FeatureRequest: Automation of Tasks

[JamieinNH]

I currently run ACT! and have a program installed beside ACT! that help automate a lot of the routine tasks and emails.

The link to more information about the program can be found here: http://www.nwoods.com/act/sam.htm

Their description from their website is:

ACT! is a great contact manager, but it does not include the sophisticated ability to automate sales tasks, which is found in high end CRM systems. While ACT! allows users to schedule meetings, tasks, calls, To Do's, etc., ACT! requires sales people to schedule these activities manually, and also figure out what each next follow up activity is. A salesperson must essentially be perfect, and spend considerable time to manually interact with the ACT! database to schedule follow up actions. As a result, even the most diligent salesperson often has the feeling that they aren't doing adequate follow up, or that they are spending too much time managing lower priority prospects when they should be contacting higher priority customers.

SAM solves this problem by allowing you to define and automate your standard sales processes. In SAM, these processes are called Campaigns. SAM lets you define any number of Campaigns. By allowing you to automate your sales processes and eliminate the drudgery of scheduling and mail merging, SAM frees up your valuable time to spend on the truly important selling tasks of personally connecting with your prospects and customers!


Can anyone tell me if there are plans to put anything like this into SugarCRM? either the opernsource version, of paid version? Or a separate module that could be bought? I have been using SugarCRM for a little while now, and although it's a great start, it's lacking the automation my sales people need. With ACT! and SAM running, they are able to focus on other important things other than sending out emails to keep in touch with the clients, or scheduling a call after someone vists our website.

Thanks for any information concerning this improvement!

Jamie

[JamieinNH]

I am wondering if this is a feature that the SugarTeam will plan to add to their program in the future? I have used ACT! with SAM and it's a great way to automate the daily tasks of a salesman..

Thanks for any informationb regarding this feature.

Jamie

I currently run ACT! and have a program installed beside ACT! that help automate a lot of the routine tasks and emails.

The link to more information about the program can be found here: http://www.nwoods.com/act/sam.htm

Their description from their website is:

ACT! is a great contact manager, but it does not include the sophisticated ability to automate sales tasks, which is found in high end CRM systems. While ACT! allows users to schedule meetings, tasks, calls, To Do's, etc., ACT! requires sales people to schedule these activities manually, and also figure out what each next follow up activity is. A salesperson must essentially be perfect, and spend considerable time to manually interact with the ACT! database to schedule follow up actions. As a result, even the most diligent salesperson often has the feeling that they aren't doing adequate follow up, or that they are spending too much time managing lower priority prospects when they should be contacting higher priority customers.

SAM solves this problem by allowing you to define and automate your standard sales processes. In SAM, these processes are called Campaigns. SAM lets you define any number of Campaigns. By allowing you to automate your sales processes and eliminate the drudgery of scheduling and mail merging, SAM frees up your valuable time to spend on the truly important selling tasks of personally connecting with your prospects and customers!


Can anyone tell me if there are plans to put anything like this into SugarCRM? either the opernsource version, of paid version? Or a separate module that could be bought? I have been using SugarCRM for a little while now, and although it's a great start, it's lacking the automation my sales people need. With ACT! and SAM running, they are able to focus on other important things other than sending out emails to keep in touch with the clients, or scheduling a call after someone vists our website.

Thanks for any information concerning this improvement!

Jamie

[daveb]

I agree with the campaign part. We would like to be able to note that we have sent an email (using other tools), to multiple contacts as part of a campaign, and have it update the activities area for every contact...

[JamieinNH]

Can the good folks at SugarTeam please look over this thread and respond. Even if it's a no, we can't or won't build this in.

This is something I need, and if you're not, or can't provide it, or won't even look into it, then I need to look into hiring someone to get this done for me.

Thanks for your time,

Jamie

[lmewshaw]

Jamie
I like the idea of having the sales process mapped out in the tool. I think it could be further enhanced by using that to drive the sales forecast. Using this approach, the sales person identifies where in the process the contact is, then the tool figures out based on that point in the process how far out to forecast the revenue. Too many times I've seen stale forecasted close dates associated with an opportunity. I'd rather see an opportunity get created with a predefined set of tasks, documents, activities, etc, then as those are completed, update the forecast according to how the administrator has defined it should be handled. For example, if a quote has been given to the customer and each quote has printed on it "this quote is good for 30 days" (a template in the documents folder), then the sales person sends the quote to customer (completes the activity, logs the email, etc), then the forecast should includeit at the admin defined % at 30 days out.

Activities could be skipped by the sales person by completing later phase stuff. Ideally these dependencies would allow for one task to kill the backflow tasks. For example, if I complete the sales quote like described above, and I haven't tagged the "discuss budgetary pricing" activity, the quote should trump that activity and mark its status as "NA" or something along those lines.

Maybe it's how I have it setup, but I'm not seeing how the current tool has a knowledge of the sales process flow even from basic level. By that I mean for example you can't sort opportunities by stage in the pipeline. You can, but it sorts them alphabetically I think. That's not necessarily the actual order of the stages. I don't think that you can easily say view only ones that are past a certain point in the sales flow (like show me all that are in the sales quote or later phase of the sales process).

Keep the ideas coming. The Sugar team and independents like MrMilk are working on these sorts of things I'm sure as we speak.

Lee

[JamieinNH]

Can anyone in the SugarTeam tell me if this Feature has been considered?

If not, can you tell me why, because if you say no, then my next question would be how hard would it be to hire someone program this for me.

If it is coming, can you tell me what features it might have and a timeframe of it coming?


Thanks!
Jamie

[andydreisch]

Hi everybody. The Sugar team is actively engaged in a detailed design process regarding workflow automation. We consider this an extremely important functional aspect to pursue and we recognize the value of workflow automation, as the earlier posts here indicate. Thanks, everybody, for your valuable input.

Below is what we have in mind from a top-level perspective on the types of module/event/action combinations of particular interest. By no means is this an exhaustive list, and the capability we're considering will allow considerable flexibility in the specifications (from an admin perspective), allowing many more workflow possibilities than we can list here. Some of the capabilities, like the Lead examples, will likely be intrinsic capabilities of other functions, like Territory Assignment.

It is important to note that Sugar has not decided on how and when this capability will be delivered.

==============

Opportunity / Sales Stage
-- If Sales Stage in [X, Y, Z] send email to Mgr; archive change as History item*
-- If Sales Stage in [X, Y, Z] create Project** with N tasks

Opportunity / Amount
-- If becomes > X (may indirectly change via a Quote), send email to Mgr; archive as History item
-- If becomes < X, send email to Mgr; archive as History item

(Various) / Team
-- Send email to former Mgr; send email to current Mgr; archive change as History

(Various) / Assigned To
-- Send email to former Assigned To; send email to current Assigned To***; archive change as History

Project Task / Status
-- If ‘Completed’ and bound to Opportunity, advance Opp Sales Stage to X

Lead / (Various)
-- If Lead Source in [X, Y, Z] set Team to X
-- If State in [A, B, C] set Team to Y
-- If Zip in [A, B, C] set Team to Y

Case / Status
-- If unchanged for X timeframe, send alert to Assigned-

=============

As always, we value your input. Please feel free to comment on these examples.

Andy

[cap2065]

Good comments!

We would like to have the ability to place leads, contacts and accounts in categories and then schedule activities pertaining to them based on values we have set for each category. These activities could be phone, email, direct contact, regardless. In this respect this feature would be different than a campaign. It would be nice for the categories to have a feature which would be rule based - such as the last post, if xzy < adb then zzzz else dddd in which field values from the database could be referenced and events automatically generated. By scheduling events for employees to perform and by generating and sending the emails in an automated process, we get a smoother, more effective process. In particular, if we could have a "Message" library which contained email and phone message templates which could then be completed during the phone contact.

Thanks!

[siersema]

Sounds a lot like an autoresponder. Would be nice to look through the text of an email response and send out automated email messages based upon what is found in the text.

[jkliza]

Any update as to the status of the implementation of any automation of tasks?