The Contact Management application area offers powerful direct marketing and sales management features. As part of an integrated Navision Financials solution, Contact Management lets you gather all relevant information about customers, prospects and vendors in one place. By integrating this information, you can more easily generate repeat business from your existing customer base, as well as target potential new customers.

Contact Management integrates completely with customer and vendor information. Prospects can easily be set up as customers or vendors without re-entering information. Integration also makes it possible to select target groups based on their sales history and to measure the actual sales results of a marketing campaign. You can also compare these results with the buying habits of a reference market segment.

With the help of Navision Financials Dataport, you can import and update prospects from external databases such as those from mailing list brokers. This allows you to easily broaden the scope of your marketing database as needed.

Contact Management, as an integrated part of the accounting and business management functionality of Navision Financials, is a unique tool for guiding the sales and marketing process.

Prospects

For each prospect, you maintain basic information, which includes name, address, language and salesperson assigned. You can also track basic market segment information that, among other things, lets you assign status, priority, territory and number of employees. To make it easy to find the information you need, the card is divided into tabs, each containing a similar type of information. You can further categorize data about prospects by using the Form Designer to add new tabs and fields, precisely suiting the information to your own business.

Contacts

To each prospect, you can link any number of contact names, each with personal profile, alternative telephone numbers, home address and more. As with prospects, contacts can be categorized according to various criteria, including job function and seniority level. You can use these categories together with the prospect information, as criteria for selecting target groups.

Campaigns

Contact Management provides extensive capabilities for applying filters, allowing you to extract manageable target groups from your database. These target groups are assigned to campaigns, which can be used for one-time and recurring marketing programs. You can expand and reduce your target groups as often as you like, honing the selection criteria until you arrive at the perfect target group for your sales or marketing effort.

Target group selection can be made using all information on prospect cards and their associated contact cards. Integration with other Navision Financials application areas also lets you take advantage of sales history in selecting your group. For example, you can target a group of individuals that purchased a certain item within a given period. That information could in turn be used to target a group that includes all customers who have an item with a guarantee that is about to expire. Customers who have already purchased a service agreement can then be eliminated, and the end result will be a group consisting of all customers who need and have not yet purchased a service agreement.

Once you define a target group, you can print mail merge letters with products such as Microsoft Word®, as well as print mailing labels. Using C/ODBC, you can also directly read the formatted addresses for the target group from other programs such as Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel®. Requires Basic General Ledger.

Activities

Contact Management has features to help you more effectively plan and follow up on sales activities. Activities, which can include such things as scheduled phone calls, visits and mailings, can be created individually for a given prospect, or can be automatically generated for a target group. When you complete an activity, Contact Management suggests the option of selecting a follow up activity, giving you complete control over the sales cycle.

Lists of the day's activities are always easily accessible, as are schedules for any other period you specify. You can easily see all planned and completed activities for a prospect or contact, so you can be brought quickly up to date for a short notice meeting or phone call. Requires Basic Contact Management.

Market Groups

You can assign prospects or contacts to any number of market groups. This lets you precisely define market segments and assign prospects or contacts to mailing lists.
Using these groups, you can manage the distribution of such things as catalogs, price lists, greeting cards and newsletters. For companies with diverse product lines, Market Groups come in handy for denoting segments with common interests. Requires Basic Contact Management.

Trade Codes

You can use trade codes to group all your prospects into industry-oriented market segments. You can define as many industries as you want and assign one or more industries to each individual prospect. Requires Basic Contact Management

Reporting and Documentation

Contact Management includes numerous standard lists and analytical reports for documenting and analyzing prospect information. Reports such as the Prospect Profile give you ready access to important information about prospects, including their sales history and marginal profit.

You can, of course, change the existing reports or add new ones using the Report & Dataport Designer, which also gives you control over importing and exporting data.

Highlights of Contact Management

• Powerful features for managing sales and direct marketing
• Full integration with other application areas in Navision Financials
• Well organized, easily accessible information about prospects
• Multiple contacts per prospect
• Precisely defined target groups for campaigns
• Efficient sales activity planning and follow-up