It’s been quite awhile since I posted but I’m now ready to get back at it. First up, I thought I’d post a review of the one of the MOSS templates that Microsoft published last spring – The Sales Lead Template. This is a pretty cool template that has a lot of the functions you need right out of the box to build a CRM system in SharePoint. In this review, we’ll look at the functions in the standard template then discuss some extensions you can make to it yourself. Of course, any discussion of SharePoint applications, especially when they involve mobile professionals like sales people, wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of how Colligo can help to improve things even further.

Many thanks to one of my colleagues here, Brent Bolleman, for preparing this entry.

The Sales Lead Pipeline is one of the free Fantastic 40 application templates from Microsoft. It is a site definition (*.wsp) that must be installed by a server administrator and can be downloaded here. This application template provides all of the core features needed for a sales team to manage leads, and can be used as the foundation for building a basic CRM system.

STANDARD FEATURES – Here is a quick overview of the key features you get with this application template out of the box.

1. Leads – A custom list for entering new leads, with a column to define the lead source, and the ability to assign it to a sales person. Once a lead has been qualified by the sales person, they can “convert” the lead into an Account and an Opportunity using a built-in workflow. This copies the core information from the lead item (e.g. company name, primary contact, etc.) and creates a new item in each of the Accounts and Opportunities lists.
2. Accounts – In addition to the information carried over from the converted lead, this list contains columns for annual revenues, main phone number, etc. There are also lookup columns to the Contacts list for tracking decision makers and other contacts related to the account.
3. Contacts – There is a standard SharePoint contacts list which can be looked up to by the Accounts list (as mentioned above).
4. Opportunities – In addition to the converted Lead information, this list has columns for additional pipeline tracking such as deal size, stage, probability, and the all-important expected close date.
5. Dashboard – The dashboard shows the two main things a sales manager cares about: unassigned leads and the opportunity pipeline (e.g. sort deals by stage, size, close date, etc.). No slick charts or graphs – but tell your sales manager those won’t help them make their quarterly sales quota anyhow.

TIPS & TRICKS – Some ideas on how the template can be readily extended to provide more functionality are as follows:

1. “Other Contacts” – The Accounts list has four single-value lookups to the Contacts list (e.g. Primary Contact, Technical Decision Maker, etc.). But what if you have 5 other contacts at the company that don’t fall into these categories? Create an “Other Contacts” column which is a multi-value lookup (a powerful feature in SharePoint 2007) to the Contacts list. Now you can link as many people as you need to the Account.
2. Tasks – The task list needs to be on the Quick Launch. Also, putting a lookup column to the Accounts list will allow you to quickly track task associations without putting it in the task title.
3. Sales Documents – Sales documents (e.g. RFPs, proposals, contracts, etc.) can be stored in a document library with a lookup to the Account list to tag them for quick reference.
4. Email tracking – A simple way to do this is to have the email stored in a list or library and then have a lookup to the Accounts list, similar to the Tasks and Documents lists above. The trick is how to get the email into SharePoint and set the Account lookup value without having to drag them out of your email client to the desktop and upload them one at a time through the browser. There are a few ways to do this. One is to use a library (or list) enabled for incoming email and forward or bcc relevant emails to the library’s address. Another is to use Outlook 2007 and drag and drop the email into a discussion board. The problem with both of these options is they get the raw message into the library (or discussion list), but you can’t set a lookup (or any other metadata) at the time of sending into SharePoint – so you end up having to wade through the emails later in the browser and assign them. Not fun. There is an Outlook Add-in for SharePoint by Colligo that allows you to drag-and-drop emails from your inbox into special folders in Outlook connected to SharePoint libraries. During the drag/drop process the user is prompted for metadata, including lookups, which allows them to configure the linking of emails to Accounts. It also automatically extracts the fields (e.g. To, From, Subject, etc. ) from emails and applies them to SharePoint columns to assist with easier sorting later. This all works offline – messages moved into the SharePoint folders via Exchange (e.g. Outlook Web Access, Blackberry Enterprise Server, Outlook Rules & Alerts, etc.) are uploaded when sales people are back online.
5. Filter by Opportunity and Account – One of the reasons we put all those Account lookups into the lists above is so we can easily sort them using connected web parts. It’s easy to set-up. Simply put a list view web part for the Accounts, Opportunities, Tasks, Documents, and Email lists onto a page, make sure all the lists have the Account column, and then connect them up so that the Account list view web part provides a row filter to all of the others (see below). Now you have an easy way to Email, Tasks, Documents, and Opportunities for a given account in one place.


(Click to Enlarge)

6. Offline access – This is challenge for sales people who travel frequently. While Outlook 2007 has some great offline SharePoint support, it does not include custom lists or columns. This means you have no access to the Leads, Accounts, and Opportunities lists, nor can you set the custom Account column we added on the others. The Colligo Contributor solution mentioned above includes a desktop client that allows you to view and edit all of the lists on the site template, including the lookups, while you are offline. Brent has prepared has a screencast that walks through the standard features of the sales lead template including add-ons discussed above. Now the free stuff. You can get a free copy of the Colligo Reader offline client that gives you read-only caching of SharePoint content and you can get a free 30 day trial of Contributor with the Outlook Add-in.