Entellium's eSalesForce

Still, without the aid of an Entellium partner, I configured a detailed sales process and imported a substantial amount of lead, customer and personal contact data within a couple of hours of logging into the system. Unfortunately, you must enter data into the sales process as a lead, so you may lose information on an existing sale's status. And it's impossible to import product-catalog data over the Web interface--it must be entered manually.

Initial setup of my sales organization was straightforward. I created user roles, then assigned my test users to one of the sales departments. But I could not import users in batch from the Web interface, and there's no way to pull users from existing directories, such as LDAP or Active Directory.

Movin' on Down

I used of eSalesForce's default seven-step sales process, which describes sales opportunities as moving through stages, starting with Above the Funnel and ending up as Won, Lost or Deferred. Using the sales-process checklist, I created a series of tasks that must be completed at each stage before a sale can progress. For instance, I created a checklist in the Above the Funnel stage that required a time frame for a completed purchase and a product demo before the opportunity could advance to the next stage. You can create tasks and appointments associated with an opportunity and integrate them into MyEntellium.ESalesForce makes it easy to manage your leads and shared contacts. You can enter work notes into any lead or opportunity record and add multiple attachments to contacts, leads and opportunities, and attach separate contracts to each line item of a quote or the overall opportunity.

Opportunity Knocks

Tracking correspondence is a manual process: You must cut and paste e-mails and phone call records into a work notes field. You can't add custom fields to eSalesForce, so tracking nonstandard sales data, such as the square footage of a buyer's premises, is difficult. Although I could add product quotes to opportunity records for both recurring and one-time sale items, there's no way to print or send a quote to a customer. Given the flexible contract-attachment options, I was surprised at the lack of a mechanism for associating a contract template to a product. Because I couldn't attach templates from the eCollaborate file store, I had to create and attach new contracts for each opportunity.

Sales opportunities are categorized by stage automatically, and forecasting and reporting functions are simple to use. In addition to canned reports, such as opportunities won or lost by sales rep, users can create custom reports. Regular users can employ the same ad hoc reporting mechanism to save reports based on leads and opportunities, a nice complement to the personalized pipeline, forecast & revenue dashboard provided by MyEntellium. Individual products can be given a bill date different than the sale's close date, and both dates will be integrated into the forecast and pipeline views.

Synching Data

Getting data in and out of Entellium's suite wasn't always easy. MyEntellium provides one-way synchronization of contacts, tasks and calendaring with Palm, ACT, Outlook and Lotus Notes clients through the Infotriever service. This lets Entellium update your clients, but data changes made outside the suite are lost. And there's no way to select multiple records, such as calendar or contacts for synchronization--each new entry or change produces a pop-up window asking if you want to synchronize the new data with your desktop.Although Entellium is missing some advanced features competitors like SalesForce.com offer--such as work-flow requirements based on deal size and marketing campaign management--eSalesForce provides a comprehensive, easy-to-use system at a reasonable price.

Daniel Koffler is a freelance writer and IT consultant. Write to him at [email protected].