What’s all the talk about? Integrating Sage CRM and Sage 100cloud

If your organization still relies on spreadsheets and notes to manage customer-facing activities, you likely know there is a better way — Customer Relationship Management, or CRM.

Perhaps you have a CRM application but aren’t fully realizing the benefits because there’s a disconnect between the application and Sage 100cloud.

Sage CRM is Sage’s flagship CRM platform, a robust, affordable solution designed to integrate with Sage’s ERP applications, including Sage 100cloud. So, why should you consider investing in a CRM solution, and Sage CRM in particular?

Why CRM?

CRM software is the fastest growing software market in the world. While that’s an interesting fact, it likely isn’t enough to spur you into adopting a CRM system for your organization. So, we’ve collected a few more facts that could provide a bit more motivation:

• The ROI of successful CRM implementation can be as much as $8.71 for every dollar invested
• Per sales person, a CRM can increase revenue by 41%
• CRM increases sales by up to 29%, improves productivity up to 34%, and boosts forecast accuracy by 40%
• CRM can improve the accuracy of reports by 42%
• Salespeople see productivity increase by 30% once they had mobile access to CRM

Why Sage CRM?

In a word: Integration.

Integration is one of those fuzzy terms that seems to mean different things to different software publishers. With Sage CRM and Sage 100cloud, integration means out-of-the-box symmetry — the two solutions communicate in real time, keeping everything in sync and ensuring that your CRM users have access to the back office data they need and that your ERP users have access to the sales, marketing, and customer service data they need.

Sage CRM integrated with Sage 100cloud provides your organization with benefits including:

• A single source for all business contacts

Improve collaboration and efficiencies across your company by organizing and consolidating ERP and CRM contact information—prospects, customers, and partners—into one reliable source.

• Increased customer visibility

Whenever an employee interacts with a customer, Sage CRM provides the information they need to answer any customer question. Using Sage CRM, you can easily see the customer’s call or payment history, order status, unresolved customer cases, quotes, and more.

• Increased efficiencies and accuracy

Increase efficiencies and eliminate errors by entering in data once. For example, you can update customer information in Sage CRM, and it will automatically update the customer’s information within Sage 100cloud.

• Better control and data integrity

Your system administrators define and control what each user can see or change within Sage 100cloud and Sage CRM. Data integrity is kept intact through automatic synchronization between Sage CRM and Sage 100cloud.

Use case examples

Here are a few examples of ways you can use Sage CRM at your organization to drive efficiency and improve service levels.

• Create orders quickly and accurately

Create quotes and orders in Sage CRM using data from Sage 100cloud, including customer credit limits, item numbers, shipping data, pricing, and availability. The quotes and orders are then updated into Sage 100cloud automatically.

• Provide stellar service

Each person across the business who interacts with a customer can use information that is relevant to the customer and consistent across the business. You can easily view real-time order status, past service call notes, invoices, payment history, credit status, and more. When you repeatedly demonstrate how well-informed you are and well you respond, your customers’ trust and reliance on your business will only get stronger.

• Provide more information through self-service

Empower your customers and suppliers with your own company self-service web portal so that they have quicker access to the information they need, such as viewing their account profile, requesting a quote, or seeing a status on a service issue. When combined with Sage 100cloud, other important information can be included such as order status, order history, pricing lists, and available inventory.

This article, written by Sage Business Partner MicroAccounting, is a part of our Sage CRM series. Sage CRM extends Sage 50, Sage 100 and Sage 300 with CRM capability for sales, marketing and customer service functions in thousands of businesses around the globe.