What comes ready to use 

There is no shortage of customer relationship management (CRM) software available out there. A CRM’s out-of-the-box capabilities are often where you can begin to draw differences in determining which one best meets your business needs. Some are free and others of course are not.

In this post we are going to take a look at the out-the-box capabilities of a relatively popular and free CRM, HubSpot CRM along with the Infor CRM system. Previously we wrote about Comparing Infor CRM to HubSpot CRM + Sales Pro.  

Before having to worry about add-ons and upgrades, it’s important to not only know what you’re going to get from the start but also where you can get the most for your investment. It also helps you to determine what you don’t need because there’s no need to add unnecessary complexity.

#8 of our 18 requirements for business success with CRM states "First, Use as Much Out-of-Box Functionality as You Can"

A well-used CRM should provide a list view that shows key summary information about each business account or contact within your customer or prospects.

Yes Infor CRM has group lists that can be easily used and enhanced with the powerful use of filters but I find that many CRM users are unaware of the Summary view of Group lists.

"All Accounts" group List view

If a detail record is chosen use the 'hamburger' icon  to show a listing, spreadsheet type view.

Each entity in Infor CRM:  Accounts, Contacts,  Tickets, or Opportunities and even custom entities have a summary list view.   It is a simple matter to clicking on "Summary" or "List" to see one of the other view

Each Infor CRM user can enhance their use of Microsoft Outlook Address book contacts when linking to the Infor CRM contacts.  This article covers using the Address book, scheduling an appointment and some recent enhancements.  For more visit, What's new with Infor CRM, mobile and Xbar in 2017.

Using Infor CRM Address Book in Outlook

One of the capabilities of the Infor Xbar implementation is the use of the Infor CRM address book.  This is configured by clicking on Options gear icon under the Infor CRM Connector options panel from the Outlook menu bar.

Then from the Address tab the user can determine how to show contact names- either by first name or last name order.  Next select what do you want to show when the Address book is accessed in Outlook.  In the following example, it is set to show the Infor CRM Groups as separate folders and Show Accounts as Distribution lists.  

For a salesperson, you'd  want to show Leads and maybe show opportunities as distribution lists.  For a CSR in customer support the "Show Tickets" would be helpful.  Optionally you can have the address book also display the CRM users.

The main Infor CRM software product has new updates every two months and here are the latest updates for 2017 as of March with Update 06. Also released where updates to the Infor mobile client and the Microsoft Outlook Integration and Infor Xbar panel.

View "What's new and useful in version 8.3" here

View "What has changes in version 8.2"

Highlights include performance improvements such as the new Favorites for groups and in exporting lists of records. There are updates to Xbar with Outlook Integration, including drag and drop functionality for all browsers and not just Microsoft IE. Finally, with every release Infor corrects open issues and defects from prior versions.

Choosing the right customer relationship management (CRM) system can be overwhelming and time consuming. Questions must be answered about the needs of your business as well as the CRM features and functions needed to fulfill them. But as important as it is to answer these questions, an equally important question to answer is are you choosing a CRM partner that has genuine concern for your business.     

Will they be involved and accessible at every stage of your CRM experience? Will they provide users the proper CRM training? Will they offer ongoing CRM support after implementation? 

Having a partner that can answer ‘yes’ to each of these questions not only guarantees a successful CRM experience, but it ensures that you can both meet your business needs and improve customer relationship engagement. 

Let’s dig a little deeper.

As we discussed in "5 Ways to Avoid the Pains of Being Orphaned..." post, there are several ways to avoid being orphaned by your CRM provider. But it’s important to know why this even happens in the first place on the side of the software vendor or implementing partner.

Four key reasons

From our years of experience, we have found four common reasons why vendors have dropped the ball and been unable to support their client-partners resulting in them being orphaned. 

• Disconnect between sales and implementation.

  There is little or no transfer of information gathered by the sales person during the selling process. As a result, there isn’t any information to be passed that was passed on to the implementation team. This is often a result of a vendor lacking defined procedures and workflow, which is a recipe for poor communication between these departments. When a sales person is focused on closing a sale and moving on to the next prospect, they can forget about what implementation needs to get the client started off properly.

  And on the other end, implementation is tasked with getting the information they need, and in some case just move forward with limited information. At the end, it’s the client that suffers the most when their CRM system implementation is mishandled, their support is unavailable, and solutions are not readily available.

Every day brings us new challenges in our jobs, but we don't need our Infor CRM system to be one of them. We 'Just need it to work'!

I know that's what you are thinking - loudly- in your head. Your in the Infor CRM system every day, updating records, looking up key information about a contact, analyzing and segmenting data, but when that moment comes that stops you from getting this information... Ugh!

These common issues, error messages or incorrect data displaying are a HUGE part of CRM user frustrations. This quickly leads to a high cost for companies over a short amount of time without preventive user awareness.

So you want faster performance?

This latest version became available April 2016 and can be obtained from your account on the Infor CRM Xtreme portal. Also contact your Infor CRM partner before installing.  Review the Client Guides and Installation Guide PDFs shown in the right middle panel.

Most useful for all users:

Previously in this series of 12 Tips to be more Effective using Infor CRM we have delved into:

1. Setting up your default options to work the way you want to work. Do this once to make life easier.

2. Using Groups - segmenting all types of information into intelligent bit-sized, digestible pieces of information.

Today let's look at Filters which is a rather unique feature only of Infor CRM and which works hand in hand with Groups.  Filters are used to group records and be used to filter records in list views and to configure Dashboard widgets.  Use filters to narrow the list of records you want to view from any given group like My Accounts or My Open Opportunities.

Previously we covered  how to setup the various user defaults  so that your work can be performed consistently and you are more efficient in looking up information using Infor CRM.

Today we are covering the next key areas that can improve you effectiveness in using CRM - groups.

Groups- segmenting all types of information into intelligent bit-size, digestible pieces of information.

What are Groups:

Groups are collections of records which can help manage your workflow in more manageable ways. You can use groups to work with a subset of records, select data to print on reports, and to send mailing, e-mails and faxes using Mail Merge feature. A record can be in more than one group.  Additionally you can export group records to Excel and share your groups with other users.