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Acumatica Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Suite: Modules/Workspaces

  • The Business Process​​​

    • Normally the business process of gathering leads and business accounts, and managing them to create opportunities may follow the following approaches and steps:​​

      • Going to a tradeshow, business meeting, etc, and getting a person's business card will make you go through the following main steps:​

        • Create a lead ​

        • Create a business account

        • Create an opportunity

      • Searching websites for businesses that satisfy your targeting requirements, will make you go through the following main steps:​

        • Create a business account​

        • Create a lead/contact

        • Create an opportunity

​

  • Overview 

 

The Acumatica CRM suite can accomodate both above approaches.

 

The CRM suite consists of the following modules or workspaces

  • Marketing management

    • Lead and opportunity management​

    • Marketing campaigns

  • Support management

  • Other great features that are included (no extra fee):

    • MS Outlook integration

    • Hubspot integration

    • Salesforce integration

    • ..

Each one will be described in some detail next.

​

  • Marketing management

    • Marketing management module/workspace contains the following submodules/workspaces:

      • Lead and opportunity management​

      • Marketing campaigns

​

We will discuss each submodule next. 

  • Lead and opportunity management

​​

Lead and opportunity management enables you to do the following main tasks:​​

  • Creating classes

    • Create a lead/contact classes

    • Create a business account class​es

    • Create  opportunity classes

  • Gathering leads/contacts, business accounts via:

    • Importing a CSV or Excel file that contains leads/contacts or business accounts​

    • A website form created in Acumatica, and inserted in your company website

    • MS Outlook plug in from Acumatica 

    • Acumatica mobile application

    • Integration services with for instance Salesforce, Hubspot, and other applications.

    • Manual creation in Acumatica CRM as listed just below

  • Manually creating profiles​ 

    • Assuming that we follow the first approach of gathering business cards, the sequence of steps will be as follows:​

      • Create leads/contacts

      • Create business accounts​

      • Create Opportunities

      • Create quotes

  • Assigning leads/contacts or opportunities automatically to employees or workgroups based on the lead/contact class or opportunity class in the assignment map.

    • For instance a website contact form in your eg. Urine foley cathether website section will automatically assign web leads from that form to your urine foley catheter sales people or workgroup in that region. An email can also be automatically send to those sales people. This is enabled by the lead class eg. urine foley catheter that is given to those webleads by that contact form. 

    • When a sales person signs in to Acumatica, he/she will see all his/her new leads in the CRM module/workspace. Those leads can be displayed in his/her sales dashboard.

  • Creating activities for leads/contacts, business accounts and opportunities with whom you are doing business, such as:​

    • Notes, tasks, events, ​email, note, chat, appointment, message, phone call and work item.  As you convert leads to  contacts, business accounts, and then to opportunities, and then to customers, all these activities are carried forward so that you keep a history.

  • Assigning activities to people​

    • An employee can assign an activity with a due date to another employee if he/she has access rights​

    • When an employee signs in to Acumatica, he/she will see all his/her past due activities, activities due this week, etc. This can also be displayed in his/her dashboard.

​​

The CRM flow diagram illustrates the different paths an Acumatica user can take to go from lead to customer during a sales cycle.

A short video and a long video covering all CRM features in detail will take you through the process of creating leads, business accounts and opportunities. You can click on the Full Screen icon at the right bottom of the video to have a full screen size video.

 Short video (4.5 mins, 2017)

Long video (47 mins, 2018) but really good

The video below shows also the import of leads, the assignment of leads to sales people, and the dashboard when a sales person signs in. This is an older video based on an older release of Acumatica but, the steps are the same.

  • Marketing Campaign Management

    • The marketing campaign management submodule enables you to run marketing campaigns, and takes you through the following main steps​:

      • Create a marketing campaign/list of leads/contacts​

        • A marketing list can be static or dynamic. When the list is static,  you have to manually add a new contact. When a list is dynamic, a new contact is added automatically to the list that is selected for the new contact.

      • Email campaign

        • Create an HTML email to eg. register for a newsletter, a webinar, or to join a private portal. Click on More below for details.

        • Send the HTML email to your marketing list

      • Postcard campaign​

      • Monitor the response of your marketing campaign​

The video below is actually a webinar (40 mins, 2018) but gives you a real good look at managing marketing campaigns.

You can see  it in a full screen in a new window by clicking here.

More

  • Support Management

    • The support management module enables you to do the following tasks:

      • Create a support case for a business account or customer​

        • Relate the case to a pro​ject, or convert it into a project.

    • Video â€‹ (1.5 mins, 2016)

More

MS Outlook Integration

​

The MS Outlook integration connects your MS Outlook email client software to Acumatica CRM. It is an add on to your MS Oullook email client software that enables you from an email to create a new lead in Acumatica CRM, a new case for an existing contact in Acumatica CRM and a new opportunity for an existing lead in Acumatica CRM.  Vice versa, if the lead already exists in Acumatica CRM, the add on will pull down the lead information from Acumatica CRM into MS Outlook.  

​

The video below illustrates this. If you want to see the video in full screen in a new window, click here. 

I'm a paragraph. Click here to add your own text and edit me. It's easy.

HubSpot integration

​

The HubSpot integration is used when you want very advanced prospecting features. You can combine it with MailChimp for email campaigns. 

Of course HubSpot has its own licensing fee. 

​

To learn more, click here.

SalesForce  Integration

​

The SalesForce integration is used when you have already SalesForce, and you want to keep it. Of course SalesForce has its own licensing fee. 

Putting it all together in an Inbound Marketing Program

​

Inbound Marketing is more effective than cold calling and sending out emails. To understand inbound marketing, and to implement it using the website design, SEO and Acumatica CRM tools, go through the following steps:

​

  1. What is inbound marketing?

    1. Read the Thomas.net ebook on "How Inbound Marketing Drives Growth"​

  2. How to implement it?

    1. Market research​

      1. Define market segments to be targeted based on your selection criteria. ​

      2. Prioritize the targeted market segment bases on your selection criteria, and next:

    2.  

      In Acumatica:​

      For each high priority targeted market segment, do the following:​

      1. In Acumatica CRM:

        1. Create a business account class id with attributes​

        2. Create a marketing list

        3. To add members or leads to your marketing list, do the following:

          1. Google for companies in a specific market segment​

          2. Qualify them based on your selection criteria

          3. Find the decision makers of the qualified company via LinkedIn

          4. Get the email id of those decision makers. You can use getemail.io ($60/mth) to find the email ids. Call us to help you with this!

          5. Add those companies and decision makers to your business accounts and contacts

          6. Add those decision makers to the right marketing list

        4. Create an HTML mass email for that specific market segment​

          1. Your mass email email should have links to a landing page/main website page for that segment​

            1. Create in your website, a landing/home page for each market segment. An example is https://www.intercs.com

              1. This is fully described in the Interactive Website Development webpage.  ​

            2. Each landing page should have the Acumatica CRM contact form so that when a web site visitor fills in the form, the contact information is automatically entered in the Acumatica database, and an email notification is sent to eg. your marketing department. Examples of contact forms are shown here.

        5. Send out the mass email

    3. In social media

      1. To attract more visitors, you also need to do the following:

        1. Create a post for each market segment in your LinkedIn and Twitter​ company page

          1. Of course, you need to invite those decision makers to your LinkedIn and Twitter page​

          2. The posting should refer to your landing page of your particular market segment

        2. Create blog posts in your website blog sections, and refer to it in LinkedIn and Twitter posts

Alternative Lead Generation Tools for Inbound Marketing

​

Besides the simple approach with Google, Linkedin and GetEmail,io there are more advanced tools that can be used to generate leads and to contact them. You can use zoominfo.com or seamless.ai and/or Hubspot with Chimpmail. See here for more details.

New CRM Features with Acumatica 2020R2 version

​

The following CRM features are new in the Acumatica 202R2 version:

  • The Business Account lists the primary contact in the main business account form so that you don't have to do two clicks anymore to find it

  • You can specify for a particular customer the recipients of a notification template such as a Sales Order email notification, a shipment email notification, etc..

The video (10 mins, 6/2020) below explains those new features. Thanks to Cloud9ERP for creating this video.

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