Open ERP Book (Managing Customer Relationships)

Managing Customer Relationships

The Sales department is the engine of your whole company. Sales success drives staff motivation and your company’s general dynamism, 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). Open ERP’s CRM capabilities are flexible and highly developed to assist you in managing all aspects of both supplier and customer relationships. Analytic tools help you understand your performance drivers, and the automation of data and processes drives new levels of efficiency.

Open ERP can share information through its interfaces to the most common office applications, 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 Open ERP, transferring to the Open ERP interface only if they need to.

Leads, Business Opportunities and Campaigns

This chapter introduces the pre-sales activities of managing leads and opportunities. You’re introduced to a more complex set of relationships between partners and contacts than offered by the ‘base’ module, and shown how to use the company calendar. You’ll finish by discussing how a call center might use the Open ERP system.

Managing Contacts

The standard way of representing partners and contacts throughout Open ERP and many other enterprise systems (such as phone contact applications) is having a partner with multiple contacts. Partner is the word for any entity that you do business with - supplier, customer, etc. This representation may not be flexible enough for some uses, so Open ERP provides an alternative, which is brought into the system by installing the base_contact module.

The two figures UML class diagram with base_contact module installed and UML class diagram with base_contact module not installed show the structure of partners and contacts in the form of UML classes both with and without this base_contact module. For the non-programmer this diagram can be a bit of a brutal way of showing it, but it’s the clearest way to illustrate the complexities that can be accomplished.

(Pic) UML class diagram with base_contact module installed

(Pic) UML class diagram with base_contact module not installed

A concrete example may illustrate this concept of multiple relationships between contacts and partners (companies) better. The figure Example of a structure with management of partners and contacts shows two companies each having several addresses (places of business) and several contacts attached to these addresses.

(Pic)Example of a structure with management of partners and contacts

In this example you’ll find the following elements:

The ABC bank has two places of business, represented by the addresses of ABC Belgium and ABC Luxembourg,

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 Fogerty) and the accountant (A. Jacket),

Mr Jacket holds the post of accountant for ABC Luxembourg and Dexey France,

Mr J Smith is director of Dexey France and Dexey Belgium and we also have his private address attached to no partner.

Depending on your needs, Open ERP provides three menus to access the same information:

List of partners: Partners ‣ Partners,

List of contacts: Partners ‣ Contacts,

List of posts held by contacts at partners: Partners ‣ Contact’s Jobs.

The three menus above are only three different views on the same data. If you correct a contact name on the contact form, this will be modified on all the posts occupied in the different companies.

The screen above represents a partner form. You can see several possible address there and a list of contacts above each address. For each contact you see a name, a function, a phone number and an email.

(Pic) A partner form with the base_contact module installed

If you click on the line you can get more detail 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).

(Pic) Detail of a job post occupied by a contact at a partner

(Pic) Detail of a contact form for someone employed in several job posts

Partner management is found in the Open ERP base modules. To manage partner relations you have to install the CRM modules. Then start by installing a CRM profile and configure the system to meet your needs.

For this chapter you should start with a fresh database that includes demo data, using the CRM profile and no particular chart of accounts configured. Open ERP’s modularity enables you to install only the CRM module if your requirements are limited to customer relationships.

(Pic) Creating a new database

Once the database is installed, Open ERP suggests that you configure it using a series of questions:

Simplified or Extended mode: select simplified and click Ok,

Creating users: click Skip,

Select the CRM functionality to install.

(Pic) Selecting the CRM functionality to install

Note: The CRM configuration module

The pre-configuration of the management of customer relations to generate prospects, opportunities, and phone calls isn’t supplied by the crm module itself but by the crm_configuration module.

If you install the modules separately don’t forget to install the crm_configuration module. The crm module just contains the generic case management system.

Open ERP proposes a selection from pre-configured functions for CRM:

managing a prospects database,

managing and tracking opportunities,

managing meetings and the company calendar,

managing pre-sales,

managing phone calls and/or a call center,

managing after-sales service,

managing employment offers,

managing technical service,

tracking bugs and new functional requests.

You see that Open ERP’s CRM module isn’t limited just to Customer relationships but is designed to generate all types of relations with a partner: such as suppliers, employees, customers, prospects. This book will describe just customer relationships. The other CRM functions are similar to use, so you shouldn’t have huge problems with understanding those functions.

The following cases will be looked at for this chapter

Prospect management,

Opportunity management,

Management of the company calendar,

Management of phone calls.

The figure Selecting parameters for CRM modules for the reader of this chapter shows the CRM module configuration screen after selecting some functions to install.

(Pic) Selecting parameters for CRM modules for the reader of this chapter

Organizing Prospects

If you have installed the management of prospects and opportunities, Open ERP implements the following workflow for the qualification of prospects and future opportunities.

(Pic) Process of converting a prospect into a customer or opportunity

Leads

A lead represents a potential customer or a possible future business or sales opportunity. They aren’t usually qualified yet and they aren’t yet assigned to an individual person for following up. When a lead needs to be followed up, it’s converted to a partner and/or a sales opportunity.

For example, the following events could result in the creation of one or several leads:

A business card from a prospective customer met briefly at an exhibition: you must contact him again to qualify the lead and to know if there is any possibility of a key sales opportunity,

A database of potential customers in a given sector and region. The potential customers must be contacted again individually or using a mass mailing to determine which contacts need to be followed up,

A contact that you’ve been given by a friend. You must then qualify it before starting to assign a salesperson to the contact,

A form completed on your website directly integrated into Open ERP. Before converting the form into a sale proposition or opportunity, you should read and handle the person’s request.

Note: Separation of sales services

In companies of a certain type, you often distinguish between the sales department and the presales department. The role of the presales department is to acquire and qualify new leads, and the role of the sales department is to crystallize the sales opportunities or work with existing customers.

System users in the pre-sales department will usually work on leads. Once these leads are converted into customers or sales opportunities the sales department pays individual attention to each opportunity.

Entering prospects into the system

New prospects are usually entered as a lead in the system. This means that you don’t create a partner form or sales opportunity until you have qualified whether the lead is interesting or not. If the new contact is indeed interesting you then enter the data on into a partner form and, eventually, a sales opportunity.

To enter a lead manually use the menu CRM & SRM ‣ Sales ‣ Leads ‣ New Lead. A form opens to let you enter data about this new contact.

(Pic) Creating a new lead

Leads have a status that depends on the qualification work that’s been carried out:

Draft : the lead data has been entered, any work has not yet been done and a salesperson has not yet been assigned to the request,

Open : the lead is being handled,

Closed : the lead has been converted into a partner and/or a sales opportunity,

Waiting : the lead is waiting for a response from the customer,

Cancelled : the lead has been cancelled because the salesperson has decided that it’s not worth following up.

When a new lead has been created it’s automatically put into the open state.

You can also import a huge list of leads. That’s useful if you’ve bought a database of potential prospects and you want to load them all into the system to handle them all at the same time.

To do that you should start with a list of leads in CSV format. If your prospects are provided in another format it’s easy to convert them to the CSV format using Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc. Open the leads list using the menu CRM & SRM ‣ Sales -> Leads -> My Leads. At the bottom of the list click on the Import link. Open ERP opens a form for importing the data.

Importing leads into the system

You then define which columns are present in your CSV file in the correct order. Then select your file and click on Import. Check in the chapter about system administration, Configuration & Administration, for more information on import and export.

Tip: Various Imports

Importing and Exporting data in Open ERP is a generic function available to all resources. So you can import and export such lists as partners, sales opportunities, accounting entries, products and pricelists.

There are other methods of importing leads automatically or semi-automatically:

Using the Outlook or Thunderbird plugin to insert new leads directly from an email client after a salesperson sees promising emails,

Using the email gateway for each incoming email from a certain address (such as info@mycompany.com) creating a lead automatically from the contents of the email,

Using Open ERP’s XML-RPC web-services to connect to a form on your website.

These different methods are described in the next CRM chapter, Customer Relationship Management.

Organizing leads

To help the users organize and handle leads efficiently, Open ERP provides several menus in the CRM system that can be used depending on the needs of each:

CRM & SRM ‣ Sales ‣ Leads ‣ New Lead opens an entry form directly onto a new lead. This menu can usefully be put into your shortcuts,

CRM & SRM ‣ Sales ‣ Leads ‣ My Leads gives a list of all the leads (both open and not) which you’re linked to,

CRM & SRM ‣ Sales ‣ Leads ‣ My Leads ‣ My Current Leads gives a list of all your leads that you still need to handle (your open, draft and waiting leads),

CRM & SRM ‣ Sales ‣ Leads ‣ My Leads ‣ My Current Leads ‣ My Pending Leads gives a list of all your leads that are still waiting for a customer response. This enables you to check periodically on your work to do,

CRM & SRM ‣ Sales ‣ Leads ‣ All Leads is a list of all the leads assigned to different salespeople. This menu as those beneath it are used by managers to check on each person’s work.