Sales vs. Accounting: The Departmental Wars
In the battle for customer satisfaction and, ultimately, your company’s success, there is an ever present push and pull within the departments of your company.

View from Accounting/Credit:
If you work in the accounting or credit departments of your company, you may view the sales staff as only “telling the customer what they want to hear.” When procedure isn’t followed, you are the one responsible for cleaning up the “mess.” Its your department that enables the sales team to do their jobs. You manage the score and keep everybody honest.

View from Sales/Customer Service:
If you’re part of the sales or customer service departments, chances are you have been overheard calling the back-office team the “Sales Prevention Department." You work hard finding and developing opportunities. You sustain the company. Without sales, there is no company.

Who’s right?
Both. Despite the fact that these departments think and work differently, both have information critical to the company’s success. Face it – you need each other and each other’s information.

The Customer Chain

Integrating the front- and back-office systems helps streamline workflow and communication. Information is entered into the system once, eliminating double entry and increasing productivity, but not circumventing necessary checks and balances.

How often do sales or support staff get asked for shipment status information? Or, what if they take an order only to find out that the customer is on credit hold and the order cannot be fulfilled? Through integration, employees have the ability to view and analyze complete customer data, which allows them to respond faster, make more informed business decisions, and provide higher levels of customer service.

A Complete Customer View from the CRM Application
How does it look when the front- and back-office system is working together? Ultimately, the solution should look and feel like the familiar, native application. The following figure shows a screen shot of Sage CRM SalesLogix, the leading CRM application from Sage Software. The interface displays customer accounting information including receivables, aging, credit limit, sales year-to-date (YTD), as well as other back-office data within the front-office application. By selecting the appropriate tab in the user interface, front-office users can view invoice history, sales history, payment history, and other important back office related customer information.


Customer Information in Sage CRM SalesLogix

Taking it one step further, there are situations where it may make sense to enable a front-office user to directly access the accounting system. These situations may include running a customer inquiry or placing an order directly into the back-office system. With the front-office account and the back-office company information linked together, users are able to click a button from the account record in their front-office CRM solution to open the back-office screen that displays the correlating customer information.


Sage MAS 90 called from Sage CRM SalesLogix

Front-office systems are historically flexible and customizable. Back-office systems are typically designed around strict rules to maintain data integrity. With an integrated system, the flexible front-office now includes an extended set of business information to create a composite application with a value greater than the sum of its parts.


Example of an Integrated CRM System

Working together
Successful customer-centric integration is achievable and affordable for small- and medium-sized businesses. The key to this success is always keeping the customer experience at the forefront of your mind. Not only does the customer win, but so do sales and accounting.

The Sales Department wins by:

• Having up-to-date product information, pricing, discounting, and inventory availability, when quoting or taking orders.
• Knowing the account credit status, terms, and account balance before creating an order.
• Knowing the invoice, payment, outstanding balance, and aging information to be able to provide more complete customer service.
• Using past product purchasing information to plan future campaigns.
• Using front-office process tools to follow up with customers after they purchase.

The Accounting Department wins by:

• Maintaining control over the order entry process so that salespeople can generate more accurate and complete orders.
• Controlling product pricing and/or discounting.
• Reducing the time spent answering questions from sales because the team will have accounting information available at their fingertips.
• Reducing duplicate work in re-keying orders.
• Reducing customer maintenance activities.

Everyone wins!
Overall, everyone wins with front-to-back-office, customer-centric integration because orders move to accounting more quickly, customers receive products sooner, the company gets paid faster, salespeople receive commission checks earlier, employees are more satisfied with their jobs, and clients receive higher levels of customer service.

The time is right to identify integration as a key corporate initiative, merge your data silos, make peace between your departmental staffs and start reaping the rewards that a customer-centric, integrated business can offer.

See a demo or call 800-223-3282 for more information.