Sales Force Automation

AAN CRM drives sales performance by allowing sales representative to track and share contacts and opportunities, manage and upsell into existing accounts, forecast revenue, monitor performance through dashboards, manage quotes and contracts, work offline through our mobile solutions and collaborate through integration with Microsoft Outlook and other groupware applications.

• − Share sales data across individuals and teams
• − Focus attention on the most profitable deals
• − Bring new sales representatives up to speed
• − Present effective presentations and proposals to customers
• − Monitor quota progress and business performance

Opportunity Management
allows your team to close deals faster by sharing consistent sales information, tracking deal progress, and recording deal-related interactions. Customize AAN CRM to fit how your opportunity management process works, including sales methodologies, account details, and opportunity handling.

• − Share opportunity information across individuals and teams
• − Increase sales productivity through standardized sales processes
• − Ensure effective opportunity handling through collaboration and workflow
• − Tailor sales methodologies to meet your business needs

Contact Management
consolidates contacts into a single location and associates accounts with sales opportunities, account information and customer case information. Proven import and de-duplication technology ensures that companies have a clean, consistent view of customers and relationships.

Contact Imports
Import contacts from a variety of data sources in a few simple steps. AAN CRM supports data transfer formats for Salesforce.com, Act, Microsoft Outlook, Excel and CSV formats.

De-Duplication
Automatically ensure good data quality through de-duplication checks which scan for similar contact records upon import.

Account Management
capabilities provide a single view of customers across products, geographies, account, and status. In one single page, users see not only account information, but all associated sales opportunities, contacts, activities, history, cases and quotes. Account management gives your organization the ability to build tighter, more profitable relationships by understanding the status of each account.

• − Understand account status and relationships
• − Improve up-selling and cross-selling opportunities
• − Ensure consistent interactions with customers
• − Share account information across marketing, sales and support departments

Quote sand Contract Management
functionality, sales reps can generate accurate quotes with support for multiple line items, currencies and tax codes. Quotes and contracts can be delivered to customers via email, Word or PDF. Strong version control functionality ensures reps can more easily manage multiple versions of quotes and contracts.

• − Generate and present accurate quotes and contracts to customers
• − Manage multiple revisions in a single location
• − Gain a clearer picture of customer agreements and products purchased

Plug-Ins for Microsoft Office
integrates your CRM data with the Microsoft’s leading productivity tools. With a few simple clicks, AAN CRM users can sync email, contacts and calendar information into AAN CRM modules, export data into Microsoft Excel and present CRM data in Microsoft Word.

• − Capture important customers communications within AAN CRM
• − Export CRM data into Microsoft Word
• − Integrate data between AAN CRM and Microsoft Excel

Mobile Solutions
Stay in touch while on-the-go with AAN CRM mobile functionality. AAN CRM offers wireless and PDA access that is hassle-free so you can continue to work away from the office. For our enterprise users, Offline Client Synchronization allows employees to work offline and automatically update AAN CRM when they return to the network. AAN CRM mobile solutions translate to less downtime and greater productivity.

• − Improve sales productivity with mobile access solutions
• − Access AAN CRM from any smart phone or PDA
• − Work offline and update AAN CRM information automatically when you return to the network
• − Implement mobile functionality quickly and simply across our deployment options

Dashboards
provide employees and managers real-time information about leads, opportunities and accounts. Define access based on user profile and expose the information employees need to know to get their job done. Automatic consolidation of sales data from across teams reveals the information executives needs to drive performance across their business.

• − Present user-specific information about sales opportunities and progress
• − Consolidate sales information from across the business for executives
• − Customize charts and reports based on key metrics
• − Drill down on charts to understand account progress and individual performance

Marketing Automation

ugar closes the loop between marketing and sales. Create, execute and track campaigns across multiple channels with the campaign wizard. Develop compelling email marketing programs and capture leads directly into your CRM system with web-to-lead forms. Manage and assign leads to your sales reps and track the marketing ROI of your programs.

• − Create and execute campaigns across marketing channels
• − Captures leads directly into CRM System
• − Measures return on investment of campaigns

Multi-Channel Campaigns
centralizes the development, execution and monitoring of campaigns across multiple channels. With AAN CRM campaign management, companies achieve better visibility into the effectiveness of marketing spend.

• − Provide detailed views into campaign effectiveness across marketing and sales stages
• − Define campaign routing and approvals to ensure buy-in across the organization
• − Benchmark campaigns to understand which campaigns produce the most revenue

Campaign Wizard
simplifies the process of creating a campaign by walking users though a simple process that gathers all the information needed to execute a campaign. The Campaign Wizard gathers information about the marketing channel, target, program dates, budget, expected revenue and offer to ensure that campaigns are effective and measurable.

• − Simplifies campaign design, execution and tracking
• − Ensures proper testing, suppression, and list management
• − Offers real-time activity and ROI reports

Email Marketing
allows marketing managers to identify the correct target for a given campaign, design offers that convey the brand identity of the organization, and track the response rates once a campaign is executed.

• − Ensure campaigns are brand consistent and coordinated across customer channels
• − Monitor campaign execution to ensure offers reach the targeted audience
• − Track and assign opportunities to campaign leads
• − Control opt-in and opt-out lists

Web-to-Lead Forms
designed for non-technical users, AAN CRM Web-to-Lead Forms simplify the process of capturing leads into your CRM system. By embedding a customizable form within customer-facing web sites, Web-to-Lead forms directly import campaign responses into AAN CRM. Marketing professional can designate what kind of information they would like to capture in each form to ensure useful information is handed off to sales people for follow-up.

• − Automate lead import from Web into AAN CRM
• − Reduce the need for technical resources in creating web forms
• − Presents all fields and values from the Leads module
• − Offers design flexibility and lowers IT time in marketing support

Lead Management
gives marketing professionals the tools to manage prospects and existing customers. Qualify and track leads from multiple campaigns and hand them off to the correct sales representative. Ensure prospects lists are valid and marketing offers are coordinated. With AAN CRM lead management, companies have the tools to populate the pipeline with more qualified leads.

• − Segment leads based on the attributes that drive your business
• − Automatically capture and assign leads across multiple channels
• − Convert leads to opportunities and ensure appropriate follow-up

Marketing Analytics
allows companies to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns from the initial offer to a closed sales opportunity. Managers can asses the effectiveness of marketing campaigns relative to budget, channel, expected revenue and win rate to gain a full picture of how marketing programs impact the sales pipeline.

• − Understand the ROI of marketing programs
• − Track which channel is most/least profitable
• − Replicate successful campaigns in a few simple steps

Customer Support

Acquiring new customers is much more expensive than selling to existing ones. With AAN CRM customer support, companies have the confidence that customer cases will be handled quickly and effectively. AAN CRM customer support centralizes customer service requests across channels to allow companies to manage inbound emails, diagnose bugs, share knowledge, and resolve customer issues. In addition, companies can defray customer support costs with the Customer Self-Service Portal.

• − Centrally manage and share all customer service issues
• − Understand frequency of incidents to improve product quality
• − Share information across individuals and teams
• − Measure the responsiveness of customer support

Case Management
centralizes the service history of each customer, allowing for a detailed view of customer requests and responses. Case management metrics allow managers to monitor how cases are handled and to escalate issues to ensure customer satisfaction.

• − Gain a complete view of customer service request history
• − Escalate unresolved issues before they become large problems
• − Monitor the effectiveness of case responses

Inbound Email
processing allows support organizations to better manage customer support requests through information sharing and routing. With Inbound Email Processing, users can create rules for in-bound e-mails and automatically assign cases to the right customer support representative.

• − Shared group inbox manages and assigns cases based on workflow rules
• − Automatically attaches to customer account record for better understanding of customer issues
• − Issues can be prioritized and assigned

Knowledgebase
helps customer support and engineering teams to better manage and share structured and unstructured information. Knowledgebase allows user to create frequently asked questions (FAQs), manage files, and search and rate content - all in an easy-to-use interface.

• − Allows users to create searchable content through full-text search, tagging, categorization and approvals.
• − Manages the content staging process so new material is reviewed by a manager who approves and posts the content.
• − Includes authoring, posting, and rating of FAQs for internal and external viewing.

Bug Tracking
effective service organizations resolve customer problems quickly and recycle feedback from customers into the next generation of product. With AAN CRM Bug Tracking, companies gain a complete view of product problems, their frequency and the effort needed to resolve the problem. AAN CRM bug tracking not only ensures that customer problems are solved, but that products are improved.

• − Ensure all customer cases are managed based on priority, status and category
• − Identify and prioritize customer problems
• − Assign incidents to employees based on availability, expertise or account relationship

Customer Self-Service Portal
allows companies to provide self-service capabilities to customers and prospects for key marketing, sales and support activities. Customers can create cases, upload relevant information, search the knowledgebase, and track cases to resolution without ever having to pick up a phone. All cases automatically appear within the AAN CRM Cases module.

• − Reduce the number of inbound support calls by offering a self-service environment.
• − Expose support knowledge to customers through FAQs and Knowledgebase.
• − Allow customers to update account information and manage newsletter subscriptions.

Reporting

AAN CRM Reporting turns data into actionable information. Managers can monitor business performance across the entire business with reporting tools on Marketing Analytics, Sales Trends, Case Reports, and Customer Profiles. Dashboards can be customized to meet the individual roles of users or to track key metrics across the organization. Underlying each report is actual data, so managers can drill down and explore the data impacting their business.

• − Create real-time reports and dashboards on any CRM metric
• − Monitor the effectiveness of marketing programs, sales opportunities, and support cases
• − Share/restrict access to reports and dashboards across teams

Dashboards
provide employees and managers real-time information about leads, opportunities and accounts. Define access based on user profile and expose the information employees need to know to get their job done. Automatic consolidation of sales data from across teams reveals the information executives needs to drive performance across their business.

• − Present user-specific information about sales opportunities and progress
• − Consolidate sales information from across the business for executives
• − Customize charts and reports based on key metrics
• − Drill down on charts to understand account progress and individual performance

Marketing Analytics
allows companies to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns from the initial offer to a closed sales opportunity. Managers can asses the effectiveness of marketing campaigns relative to budget, channel, expected revenue and win rate to gain a full picture of how marketing programs impact the sales pipeline.

• − Understand the ROI of marketing programs
• − Track which channel is most/least profitable
• − Replicate successful campaigns in a few simple steps

Sales Trends
Reporting gives sales managers the insight needed to adjust to changing business conditions. On one screen, sales managers can monitor the pipeline of sales representative by sales stage, view how many calls each rep has made over a given time period, and monitor closed and expected revenue for the quarter. Managers and reps can also take advantage of the strong reporting and charting capabilities to create personalized dashboards that update whenever information changes.

• − Present user-specific information about opportunities
• − Consolidate sales data for executives
• − Customize charts and reports based on key metrics
• − Drill down on charts to understand performance

Case Reports
monitor customer problems and how well your customer support team is solving these issues. Case Reports can be used to measure open cases by time period, support representatives, priority and entitlement. With AAN CRM Case Reports, managers gain a better view into the satisfaction of its customers and the performance of the support organization.

• − Monitor the effectiveness of case responses
• − Identify and prioritize customer problems
• − Measure how issues are resolved across individuals and teams

Customer Profiles
provides a better understanding of who your customers are. Reports and dashboards show customer profiles by industry, geography, company size, product assets, revenue and other important attributes. By gaining a better understanding of customers, companies can better manage existing relationships and build new ones.

• − Understand your customer base and how it changes over time
• − Parse by industry, revenue, time, geography, and other attributes
• − Deliver relevant reports based on concrete data

Collaboration

Underlying marketing, sales and support activities, AAN CRM Collaboration provides capabilities to manage email within AAN CRM while integrating with Microsoft Outlook, schedule and track activities, manage projects, and work in offline or mobile settings. AAN CRM collaboration streamlines common tasks and promotes more effective communication with employees and customers.

• − Manage schedules, calls, meetings and emails from a single location
• − Create, assign and manage key projects across teams
• − Integrate AAN CRM with popular applications such as Microsoft Outlook
• − Allow workers to access CRM in mobile and offline settings

Email Client
delivers the functionality of a desktop email client with the portability of a web-based email application. The new Email Client features tight integration with all AAN CRM modules and offers state-of-the-art design, including drag-and-drop capabilities, search, keyboard shortcuts, rules wizard, support for folders, contacts, and personal inboxes. The Email Client can serve as a compliment to existing email clients or as a full replacement due to its interoperability with all leading email servers.

• − Handle all email communications without leaving AAN CRM
• − Drag-and-drop capabilities makes for a great user experience
• − Support for search, folder and group inboxes makes email management simple

Project Management
delivers a full project management solution combined with the sales management, marketing automation and customer support used by employees to manage customer-centric activities. These new capabilities allow users to deploy projects across all customer-facing tasks, including campaigns, opportunities, accounts, and customer cases. Since Project Management is integrated with AAN CRM’s customer information, users no longer need to be concerned with redundant or inaccurate information, lost customer data, poor information sharing, or lack of user adoption

• − Build and manage projects across teams
• − Create projects from pre-defined templates
• − Monitor activity and dependencies with Gantt Charts
• − Manages upcoming tasks, open items, percentage completion, open cases, etc.

Plug-Ins for Microsoft Office
integrates your CRM data with the Microsoft’s leading productivity tools. With a few simple clicks, AAN CRM users can sync email, contacts and calendar information into AAN CRM modules, export data into Microsoft Excel and present CRM data in Microsoft Word.

• − Capture important customers communications within AAN CRM
• − Export CRM data into Microsoft Word
• − Integrate data between AAN CRM and Microsoft Excel

Mobile Solutions
Stay in touch while on-the-go with AAN CRM mobile functionality. AAN CRM offers wireless and PDA access that is hassle-free so you can continue to work away from the office. For our enterprise users, Offline Client Synchronization allows employees to work offline and automatically update AAN CRM when they return to the network. AAN CRM mobile solutions translate to less downtime and greater productivity.

• − Improve sales productivity with mobile access solutions
• − Access AAN CRM from any smart phone or PDA
• − Work offline and update AAN CRM information automatically when you return to the network
• − Implement mobile functionality quickly and simply across our deployment options

Activity Management
streamlines the tasks necessary to get the job done. Manage e-mails, meetings, calendars and calls within a central location to ensure teams work together to close more opportunities in a shorter period of time.

• − Schedule and assign calls attached to a specific account to ensure a more complete customer record
• − Archive emails and meetings notes to individual accounts
• − Manage schedule, meetings and calendars in a single location

Platform

AAN CRM Platform capabilities allow administrators and developers to create powerful business processes quickly and easily. Administrators can define teams, control access rights to modules and fields, change the homepage layout or modify and existing screen with the layout editor, and create new dashlets from third-party data sources. Simple yet powerful workflow tools give user the ability to create and enforce business rules. AAN CRM offers the ability to create custom fields within a given module or create an entire new module with Module Builder. These new modules can be unique to your company or they can be shared or sold via AAN CRM Exchange and loaded into other AAN CRM instances through the Module Loader.

• − Simple drag-and-drop user interface for easy configuration
• − Deep customization features allow for the creation of custom fields and modules
• − Streamlined business processes to match business requirements
• − Reveal and protect information based on user role and profile
• − Share and add additional modules based on your company needs

Team Management
allows companies to create and manage teams based on job type, division, geography or other attributes. Once roles are assigned, administrators can assign access rights to a given role to ensure team members have access. Team Management ensures more effective information sharing and better information about team performance.

• − Define teams based on company and customer needs.
• − Assign leads to teams based on expertise and existing relationships.
• − Analyze how teams are working together and identify potential gaps in performance.

Access Control
levels allow information to be shared or restricted based on user role. Administrators can determine what information that role can access at either a module, view or field level. Access Control rights include the ability to access, view, edit, import or export.

• − Ensure information security by controlling edit privileges
• − Protect confidential information within the organization
• − Reveal general information across the company

Workflow management
streamlines critical business processes within your organization. Using AAN CRM templates, administrators can create custom business processes based on AAN CRM Objects. Users can also define alerts, actions and triggers to become a more responsive to customer demands.

• − Standardize business processes across the organization
• − Create custom business processes based on unique needs of company
• − Define alerts, triggers and actions to ensure follow-through

Layout Editor
provides administrators with the ability to tailor the look of each AAN CRM screen by editing and renaming tabs, changing dropdown values, and choosing to hide unused modules. With the AAN CRM Layout editors, administrators can tailor the application to meet the specifics use cases of the company, while hiding unneeded modules

• − Change the appearance of AAN CRM to fit your company needs
• − Hide unused modules to focus user attention on core processes
• − Prioritize module appearance based on company objective

Custom Fields
allow companies to capture information specific to their business within AAN CRM. By creating Custom Fields using AAN CRM Studio, administrators create fully upgradeable values that reflect information most important to the company. Administrators can also choose to require users to populate custom fields before a record is saved.

• − Create custom fields to capture critical information about marketing programs, sales opportunities and support cases
• − Required fields ensure information is populated before record is saved
• − Full upgrade support means customizations are preserved.

Module Builder
enables users to build custom modules from scratch or combine existing or custom objects into a brand new CRM module. Developers can leverage existing AAN CRM Objects such as Contacts, Accounts, Documents, Cases and Opportunities to build a new module or create their own custom objects from scratch to form a new module. Users can build an unlimited number of custom modules, which interoperate seamlessly with Reporting, Workflow and AAN CRM Studio tools. Upgrades for custom modules are fully supported.

• − Create custom modules to track information critical to your business
• − Utilize pre-defined objects or create custom objects for the new module
• − Share or charge for custom objects on AAN CRMForge and AAN CRM Exchange.

Module Loader
The AAN CRM Community has developed hundreds of module extensions for AAN CRM. With AAN CRM Module Loader, companies can easily install these extensions into the AAN CRM application to get the most out of your CRM system. Using the AAN CRM Module Loader framework, administrators follow a simple process for installing new applications in a completely upgrade-safe environment.

• − Extend AAN CRM functionality based on business need
• − Choose from hundreds of different projects across a broad range of categories
• − Automated installation of new modules with fully supported upgrades

Homepage Layout
AAN CRM gives end users control over what information they see on their screens. Using drag-and-drop capabilities, users can change the layout of their homepage, hide unused dashlets or create new dashlets reflecting information important to the user. With AAN CRM, CRM becomes a little less staid and little more like a My Yahoo! page.

• − Configure homepage to display only information relevant to your job
• − Create multiple dashlets based on AAN CRM modules or outside data sources
• − Edit the information display of any dashlet

Dashlets
are highly configurable containers which display AAN CRM module data, along with external sources like RSS feeds and with web services like Google Maps. AAN CRM Dashlets is a powerful new way to combine highly functional mash-ups in an attractive and easily tailored AJAX-based UI framework.

• − Create web mash-ups between AAN CRM and external data sources
• − Add, edit, move or remove AAN CRM Dashlets with a few simple clicks
• − Change information within AAN CRM Dashlets to reflect the information you want to see

AAN CRM Exchange,
the online marketplace for AAN CRM extensions, offers a wealth of extensions written by the AAN CRM Community. These Exchange Apps can be easily integrated into your AAN CRM instance through the AAN CRM Module Loader. Technical and non-technical users can author their own modules through AAN CRM Module Builder for sharing or sale on AAN CRM Exchange.

• − Research and test application on AAN CRM Exchange to learn how to extend your CRM deployment
• − Download and deploy certified AAN CRM extensions written by the AAN CRM community
• − Create your own Exchange App through Module Builder to share or sell to the AAN CRM Community

• − Linux (any)
• − Windows (2003, XP)
• − Unix
• − BSD
• − Mac OS X

• − Apache
• − IIS
• − Web servers that support PHP

• − MySQL: 4.1.2 or higher
• − SQL Server 2005 (only)
• − Oracle 10g

PHP versions 4.3.X (best 4.3.10 ) or 5.X

FireFox or Internet Explorer are recommend for viewing the AAN CRM user interface.

• − Minimum Memory: 256 MB
• − Minimum Harddrive Space: The harddrive space required to run your CRM instance will vary based on many factors, especially the size of your database. Consult your system or database administrator for their recommendation.

AAN CRM is a flexible, scalable application that can serve one user or several thousand. Hardware requirements will vary based on:

• − Number of users connecting concurrently to the server.
• − Whether the CRM applicaton and the database are on a single server or multiple servers.
• − Environment factors, such as Operating System, Web Server, Database Server. Consult your system administrator for their recommendation.