SFA Brochure

SFA  delivers essential contact information across your enterprise

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Verticent® offers the first enterprise application software solution, Verticent ERP, that integrates Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications for manufacturing, distribution and financials with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications for customer support and sales force automation. Verticent ERP is an e-enabled software suite that extends communications across your entire organization and throughout your virtual value chain.

The Verticent CRM Solution
Unique to the Verticent solution is a long­standing commitment to CRM. From day one, all Verticent products were designed to incorporate functionality that improves customer communications at every point across the enterprise. CRM has been a consistent vein during the development and evolution of Verticent products, and now SFA ™ and Support ™ showcase our CRM commitment.

SFA and Support comprise Verticent's CRM solution by offering contact management, opportunity management, time management, marketing automation, customer service and more. Together, these CRM modules deliver the solutions you need to boost corporate sales and improve overall levels of customer satisfaction.

SFA and Support offer all of the functionality of a best-of-breed CRM solution - while integrating seamlessly with the Verticent ERP software suite. They also complete Verticent's end-to-end system to enable information flow from marketing, sales and service to critical back-office operations such as manufacturing, distribution and financials.

SFA
When it comes to making every sales call count - SFA is your best solution. SFA delivers critical customer contact information to the right person at the right time. With SFA delivering valuable information, your sales team boosts productivity, eliminates extra paperwork, improves order accuracy and - most importantly - enhances communications with current and potential customers.

Contact Management
Contact management within SFA enables you to efficiently manage customer contacts by recording and tracking all contact data, creating comprehensive contact profiles and targeting quality sales opportunities.

Capturing Data and Creating Profiles
When it comes to capturing and organizing contact information, flexibility is imperative. In SFA, unlimited user-defined fields are available for extra contact profile information. You also can attach Notes or document files - such as word processor or spreadsheet items - to customer profiles to expand contact data details.

From an established database of contact profiles, you instantly gain access to contact histories. This functionality is critical in understanding and viewing activities for each customer by date, status, contact name or subject.

These fields also offer drill-down capabilities to more details such as participants, location, subject and upcoming activities.

All contact profiles also are viewable by account type - such as vendor, dealer, partner or competitor. An intuitive tree view reveals relationships among company entities, and you can view customer service cases via the account activity list.

Targeting Sales Opportunities
SFA offers the powerful Opportunity Workbench and Quote Workbench as intuitive graphical mechanisms for managing opportunities and quotes with accurate, shared information about accounts, contacts, interests and historical activities.

SFA also enables your sales force to easily define sales territories and to generate informative reports. Aligning territories has never been easier. Management-level sales personnel can assign sales groups within a group hierarchy by dragging and dropping items within that specific hierarchy. Assignment levels can be based on different parameters such as SIC, employee, revenue, zip code, and more.

SFA also supports geographic or named accounts - and you can even allow software security privileges (such as create/view/full) by user or region. Lead tracking functionality in SFA enables you to automatically track leads based on territories, while the Lead Pass feature also allows you to track the source, product, priority, etc. of each lead activity.

And your sales staff is notified of leads via activity alarms. When the sales team has been notified and opportunities are in motion, it's important to have access to lead activity reports. You can verify sales activity by accessing standard reports organized by begin-date, end-date, user, sales group or company.

SFA also performs sales cycle analysis of sales group, sales rep or current user, and instant queries deliver summary reports of sales pipeline items - which are represented graphically in different bar graphs or pie charts.

These reports offer drill-down functionality to deliver detailed information on sale status and results.

Communication is Critical
With all the new information gathered and generated by SFA, communication between sales personnel and the rest of the enterprise becomes more effective and efficient.

SFA delivers enhanced sales information to all employees - helping open the lines of corporate communications. SFA seamlessly integrates with third-party email, fax or modem applications to transmit customer-centric documents. It also enables other convenient communication functions such as sales call planning, recording and reporting.

Sales call planning within SFA allows you to setup call activities during which users indicate priority levels, dates, times, status, subject, etc. for specific conversations. During the call it's easy to capture vital data - such as who, what, where, when and why - via activity detail fields. And to access and analyze the captured call data, call reporting features deliver Activity and Full-Profile reports.

Activity Access
Activity management capabilities enable your entire sales force to track and enter opportunity­specific, account-specific, contact-specific or personal activities - including meetings, phone calls, events, etc. In SFA, events are completely user-defined via online tables.

SFA activity management functions also allow you to track open and completed activities by company and to view list of activities by date, status, type, contact owner and subject.

Drill­down functionality delivers greater activity detail. You also can access standard activity reports via specific parameters including begin-date, end­date, user, sales group, company, etc.

Calendar Control
Timing is everything. And SFA allows you to schedule and manage appointments according to a personal calendar with daily, weekly or monthly views. You also can easily synchronize SFA with Microsoft Outlook™.

On your SFA calendar, you can easily customize different views by dragging and dropping appointments between them. You also have access to a handy To-Do List featuring chronological views that display color-coded and dated items to indicate status and history. The To-Do List in SFA is a powerful sales tool. It does more than highlight events - it enables you to access a detailed list of all your activities in a browse format that readily displays planned date, subject and contact information. To-Do List icons even graphically illustrate the type of scheduled activity. And just in case you forget a project, you can set alarms to remind you.

SFA allows you to select alarm parameters such as time, date and priority - and certain alarm fields integrate seamlessly with the third-party daily-planning applications for additional scheduling and alarm functionality.

Marketing Management
When perception is reality - and your marketing and sales teams are communicating effectively - you enhance your bottom line. SFA marketing management functionality allows marketing professionals to define and execute promotional campaigns that generate quality leads for your sales force.

These marketing capabilities allow you to define campaign steps, descriptions, events, costs, instructions and more. An important initial step in campaign development and execution involves tracking and understanding competitor initiatives.

You can easily establish competitor accounts to hold strategic information and news items. With the SFA optional module Smart Encyclopedia™, you can institute total competitor tracking - including automated Web site monitoring and notification.

Marketing management in SFA also includes an automated literature fulfillment queue that allows users to mail, fax or email requested information to their contacts. It even simplifies customer correspondence. Automated letter generation allows users to merge sales letters to word processor templates where they can preview, print, fax or email their responses to customers. Labels are easy to print, too - with SFA, users have direct access to label and envelope templates in third-party word processing applications.

Telemarketing is another critical lead-generating function - and SFA enables lead generation and qualification with powerful call scripting capabilities. It's also easy to enhance telesales call scripts - users simply can drag and drop questions to change scripts to meet different scenarios. SFA also facilitates automatic lead distribution to appropriate sales reps or business partners.

With SFA marketing management - you can make positive corporate perception a reality.

Technology
When integrated, SFA and Support comprise the Verticent CRM solution. Also, back-office integration with Verticent ERP modules - Manufacturing, Distribution and Financials - gives you a comprehensive enterprise application software solution developed on one common technology platform with a consistent user interface.

To reduce maintenance costs and total cost of ownership, SFA operates on thin clients running Citrix MetaFrame™. Response times are fast, and MIS managers like the Citrix capability because it allows them to deploy SFA without having to store source-code on PCs. That means upgrades and patches need only be made on a single Citrix MetaFrame server rather than individual PCs - and that's a very powerful advantage for your MIS department.

To ensure data is current between corporate and remote databases, SFA also features an integrated data synchronization window. Sync enables easy data synchronization in SFA and provides a summary report when data is exchanged between corporate and remote databases.

And since Sync users directly initiate synchronization, no additional IT staff are required to configure and maintain the sync process. Sync also implements a "Last Update Wins" business rule to resolve any data conflicts.

Sync dramatically improves the performance, ease of use, administration and on-going maintenance of the data replication capabilities within SFA.

The SFA technical environment features: 

• Open systems, object-oriented, client/server architecture built on a PowerBuilder™ platform
• Database compatibility with Sybase™, Microsoft SQL Server™ and SQL Anywhere™
• Client compatibility with Microsoft Windows 2000/XP/2007®, Windows 2007 Terminal Server® or Web browser

 

About
Verticent Verticent provides Integrated Enterprise Response to companies around the globe. Featuring fully integrated enterprise application solutions with innovative e-commerce capabilities, the Verticent ERP software suite enables companies to completely integrate the management of front-office and back-office operations.

With Integrated Enterprise Response, companies extend their enterprise operations across the virtual supply chain and successfully respond to customers, suppliers, partners and employees around the world.

The Verticent ERP software suite is comprised of Manufacturing, Distribution, Financials, SFA and Support - developed on one common technology platform, by one provider, to deliver seamless integration and enhanced functionality.

Verticent ERP, Manufacturing, Distribution, Financials, SFAand Support are registered trademarks of Verticent Corporation. All other products or company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

 

• If you would like more information about how Verticent Solutions can help your business, contact us today.