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Hi all - we've been using Acumatica for close to 2 years and we are very happy with it (after using Sage MAS products for 20 years and looking at Netsuite). We are just now implementing the CRM module and trying to find best case/use examples to see how others are using it in the most efficient way possible.  CRMs are useless if not set up in a way that makes sense. Â
Our local Acumatica VAR is amazing but they really only have exposure to their local customers and perhaps not the entire Acumatica customer world.  My opinion is that Acumatica as a corporation does a terrible (incompetent) job of getting information out to customers about how to best use their products. Wondering if anybody can point me to case studies, videos, anything related to how companies have set up their CRM in Acumatica. Most of what is on Youtube from Acumatica is 2-4 years old and probably not relevant today.Â
I realize that CRM is very customized for each company, their needs, sales process, etc... but I'm just looking for any info on Acumatica users that have had great success using the CRM and how they set it up. I don't want to end up on Salesforce a year from now with a solution that is not integrated with my ERP.Â
Thanks!Â
I haven't done a lot with Acumatica CRM, but my understanding is that it is pretty simple. I don't think there is a lot to it. Salesforce is a lot more robust which is why Acumatica built a real-time integration to Salesforce.
With Acumatica CRM, you track Leads and do marketing to those Leads. You hopefully turn many of those Leads into Opportunities which you move through the sales process and then turn them into Sales Orders when you close the business.
Acumatica is very much a horizontal solution meaning that it isn't built for a specific industry. In my opinion, in any module, you really are better off defining how you want it to function before looking into the Acumatica configuration options. Make the software mold to your business rather than molding your business to the software, making customizations where it makes sense.
I'm with you Tim. I have the module, but not really sure what to do with it.
Hey Russ,
Like any good chef, we believe in eating your own cooking so we implemented CRM internally on 1/1/2018. We moved from SalesLogix. The process was pretty arduous but that is typical for any conversion when moving data from one system to another.
As Tim suggests, it is critical to understand your internal policies, processes, and procedures before staring an implementation. Unlike in accounting, there is no governing body to set rules and procedures for how marketing and sales processes work. Therefore, you have to know what you want to automate, what you want to track, and what you want to report. Without this, you have no blueprint and won't have a successful result.
For us, we implemented lead and opportunity tracking, business account management, and activity logging. We have done a little with marketing management but will probably keep these activities outside of Acumatica in other services to better manage the processes. We plan to implement Case Management in the near future as soon as we finish implementing Contract Management in AR.
We started the process with a good amount of concern that we would be loosing functionality moving from SalesForce and in someways, we have relative to automated business processes. However, we think we can replace much of this with version 2018, R1 with Business Events but this will be more involved and more difficult to both set up and maintain. Overall, we are happy with the result and feel that Acumatica will provide us with a better solution that what we had in with an older version of SalesLogix.
Hope that helps.Â
The main drivers I have for why you should use CRM in your business is the following,Â
1) Opportunity ManagementÂ
This should do a number of activities, the first is to get all the sales team working in the same format, the next is that after using this for a period of time say 6 months will give you a clear idea of success rates (probability) per stage of the sales process. Once this is understand the next challenge is then how to improve those probabilities and therefore improve sales. Also you can benchmark individual performance against the average to work out if the sales person needs training or shown the door 😀
The key driver to using this is that if you can lift sales conversions from 8% to 10% the outcome for a business turning over $40 million with average sale = $50,000 will take that business to $50 million turnover.Â
Not only do you understand sales probability you will also be recording time taken to start and close a sales, coupled with probability you can more accurately forecast future revenue amounts and when they will happen. Again with these time lines understood you can work out how to shorten those timelines if possible.
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2) MarketingÂ
Every business does some form of marketing and by using the CRM you should be able to work out cost per lead, cost per opportunity and again once understood you can try pivots to reduce these costs to get better bang for your marketing buck.Â
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In summary the CRM allows your sales and marketing teams to understand where they are at and should provide the information to make informed decisions on how to be better.Â
Hope that helps as a starter for 10, I could talk all day about this if you let me.
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