Does this mean anything for your company? It does if you’re like the 83% of companies in the U.S. that currently have a CRM system in place.  A Nucleus Research survey of CRM decision makers found that organizations can significantly increase returns on their CRM investments by adding mobile and social capabilities, particularly when used for salespeople.

Nucleus recently surveyed 223 CRM decision makers and found an average productivity gain of 14.6 percent from mobile capabilities.

"Given the relatively low price point of many mobile CRM applications, and the fact that most social capabilities are bundled into CRM at no additional per-user price, organizations that do not explore mobile and social strategies are likely to lose competitive advantage in 2012 to those competitors that do embrace these technologies," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research.

While salespeople have used mobile devices for some time, the 14.6 percent productivity increase seen in this report is driven by the development of custom, device-specific applications that take advantage of the form factors of individual devices. Vendors and consultants are increasingly delivering task-specific, role- and vertical-based views of mobile CRM data that make it easier for salespeople to go beyond updating their pipelines via their smartphones, the research found.

 “It is not hard to see the additional impact smartphones have on both primary and secondary groups that really work in the trenches delivering the service work sold by salespeople,” said Mark Engelberg, founder and president of TimeLinx Software.  “When the service team can quickly and easily enter their time, expenses, and work details into a smartphone and have the data instantly be transmitted wirelessly back to the office, then salespeople know exactly how their customers are being serviced and can ensure the relationship is well maintained. And when problems arise, it’s critical that the salespeople that own the relationships can step in with all the details and attempt to resolve the issues.”

The productivity gains are high, and the adoption of social CRM by salespeople and service CRM by service staff will grow not just in real numbers, but also in frequency of activity as users become more aware of the technology's capabilities and as vendors' offerings mature.

1)      Better pricing intelligence. Knowing how much time staff spends on projects enables management to adjust project fees as necessary as well as see which types of projects and clients are most profitable.

2)      More accurate scheduling. Knowing how long a certain type of project will take, allows management to schedule resources more accurately and efficiently.  It removes the guess work, helps teams avoid scrambling at deadlines to complete a project and more importantly prevents a company from having to turn down work due to limited resource availability.

3)      Clearer visibility into monthly billable time. Many companies that have never tracked time within fixed fee deliverables before, are shocked to learn how much it takes in terms of resources and dollars.  While this doesn’t necessarily signal looming overtime in a company’s future; it gives insight into what is actually billable versus work that is not and helps a company streamline its internal processes and get rid of unnecessary or duplicative applications.

4)      Greater discipline.  There’s no denying that when staff are “on the clock” they tend to work more efficiently resulting in faster completion of projects and tasks. 

Executives should consider what a time tracking system will do to a company’s bottom-line.  Giving customers peace of mind that they are getting what they paid for is essential especially in economic times when people are scrutinizing their bills.  Implementing a system like TimeLinx into a company’s service delivery business and leveraging that tool to manage fixed fee deliverables will have a significant impact.

No matter your job role, expect immediate takeaways, best practices, and advice. Sage Summit is the perfect place to meet with other Sage customers, Sage employees, and Business Partners to share your experiences with Sage SalesLogix and other Sage products. 

Why is Sage Summit a MUST attend? Visit SageSummit.com to learn why you'll get nonstop value from start to finish, including: On-Site Tech Support Center: Get "how-to" technical advice from Sage support staff and insiders in a one-on-one appointment. Rich Content: We're loading up the conference with new sessions, labs, case studies and roundtables.

There's something for everyone. Chart-Topping Entertainment: Rock out to Trace Adkins, Montgomery Gentry, Diamond Rio, and more at a private Grand Ole Opry event. Sage SalesLogix will be providing a great selection of sessions this year. Keep following Sage SalesLogix Journal Post to learn more about Sage Summit. Share your Sage Summit stories! Let us know why Sage Summit is value to you and your organization. Follow Sage Summit activity on Twitter @Sage_Summit, hashtag #SageSummit

• Avoiding cash flow crunches
• Keeping your company afloat during lean times
• Keeping your credit rating in good standing
• Assisting you in pricing products and services
• Facilitating your ability to obtain loans and lines of credit
• Helping you budget properly for growth

More and more business owners are now using web-based applications with built-in forecasting and budgeting tools to help get a handle on expenses.  An application such as TimeLinx for Sage SalesLogix or Sage CRM is a great way to ensure your expenses are properly tracked, captured and forecasted for maximum clarity and planning.  Having insight into your expenses in real time and even projected can help you make the right decisions with regards to allocation of resources, staff time, and overages. The more accurately you can forecast expenses the faster and leaner your company can perform.  

Interested in learning more about how TimeLinx can help with your quote-to-cash strategy?  Email sales@timelinxsoftware.com for more information.

What passes for your project management and time tracking system is a hodge podge of multiple spreadsheets, paper documents and applications.  Rekeying of information causes errors and slows down invoicing to a glacial pace.  Tracking profitability at the project level is nearly impossible and requires manual calculations.  It’s difficult to calculate payroll and commissions.  Staff and management have poor visibility into resource scheduling, which is manual and time-consuming.   Multiple data silos exist throughout your company.  Duplicate records make data analysis difficult.  It’s hard to determine what work has been performed by particular staffers and how long it took them. 

All this leaves you with poor communication between departments, inconsistent business processes, revenues not captured, reduced margins, missed sales opportunities, and a costly infrastructure to maintain. And that's not mentioning the impact on customers and customer service!

If this sounds all too familiar, there’s hope. Make your CRM the cornerstone and  repository for all client and project information.  Embed extensive project management functions directly into Sage CRM or Sage SalesLogix.  Capture time and expenses through a single system and proactively access, analyze and manage project tasks, resources and associated costs and revenues.  Such a system will unite once-siloed departments, expanding their views into work, clients, and project profitability. 

Professional Services companies must recognize that project management is an essential and naturally intertwined part of Customer Relationship Management.   Properly managing deliverables, timeframes, and budgets will determine customer contentment and your success.  Streamlining your service engagements, while serving your customers well, will allow you to scale your service operations efficiently.

It’s all too logical to build project management within your CRM system.  Information captured during the sales process easily feeds the project record.  Information that serves sales pipeline management will also serve the project team.  Your CRM database becomes the perfect container for your service business.

Project Management for Professional Services 
Professional Services companies would do best by defining projects based on their service delivery model.  All projects have a start and end date with tasks in between that will define the project.  Make sure you capture the project attributes that you will need to efficiently report to the customer and internally manage resources assigned to projects.

Follow these steps to effective project management:  
 
1.  Make sure you can measure what you manage.  Create a simple process to gauge resource and time management against the project tasks that comprise the project.  This will give you an internal measurement of each project’s status and how well you are delivering against milestones and the overall project budget.

2.  Use project templates. Create templates for the specific types of projects you engage in.  Create workflows for project types and define checklists for specific project tasks.  This will facilitate internal communication and accelerate standard project creation in the future.   

3.  Utilize resources.  Define a project team for every project and make it easy to capture the efforts provided by each team member.  This will give you a simple way to measure actual versus estimated time for any project task.  Providing visibility into estimated hours will also set internal expectations for time management and allow you to readjust estimates when appropriate.

Delivering projects on-time and on-budget is obviously key to your and your customers’ health.  So ask yourself:  Is project management a key part of our CRM system?  If not, what steps should we take immediately?      

1. Can you easily, and in real-time, determine non-performing and under-performing projects and resources based on profitability?
2. Do you spend time and money on salaried staff to manage timesheets and expense reports?
3. Does it take too long to compile and bill for out-of-pocket expenses?
4. Do you know when your staff is performing out-of-scope project work that should be captured for additional  billing?
5. Does your staff spend time on projects that is not captured for cost analysis, such as email time, phone calls, meetings, etc.?

Manage more than projects.  Manage dollars and profitabilty from within your CRM system.  To find out how, request TimeLinx's latest white paper.

It seems obvious, almost a cliche: Align your business processes and technology to eliminate silos of information across departments and improve collaboration.  Yet SPI says firms are slow to react.  Here's a quick litmus test to see how your organization is doing:  Is your time and expense information spread across spreadsheets, applications and custom databases, forcing error-prone and time consuming data re-entry?  

Reduce the number or redundant systems into one to create transparency across your entire Service Delivery LifeCycle.  

According to Software Performance Insight, "To improve communication and sales visibility many professional services executives invest in CRM to provide some level of visibility to executives."  However, SPI Research found that very few of these organizations actually integrate their CRM with core financials or professional services automation (PSA).  "This lack of integration creates inefficiency within the PSO, as resource managers and consultants alike lack the visibility into future work or the skill required to assure they can deliver quality services on a timely basis. For PSOs that do integrate both CRM and PSA with the core financial solution, the benefits are both quantifiable and lucrative."