Hello,

I am wondering about the following issue. We would like to utilize the
sales process in order to make use of the pipe line reports and to
show the management in what fase the opportunity resides. However, we
are not interested in the activities being created by the system
automatically. We are just interested in the sales phases.

Is there a way to just use the different sales stages only? So no
activities, just stages?

Any help is appreciated.

ps The installation is a professional sales, so we could use either
workflow or edit the picklist of the sales stage??

How are you planning on advancing an opportunity through the sales funnel if
you don't use associated activities? The only other way would be to manually
update a field like the "Probability" field or a custom picklist field with
your sales stages, in which case you could easily create reports and not use
any Sales Process workflow automation at all.

Matt Wittemann
http://icu-mscrm.blogspot.com

"Michiel" wrote:

Hi Matt,

Thanks for your help so far. I read your weblog by the way..looks good.
Coming bakc to my question..we are in a situation where it appears to be
impossible to determine activities /taks that need to be undertaken in order
to close a sale successfully. In other words, sometimes it can take 25
activities in fase 1 to be able to progress to fase 2. But....the pipe-line
reports are too interesting not to be used. Besides that, it's interesting
to see in which fase an opportunity resides.
What kind of workflow rule would you advise?

Thanks agina for your help
Michael

"MattNC" wrote:

Michael: One of the things I have found to be beneficial for our internal use
of CRM and for our clients is going through the exercise of defining a sales
process. If you have multiple divisions or product lines/services, this can
get a little complex. But it has been helpful to define a methodology based
on the company's overall philosophy of selling. Usually the goal is to come
up with a broad structure for the sales process/funnel. Of course, the more
broad, the less insightful are the reports.

That being said, I would recommend two things:
1) For the reporting to be meaningful, some parameters of the sales process
will need to be defined. In other words, what stage of a sale makes it 25%
likely to close, what about 50% or 75%? If you let every sales person assign
arbitrary probabilities, you will get arbitrary reports. You might consider
setting up a sales process that has just basic steps like:
A-Initial Conversation
Task: Send prospect email confirming details of conversation
Probability: 10%
B-Proposal
Task: Deliver quote for product
Probability: 20%
C-Negotiate
Task: Send letter confirming negotiated price
Probability: 50%
D-Close
Task: Send contract
Probability: 80%
E-Submit to Operations
Task: Notify project manager of new client
Probability: 98%

This would at least allow you to have more meaningful reports.

2) I would also suggest looking at c360's Forecast Manager (www.c360.com)
This is a great tool for tracking and adjusting opportunities. It allows you
to jump from one sales stage to the next (skipping associated tasks) and
change probability percentages and estimated sales figures from one place.

Good luck.
Matthew Wittemann
http://icu-mscrm.blogspot.com

"Michael" wrote:

Matt GReat Blog.
Done any work on quotes form custmizations, quotes processing, printing and
emailing?
I am at a dead end and cnoot seem to find any help at this time.

"MattNC" wrote:

I haven't done any work directly with quotes, but I have found that for most
of the CRM records, the canned printed forms are somewhat lacking in content
and visual appeal. (In addition to being unable to customize them with logos
and company letterhead type stuff.)

I ran into this problem with leads. I have a client whose salespeople wanted
to be able to print out a "Lead Card" to take on sales calls that had would
have all the most relevant info on one page. I created a report in Crystal
that showed all the lead's pertinent information on the top (basically
everything from the Lead form Information tab) and the 5 most recent
activities on the bottom, plus the rep's name, etc.

This kind of report is easy to make in Crystal, the problem is that it
creates a report for every lead in the database, and would crush the server
if I ran it. So the next thing I did was to add a parameter to the report,
then add an ISV button to the lead form that passed the lead's GUID to
Crystal. You click on the button and Crystal report viewer launches and asks
you to select a parameter (you have to have two choices, so in order to keep
people from running the whole thing I made the second choice return a blank
report). So the salesperson can leave the parameter at the default choice
without selecting, and click OK, and voila---they have a customized, easily
printed lead card.

I think this would work well for quotes too. The next problem is how to
email them, which I haven't had to try to figure out yet. That's a little
harder, because from here you would basically be trying to email a dynamic
web page. Maybe you could then use a PDF utility. Copying the report and
pasting it into Outlook or word (or a CRM email) will cause it to lose
formatting. I think I would look for a cheap or shareware PDF utility for
salespeople to use so they wouldn't have to buy a copy of Acrobat.

Well, I hope that helps. Sorry for being so long-winded.
Matt Wittemann
http://icu-mscrm.blogspot.com

"JP123" wrote:

why dont you just create a piclist with your stages and then have code
behind them in javascript update a close probability. The last step is to
simply create the reports you need. If you have access to cyrstal designer
any reports can be created in a few hours

--
John O'Donnell
Microsoft CRM MVP
http://www.microsoft.com/BusinessSol...aqLanding.aspx


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