Project

What is this?

Projects in the ChannelCRM system is designed to accommodate a very broad definition of projects. For some user of the ChannelCRM system, projects correspond quite closely to traditional project work, for others the projects are specific sales projects that are terminated once the customer has signed a contract.

A Project is a very useful umbrella for the activities, documents, teammembers needed to conduct the sale of a specific solution to a customer. Under the project you can keep track of the historical and planned activites.

The project makes use of your salesmodel through the scoreboard zzz. The scoreboard enables you to determine the progress of you project and the likelihood of success of the sales effort.

There can be more than one project for each company, giving you better overview and insight into which activities, which forcast etc. belongs to which sales-project.

The Project Window

This is an example of a project window :

The project has a name, expected contract date, and maybe a project number. The project number is very useful if you have to connect CRM projects with projects in other systems.

Relation is used to identify the company that is the target customer for your (sales)project.

When to use a project?

It is almost easier to say when it should not be used: If a customer calls and wants to order a product.
 
In this case, the activity (phone call) and forecast lie well below the customer directly. Without a project. And there is surely no reason to assess the weighted forecast from information regarding previous activities. The customer has made a purchase.
 
In other cases - more resembling a real sales process - the project comes into its own. So you can overview the activities, the resources involved and to what extent the project is healthy. And how it should be given priority compared to other projects.
 
Another reason to use projects is in cases where there are related businesses in addition to the end customer. It may be that there are partners, suppliers or similar. It may also be that your client is not the end customer but you are acting in a subcontractor role. For example; supplying raw materials to contractors. Particularly in cases where you must offer your products to several contractors bidding on the same project. Here your forecasts cannot all be realized (only one can win the supply order) and therefore it is useful to reflect this in CRM. You can thus make sure that the current offers are adjusted in relation to each other and perhaps even refrain from offering if there is conflict of interest.

Technique

Technically speaking, a project is an entity at the same level as say a company. This means that activities, documents, links, info-tags, etc. can be linked up to a project. It also means that projects can be named freely. It is not the name that uniquely identifies a project, but an automatically generated key (ProjectId).

Page url: http://www.channelcrm.net/us/index.html?net_projectwindow.htm