Tag Archives: featured

Sage CRM Breaking Sales Records

Demand for Sage CRM seemed to have gone haywire in 2020. Globally, sales of Sage CRM was up 26%, but in North America specifically, the uptick in new sites was >83%.  

Why all of the sudden?  Likely a combination of factors including:

  1. The GUMU™ for Sage 100 CRM (Advanced integration) certainly helped
  2. Sage NA did make an effort to talk more about Sage CRM to their channels last year
  3. COVID was cause for many business owners to re-tool their systems, and come up with practical solutions to connect remote staff
  4. IMO many companies are actively seeking alternatives to SFDC  

Regardless of the reasons for this massive swing, it is great news for the Sage community and only a sign of things to come.  

Sage CRM Crushing it

Editable Grids

If you have ever wanted to edit the values in a Sage CRM list quickly, then this is the solution for you.  

Editable Grids allows you to edit the values displaying on a list without having to open each and every record. It is an amazing time-saving feature. 

Once clients have the Editable Grids solution, they can use it in as many different parts of their Sage CRM instance as they wish.

Case Workflow

We have always been very focused on Sage CRM’s workflow engine.  It seems once clients start using this tool, they can’t get enough.  

We have created a new page on our site to host various examples of workflow in play to help companies wrap their head around the feature.  Over time, we will have more and more examples.

The video below is a good example of a workflow but serves another purpose.  Since it is a workflow of our internal case management process, it also helps the viewer understand how we work.

Planning for Sage CRM

You definitely don’t want to be underprepared as you move into a CRM initiative.  We have a video (below) we use to help people wrap their heads around how these projects should go down. It covers the highlights such as:

  • Outlines the sequence of steps to move forward
  • Gives you a good idea of a timeline
  • Defines the key resources you will need to be successful

GUMU™ Sage 100 CRM updates

Greytrix’s Sage 100 to CRM integration (aka GUMU™) continues to rapidly add tangible improvements.  Recent enhancements include:

  • From the Inventory look up feature, users can drill into an item to see where, when, and to whom a product was either quoted on or sold
  • New graphical representation of a customer’s buying history available from the company summary screen as well as from the Accelerator interface
  • Several enhancements to the Order Processing system including performance enhancements, as well as the ability to check inventory quantities mid-quote across multiple warehouses

Opportunity Workflow Example

This is the first video in our ‘Workflow Examples’ series. In this example of an opportunity workflow, see some of the basic principles of Sage CRM’s workflow engine. 

This example shows:

  • Information messages that change depending on where the user is in the cycle
  • Conditions that force the user to attach specific documents before they can advance their opportunity
  • Automatic emails that can go out (or not) depending on the values selected 

Over the coming months, I will provide more examples on the Process Controls page of the My CRM Manager website.

Sage 300 CRM

The Sage 300 integration with Sage CRM leverages Sage 300’s native ‘web-screens’.  This is awesome because it provides CRM users will access to an incredible amount of Sage 300 functionality.  Creating and viewing orders, viewing inventory, Looking up credit history, etc.  It even includes vendor integration.

Important –

  1. Sage CRM users do not require a license for Sage 300 when they access Sage 300 via Sage CRM.
  2. Sage CRM licenses are approximately 1/3 of the price of Sage 300 licenses. 

This integration is one of the few integrations to CRM published by Sage themselves.  That makes the integration free AND supported by the Sage support desk. A complete breakdown of this integration is found on this page on the My CRM Manager website. 

Be aware that we do offer evaluation packages for Sage 300 clients (aka Pilot Package).

Sage 50 CRM

The Sage 50 integration to Sage CRM is perfect for account managers that need visibility into transaction history – without asking the accounting department. 

With this integration, from the company summary screen, you can see relevant key statistics such as YTD and LTD values.  Additionally, the Quote, Order, and History tabs show you Sage 50 history.  

These tabs show you transaction history, and you can even dive in to see line item level information (image below)

Sage 50 Invoice Record

This 1-way read-only integration refreshes Sage CRM every night with the latest Sage 50 transactions.  The full write up on the My CRM Manager site is found on this page.

Google Maps integration

5/5

This solution has justifiably warranted a 4-star rating from me.  Not only does this integration make it easy to plot your data, but it is also just as easy (2 clicks) to add new companies to your Sage CRM instance.

I have seen a variety of mapping solutions for Sage CRM, including several that use Google Maps, but this one is clearly the best.  Please do watch the video below.  

I see this solution being popular for clients with over 10-users (due to the cost).  It is one of those things that, once you see it, you can’t unsee it.   The full outline is provided on this page of the My CRM Manager site.

Using Identifiers within Sage CRM

By default, Sage provides a description field when entering a job (Case) or opportunity.  However, that description field is a free text field.  So users could type in whatever they want — i.e. ‘big opportunity’.  

Instead of using that free text field, we strongly recommend clients define a consistent in the naming schema that CRM automatically manages those description fields.  To this end, our ID Generator utility allows you to create a consistent naming convention for data created in Sage CRM. This could be applied to anything within Sage CRM, Cases, Leads, Opportunities, or otherwise.

In this video example below, we are using a format of YY + Number for the opportunity + Company + Creation date of the opportunity, but keep in mind that it can be whatever you want, this was just an example.