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  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
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Author Topic: CiviCRM for Business- sales team integration  (Read 5592 times)

keith

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CiviCRM for Business- sales team integration
April 17, 2012, 11:50:49 pm
Hi
Was wondering of the use of civicrm in a business application for companies?
Want to use it for a sales team to track leads as well as give anyone in the company the ability to enter data about the customers that contact the company.


Anyone have any projects that are more like this vs the usual applicability outlined on the main page of civicrm?

Thank you

Keith

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Re: CiviCRM for Business- sales team integration
April 18, 2012, 03:03:52 am
Hi Keith,

CiviCRM does not support things like leads in the generic setup. In general CiviCRM focuses more on individuals/organizations and relations between the two. Obviously you can create relations and activities to reflect leads and commercial relations. There are alternative CRM's that are more often used in commercial situation, Vtiger and SugarCRM are more or less open source too :-)
Basically, I am saying 'yes you can' but there might be more suited solutions? I would certainly recommend investigating and comparing....but perhaps you have already done that :-)
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Re: CiviCRM for Business- sales team integration
June 10, 2012, 06:22:41 pm
Hi Keith-
I've been the vTiger and SugarCRM route- only to find that the UI/UX is horrible for both.
Neither handles basic email campaign functionality as easy as CiviCRM.
I'm thinking of trying to either adapt CiviCRM into a business CRM by using contacts as what the others call "leads" or "Contacts" (which is a screwed up nomenclature- a person is a person- the difference between these is really just a status) and using organizations as "accounts"- collections of "leads and contacts"
I'm not sure the pipeline is critical to me- as much as building workflows- to make sure I stay in touch.
I think CiviCRM 4.1 is way ahead of either vTiger or Sugar.
The other option is to look into building a new module- much like CiviCase or CiviCanvas that will handle business functionality.
I wonder how much we'd need for a Make it Happen Campaign to do it.
There are a ton of really bad crm systems out there- and a bunch of really expensive ones too-
Sugar and vTiger split at version 4- and that code base is a mess.
There is a ruby app- FatFreeCRM  that looked a lot like highrise- but, it, alas doesn't have an import function- or an email campaign function.

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Re: CiviCRM for Business- sales team integration
June 11, 2012, 12:44:55 am
Hi,

You might want to look at CiviCampaign, that could be used for a commercial campaign as well.

With the existing components & customisations options (custom fields, reports...) it is probably not that difficult to use civi for a business CRM. This being said, the focus is still the Not for Profit world.

Let us know what you think is missing feature wise for a business CRM.

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  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
  • Old sections (read-only, deprecated) »
  • General Discussion (please no support requests here!) (Moderator: Michał Mach) »
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