Entellium PRO-Activity Release Helps Employees Spend Less Time With CRM
Entellium (http://www.entellium.com) today announced the commercial availability of its "PRO-Activity Release 2005," a comprehensive set of enhancements for its flagship CRM suite based on over 43,000 hours of research into CRM usage behavior. The outcome of this year-long initiative is a significant redesign of CRM built around the needs of sales and service representatives to get their daily activities done faster, including the complete automation of many routine and mundane tasks that other leading hosted CRM vendors still require the employee to perform.
Entellium introduces a number of industry-first features with the PRO-Activity Release, including:
- A single location to track all activities to minimize navigation fatigue;
- Activity-centric quota planning for cold-calls, appointments, sales contests and more;
- Creation of custom quotes, contracts, letters, and collateral by merging customer data with company templates directly from the application and emailing them automatically;
- Report Automator™ that generates and distributes reports at predetermined times.
To accomplish this, Entellium includes sophisticated business process automation normally reserved for enterprise level companies.
Most industry experts agree that user adoption is still the number one issue preventing successful CRM deployment, especially in small and midsized businesses where resources are often limited. The PRO-Activity Release includes several industry-firsts designed to make it easier for people to complete and track everyday activity. The ultimate result of an easier to use CRM solution is more accurate and meaningful management reports, a key reason CRM initiatives are undertaken in the first place.
"Though on-demand CRM providers can be proud of driving awareness in our industry over the past couple of years, our research confirms that businesses are still frustrated by how long it takes to encourage employees to accept new processes and systems," said Entellium CEO Paul Johnston. "Our new product release responds directly to those findings with a ‘bottom-up' design that clearly simplifies the user experience to match how individuals are most likely to plan their daily activities, while fully automating tedious tasks that they shouldn't have to worry about."
"The difference in ease-of-use is so apparent, we are aggressively encouraging our customers to compare our CRM suite with competing applications from leading on-demand CRM vendors, based on how sales and service reps and frontline management go about their daily activities," said Johnston. "Early response shows that customers who have conducted their own in-depth side by side reviews are migrating to our user-centric approach."
Entellium's strong usability and focus on the end-user has been recognized by several industry authorities, including Forrester Research, a leading analyst firm, which awarded Entellium top scores in Usability in its 2005 Forrester Wave report: Hosted Sales Force Automation.
"Frankly it's harder to make it easier, but we're determined to finish what the industry started for mid-market companies," said Johnston. "While other hosted CRM providers are announcing departures from CRM into development platforms and operating systems for the largest enterprise customers, we put our effort into automation specifically to help sales and service reps spend less time with CRM so they have more time to work with customers directly."
Priced at $59 per month for the suite, Entellium is affordable for any size company. The company also includes 24/7 real-time support for every user at no additional charge, furthering its lead in CRM value. In fact, Forrester Research also gave Entellium top scores in Cost among leading hosted CRM providers in its 2005 Forrester Wave report.
The following are details on Entellium's PRO-Activity Release industry-first features:
- Industry First: Activity Center™ for Sales and Service
To improve how reps track interactions with customers and prospects, Entellium introduces the Activity Center™ – a powerful portal where users can track every interaction with contacts in their database, including Appointments, Recurring Appointments, Tasks, Notes, Email, Inbound Calls, and Outbound Calls. Companies can also define a series of activities that must be completed during a certain process, like a new customer on-boarding process or lead-handling procedure. Once the activity set is established and applied, Entellium takes over to automatically assign tasks, send emails, add reminders to a calendar, or even send documents – no user intervention is required.
- Industry First: Activity Quota Planner™
Entellium is the first solution to predict where a business is going before it gets there with Activity Quota Planning. By the second week of the month, well-run companies already know if they will hit their sales and service targets by month's end because they manage all the activities that get them to their goal - not just the sales or service numbers themselves. Entellium lets managers assign and track quotas on all of the activities that lead to results, such as number of cold-calls, number of appointments scheduled, lead generation targets and so on. Other solutions only focus on month-end numbers like units sold and revenue, without actually measuring the activities that lead to achieving those end-goals.
- Industry First: Predictive Navigation™
Entellium goes further than any other CRM solution to minimize the number of screens, tabs and clicks it takes to get the job done by predicting where in the application a user is likely to go next, based on what they are currently doing. The company's exclusive Predictive Navigation™ menus anticipate the next action, so users spend less time in Entellium and more time interacting with customers. Other CRM solutions require four or more screen changes and clicks to accomplish similar tasks.
- Industry First: Document Automator™
With the Document Automator™, Entellium extends its lead in workflow automation by permitting users, in less than a minute, to create quotes, proposals, contracts, and letters directly in the application and then automatically send them immediately or at a specific time via e-mail. Entellium's Document Automator™ offers the ability to merge any existing document template with customer data, including contact and product/price details. Entellium assembles the information into the template and sends out a professional-looking PDF or Microsoft Word® -format document. The document is also automatically attached to that contact's record where anyone can find it.
- Industry First: Report Automator™
Many salespeople and executives need the same reports regularly – for instance, at the end of the week, month, or quarter, or before recurring meetings. With Report Automator™, Entellium lets users configure any report so that it is automatically generated and distributed at certain dates and times – or in specified intervals – in HTML or Excel format with up-to-the-minute sales data, enabling them to focus on closing deals, not running reports.
- Industry First: Virtual Sales Coach™
Entellium introduces another hosted CRM first: A knowledge base for sales teams which puts every piece of institutional sales knowledge one click away. This enhancement is a powerful selling aid that provides immediate access to competitive selling points, product information, sales scripts, benefit statements, objection handling techniques and so on. Now while sales people are on the phone they have a real-time sales coach to improve their effectiveness.
- The Only Hosted CRM Company with Modular Pricing
Entellium is the only CRM provider that offers sales force and customer service modules separately to help companies reduce costs. Further, each module has a portal view into the other at no additional cost, so businesses still get a full 360-degree view of customers. This approach offers significant cost savings for businesses. In addition, Entellium does not require contracts, although they are available to those interested in greater savings.
About Entellium
Founded in 2000, Entellium's suite of CRM solutions has been designed specifically for small and mid-size companies and divisions of large enterprises who want a powerful solution that strikes the right balance between the everyday needs of sales and service representatives and the reporting requirements of management. Entellium has won several industry awards for innovation in usability, and was recently recognized by Forrester Research for top scores in Usability and Cost among leading CRM providers (The Forrester Wave: Hosted Sales Force Automation, Q1 2005). Entellium is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, with a global R&D Center in Malaysia and sales operating worldwide via our partner network. For more information, visit http://www.entellium.com.