SENDING & RECEIVING E-mails FROM OpenERP

OpenERP can do most of the things you need in order to organize your Business effectively. So, even it can organize your email communications nicely. The use of E-mails becomes essential from business point of view. Business of all sizes, locations and types can effectively use E-mails today for multiple purposes. E-mails are now-a-days used in Business to communicate with the Clients, Management and the Business Partners. Email is a growing Communication System that has transformed the way Companies conduct and run their businesses. Email expedites the exchange of information, keeps communication cost low, remove global barriers and allows user to easily access their messages from anywhere in the world.

OpenERP offers the flexibility to use E-mail within OpenERP so that you can easily communicate with team and Clients. OpenERP can be connected to Outlook and Thunderbird. With the Outlook and Thunderbird plug-ins, you can create and/or open contacts directly from your email client in OpenERP without any efforts.

OpenERP CRM

With OpenERP you can track your best leads and opportunities. Using OpenERP automated e-mail feature you can customize your sales cycle, control statistics and hence improve your Business Performance.

Its Key Features are -

* Track lead and Opportunities
* Outlook and Thunderbird plug-ins
* Acquire leads
* Follow quotes and Sales Order

Let us understand this by taking an example of Sales Organization. Suppose you have a Sales Organization and you have several things to manage such as -

Address of different Customers
Managing different Sales Cycle
Sells Different Products and Services

As a manager, you need to track the performance of each and every team within company. OpenERP allows you to do this by defining Sales team. A sales team is a group of sales people who are performing a similar job. OpenERP for your sales organization allows you to :

* Assign leads or opportunities according to the nature of sales team. Opportunity can be assigned to an individual also.
* You can group your Sales team in a tree like hierarchy structure.
* For each Sales team, you can assign a responsible user email address that will be used when creating or replying to emails from OpenERP.

>> Defining the Key Steps of your Sales Cycle

Each Company will have stages to qualify Opportunities. To see & define stages for Opportunity , go to Sales >> Configuration >> Opportunities >> Stages.

The key steps of your Sales Cycles are called Stages. Stages will allow salesman to easily track the Opportunities and determine where the Opportunity is positioned in the Sales Cycle. Now when you move ahead further in your sales cycle and move from one stage to another, you can expect to gain more precise and correct information about a given opportunity. For Example - When setting an opportunity as 'Qualified', you can decide that the salesman has to enter 'Expected Revenue' and the 'Expected Closing Date'. You can also change the Probability when changing stages by choosing "Change probability Automatically " checkbox.

To track your opportunity, you can assign the following stages to sales team. Different stages included are :

1) Territory
2) Qualified
3) Qualified Sponsors
4) Proposition
5) Negotiation
6) Won/Lost

You can assign your own stages throughout the qualification process by means of the Stage field that is found up to the right of the opportunity definition.

>> Planning your Next Actions

When leads has been converted to an opportunities, OpenERP allows you to automate certain steps in sales cycle. Using this, you can assign or change the status of an opportunity according to a specific condition. To access the CRM rules within OpenERP, use Sales >> Configuration >> Automated Actions >> Automated Action menu

Planning your next action also refers to performing your actions manually, without any interference of automated rules. You can also use the filters to group by Priority and then click the next action date column to sort by next action date to easily follow up your opportunities and then to decide or know exactly what you have to do.

>> Planning your meetings and calls effectively

Planning your meetings and calls allows you to improve your sales skills by learning from your calls and meeting history. You can enter complete and up-to-the-date report for both your meetings and calls. You can schedule a meeting from an opportunities and directly from a Customer form also.

A) Scheduling a meeting from an opportunity

For this, click the schedule meeting button in the Opportunity and then clicks on the week button in the calendar view.

B) Scheduling a meeting directly from a Customer form

* Goto the customer for whom you want to schedule a meeting and then open a form view.
* From the list of actions appeared, click Schedule a meeting
* Click on the day you want the meeting to be scheduled. A meeting form will be displayed, with the name of the customer and the date profiled.

After scheduling a meeting, you can define several meeting attributes such as meeting agenda, meeting time, meeting duration. You can also set reminders or alarms to your meetings and send invitations to anyone in your business organization just by specifying the email address of the specified person in the invitation.

MANAGING YOUR LEADS

A leads in OpenERP represents a Potential Customer with whom you have not established a relationship yet. A lead contains valuable information to realise future sales Opportunities. When you create a lead in OpenERP, the following events could trigger :

* An inquiry email sent to one of your company's generic email addresses, such as sales@company.com, from the mail gateway.
* A business card from a prospective customer met briefly at an exhibition: you have to contact him again to qualify the lead and to know if there is any possibility of a sales opportunity; registered manually.
* A form completed on your website directly integrated into OpenERP using the web service. Before converting the form into a sales proposition or opportunity, you should read and handle the person's request.

LEADS IN SALES DEPARTMENT

Usually employees in the marketing/sales department, needs to works on leads. You can create your own stages through Sales >> Configuration >> Leads and opportunities >> Stages.
A Salesman can also change the status of the lead according to need.
From the Sales >> Lead menus, you can qualify each and every lead through the stage field that is found up to the right of the lead definition. In order to move your lead to next state or level from the list of leads, you can use the button that looks like green, right arrow. When a qualified lead requires further actions, you can turn the lead into a partner and, eventually, a sales opportunity.

IMPORTING A LEAD DATABASE

Using OpenERP, you can also import a huge list of leads. It can be useful in terms of database of Potential Prospects that you want to load into OpenERP to handle them all the same time. For example in Call centres it is required to call prospects from Lead database. You can start with a List of Leads in CSV format. If it is available in some other format then you can easily convert it into CSV format using Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc.

Now for importing a lead database, Open the leads from Sales menu >> Sales >> Leads.

You can also import link from your system by clicking on import link.

THERE ARE OTHER METHODS OF GENERATING LEADS AUTOMATICALLY OR SEMI-AUTOMATICALLY :

* Through a Contact Form on your Website
* Using the Outlook or Thunderbird plugin to insert new leads directly from the salesman's mailbox when he sees promising emails
* Using the email gateway for each incoming email from a certain address which may create a lead automatically from the contents of the email.

ORGANIZING LEADS

OpenERP allows users to organize their leads in an effective manner.
In order to organize leads use Use the Sales >> Sales >> Leads view

* Display a list of all the leads according to the sales team you are linked to.
* Create a new lead by clicking New.
* Display Unassigned Leads, click the button next to the Salesman field.
* Display a list of all your leads you still need to handle.
* Display a list of all your leads that are waiting for a customer response (usually in Pending status). This enables you to check periodically on your work to do.
* Display a list of all the leads assigned to different salespeople.

Leads can also be prioritized in OpenERP. Salespeople can assign a priority to their lead, and then start working on their leads from the top of the list, which is sorted by priority.

OPTIMIZING YOUR SALES CYCLES THROUGH OPPORTUNITIES

While a lead represents the very first contact with the prospect, a sales opportunity represents a potential contract! Each opportunity has to be followed by a salesperson and deciding whether to Qualify the opportunity either by making a Quotation or by Cancelling the Opportunity. All opportunity can be found under Sales menu :

Sales >> Sales >> Opportunities.

Opportunities can be connected to the email gateway i.e. new emails may create opportunities, each of them automatically gets the history of the conversation with the customer. You and your sales team(s) will be able to plan meetings and phone calls from opportunities, convert them into quotations, manage related documents, track all customer-related activities, and much more.

CONVERTING LEADS INTO CUSTOMERS OR OPPORTUNITIES

If the salesperson thinks that the lead has been well qualified and that there is a real opportunity, he can easily convert the lead into a opportunity using the button Convert to Opportunity. Clicking the Convert to Opportunity button offers several possibilities, allowing you also to avoid duplicate partners:

* You can decide to just create the opportunity and keep the contact data from the lead without creating a partner
* You can convert to an opportunity, and create a new partner if it does not exist yet, or merge the contact with an existing partner
* You first create a partner, and later you convert the lead to an opportunity

Tip : Convert to Opportunity

When you click the Convert to Opportunity button and the email address of the new contact is filled out, OpenERP will check whether this email address corresponds to an email address of an existing partner. If so, OpenERP will directly propose to merge the new contact with the partner found.

CONNECTING WITH YOUR Email

With the Outlook and Thunderbird plug-ins, you can create and open contacts directly from your email client in OpenERP without effort. You can also link emails (with attachments) to OpenERP, to avoid information getting lost. The email gateway functionality enables you to use OpenERP's CRM without necessarily using the OpenERP interface. Up-to-date leads can automatically be stored in OpenERP just by sending and receiving emails through a specific email address. You can even answer such mails from your own mailbox.

The Fetchmail / Mailgateway functionality lets you interface the CRM with incoming and outgoing emails. So you can receive mails in OpenERP and answer them directly from OpenERP. You can install it when you configure the CRM, through the Reconfigure wizard, Fetch Emails, or by installing the fetchmail module from the list of modules in the OpenERP Admin area. Each email you receive on the specified email address may automatically create a lead, a contact or an other object in OpenERP, while keeping track of email attachments. This is an easy way to ensure that no crucial information gets lost.

You can set the generic email address you want to use, such as sales@company.com, and then you tell OpenERP that every incoming email for this address should automatically be created as a lead.

HOW TO CONFIGURE YOUR Email SERVER FOR INCOMING MAILS?

* Sales >> Configuration >> Emails >> Email Servers.

* Go to Tools >> Configuration >> Email Template >> Email Accounts to define the email smtp settings.

* In Server, type the mail server, i.e. SMTP OR POP

* Add the User Information, such as email address for which the mails will enter OpenERP, i.e. support@company.com, the user name and the password. Configure the other settings to your needs.

* When everything is correctly configured, Approve the account. OpenERP will automatically create a Scheduler for the mails. You can also send/receive mails manually by clicking the Send/Receive button.

HOW TO CONFIGURE YOUR Email SERVER FOR OUTGOING MAILS?

* Go to Sales > Configuration > Emails > Email Servers to define the email server settings.
* Assign a Name and select the Server Type, i.e. IMAP Server.
* Click Add Attachments if you want to include attachments for the mails received / sent
* Assign the Model to use when a new email arrives, i.e. choose Lead (crm.leads) if you want every new email that arrives to be created as a lead.
* Click Confirm to confirm the account settings.