Net at Work and Sage Working Together on Sage CRM

I am recently back from Dublin working with the Sage Ireland  team that are responsible for creating, developing and supporting our flagship CRM product, Sage CRM.  As the chairman of the Sage CRM Business Partner Advisory Council for North America I get to spend time with all of the various constituencies that we work with throughout the year to give them input on all aspects of the Sage CRM business here in the USA and Canada.

For someone in the CRM business this is probably the equivalent of a child being invited to visit a toy factory right before the holidays.  During my week there we spent time reviewing the current state of the Sage CRM product and we also took a look at what our customers are doing with the product.  We also get to spend time discussing what our customers would like to see from both a standalone and an integrated perspective.  While there are some things that I can’t divulge based on our agreement with Sage I did want to write a post and let people know in general terms what Sage is spending their time on and what they intend to deliver in the coming months.

Mapping Option
Mapping is one of the newest features has recently been released and is available in the Sage CRM Community today.  The new Mapping option in Sage CRM is a very creative way for people that are in the field to get an understanding of their prospects and customers from a map and then be able to integrate other points of data from within CRM that make life easier for people to accomplish their sales or customer service responsibilities while in the field.  This is really interesting in the fact that there continues to be a drive for what people can do from an anytime, anywhere perspective as mobile technologies continue to become more and more important to our customers.

Codeless Customization
Another update that we have been anticipating is the development of a new codeless customization tool that will first be released for Sage CRM cloud customers and then eventually rolled into the on premise product.  We see this development as another key feature set that will be important for small and medium size companies that choose to run CRM in the cloud and still want the personalization of customizations that adapt the product to their individual processes or database needs.  We should see these features in the next six months.

ERP Integration
When it comes to integrations there is lots going on with the CRM team as they are embarking on more and more capabilities for customers that run ERP products from Sage and these efforts include everything from mobile access for financial information to order processing capabilities from tablet devices.  There is too much to get into on any specific ERP product but you can anticipate that with each release of these various ERP products the CRM integration will continue to provide robust capabilities.  The one twist is that Sage is working on integration to Sage North American ERP products not only on premise but also with cloud CRM.

Collaboration
Collaboration has also hit the development radar and will soon be available for the core Sage CRM product (probably in the 8.0 release).  These tools and features will give users that ability to interact with each other and follow certain deals or communicate better between sales and service or sales and marketing.  Other CRM products have begun to offer these features and Sage is staying in line with the evolution of the CRM market place in this area.

User Experience
Finally, Sage is working on enhancing the user experience and there are lots of ideas and new ways that the Sage CRM product performs from a look and feel perspective.  Sage was unclear about exactly when they will make the switch to the new interface but the concepts we reviewed were amazing and we can’t wait until we bring those options to our current and future customers.

Overall, the weeklong meetings were very impressive and we continue to have a very strong relationship with Sage on the CRM front.  Stay tuned for my next post that will come after the Sage SalesLogix bootcamp the first week of November where we will update you on what is happening with the highly anticipated release of SalesLogix 8.0 in the next few weeks.

If you want more details on anything CRM related from Sage feel free to drop us a line or ask your Net at Work contacts to schedule a meeting to review.