With Customer Relationship Management, or CRM for short, we primarily track activities related to our customers. The focus here is primarily on contact information, communication history and our sales opportunities with potential and existing customers. Odoo, with its Customer Management module, offers us a very good tool to map this process. At the same time, Odoo provides us with the already familiar links to the adjacent processes within the module, such as the management of company contacts or Sales.
The access rights for this module are controlled via the Sales module. There are four different access rights. If a user does not have access rights, the module is not displayed to him in the dashboard and he therefore does not have access. The users of the rights group "User: Only own documents" can access the sales opportunities in which they themselves are sellers. The users of the rights group "User: All documents" have access to all sales opportunities, regardless of whether they themselves are sellers of an object. The users of the "Administrator" rights group have full access to the module, including reporting and configuration.
In the Customer Management module there are three menu items - Sales, Reporting and Configuration. From the Sales menu item, we can navigate to our opportunities, to an overview of our activities within opportunities, to quotes, to an overview of sales teams, and to our customers.
If we open the Customer Management module, we end up in the overview of our opportunities. Here, Odoo sets a default filter that allows us to see only the opportunities in which we are assigned as a salesperson or contact person. Of course, we can remove the filter so that we see all opportunities.
In the overview, we are shown the opportunities in a Kanban view. However, here we can switch to other views, such as the list view. There are four different levels for the opportunities, each of which shows us the progress of the process. In addition, Odoo shows us the name, customer, expected revenue, priority and salesperson for each opportunity. The standard features for filtering and grouping the views are also available to us at this point.
From the overview we have the possibility to create a new opportunity or edit already existing opportunities. In addition to entering a description, we can also enter the expected sales volume. Odoo automatically calculates the probability of occurrence based on the levels and other optional dependencies. We then assign the opportunity to a customer or contact, a salesperson as an internal contact, and a sales team.
The specification of the expected closing date, the priority as well as the keywords are optional. In the "Internal notes" tab we can record any information about the opportunity. In the "Additional Information" tab we can find even more contact details of the customer and specify whether the opportunity was generated from a specific campaign, from a specific channel or through a referral. In the history, we have the already familiar options for internal and external communication as well as activity planning . In this way, we ensure that every communication is documented and the next steps are planned transparently. Finally, we can archive, duplicate or delete the sales opportunity via the "Action" button. company contacts or sales.
Furthermore, we find various buttons for further actions or processes in the sales opportunity. With the buttons "Mark as won" and "Mark as lost" we reach the last stage in our process. For lost opportunities, we can optionally specify a reason. Afterwards, the opportunity gets the flag "Lost" and is removed from the overview of opportunities. However, we can still call up the lost opportunities later using a filter. The won opportunities receive the flag "Won" and are automatically moved to the "Won" stage.
In the further process we use the "New offer" button to generate an offer from the opportunity in the Sales module. In this process, all the information that we have already specified in the opportunity will be automatically transferred to the offer. The "New Rental" button will be shown to us once we have installed the rental module. This will also create a new offer for us to rent our products. This offer is visible both in the Sales module and in the Rental module. Again, the existing information from the opportunity is automatically copied to the quote. Finally, the opportunity is linked to the quote, so that we can navigate directly to the quote via the opportunity.
In the overview of our activities, we can see all the activities to which we are assigned within an opportunity in the Customer Management module. This overview serves us as an overview of the next steps of the opportunity. The activities are sorted by due date. Overdue activities are shown in red, today's activities in orange and future activities in green. Again, Odoo sets a default filter for the activities of the respective user, which can also be removed to see the activities of colleagues as well.
At this point, the menu items for quotations and customers serve more as quick access for the adjacent processes and information, respectively, and navigate to the Sales and Contacts modules, respectively. The sales teams menu item gives us an overview of the performance of the sales teams and provides further links to the opportunities, quotations, sales orders and invoices assigned to the respective sales team.
The reporting system provides us with comprehensive key figures on our sales opportunities. Using various views, different graphical representations and a wide range of filter options, we can adapt the reporting exactly to our needs.
Finally, through the "Configuration" menu item we can find various settings options for the Customer Management module. On the one hand, we have the possibility to define the sales teams, edit the list of keywords or create the reasons for lost opportunities. On the other hand, we can still find optional features with which we can customize our process.
By means of the prospects, we add an additional step to our process. This allows us to collect unqualified inquiries from contacts and map them in Odoo. The prospects represent a preliminary stage of the sales opportunity, for example as a received business card, a completed contact form on our website or an imported list that we have generated as part of our sales activities. In this process, a prospect does not generate a contact and ensures that our contact database contains only relevant contacts. Once the inquiry has been qualified, we can convert the prospect into a sales opportunity. Also at this point, information already present in the prospect is automatically transferred to the opportunity.
We also find a feature for generating and enriching leads. However, there are additional costs for these features, which can be used by purchasing credits .
So, we keep in mind that with the Customer Management module, Odoo offers us a simple yet versatile tool for managing our customer relationships and sales opportunities. By recording all information and documenting the communication and activities regarding our customers and their transactions, our colleagues are always up to date and can control our sales processes in a targeted manner. By means of sensible extension options, we remain flexible in the mapping of our process and design it exactly according to our requirements.
Are you looking for an ERP system to map your customer relationship management? No problem! Contact us now and we will be at your side as experts for the implementation of Odoo!
Source: www.odoo.com