensure team members have access.
3. Module Administration. Delegate administrative authority for different parts of the application.
4. Access Control. Sugar Access Control levels allow information to be shared or restricted based on user role. Administrators can determine what information that role can access at either a module, view or field level. Access Control rights include the ability to access, view, edit, import or export.
5. Data Quality Control. Insure clean data through import and de-duplication controls.
6. On-Demand or On-Site. Choose which deployment option is right for your organization.

Do you need more information or a SugarCRM demo? Do you need to understand the differences between SugarCRM and other CRM solutions such as Sage ACT!, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Sage SalesLogix or Salesforce.com? Please don’t hesitate to contact us. We would love to help you properly compare so that you are empowered to choose the best web CRM Business Software system for your organization.

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You love ACT? You love Microsoft Office? Now you can have both – and live to tell! This new Whitepaper covers the integration between ACT 2011 and Microsoft Office. Topics include:

1. ACT! integration with Outlook. Learn how easy it is to set up the configuration and sync with contacts as well as calendars. You will grasp how the Outlook Address Book is configured as well as numerous other E-mail integration features (including preferences, history creation options on outbound and inbound). Learn about creating invitations and even Outlook’s integration with ACT for Web.
2. ACT! integration with Word. This portion covers attaching documents to Histories as well as to the Documents tab. Learn how to design mail-merge templates for marketing to your hot leads.
3. ACT! integration with Excel. ACT offers numerous oppotunities to export data to Excel reports. It even takes it a step further and creates Pivot Tables for you. Learn how to attach Excel documents to contacts and even groups or companies. Want some magic? Learn how to merge fields directly from ACT into an Excel file! Even learn how to extract data directly from ACT into Excel while ACT is closed!
4. ACT! integration with Internet Explorer. If you haven’t spent time investigating the new features in the Web Info tab, hold onto your hat. Facebook integration, Twitter integration, Google maps and Driving Directions, Hoovers Lead Generation and automatic download, and much more!

To download the whitepaper, click here.

Now that you’ve read about it, do you now need a CRM web demo? Just contact us for more clarification or licencing information. We would love to answer your questions and get you going in the right direction!

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Sugar 6 is open. This means that Sugar is already integrated with the sites and tools you need on a daily basis – like Linked In, Twitter, InsideView and Hoovers.

Do you need Lead Generation? Sugar’s got it! Do you need to easily pull in or import data from Lead Sources? No worries. It’s built in.

Sugar also syncs with Microsoft Outlook (2003/2007) so that all information and meetings can be stored within Sugar to speed up the search process.

This empowers users to quickly create activities for new leads and then convert new leads to opportunities. Does your team run better on CRM Sales Automation, Workflow and Alerts? It’s all built right in!

For a free demo of how easily this works in the day to day environment, give us a call. We are confident that Sugar 6 has the features and you need.

Do you need a review of Sugar as an ondemand CRM software (windows CRM application vs web CRM software)? Do you have questions regarding the pricing model (Licenses, Software as a Service SAAS CRM) and feature differences between the free/community edition and the  paid (professional, enterprise) editions? Are you interested in a SugarCRM upgrade or in need of a download to install SugarCRM 6? No worries! Just give us a call! We’ll help you understand just how powerful this web based online customer management tool can be as a hosted sales CRM – especially in an Open Source or Call Center software environment.

Do you need a review of how SugarCRM as a web based CRM compares to Sage SalesLogix (Cloud) CRM, vTiger (Open Source CRM) or Salesforce.com (on Demand CRM) - or the differences to hosted MS CRM? Are you concerned with understanding free online CRM Software and your options? Do you have questions regarding how the world of online CRM, website CRM  and cloud CRM in a locally hosted CRM environment? Do you need clarity regarding CRM lead generation tools or CRM maintenance and support (incl. CRM Help) plans? No worries! Just contact us!

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Have you seen how easy and flexible Sugar 6 is? Here are 4 Teasers.

Custom Reports and Dashboards
With a few clicks, users can create a custom report or dashboard chart, display it on their Home Page and even share it with others.

Administrators can build custom fields, custom layouts and even custom modules (i.e. “Billable Hour Tracking”).

Workflow
Sugar 6 also empowers users to design workflow automation that controls the flow of information and action within your business.

Email Alerts
Do you need to be alerted via email each time a Sales Opportunity is created or closed? No worries. This is easily handled within SugarCRM’s workflow.

Microsoft Office Integration
SugarCRM’s open architecture is designed to easily integrate with 3rd party data sources – so that the user stays in control.

Need to integrate SugarCRM 6 with Microsoft Outlook, Word or Excel? No worries! Integrate Sugar with Outlook E-mail and Calendar.

Need to mail-merge to Microsoft Word? Sugar automatically populates form letters, direct mail and other Microsoft documents.

Need to see your reports in Microsoft Excel? No worries. Sugar easily exports into Microsoft Excel so that you can analyze your data as much as you need – including Pivot Tables!

Need more information or a demo/review of Sugar? Do you have questions regarding the pricing and feature differences between the free/community edition and the  paid (professional, enterprise) editions? Are you interested in upgrading or in need of a download of SugarCRM 6 to install? Not sure which mobile (Android, iPhone, Blackberry) will work the best? No worries! Just give us a call!

Do you need a review of how SugarCRM compares to Zoho CRM or Salesforce.com? Do you have questions regarding the world of online website CRM  and how the CRM cloud (Saleslogix) can work for you in a hosting CRM environment? Do you need clarity regarding CRM lead generation tools or CRM support/help plans? No worries! Just contact us!

Join us for our newest Webinar Series.

We will be examining and evaluating Microsoft’s newest product Dynamics CRM 2011.

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