I recall having some great conversations with the Carson's.....Sullivan's.....et al about how a real activity should be structured....circa 1997-2001.
We still need the following in 2010:
An address/location/location type and link to directions on where a meeting is going to be held.
Many meetings have ContactS at them, need a list of attendees\roles.....
Sales Calls are often about a 'sub' Account....you call on Wal-Mart or Home Depot and talk specifically about a store opening that isn't the HQ Account.
You often bring product samples to a meeting (productID, quantity, lot # and expiration date).
Literature pieces......
Sub Activities (the check list of items to discuss that themselves may need follow up/another meeting/someone else's involvement)....
you get the idea.....
Infor CRM manages activities and historical account data very well. The ability now to record activities against multiple participants and the roles they play in the activity is very much a welcome move.
That being said, the ability to report on completed activities leaves much to be desired. Some semblance of old reports do exist but they don't reflect a full picture and look very dated. It would be great to be able to add dashboard content that dynamically show activities completed in selectable charts.
The ability for managers to quickly and easily see how busy their department has been by how many calls and meetings are being completed would put a huge amount of power in to their hands. At present, you can look at individual accounts and even build groups to display this data. These don't go far enough though.
Common reports might be:
- Completed activities by user filtered by date range, team and department. (Monthly, weekly and daily call volumes).
- Completed activities by activity type. Consisting of a chart that displays how many phone calls, meetings and to-do activities that have taken place for a configurable selection of users over a particular time span (again, daily, weekly, monthly). The ability to add a department, team and individual users would be fantastic!
- Completed activities by entity showing a breakdown of the number of calls made against leads, opportunities and contacts. This will allow managers to see where users are concentrating their efforts. It should be filterable by user, team, department and date range.
- Completed activities by Category. A breakdown of the activity category picklist allows an organisation to quickly see what types of activity are being completed and by whom. Should be filterable by user, team, department and date range.
- Number of outstanding activities by user. Should be able to be filtered by date range, whether to only display past due, the type of entity that it is and the department or team.
If anyone else has any other ideas for fantastic reports to add, I'd love to see them.
I've been asked this on three separate occasions by different customers. Their attitude toward the ability to do this is that the software should be able to do this out of the box, that other CRM systems are capable of doing this and they're bordering on disbelief that a CRM system as advanced as Infor CRM (or SalesLogix, it's going to take a while for that one to stick!) doesn't do this currently. It's certainly a feature that's lacking.
The whole area of recuring activities has been a PITA for 13 years. One suggestion that has been made by others (and me) over the years it to take a fresh look at how they are implemented (both normal and recuring) and go to a "linked list" activity approach. This simplifies the Activity object radically and gets rid of a lot of special casing.
At the same time, make it possible to add to activity types so that an "Event" is really anActivity (type) and not a special case that's basically useless.
Make it so a user can generate a list of ToDo's that roll over and are easily converted (drag-n-drop/RMB) to another Activity type (two clicks at most) and could be then attached or linked to an existing activity
We want to hear your cool ideas for enhancing Saleslogix products and services. So add your own ideas or kudo (vote) on the ideas of others here! Watch the most valuable bubble to the top!
I have an idea! How do I get started?
One