Microsoft Dynamics CRM holds a prominent place in the “leaders” quadrant due to its many strengths including its global reach and language availability, the user interface compatibility with Microsoft Outlook, the ability to create custom interfaces, the multitenant architecture, the vast partner network, and the integration with the Microsoft stack.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online was assessed as an individual product for the first time this year and was placed in the “visionaries” category.  In addition to all of the strengths of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which it shares, the cloud deployment combines proven and committed service levels, flexible contracts and a low price ($44 per user per month at time of writing).

Sage SalesLogix was given a spot in the “challengers” segment.  It addresses the needs of sales professionals by leveraging its strengths including its choice of on-premise or cloud deployment methods, advanced mobility options, adaptability for varying deployment sizes, and proven customer support strategy.

SageCRM held onto its previous position in the “niche” quadrant due to its strong integration focus with Sage ERP solutions, providing an affordable end-to-end business management solution with effective opportunity management and an impressive vision for enhanced mobility.

Sage ACT! serves an important “niche” in the SFA market by providing an easy to use, inexpensive contact management system that is widely used by salespeople.

To help you decide which of these sales force automation solutions is the right fit for your organization, request a free business strategy assessment today!

Communicate more effectively with…

• Rapidly executed email campaigns leveraging a new 3-step e-marketing wizard
• 90+ eye-catching email templates
• Email statistic tracking including open, click-through, and bounce rates
• Seamless campaign management for social media
• Simple synchronization between Sage CRM and MS Exchange
• Bi-directional updates to appointments, tasks, and contacts

Collaborate internally better with…

• Consistent execution of campaigns through cloning
• Marketing workflows that leverage best-practices and enable consistency
• E-marketing templates that are shared across teams for maximum re-use
• Document storage and sharing capabilities
• Alerts when budgets are over-run

Compete in today’s marketplace with…

• Interactive dashboards that enable better business and priority management
• Flexible gadgets and real-time data drill down to show you what you need to see when you need to see it
• Company dashboards pre-built and available right out-of-the-box
• Visual charts that make an impact
• KPIs available at a glance for easy analysis that leads to better business management

Learn more about the latest version of Sage CRM then contact us to schedule your upgrade!

The Disconnected Enterprise
Small businesses today are faced with the same operational complexities as their larger counterparts.  Unfortunately without an equally large technology budget, small businesses are often forced to rely on a patchwork of systems. One system for accounting, another system for sales, and maybe a third for operations.  Sprinkle in a few spreadsheets and rogue databases across various departments and you’ve got the recipe for duplicate data entry, inaccurate reporting, inefficiency, and excessive IT support costs.  That’s where Sage MAS 90/200 Extended Enterprise Suite comes in.

The Extended Enterprise
At the heart of Extended Enterprise suite is the same Sage MAS 90 or MAS 200 software you’re using today. Your core system is then extended by adding SageCRM, FAS Fixed    Assets, and a variety of other tools that combine to create a completely integrated front- and back-office suite. Whether data is entered by sales, accounting, customer service, or someone on the shop floor, everything is captured in one integrated system. That means everyone in your company is working from the same data, following the same workflow, and breaking down departmental barriers to improve efficiency.  It transforms your business from a restricted enterprise with departmental bottlenecks to an integrated and free-flowing extended enterprise.

A Quick Look at SageCRM
SageCRM is one of the most important reasons you’d upgrade to Extended Enterprise Suite.  If you’re unfamiliar with CRM software, it’s useful to think of it as technology that helps you manage sales and customer relationships. SageCRM provides tools for contact and lead management, sales pipeline reporting, task management, call center automation, and marketing campaign management.

Perhaps most important is that ALL customer and prospect interaction is entered into a single database that’s part of your core Sage MAS 90 or MAS 200 system. Critical information about your customers is stored in one place and automatically synchronized regardless of whether you’re updating SageCRM or Sage MAS 90.  If your accounting department puts a customer on hold in MAS 90 because of past-due invoices, your salespeople will stay informed through SageCRM.  Likewise, salespeople benefit from access to pricing, inventory, and customer history without having to fumble around in MAS 90 or interrupt your accounting staff with numerous inquiries.

The View From Here is Great
With Extended Enterprise Suite, all company transactions are unified into a single database – both front and back office.  Integrated data translates into more accurate reports, better decisions, and a complete 360-degree view of your operations.  Plus, you’ll eliminate duplicate data entry, improve the accuracy of your data, and eliminate the costs associated with maintaining multiple systems and databases.

See the full capabilities of Sage MAS 90 and 200 Extended Enterprise Suite in this video demonstration.

Marketing
For many businesses, customer relationships are considerably more profitable after the initial sale.  Implementing marketing programs aimed at current customers can be an important advantage in building customer loyalty and mutually beneficial relationships.

SageCRM Marketing empowers your marketing team with tools to plan, execute, and evaluate the performance of targeted marketing campaigns.  You can segregate campaigns aimed at new business vs. those that are targeted to existing customers as well as track and measure every phase of a given campaign.  SageCRM Marketing also allows you to build a detailed profile of your customers over the course of your relationship to ensure that marketing communication is highly relevant.  With the right information, your marketing team make can design effective promotions based on a customer’s previous purchases, product preferences, and other important characteristics of your relationship.

Customer Care
Sales and marketing bring new customers to your business, but your Customer Service department keeps them with you for the long haul.  SageCRM Customer Care provides your customer service personnel with fast access to service requests, call and escalation history, recent customer communications, support cases, email communication,  documents sent and received, and much more.  Plus, all service and support activities are captured in SageCRM so that you start to build a knowledgebase of common issues and resolutions.  Your service reps can then use that knowledgebase to quickly resolve common challenges.

Whether you sell products that require technical support or offer service agreements that continue well beyond the initial sale, SageCRM Customer Care provides the tools you need to manage resources, quickly resolve issues, track customer requests, provide high quality service, and build long-lasting and loyal relationships.  And with all of that information at their fingertips, your customer service reps will have a better opportunity to cross-sell complementary products and services.

Mobile Access
If you have service personnel that work in the field, then all that great customer information stored in SageCRM is rendered useless unless you can provide access to your field personnel.  That’s where SageCRM Mobile Solutions comes in.  Using a PDA, your field service reps have real-time access to customer contact information, account history, and can schedule follow up activities and appointments.  Or you can use the web to access the same features … even if you’re not connected, you can work offline and synchronize with the SageCRM database later.

By enabling sales and service personnel to securely access SageCRM using the web or mobile device, you’ll ensure they have information available to resolve customer issues quickly, place orders efficiently, and keep customers happy.

Try SageCRM free for 30 days!

What’s New in SageCRM v7.0?

Better Cash Flow and AR Collections
SageCRM provides an “AR Collections Manager” that allows your accounting personnel to prioritize and manage customer collections and rapidly convert outstanding invoices into cash in the bank.  The AR Collections Manager consolidates outstanding account information into a single view that combines graphs and data in tables that allow you to quickly identify potential problems and schedule follow up action.

Plus, the integrated Calendar and Task Manager takes you beyond a static printed aging report and arms you with tools to prioritize collection calls, escalate accounts, and schedule automatic email reminders.  And since everyone in your organization is working from the same Extended Enterprise database, your sales people will have access to customer history and can help keep the collections process moving during their interaction with customers.

No More Hand Holding
No doubt your accounting department receives multiple requests each week from sales and customer service regarding status of orders, shipments, refunds, credit lines, payments received, and endless other accounting and operational inquiries.  With Extended Enterprise Suite, SageCRM can provide a window to Sage MAS 90 and 200 because all data is centralized in a single database.  That means sales and customer service personnel get fast answers using SageCRM to perform their own operational inquiries while Accounting benefits from fewer daily interruptions.  In fact with appropriate security settings, sales can enter orders directly into Sage MAS 90 and 200 from the SageCRM desktop.

Improve Vendor Management
SageCRM makes it easy to stay on top of vendor discounts, track special contract arrangements, and process purchasing requests and quotes in a timely fashion.  With the Calendar and Task Management functions, you can set up task reminders to take advantage of timely payment discounts.  Using the Communication Management function of SageCRM, you can keep track of key members of your Vendor’s team and collect all agreements and documents in one place which will ensure fantastic vendor relationships.

Those are just a few examples of how SageCRM and the Sage MAS 90 and 200 Extended Enterprise Suites will transform your business from a restricted enterprise with departmental bottlenecks to an integrated and free-flowing extended enterprise.

Learn more…

Microsoft is offering a $200 per user cash incentive to any organization that transitions from Salesforce.com or Oracle to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.  This offer is available through June 30, 2011 and can be combined with the discounted pricing of $34 per user per month for Dynamics CRM 2011 Online, which will be available in January 2011.  Learn more about the “Cloud CRM for Less” offer today!

Sage is offering two versions of their “Switch and Save” offer.  Organizations interested in either Sage SalesLogix (on premise) or SageCRM save 60% off  the software license price, 5% off a 2 year maintenance and support contract, and a 10% discount on data conversion services from your Sage software partner, like Socius.  Organizations that prefer Sage SalesLogix Cloud Advanced Edition are eligible to receive a discounted rate of $40 per user per month for the term of the contract, with a 10-user minimum when switching from an eligible CRM product.

To be eligible for either of the Sage customer relationship management offers, an organization must have a current licence of one of the following competitor’s products:  Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics® CRM, SugarCRM®, GoldMine®, Maximizer, Siebel, Pivotal, Onyx.

Let us know if you are looking to make a switch to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Sage SalesLogix, or SageCRM.

This quick quiz game is the entrance requirement for a sweepstakes:  Sage is offering a one-year subscription to Sage SalesLogix Cloud for up to 15 users!  This prize is valued at $11,700 (and that doesn’t include any cost savings or increased business you experience as a result of using an industry leading customer relationship management solution). 

Test your CRM IQ, challenge a co-worker, and enter for your chance to win a year of SalesLogix Cloud!

Play Sage SalesLogix Cloud for Smarties

You see, Socius is a professional services company, providing a wide variety of consulting services to companies across the country.  This makes us a great candidate for customer relationship management software.  Our relationships with our clients and partners are the lifeblood of our organization and we need a system to manage those relationships. 

Unfortunately for the company sending the email, many of the services that we offer center around the selection and implementation business management software solutions; including industry leading CRM software from Microsoft Dynamics and Sage.   We also use those CRM systems internally to track, not only our sales activities, client relationships and the services we provide, but also our marketing activities. 

The CRM solutions that we use and support have advanced marketing functionality with robust data cleansing and segmentation tools, leading campaign management features, and insightful marketing analytics to increase the effectiveness of marketing programs, improve efficiencies, and better track key metrics.  First and foremost though, our CRM software products have marketing data and list management capabilities that help you segment and target your marketing activities for maximum efficiency and return on your investments.  These tools can also help you navigate through the marketing minefield and keep you safe from costly mistakes (like marketing directly to your competitors). 

Learn more about the marketing, sales and service functionality of SageCRM, Sage SalesLogix, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM or request a complimentary business strategy assessment for advice on which CRM solution can help you streamline and secure your marketing efforts.

• 87% of respondents stopped doing business with an organization or company because of a negative customer experience. That’s up from 68% reported just two years ago.
• 58% of consumers polled said they will pay more for a better customer experience during a down economy.
• Consumers stated that the most important thing companies could do to encourage them to spend more is to improve the overall customer experience.

Since it costs five times more to attract a new customer as it does to keep an existing customer, it is in every organization’s best interest to ensure that the experiences they are delivering to their customers are the highest quality possible.  A great CRM solution can be key to delivering the kind of experience that will keep your customers coming back to you for more. 

In our post on www.crmsoftwareblog.com we discussed the “10 Ways Microsoft Dynamics CRM Helps You Enhance Customer Experiences.” 

SageCRM also boasts 7 excellent tools to help improve communications, manage expectations, and clarify responsibilities between businesses and their customers and build the foundations for a win-win relationship.

1. Workflow capabilities in SageCRM ensure that the exceptional customer service levels which are expected in the post-recession climate are consistently met every time.
2. Triggers and alarms allow customer service teams to ensure that queries are followed up in a timely manner so that issues don’t get ‘lost between the cracks’ and that demanding customers are served efficiently and effectively.
3. Knowledge management capabilities make it easier to capture remedies related to specific issues which may recur over time, enabling users to find information quickly and easily, ultimately resulting in improved customer care.
4. Integrated with Sage ERP systems, SageCRM provides customer service agents with complete customer information enabling them to answer customer queries confidently and accurately.
5. Real-time monitoring of SLAs ensures that customer service cases are progressed in accordance with SLA requirements, driving customer satisfaction and retention.
6. Self-service capabilities empower customers to securely access CRM data over the web in a convenient manner, enabling customers to services their own information requirements while reducing the resource overhead to the business.
7. SageCRM reports and dashboards provide detailed analysis on metrics such as call volume, case resolution times, communications, follow-up statistics and escalations; enabling management to quantify the performance of their agents – a key requirement for companies entering the recovery with fewer staff on board.

Sage highlights these and other features of SageCRM that can help you thrive throughout the current economic changes in their whitepaper:  “Accelerate out of the Downturn with SageCRM”.

1. Data Ownership – Although it seems obvious, the ability to retain ownership of all of your data and processes is actually somewhat rare in the SaaS world, so it is a great feature of the new edition. 
    
2. Upgrade Control – You are no longer tied to an outside vendor’s upgrade schedule or obligated to add unwanted features during an upgrade.  With the cloud computing edition, you can trigger an upgrade on your schedule.
    
3. Deployment Flexibility – Receive the benefits of a hosted, on-demand solution with the option of migrating to an on-premise deployment at any time should your needs change.  Likewise, if you already own an on-premise deployment of SalesLogix, you can seamlessly migrate to the cloud edition.
    
4. Customization Flexibility – Adapt your SalesLogix CRM software to your unique sales, marketing, and support processes  and take advantage of industry-specific versions without the restrictions that are common in other multi-tenant SaaS offerings. 
    
5. Buying Flexibility – Whether you want to purchase a perpetual license or a subscription, Sage SalesLogix cloud edition allows you to pick the purchasing manner that best fits your needs and financial goals.

Would you like Socius to keep you up to date on the development and release of the cloud computing edition of Sage SalesLogix?  Sign up for release alerts!