Sage CRM

Sage CRM + Innov8

A trusted Sage Business Partner and Tech Partner for over 25 years

Whether you are a business seeking to implement a wide ranging CRM across your organisation, or an organisation looking to implement your first CRM, we have a range of consultancy, implementation, training & support services to deliver the most cost-effective Sage CRM solution to meet your needs.

We have substantial experience of implementing and managing Sage CRM systems in organisations of all sizes and across a variety of industries, across the UK.

Our approach is to understand and align to your needs, so we can support your business on a long-term basis. Together we can unlock the full potential of your business management software to drive success for you in today’s competitive landscape, elevating you to new heights in partnership with us and Sage.

Make sure you take a look at all the information we have to offer online, but if you have any questions, please reach out to speak with a member of the team.

Explore what we have to offer…

Consultancy Implementation Training & Support

CRM Consultancy

Requirement Gathering

The first step of any successful CRM implementation is establishing a clear understanding of your requirements. However, understanding what you do currently is only part of the story. Whilst most CRM products can be tailored to support your processes, it’s also important to identify where CRM can support other beneficial changes to the business that are not possible without a formal CRM system.

On many occasions we have seen businesses undertake complex and costly developments to support existing business functions, just because “that’s the way it’s done”.

When embarking upon a new CRM implementation it’s important to keep an open mind and remember that CRM is a methodology as much as it is a software product.

Establishing this fine balance can be challenging, and that’s where we come in – we have years of experience in CRM implementations of all shapes and sizes, so we can help to determine where investing in development brings value, or where simple changes to your current processes may save you time, cost and hassle.

We take a “top-down” approach to requirements specification – starting with a review of what your business does as a whole, we then “drill down” into each functional area of the business before specifying all of the functions and processes therein. The end result is a comprehensive document which will enable us to give an accurate pricing proposal for your implementation rather than an estimate.

Implementing a CRM system is often more about what to leave out (at least initially) rather than trying to find a use for every feature and function that the system offers.

Steps include:

Business Case Support
Process Mapping
Gap Analysis
Costing & Value Proposition
Timescales
Key Risks Identified

Functional Specification

In order to design the technical aspects of a CRM system a unique blend of technical understanding and business knowledge is required. From the underlying system architecture to the end-user interface, it’s crucial that your needs are presented in a form that you can understand which relates to your real world business.

Business needs can often be lost in translation when talking nuts and bolts. The end result is a CRM system which drives users mad and could cost the business time and money in on-going maintenance and further development.

Understanding how your processes are likely to evolve over time should drive a technical approach which can adapt and grow with your business. The ability to see the world through the end-users’ eyes should ensure that interfaces are designed so that their lives are made easier rather than a chore, securing that all-important user buy-in.

We have a deep technical knowledge coupled with the business acumen needed to grasp your requirements and speak your language.

A functional specification will result in a system which is robust, cost effective and firmly meets your business requirements.

Including:

User Interfaces
Data Structure
Automated Processes
Integration
System Architecture
Reporting & Business Insight

System Review

A CRM is designed to grow and adapt in line with changing business needs. Therefore, we recommend that any business that is serious about maintaining the long-term effectiveness of its CRM system should carry out regular reviews in order to:

Ensure that it continues to meet the needs of users.
Make sure that it aligns with the strategic direction of the business.
Identify new requirements.

The danger of not reviewing your CRM is that it becomes less relevant for users, who may then start to find workarounds or even abandon the system altogether. This clearly reduces the business value of having a CRM and leads to significant inefficiencies.

If you have users that regularly complain about aspects of your system, or are creating spreadsheets and other documents to fill in gaps, then now is the time to carry out a review of your CRM.

We have extensive experience of keeping CRM systems performing at their best.

A review typically includes:

Consulting with users and business managers, who often provide very useful insight and feedback to improve the system.
Discussing the strategic vision of the business and identifying how the CRM should be managed to align with this.
Providing information to business and technical managers on latest developments in CRM technology.
Reviewing the current version of software and ensuring that you are benefiting from any new features
Undertaking a technical check to ensure that the system architecture is appropriate.

On completion, we provide a comprehensive report which sets out our findings and recommendations. We can then, if desired, assist you with implementing these steps.

CRM Strategy

CRM is more than just a software product; it’s a company-wide business strategy designed to reduce costs and increase profitability by maintaining customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy.

A true CRM solution brings together information from all data sources within an organisation (and often outside the organisation) to give a complete, “360 degree” view of each customer in real time.This allows customer-facing employees in sales, marketing and customer service to make quick yet informed decisions on everything from cross-selling and upselling opportunities to targeted marketing strategies and competitive advantage.

CRM has evolved into a customer-centric philosophy that must permeate an entire organisation and encompass the three key elements – people, process and technology. The people throughout a company – from management to “shop floor” – need to buy in to and support CRM. Business processes must be focussed to bolster CRM initiatives. The technology to drive these improved processes and provide the best data to the employees should be robust, reliable and easy enough to operate that the lives of end-users are made easier rather than hindered.

Customer relationships are the heart of business success. There are many technical components to a CRM solution, but only thinking about the technical side of things is a mistake – CRM should be thought of as a set of processes which help bring together information on customers, sales, marketing, efficiency and productivity. This insight can facilitate increased efficiency, added cross-sell and upsell opportunities, improved close rates, streamlined sales and marketing processes, improved customer profiling and targeting, reduced costs and an increased share of customer and overall profitability.

This may sound too good to be true, but a successful CRM initiative is not without its challenges. Our many years of diverse experience in the industry enable us to focus your CRM strategy and bring every piece of the puzzle together to ensure that, more than just supporting your operations, CRM actually brings true value to your business.

Strategy steps include:

Performance Assessment
Cost/Resource Analysis
Operating Practices & Procedures
Customer Segmentation & Targeting
Customer Satisfaction & Retention
Data Strategy & Best Practice

CRM Implementation

Getting Started

We have many years of experience with Sage CRM and have worked on implementations of all shapes and sizes (including our own), from simple installations to those with extensive bespoke developments and integration with other systems.

In addition to the Sage CRM solution, we also have extensive experience with the supporting technologies such as SQL databases. To date, we have had the pleasure to have worked on some of the largest and most complex Sage CRM implementations in the UK.

Customisation

Nominated Sage CRM users can be provided with administrator rights which gives access to a well developed graphical point-and-click interface which enables screens to be customised without significant programming skills.

In many cases Sage CRM can be ‘configured’ to meet requirements without the need to write code. Adding data fields and selection lists, customising screens, setting up custom reports and much more are all possible via the standard administration interface.

Whilst you may not need to be deeply technical to perform basic Sage CRM customisations, it is important to have a good understanding of best practices and how the changes you make may affect other aspects of the system.

So, in addition to simply providing Sage CRM customisation services, we are more than happy to work alongside your internal staff and share the knowledge, giving you the power to to manage and customise your own system going forward. Alternatively, if you prefer, we can simply handle things for you.

Development

Using the tools available through the Administration interface it is possible to add new fields and screens, create new system entities and configure sophisticated Workflows.

However, there are times when you need the system to do just a little more, or even to create a whole new area of bespoke functionality. The possibilities are virtually endless with Sage CRM.

Over the years we have been involved with some extensive Sage CRM developments and have created bespoke functionality to:

Capture financial fact-find information onto user screens that adapted according to responses and output these into a client document.
Provide resource planners and calendars that display summary information.
A questionnaire development tool that provides the user to create custom questionnaires for customer service and surveys.
Mapping tools to display information for route planning based on complex criteria.

All bespoke developments are undertaken in accordance with best practices to require little or no adjustment when software upgrades are applied.

Data Services

Sage CRM comes with a built-in data import tool which can be used for uploading simple Company, Contact or Lead data.

However, on many occasions more comprehensive routines are required when populating Sage CRM with data from another system, particularly when dealing with custom data which is not part of the standard out-of-the-box Sage CRM data structure.

We have a great deal of experience in Sage CRM data imports and the migration of data from other systems into Sage CRM. We know the Sage CRM data structure inside-out and we’re also very familiar with the various tricks and routines required to ensure that imported data conforms to the standards required to function correctly within the application.

Data Cleansing

Data quality is fundamental to the efficiency of a CRM system, it is essential that core data is clean, normalised and free from duplicates.

Effective data cleaning is not just a case of running bulk routines across your CRM data to improve quality – it is also crucial to look at the point of entry to ensure that input is restricted to a set of consistent values, or validated before saving to ensure that all required data has been entered in the best way. In addition a data cleaning strategy should be devised to ensure that things are kept in order going forward rather than simply running a one-off routine.

Workflow

Sage CRM includes a powerful workflow tool which enables the development of both user-driven and automated workflow processes.

Workflows can be applied across the system and are commonly used to ensure the consistent progression and tracking of leads, sales opportunities or customer service cases.

However, workflows have many other possible uses too.

We have extensive experience in the development of Sage CRM workflows and have worked on those of varying complexity, from simple step-by-step processes to complex workflows with multiple branches, automated escalations and triggered notifications.

Integration

Sage CRM is a very capable product when it comes to integration. There are standard integrations available (such as Sage 200). However, it is also possible to integrate Sage CRM with many other business systems.

As with anything, there are varying degrees of capability depending upon your requirement. At the simple end of the scale it is possible, using built-in capabilities of the solution, to make data from other systems visible within the Sage CRM interface. For example, when looking at a customer record within Sage CRM, you may wish to see information from your accounts system, display a list of purchases from a point of sale system or a list of cases from a customer service application.

When the simple integration method is not enough, Sage CRM’s open data structure and customisation capabilities mean that it is possible to fully integrate with or synchronise data from other systems.

We have experience in integrating Sage CRM with other systems and over the years have developed and implemented some very complex integrations, including (but not limited to) full bi-directional synchronisation of data between Sage CRM and accounts, EPOS and website-based systems.

Reporting & Insight

Sage CRM comes with its own built-in report writing tool, which provides a non-technical point-and-click interface for producing all kinds of reports. In order for this to provide you with the information you need, it is crucial that the underlying data and “views” (queries which present data to the reporting tool) are in good shape.

As well as ensuring that you can get hold of the data you need, we can help you to use the Sage CRM reporting tool to its full potential, enabling you to get the most from your CRM data.

If you require more advanced management reporting and analysis over and above the capabilities of the built in Sage CRM reporting tool, you may be interested in additional Reporting and Business Insight products.

CRM Training & Support

Training

We provide full user training as part of any new system implementation and generally include some administrator training in this as well.

It is not unusual however, that over time, as new people join the company and job roles change, for users to get out of touch with certain aspects of the system. We can therefore provide standard or bespoke training packages for both users and administrators to make sure that everybody is confident in using and supporting Sage CRM on a day-to-day basis.

End-user training

Training people in CRM is more than just telling them where to click

Awareness of the associated business processes, adherence to the relevant protocols and appreciation of the actual benefits of using a CRM can make a huge difference to the people who have to use it. A business-aware approach is crucial throughout the planning, compilation and delivery phases of a CRM training programme and will significantly improve the efficiency of your CRM operation and the value it brings to your business.

Administrator training

Gain the knowledge and start to build in-house expertise, which reduces reliance on our services to manage the further development of Sage CRM.

Initial training will usually include tasks that may be required on a day-to-day basis such as adding items to dropdown lists, creating and adding simple custom fields and some data management tasks.

Where a business is interested in having a deeper understanding of Sage CRM we can provide additional training based either on a standard course or selected topics, depending on the depth of knowledge required.

Support

As an ongoing service to our clients we provide telephone and email support to users and administrators via our helpdesk.

If you would like to discuss us taking on the support of your Sage CRM system then please contact us.

Know your business, grow your business

Sage CRM is a Customer Relationship Management software application for small and medium-sized businesses. Over 15,000 companies in over 70 countries use Sage CRM every day to accelerate sales, drive business productivity and make every customer interaction count.

With a complete set of features ‘out of the box’ Sage CRM will help you unlock success from day 1, plus as a highly configurable solution you can continue to strengthen processes in your organisation to completely new areas of functionality, anything is possible!

Gain reliable insight and evaluate where your business stands, to make more informed decisions you can be confident about.
Understand your customers better and deliver an exceptional customer experience to improve customer retention and drive revenue growth.
Collaborate effectively and avoid duplication of work, empowering teams to work faster and smarter.
Improve business processes across the business to help your teams accomplish more.

What is CRM software?

If Business Management software lets you focus on running your business, CRM tools help you focus on customers. CRM software helps businesses improve customer relationships by organising and automating communications and activities across all customer-facing departments including sales, marketing and customer service.

CRM systems provide a level of automation that enables businesses to run smoothly and efficiently. And, because every customer interaction is stored in one place, you and your team can nurture these relationships at every stage. As a CRM user, you can also gain insight into how your sales and marketing campaigns are performing, helping you make more informed business decisions.

Sage CRM Features

Reporting & Dashboards

Workflow

Web Portal

Integration

Mobile & Remote Access

Key Functionality of Sage CRM

Contact Management

Contact Management is so much more than just storing names and addresses.

In addition to core contact details, Sage CRM enables you to add and customise fields to collect all the information relevant to you. This enables you to profile Prospects and Customers for the purpose of targeted activities or reporting metrics.

The Communications functionality allows you to maintain a history of all interactions with Customers, Suppliers and others – both at organisation and individual contact level. This ensures that everyone across your organisation has full visibility of past/future customer activity. By combining the tracking of contacts, their profiles and their interactions with the business, it is possible to create a single, unified view of the customer – vital data not only for a successful sales team, but also for the delivery of excellent customer service.

Integration with Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft 365 enables appointments, tasks and contacts to be synchronised between Outlook and Sage CRM. The Outlook Plugin allows emails within Outlook to be filed into CRM against the relevant company/contact record(s) and the Email Management Server service enables Sage CRM to retrieve emails from one or more mailboxes (for example an inbound Sales or Support mailbox), to automatically file the inbound email as a communication and trigger actions in CRM such as Cases, Tasks or Workflows.

HTML Email Templates can be created and used for one-off or bulk outbound emails, whilst Document Templates can be created using Microsoft Word and used for individual or bulk mail merges.

Sales

Equipping your Sales team with the necessary tools, enables them to do their job effectively, making the most of each business opportunity.

CRM provides Sales users with instant access to calendars, accounts, reports, pipelines, contacts and call lists, empowering salespeople to sell.

All sales information is stored, tracked and reported providing meaningful and up-to-date information on the performance of the Sales team.

The Sage CRM Sales management function provides real-time sales opportunity analysis allowing you to see at a glance the stage and status of each opportunity; the forecast close date and sales value; who is working what; planned contacts and meetings and much more.

Parts of the Sales process can be automated using workflows. This ensures that required business processes are followed, streamlining your business and enabling better business management.

The interactive dashboard allows users and management to have a view of Sales insight, all in one screen, that in short helps manage opportunities from new through to close, effectively and efficiently.

Marketing

Targeting the right audience for your products & services and understanding buying behaviour is critical in today’s competitive marketplace.

Sage CRM provides powerful tools for Marketing teams to plan, execute and audit both simple and highly targeted marketing campaigns. Sage CRM is the perfect Marketing management solution as it allows you to effectively promote your products and services by segmenting your customer lists to target the right audience and develop follow-up campaigns based on the outcome.

Whether it be building static or dynamic groups, you can segment your information and use it as the basis for a simple or multi-layed campaign for either telesales, email marketing or direct mail.

Campaign tracking and monitoring tools allow you to see which marketing activity led to the most sales opportunities, helping you focus on prospects that are more likely to purchase, increasing ROI and maximising the marketing budget.

MailChimp integration provides a full suite of tools that allows you to send professional template messages and capture the results directly back into CRM. This not only provides a fast way of evaluating the progress of the campaign, but also allows follow-up campaigns to be developed based on metrics such as opens and clickthroughs.

Customer Service

Effective customer service frequently ranks higher than product price as the main buying criteria.

The ability to deliver this service effectively and efficiently is therefore fundamental to a business winning and retaining customers.

Using Sage CRM and the powerful ‘Case’ management system, capture and tracking of a range of issues such as helpdesk tickets or customer complaints. Cases can be assigned to specific users for follow-up and full tracking notes are maintained.

Escalations and alerts can be applied from an associated workflow to ensure that cases are resolved within an agreed time and Case management can even be integrated with Sage CRM self-service features to provide customers with a self-serve way of logging and viewing cases in progress via a web portal.

Cases can be used in a wide variety of manners to ensure that you can deliver on exceptional customer service.

Reporting & Dashboard

Quickly and with ease access to all data in the Sage CRM via a vairety of Reports and Dashboards.

Whether you are looking to do ad-hoc analysis or create regular reports to keep you up to speed with the business, Sage CRM reporting tools will provide a user-friendly solution.

Dashboards provide a means of creating one or more screens that bring together data from within CRM, external sources such as websites and RSS feeds as well as information from other systems with which CRM is integrated. Dashboards are a great management tool to provide a summary of the key information that they need to keep on top of their job.

Users can have access to one or more dashboard views depending on their requirements.

Reports are typically output to provide a ‘printed view’ of information for use in meetings or as part of a larger report pack.

It is possible to create a library of reports which can be run frequently. The ‘run time’ parameters can be changed if required, to allow a single report to output data for a range of data options. The built-in report writer provides an intuitive way for users to create their own reports which can be viewed on screen, printed as pdf documents or exported to Excel for further analysis.

Workflow

A workflow defines and automates business processes using a predefined set of business rules and actions.

Workflow in Sage CRM guides the user through a business process, checking, tracking, and validating information, and triggering actions.

It’s a great way to reduce administration overhead, ensure consistency, and benchmark performance. For example, you could apply a workflow rule to opportunities to automatically generate a follow-up call whenever a quote is issued to a customer. Or you could apply a workflow rule to cases to send an email to the customer service supervisor if a case remains at the Investigating stage for more than twenty-four hours.

In addition to enforcing a structured process through which users must progress and update records, workflow provides the following functions:

Ensuring that all required data is captured at each stage before progression is allowed
Enforcing conditional data validation at different stages of the workflow
Triggering automated actions – such as creating a task, sending an email or updating other records – either as the workflow progresses, or based upon elapsed time

Web Portal

A web portal allows you to capture and share business and customer specific information via your website.

At its simplest, this could be capturing new enquiries via a website form but with Sage CRM any information entered is immediately added to the CRM database, where it can be followed up either by alerting a user or as part of a more detailed workflow.

More complex uses of a web portal can allow customers to log in to view and post information. One such use is in customer services, where customers can log new issues and view the status of live cases via their own online dashboard. This can be extended to allow upload and downloading of documents and also preparing and sharing reports.

All web portal customisation is handled via the Sage CRM Administration panels so you do not have to be a web developer to extend or change a portal once it has been set up.

The ability to develop a web portal is a core feature of Sage CRM and can have wide-reaching business benefits, such as reducing the pressure on employees to answer customer queries on the phone or by email and freeing up time for other tasks.

Easily customisable and integrating with any website, customer issues can be resolved more efficiently as they are logged and handled automatically. Flexible to changing business needs and providing easy access to information, including updating historical and commercial orders, quotes or cases. The Sage CRM web portal feature allows customers to keep track of their information 24/7/365.

Integration

Sage CRM is a very capable product when it comes to integration.

There are standard integrations available which we work with frequently. However, it is also possible to integrate Sage CRM with many other business systems.

As with anything, there are varying degrees of capability depending upon your requirement. At the simple end of the integration scale, it is possible using built-in capabilities of the product to make data from other systems visible within the Sage CRM interface. For example, when looking at a customer record within Sage CRM, you may wish to see information from your accounts system, display a list of purchases from a point of sale system or a list of cases from a customer service application.

If the simple integration is not enough, Sage CRM’s open data structure and customisation capabilities mean that it is possible to fully integrate with or synchronise data from other systems.

We have vast experience in integrating Sage CRM with other systems and over the years have developed and implemented some very complex integrations, including (but not limited to) full bi-directional synchronisation of data between Sage CRM and Accounts, EPOS and website-based applications.

Mobile & Remote Access

The ability to access data on the move through a variety of devices has changed the way we do business.

Sage CRM is supported for use on most popular browsers and can therefore be accessed on pretty much every portable device. Furthermore, it is possible to develop screen layouts for different devices, so that a user always receives information in a convenient format.

As a web app, Sage CRM is accessible anytime, anywhere.

Finally, the Sage CRM for iPhone app allows your team to update data whilst away from the office. This means that people can stay on top of their leads, opportunities, appointments, and tasks no matter where they are – even without an internet connection.

Why Sage CRM?

Gain reliable insight
Evaluate where your business stands, and make more informed business decisions you can be confident about
Understand customers better
Deliver an exceptional customer experience to improve customer retention and drive growth
Collaborate effectively
Avoid duplication, empower your teams and work faster and smarter
Accelerate performance
With access to information, your people are equipped to be more efficient
Integrate systems
Fully automate CRM or push/pull data from other systems to connect your business
Drive processes
You decide what, when and how things are done. CRM has process design at it’s heart

Boost Sage CRM with i8CRM add-ons

Supercharge your Sage CRM experience with i8CRM add-ons

Elevate usability and functionality within CRM using these powerful enhancements.

Effective customer relationship management (CRM) is crucial for sustained business success. Enter i8CRM add-ons, a suite of enhancements designed to elevate the capabilities of Sage CRM software. These additions go beyond the standard features, offering businesses a comprehensive toolkit to streamline their CRM processes, as well as add useful functionality.

Looking to empower your business, whilst elevating your functionality?

Wanting to supplement your CRM use, beyond the norm?

Does your business need functionality to add value to customers and your team?

Download Brochure

i8CRM Add-ons

i8CRM Link
Linking your systems is a crucial component to effective business management. i8CRM Link delivers that connection
i8CRM Mail Merge
Increase your ability to leverage email templates and your customer data, i8CRM Mail Merge enhances the configuration possibilities
i8CRM Mailer
Leverage email templates and your customer data. (i8CRM Emailer works in conjunction with i8CRM Mail Merge)
i8CRM SMS
Easily send text messages individually or in bulk from within Sage CRM. (N.B. SMS provider required)
i8CRM Data Pump
Scheduling and process regular data transfers in/out of Sage CRM to/from a variety of data sources
i8CRM Maps
Add geocoding capability to CRM, enabling you to view all types of record on a map and perform geography-based queries
i8CRM App
Our app platform holds the foundation components upon which we can build bespoke mobile app functionality connected to your CRM for Android
i8CRM Portal
Display any CRM data in an online portal. Make it view only or editable, and accessible via a login. Plus many more customisations
i8CRM SFDG
Single Figure Dashboard Gadget, enables you to have a value displayed on a CRM dashboard widget, based upon your system data

What’s next?

Discover Sage 200 Download Sage CRM Brochure Sage CRM Demonstration Download i8CRM Brochure

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A Sage Business Partner + Technology Partner for over 25 years

If you want to experience the best software consultancy then do not hesitate to get in contact today!

Get in touch

Sage CRM + Innov8

CRM Consultancy

Requirement Gathering

Functional Specification

System Review

CRM Strategy

CRM Implementation

Getting Started

Customisation

Development

Data Services

Workflow

Integration

Reporting & Insight

CRM Training & Support

Training

Support

Sage CRM

What is CRM software?

Sage CRM Features

Key Functionality of Sage CRM

Why Sage CRM?

Boost Sage CRM with i8CRM add-ons

i8CRM Add-ons

What’s next?

Don’t just take our word for it…

A Sage Business Partner + Technology Partner for over 25 years

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