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Dynamics CRM 4.0 Launch Highlights 'Ease-of-Use'
3/25/2008
Managing Turnover
Lush earlier had explained another benefit of using Dynamics CRM -- managing sales personnel turnover. The Linc Group has a difficult sales task of trying to sell maintenance policies on lighting for buildings. There is a lot of turnover, he said. And Dynamics CRM makes it easy to plug the next salesperson into the system to use the leads in the database.
Another audience participant complained that her sales people are "technically challenged" and that "they believe their contacts are their intellectual property." Lush replied that "you have challenges with any salespeople," and that The Linc Group's salespeople "have very little computing background" but "the product is not hard to use." He added that the company also uses Windows Workflow technology to automate things like customer follow-up to make things easier for the sales team.
The Linc Group uses Dynamics CRM as part of a hosted solution, and Lush was enthusiastic about that software-as-a-service approach.
"In 2006, we adopted a 100 percent Web service-based approach," Lush said. He added that the idea of using Web services and being able to pull from a service-oriented architecture is "huge." Lush explained that you can create dependencies in and out of Dynamics CRM. "You don't have to reinvent the wheel [and] Web services really help out."
Dynamics CRM Partners
There were about 10 vendor-sponsor booths at the event, featuring products that extend the capabilities of Dynamics CRM. Cisco Systems offered a few products that integrate with Dynamics CRM 4.0, including the Cisco Unified CallConnector (both as part of the Cisco Unified Communications platform and as a hosted solution) and the Cisco Contact Center. Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, provides switched and IP-based customer interaction communication solutions.
Other interesting vendors included Richmond Hill, Ontario-based VoiceGate, which makes a product that automatically records sales calls and saves them as WAV files, providing a customer interaction history. New York-based SalesCentric makes a charting application that provides visual models of Dynamics CRM users, showing their relationships within an organization. There was also a mobile software-as-a-service provider at the event, Rockville, Md.-based Logotec Group, which provides remote mobile access to Dynamics CRM via a Pocket PC.
Kurt Mackie is online news editor, Enterprise Group, at 1105 Media Inc. You can contact Kurt at kmackie@1105media.com.
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