SELL! is a shrink-wrapped CRM system based on the leading groupware standard Lotus Notes. As such, it includes email, personal calendaring & scheduling as well as a sophisticated replication mechanism to ensure consistent data.

SELL! consists of a number of modules which can be combined to meet individual requirements. In addition, the software can be modified and/or expanded to take into account individual aspects particular to a company or an industry.

Customer management

You can create and manage customers, leads and business partners, all with as many subsidiaries and contact persons as necessary. A volume analysis can be created for all companies to assess future sales opportunities.

Contact management is twofold: you either use the regular reminder system based on definable intervals or you create individual contacts (s. below). The system tracks all important information related to contacts such as number of contacts, first contact, time span between first contact and first order.

Of course, all business data such as company size, number of employees, ABC-analysis and financial details can also be captured.

Sales areas, sales offices and sales reps can be defined / assigned. Every sales rep will only see those data belonging to his/her customers or leads and does not interfere with other accounts. The head of sales can have access to all information.

Contact management

SELL! uses just one folder document to plan, follow up and report on a contact; contacts can be defined as phone calls, visits, mails, etc. or a combination of them representing the complete life cycle of a particular contact e.g. on a specific subject. In addition, you can deal with incoming customer requests in a separate way using a special inquiry-form.

When a contact is planned, SELL! not only supports the classic follow up - list but also allows you to automatically transfer your appointment into your personal Lotus Notes calendar (which is separate to the CRM system). You can also create mails from within a contact as letters, faxes or e-mails. They are formatted and printed in MS-Word (or sent via Email) right from within the application.

To support a coherent workflow between sales reps and their HQ, a number of freely definable ToDos can be delegated and tracked based on a contact. Contact reports can also be written, either be in a free form or based on corporate-wide reporting standards. To collect information regarding markets and competitors, you can use a special mechanism which leads to the creation of a unique, company-wide knowledge pool.

In addition, a contact document can be used to invite other people (e.g. if the contact is an inhouse-meeting) using Notes functionality and allows you to attach the meeting minutes. You can also attach any kind of document (Word, Excel, PDF or any other format) or incoming Email to a contact making a contact document the container of all relevant data related to the contact.

Offer generation and lead management

There is a dedicated component within SELL! to create, manage and follow up on leads and offers (also orders) based on the products / services defined in the product database and taking into account the discount structures layed out in the discount section of each customer.

Alternatively, you can also choose a free text form to generate an offer or a proposal if this better suits your requirements. Within this free form, you can include as many external documents (Word, Excel, graphics, etc.) as you like. The lead/ offer generation module accepts multiple currencies.

You can fill in an analysis section for every lead or offer (or order) to specify - amongst other things - the offer’s status (win, loss, probabilities) and current step within the lifecycle. When losing an offer, you may complete a loss analysis form. Depending on the offer’s value or products, a definable workflow can be used to review the document before it is sent to a customer.

A forecast module allows you to define the key forecast parameters for each offer which are the basis for forecast reporting.

This module allows you to print out offers, order confirmations, invoices and delivery notes based on the offer you have generated. The formatting and printing is done in MS-Word directly from within SELL!.

There are numerous statistics and reports to give you information on planned vs. actual sales in total or sales by sales rep, area, timeframe, customer, product or product group. In addition, there are annual forecasts by product group and by sales rep. Additional non-graphical reports can be defined inside the integrated reports-db without needing any additional reporting-tool. Graphical reports require third-party software e.g. Crystal Reports or Integra4Notes.

Product catalog

All products and services can be defined in the product database. You can specify a product using a multi-tier product structure and also define all suppliers of a product. For every product, you can also define staggered buying and selling prices to be used when generating an offer or an order.

Market analysis

All data gathered by sales reps within their contact reports can be collected in a central repository under user-definable headings. This enables you e.g. to view all relevant data relating to particular competitors, products or other market factors.

Mailings

SELL! allows you to define and send out mailings. To create the mailing list, you can either select companies by every field available in the database (using an extended search functionality) or use predefined mailing-lists such as Christmas mailing, invitations to trade fairs, etc..

Once a mailing is set up, SELL! creates a special type of response document to help you track feedback and allowing you to analyse the response generated by a mailing campaign. The mailing module also includes a cost analysis to identify Cost per Contact and Cost per Interest.

Mailings can either be printed using MS-Word or be emailed. A third alternative takes into account a receipient’s preference, i.e. each document is either printed or emailed.

You can also use the mailing module to create contact documents for sales reps instead of mailing documents. So if you identify a customer target group based e.g. on a previous search (e.g. all A and B companies in a specific area and industry which have not been contacted in the past 6 months), you may well generate contact documents for the appropriate sales reps of these companies and put them on their ToDo-list.

Search Engine

In addition to Notes‘ own full text search SELL! includes a configurable search engine which allows you to define all searchable fields in the application’s customer database. The result is a very user-friendly search functionality with reusable search algorithms that even support the use of logical brackets.

Extensions

Most companies have running systems for their accounting, invoicing or logistics and in many cases it makes sense to integrate these systems into SELL!

Thanks to the great flexibility and openness of Lotus Notes and SELL!, interfaces can be defined e.g. for SAP, DB2, AS400 and every RDBMS to exchange data in both directions. In practical terms, this could mean that all offers (orders) created in SELL! can be transferred to an external ERP system - or that sales statistics created in an external system can be imported back into the Notes application.