Most of the modern-day CRM systems will provide you with the function to place the order in the CRM as an Out of the Box function, it’s already there, ready to be used. Actually, most CRM systems can provide you with a lot more than that, but let’s focus on the latter part of the process, the centrepiece of your customer engagement, the order.
First off, a Sales Order is the confirmation record that the Quote has been accepted by the customer and (potentially) the Purchase Order is sent from the customer which should mirror the Quote. To paint a picture of the process:
The sales order is a split document or record in the sense that it will be an Order Confirmation back to the customer as well as the order to the production/warehouse to start their process to accommodate the Sales Order.
Why do this in CRM?
There are many benefits to having this process in your CRM rather than in the ERP:
- A best practice is to keep all customer engagements in one place, the CRM. This includes the order as this is the centrepiece and the one source of truth, when it comes to the customer engagement.
- The customer experience of your company may potentially become greater by keeping your Sales Orders in the CRM together with all other customer engagements – making searching and reporting easier for all users.
- CRM is often a big investment, utilize the full potential of the system to produce more accurate reports.
- Accurate reports also include Marketing. By being able to follow up on marketing activities more accurately, for example campaigns or webinars, and place those on a specific order, adds great value to the Marketing department. This of course requires that the Marketing system is integrated with your CRM, unless you run them both on the same platform, e.g.: Microsoft’s or Salesforce’s solutions.
All of the above can of course be done by the old ways of working but would not create the clear handover from Sales to Finance. It would also require the push of data between the ERP and CRM to get accurate reports – unless you run it on and one and the same platform.
Steven Belin
Project Manager
