Preparing goods for shipping to customers Invoicing Goods Customer Payment

88 Figure 8.14: Invoice Form Check your Chart of Accounts as before to see that you now have a healthy bank balance in the Cash account. 89 Part III Boost your Sales Deliver Great Services 91 The Sales department is the engine of your company. Sales success drives staff motivation and boosts your company’s dynamics, which in turn enables you to keep innovating and lay the foundations for future success. The key to continued sales success is effective Customer Relationship Management most often known as CRM. OpenERP’s CRM features are flexible and highly developed to assist you in manag- ing all aspects of partner relationships. Analytic tools help you understand your performance drivers, and the automation of data and processes drives your company to new levels of efficiency. OpenERP can share information through its interfaces to the most common email clients, calendars and mobile phones, minimizing disruption to your operations when you first install it. Your staff can build on their previous productivity by continuing to use their email and office systems, now connected to OpenERP, transferring to the OpenERP interface only if they need to. This book will help you value your customer and partner relations even more. 92 93 CHAPTER NINE TRACKING LEADS OPPORTUNITIES Whatever business your company is doing, every single sales act is related to your Customer. Time to come up to your Customer’s Expectations 9.1 What is in it for you? • Track, drive and optimize your sales activities Handle your full sales workflow, from lead to invoice. • Access all information such as partners accounts contacts in one place, directly at hand when you need it, even when you are working at home • Offer an excellent Customer Service by improving issues management and automating follow up. • Be Mobile and sync your Calendars with your mobile device. • Link important e-mails to the CRM directly from your current mailbox Outlook Thunderbird. Easily integrate your e-mails with OpenERP so that you can reply from your own mailbox and have the answer stored in your CRM automatically. • Complete history of every action and transaction related to your valued customers and partners. • Drive your Marketing Campaigns • Measure your business through up-to-date dashboards and reporting Use the OpenERP CRM application as from the very first business contact - either personal, by e-mail, through a contact form on your website, ... OpenERP allows your sales team to concentrate on their deals and manage the full sales flow lead qualification - opportunity tracking - quotation - sales order while keeping a global vision of each stage.

9.1.1 Terminology

Lead A lead represents a prospect potential customer or a future sales opportunity. A lead usually is not qual- ified and not assigned to a sales person for follow-up. Example: a business card, a database of potential customers. Opportunity A sales opportunity represents a potential contract. Each opportunity has to be followed up by a salesperson spending time to make a quotation or cancel the opportunity. OpenERP Customer Relationship management helps you boost the pre-sales activities of managing leads and opportunities. Manage complex relationships between partners and contacts, be mobile, and automate your sales flow as much as possible. We will also develop some business cases to show you an example of how to use OpenERP in your company. 94 Managing your Potential Customer Contacts The standard way of representing partners and contacts throughout OpenERP and many other enterprise systems such as phone contact applications is a partner with multiple contacts. Partner is the word for any entity that you do business with - a supplier, a customer, a prospect, ... In other CRM applications, a partner is also referred to as Account. The example below illustrates OpenERP default way of handling Partners and their Contacts. Figure 9.1: Default Partner Contacts Relationship According to your Business, the standard way of linking several contacts to one partner may not be flexible enough for you. Of course, OpenERP provides an alternative, the base_contact module. This allows you to share the same contact, holding different positions, with several partners. You only need to enter the contact once and link it to the partners concerned. Any changes to contact information only need to be applied once. The two figures Default Partner Contacts Relationship and Base_contact module installed show the structure of partners and contacts in the form of UML classes both without and with the base_contact module. This is a clear way to illustrate the complexities that may be accomplished. Figure 9.2: Base_contact module installed The concrete example may even better illustrate the concept of multiple relationships between contacts and part- ners companies. The figure Base_contact module installed shows two companies having several addresses places of business and several contacts attached to these addresses. In this example you will find the following elements: • The ABC bank has two places of business, represented by the addresses of ABC Belgium and ABC Lux- embourg, • The addresses of Dexey France and Dexey Belgium belong to the Dexey company, • At the office of ABC Luxembourg, you have the contacts of the director D. Smith and the accountant A. Doe, • Mr Doe holds the post of accountant for ABC Luxembourg and Dexey France, 95 • Mr D. Smith is director of Dexey France and Dexey Belgium and we also have his private address which is not attached to a partner. According to your Configuration, OpenERP provides three menus to access the same information: • List of partners: Sales → Address Book → Customers, • List of Addresses: Sales → Address Book → Addresses, • List of contacts: Sales → Address Book → Contacts, If you correct or change a contact name in the contact form, the changes will be applied to all the posts occupied in the different companies. The screen below represents a partner form. You can see several possible addresses there and a list of contacts below each address. For each contact you see a name, a function, a phone number and an email. Figure 9.3: A partner form with the base_contact module installed If you click the line, you can get more details about the function such as start date, end date and fax or enter into the contact form such as personal phone, different posts occupied, and personal blog. You can also add a photo to your contact form. Figure 9.4: Detail of a job post occupied by a contact at a partner 96 Figure 9.5: Detail of a partner form with several contacts Partner management is included in the OpenERP base modules. To manage partner relations you have to install the Sales Management module. Then configure the system to meet your needs. For this chapter you should create a new database with demo data through the Configuration Wizard. Select Customer Relationship Management and configure the CRM according to your needs by selecting the appropriate modules. OpenERP’s modularity enables you to install only the CRM module if your requirements are limited to customer relationships. Figure 9.6: Creating a new database When creating the new database, OpenERP suggests that you configure it using a series of questions: • Simplified or Extended mode: select simplified and click OK, • Select the Customer Relationship Management functionality to install. Figure 9.7: Selecting the CRM functionality to install OpenERP proposes a selection from preconfigured functions for CRM: