The holy grail of systems. CRM is a hot topic but guess what? Integrated CRM and accounts in the Sage world is a myth. It simply doesn’t work 100%. Why because the Sage 200 suite and Sage 1000 comprise of nothing more than two products loosely coupled together. With the Sage 200 suite you get a windows based legacy application bundled with a web based application; two applications and two databases. With Sage 1000 you get a Sage Line 500 webclient (which uses Java) and the same web-based CRM (which doesnt use Java). So what happens when you want to raise a quotation for a prospect in Sage 200? There you are in the web-browser and as soon as you hit the quote button up pops the a windows application window from Sage 200! As this site is focused on business productivity and not specifically Sage productivity I am watching with interest a product called Interprise suite. It is the only completely integrated accounts, CRM and webshop on the market. The single user version is completely FREE and it is priced between Sage 50 and Sage 200. A demo can be downloaded from this site.

There has been a huge uptake in customer relationship management (CRM) systems over the last couple of years. All businesses from small to large have been clamouring to select, buy and implement CRM as it is seen as a ‘must-have’. But I wonder, how many businesses have actually measured their return on that investment? How is your CRM system delivering benefit not just in operational process but in additional sales and new customers? Sure your CRM will tell you how many leads have been won, the status of those leads, which salesperson brought in that lead. It will also tell you how many and the potential value of any opportunities arising from that lead. But of course the real crux of the matter is you need to measure/test/refine/repeat the effectiveness of your campaigns.

And there lies the problem, whilst most CRM systems on the market allow you to create a campaign against a list of customers it is the segmentation of your customers that falls down. Why? because even if you do have an integrated CRM and financials system the chances are you cannot create what I would term as dynamic campaigns. I had this very request a few weeks ago from a Sage CRM customer. “We want to be able to create a campaign based around customers who have bought product x”. Can the system do it? No! Can it be made do it? Absolutely. Here are 4 examples, from hundreds of possible, dynamic campaigns you could be using (but probably won’t be);

• Customers who bought product x
• Customers who have spent more than (or less than) x pounds, dollars, euros
• Customers who have bought within the last 180 days but not within the last 90 days
• Customers who have only bought once from you

So the key is getting at your financials data and using it to create customer segments that are meaningful (and hopefully responsive!) to an offer in the campaign.