The marketing module within NAV provides a wide array of functionalities including managing contacts, developing campaigns, selecting a target audience, processing incoming leads and creating follow-ups. These processes are essential for businesses that provide promotional sales as well as those that identify the pre-sales step as a critical part of their overall business.
Having implemented NAV for clients from different industries, it is apparent that the use of the contacts/marketing module varies for each client. For one of my recent implementations, we have been successful in providing marketing solutions for all levels through the standard marketing module, minor customisation and the use of Fenwick Gold granules.
With this particular client situation, sales quotes fulfilled their requirements but didn’t allow them to manage follow-up tasks and sales cycle. Sales cycles and follow up activities are a standard part of NAV, but only available with opportunity management. We carried out a minor modification where we linked sales cycle and activities to sales quotes (in addition to them being linked to opportunities). This created huge benefits and process efficiencies for the client as they were able to manage their processes with the use of one screen only.
This is one of the great strengths of NAV. It has flexibility where new functionality can be created with ease but it is also flexible where an existing piece of function can be linked to a different process and provide huge benefits to the client
For this implementation, Fenwick Gold granules also allowed us to further enhance the sales process. The Advanced Record Links granule provided an intuitive drag-and-drop or click-to-paste interface into NAV. Documents and email interactions were linked to Contacts and Quotes within NAV for easy access rather than having to open files through a folder structure. Further, the Advanced Notifications granule provided users and customers the ability to subscribe to real-time alerts about critical events occurring in NAV. Automatic emails are sent to Customers when quotes are created or when they are converted to orders. Similarly, Salespeople are notified for follow-up phone calls based on the stage of the sale.
A mix of standard functionality, minor customisation and Fenwick Gold granules, in this case, provided a good balance in matching the exact customer requirement.
