The sales process supported by the CRM has been divided into the following steps:

You will find a more detailed description in section: The Sales Process.

Leads are the initial contact data you have collected for a prospective customer. You might collect leads from your marketing activities such as trade shows, advertisement, presentations etc. It is likely that most of your leads will not lead to a business relationship.

	Tip
	If you click [New Lead] at the Quick-Create menu, you are offered a quick entry menu for leads, but only for name, company, phone and email entries.

If you want to collect more detailed lead information, you may click the [Sales] tab at the navigation area shown in figure: Top Area. Use the plus icon to create a new lead as shown in figure: New Lead. Now you can enter any lead information you may have. Click [Save] to save your entries to the CRM system.

Use the plus icon to create a new lead as shown in figure: New Lead. Now you can enter any lead information you may have. Click [Save] to save your entries to the CRM system.

	Important
	Entry field marked by a "*" are mandatory. (It is possible to customize which fields are mandatory, for a CRM system administrator)

Figure 2.1. New Lead - Basic Information

	Tip
	If you create a lead, it will be assigned to you automatically. You may assign the lead to a different CRM user or user group by changing the content of the "Assigned To:" field to a different person or to a team.

The most efficient way to create a new account from a lead is as described at section: Creating Potentials from Leads. However, sometimes it will be necessary to enter new accounts directly. This is helpful, for instance, if you want to have competitors, private contacts or special contacts also stored in your CRM system. Since account information can contain references to contacts, it is always advisable to enter the account information first before you begin entering contact information. When you add a contact to the CRM system later, the related account information will already be available.

To create a new account, click [New Account] at the entry Quick-Create menu shown in figure: Top Area or goto [Sales] -> [Accounts] and click the plus icon. An new window will open as shown in figure: New Account - Basic Information.

Figure 2.2. New Account - Basic Information

Now you can enter the basic account information. You should only enter information which is relevant to you or to your business. Non-relevant entry fields can remain empty or should be removed by your CRM system administrator. You may also consider adding customized fields. If several users have write access to the same entry fields, make sure that you agree on a common standard for making entries.

If you want to use the Locate Map function of the CRM system in a country other than the USA, you must include the country information.

You may add further account information by clicking the [More Information] tab as shown in figure: New Account - More Information.

Figure 2.3. New Account - More Information

Important

Some entry fields refer to information already stored in the CRM system. You can see this, for instance, for the Member Of entry in figure: New Account - Basic Information. Here you cannot make a direct entry. You have to click the icon at the end of this line. Then a new window will open that displays the data already stored in the CRM system. When you make a selection this window will close automatically.

Click the [Save] button to save your data to the CRM system.

Accounts Hierarchy

If you have to keep track of a hierarchical order of accounts you may use the "Member Of" entry as shown in figure: Call Account Memberships. This is particularly useful for keeping track of a Parent company and its subsidiaries, or companies that are part of a trade organization.

Figure 2.4. Call Account Memberships

Click on More Actions -> Show Account Hierarchy to get an overview about the relationships as illustrated in figure: Display Account Hierarchy.

Figure 2.5. Display Account Hierarchy

If you want to enter contact information for individuals, please click [New Contact] at the entry Quick-Create menu or goto [Sales] -> [Contacts] and click the plus icon. A new window as shown in figure: New Contact - Basic Information will open.

Figure 2.6. New Contact - Basic Information

The offered standard fields are self-explanatory.

	Important
	A Last Name entry should be one word only if you plan to synchronize your data with Outlook. For instance, if the last name is Mc Murphy make an entry like Mc-Murphy otherwise Murphy will be counted as the middle name.

Make sure that all CRM users agree on the same purpose for each entry field. Your CRM administrator may remove those standard fields which are not suitable for your company based on profiles, or add additional entry fields as explained in chapter: User Administration.

If you click the [More Information] tab shown at figure: New Contact - Basic Information, you may add further information to the contact as illustrated in figure: New Contact - More Information.

Figure 2.7. New Contact - More Information

While most are self-explanatory, the following fields serve special purposes:

You may also use this entry page to allow contacts to access the Customer Portal. The Customer Portal provides contacts with a limited access to the CRM help desk functions. Please refer to section: Customer Portal in this manual and to the Customer Portal manual (see Appendix: Ressources) for further information.

Caution

If you enable the customer portal for a contact by marking the Portal User check box, the CRM system will automatically generate an email and will sent it to this contact immediately upon your clicking the [Save] button. (Your outgoing mail server must be configured.) This email will contain the username and password for accessing the customer portal. It is advised to inform your contact of this automatically generated message in advance by a separate email.

Click the [Save] button to transfer the entries to the CRM system.

The export and import functions will help you to exchange data between your office environment and the CRM system. CRM data can be used by a large variety of other applications at your office.

	Tip
	In addition to leads, contacts, accounts, and vendors, data for products and potentials can be imported and exported. Furthermore, documents and emails can be exported. Please refer to the proper sections in this manual for further information.

To export or to import data, click a module name as shown in figure: Top Area. You will get to a List View . At the top of the list, as shown in figure: Contact List View, you will find the import and export tools icons. These icons are only active if they have been enabled by the CRM system administrator.

Figure 2.8. Contact List View

Note

The CRM system uses a character set internally which is UTF-8 (Unicode compatible) coded. Unicode is an industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in any of the world's writing systems. Please refer to chapter: UTF-8 coding tools for further information. You may import data which is UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1 coded. If you use data which is based on ISO-8859-1 your data will be converted to the required UTF-8 format automatically.

	Tip
	For the importing and exporting contact data, you may also consider the MS Outlook plugin for Windows computer or the Thunderbird extension for Linux, Mac and Windows operating systems, as they are provided with the CRM system.

The following section describes the import and export function for contacts. If you want to import or export accounts or other modules, you may refer to this description, keeping in mind that some of the specifics will be different.

Import Contacts

Click [Import Contacts] at the Tool tab as shown at figure: Contact List View. A new window will open as shown in figure: Import Contacts, Step 1. You have to select your data source (csv file) by browsing your computer or network. All of the data you intend to import must contain the mandatory fields as they are marked by a [*] sign at a contacts edit view and values for all your picklists. You can find sample import data at section: Data Format for Imports. This section also explains the Has Header, Delimiter and Format parameters and how you can create your own data sources. If your data contain more information as the available fields in the CRM system can provide, you may start to use User Defined Fields as explained in section: Custom Fields.

Figure 2.9. Contact Import, Step 1

If you have created a file that meets the requirements, you may upload the file into the CRM system. Click [Next] to continue.

For the second step, a new window will open as shown in figure: Contact Import, Step 2. At this site you have to link your data with the corresponding CRM fields. You see the standard fields as they are offered by the CRM, and your custom fields if you have created them beforehand. It is not necessary that you create references for all data types in your file, but you must link the mandatory and all custom fields. In the illustration you can see sample entries.

	Important
	Account and the last name are mandatory fields for Leads. As an exception, you may leave the Last Name field blank in your import data but you must map this field. If you do not provide a last name, the corresponding lead entry will be filled with '?????'.

Figure 2.10. Contact Import, Step 2

	Tip
	If you have to make multiple imports, the CRM offers to store the references you have selected for future use. Mark the check box [Save as Custom Mapping] and write a name of this reference into the entry field. Make sure that this name has not been used before. This Custom Mapping will be available at step 2 as Use Saved Mapping when you make the next import.

If you have only new data to import and have set all references, skip the third step and click [Import Now] to transfer your data to the CRM. The third step provides the option to check for duplicates during an import as shown in figure: Contact Import, Step 3. Duplicates are only recognized if the contents of records have an identical spelling. This is a limitation which always needs to be considered. Therefore, in many cases it is recommended to check for duplicates with other tools before importing.

Figure 2.11. Contact Import, Step 3

Table 2.2. Duplicate Check During Import

Manual Merging:	The duplicate check will be done after the import. All entries which contain duplicates will be listed. You may decide for each data set which information you want to use and merge existing data with the new imported data.	The manual check is best if you do not expect a large number of duplicates or if you are not sure what to expect as the outcome after an import. Since you can review the outcome and undo an import you may switch to auto merging and redo an import if necessary.
Auto Merging:	The duplicate check will be done during the import automatically. You need to decide whether you want to overwrite the duplicate records with the new information or ignore data sets from the import data which would otherwise generate a duplicate entry at the CRM.	The auto merging function is especially appropriate if you want to add new information to existing data sets (update function). Note that the auto merging function is not suitable for updating parts of data sets (e.g. to add phone numbers to contacts).

At the last import step the CRM shows you the result of the import operation as you can see it in figure: Contact Import, Step 4. Below you will see a list of all imported contacts.

Figure 2.12. Contact Import, Step 4

Now you can review your import, accept it or reject it.

	Tip
	If you import contacts with account information, the import will generate contact and account entries which refer to each other. During an import the CRM checks whether the contact's account name already exists. If it does, it will link the imported contact to the existing account automatically. Therefore, it is always better to import the accounts first.

Export Data

You may select the following criteria for your export:

• all records of this module

• only the records you have marked at the list view of this module

• all records which meets your search criteria at the list view of this module

• all data of the current page at the list view of this module without search criteria set

	Important
	Your data is exported in the UTF-8 format. For further use you may have to convert the data to the character set used in your language. Please refer to chapter: UTF-8 coding tools for further information about UTF-8 and convenient conversion tools.

You have to make your decision at the list view about the data you would like to export, before you hit the export icon. For instance, if you would like to export all records of contacts where the last name starts with a B, make a search as explained in section: List Search with B as your search criteria. Afterwards hit the [export icon] at the list view menu, if this function is available to you, and the menu as shown figure: Export selection will be displayed.

Figure 2.13. Export selection

At this menu you may change you selection criteria if desired and click the [Export Contacts] button. A new window for uploading data to your computer opens. The upload window you will see depends on your operating system. If you have a Windows computer, you will see a window as shown in figure: Export Contacts.

Figure 2.14. Export Contacts

If you click [OK], all data will be exported to your computer. The data is provided as an ASCII file with comma separated values, also called CSV format.

	Important
	Since the format of the exported data is different than the data format required for an import you cannot use exported data for an import directly.

Before you can import data you have to format these data in order to meet the CRM's requirements. The first requirement is that the data must be presented in the ASCII format with comma separated values (CSV) and UTF-8 or ISO-ISO-8859-1 coded character sets. The CSV file format is often used to exchange data between different database applications. Your file must have the extension csv with lower-case letters. Since a common standard for the CSV format does not exist, your data sets must be formatted according to the following rules:

The following is a sample file for lead imports. Each line represents a data set.

"Company","Street","City","PostalCode","Country","Phone","Lastname"
"Sample Inc.","123 Samplestreet","Scity","12345","USA","(123)123-4567","Miller"
"XYZ Inc.","Main Street 33","Xcity","5555","Germany","","Brown"

	Important
	If you do not have all a full set of data available, you must wrap an empty entry by double-quote characters as it can be seen in the figure above for the missing telephone number in line 3. If you have data sets which do not have all mandatory fields included, these data sets will be ignored during an import.

The second requirement is that you have to include all custom fields with your import if you have created such fields before. In case you do not have a content for the custom fields you may leave the field in your data list empty but you must import it. If you do not import these fields, the status of these fields in your CRM's database remains undefined and you can not use such fields for filter functions.

The file formats used in Microsoft Excel have become a pseudo standard throughout the industry, even among non-Microsoft platforms. Excel is an application that also produces and uses CSV. Unfortunately, depending on your Excel version the import of CSV data may cause some problems. Some Excel versions do not automatically accept comma separated values. If you experience that after opening exported CRM data, all fields are listed in one column, you may use the following instructions for clean them up:

	Tip
	If your data contains line feed or carriage return characters, you have to remove these before importing the data into Excel. Such characters might be created by the CRM system if you have entries that use multiple lines. This might for instance be the case if you separate street name and suite number in an address entry by an additional line.

If you want to import contact data from you office application, you need to make sure that this data is well-formed. The following list describes how you may use contact data from your Microsoft Outlook: