Your CRM does what? Part 1 of 4

By Todd Fleming

Senior Consultant, Microsoft Business Solutions

BroadPoint Technologies

I think most of us know what a standard CRM application does out of the box. You have the typical functionality across all of the major CRM vendors to include: Sales Force Automation- Leads, Accounts, Contacts and Opportunity Management, Marketing Automation – Campaigns and Marketing Lists, and Service Automation – Contracts, Cases and a Knowledgebase. While this includes a lot of useful features it rarely ever satisfies all of the needs of a company. This shouldn't be viewed as a negative as long as your CRM solution is also flexible enough to handle your company's specific business needs.

One of the solutions we have incorporated in Microsoft Dynamics CRM for customers in the past includes:

Project Budgeting and Analysis

In this case, the client was using their financial application to track time and materials against projects. The goals were to: (1) give Account Execs more visibility into project details and current budget to actual amounts thereby reducing the burden on the finance team for having to produce weekly status reports, (2) provide a central repository for all project documents and customer interactions and (3) provide an estimate tool within CRM that would assist with creating budgets and client facing quotes. What we created in Dynamics CRM was a solution whereby:

• Account Execs could create a new project with the necessary project description and details needed for budgeting
  
• The project record would be the central location for storing files and recording interactions with customers regarding a project
  
• Several departments would be tasked with creating budgetary estimates for the project
  
• A quote would be generated based on the details and budgetary estimates and sent to the client
  
• As time and expenses are approved against the project in the financial application it systematically integrates this data to the corresponding project in Dynamics CRM
  
• Budgeted time and expenses can be compared to actual time and expenses to monitor a project's status within Dynamics CRM
  

In my next blog postings I will discuss additional features we have added in Dynamics CRM such as Contract Administration, Event Planning, Speaker Bureau Management, Credit Card Verification, Integrated Freight Calculation and Partner Portal for managing Leads and Opportunities by external Partners.