An Alternative Use of OpenCRM

23 Feb 2017

Every business has a reason to have a CRM solution. It doesn’t mean that every company will have one or that every company will use them in the same way. Often, different people in the same company will use their CRM differently because they have different reasons for needing one.

This means that every CRM solution out there needs to be flexible enough to meet a wide variety of business needs, some simple and others complex.

Over the last 12 years, we’ve found that although many of our customers will all use the same core modules (Contacts, Companies, Activities, HelpDesk, etc.), they all use them in slightly different ways. In some cases, it’s the simple renaming of modules and/or fields to better fit with their processes. In others, a whole host of new custom fields are added to capture the most vital information to their business.

And then there are the rare ones where a business wants to use the functionality of a particular module, but in a completely new and different way.

I’ll give you an example.

Not that long ago, we had a customer with a very particular way of managing their ongoing prospecting. They would have a number of complex negotiations and specifications relating to an individual business opportunity.

We originally suggested linking together several different sub-Opportunities to a master Opportunity to manage this. But it didn’t really work for them, they really needed these sub-negotiations held separately, with a whole different process and a large number of custom fields.

So instead of creating different types of Opportunities, we worked closely with them to transform the Quotes module to work as the separate technical specifications of each Opportunity.

Because of the flexibility and customisation options we have available, they were able to add all the necessary fields and organise these on the page themselves, really just using their project manager here as an advisor in order to cut their costs. We simply renamed the module from Quotes to “Specs” to match up with their existing process names.

The ability to use and send out PDF templates associated with each Quote gave them a certain level of autonomy with each technical specification the deal. As they were all linked to a single Opportunity, though, it was easy for the sales person in charge to get a quick overview of how the deal was progressing.

Now, you can see how these method of planning a particular business opportunity would not work for every company and isn’t really the “standard” method. But it was exactly what our customer needed, giving them a separate place to view the more technical details outside of the actual sales information.

By keeping these aspect of their business within the same CRM as their support ticketing, their marketing campaigning, and their general account management gave them exactly what they needed from a CRM solution.