An inbound sales call comes in from a hurried purchasing manager for some product information.  The person on the other end has been procrastinating on researching your product and the executives are looking to make a decision this week.  Perfect!  You have the exact piece of information already organized in an easy to read document comparing your product with your competitors that will solve everyone’s problems.  Touchdown! (I would say Slamdunk but the football season just started)  Now where did you last see that document?

Finding the ideal attachment to send to a client or prospect can be a frustrating experience as you frantically search your sent items folders, local/shared folders, and the internet. Finally, you swallow your pride and beg your colleagues for some help.  You find nothing in your email and your colleagues aren’t being much help.  Finally, an hour later, you find the right document to only realize it is the previous model and hasn’t been updated!

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 has a great solution to your attachment woes.  It’s called Sales Literature and consolidates, organizes, and validates all your valuable attachments.  The best part is that it can be fully accessed through the toolbar already built into your Outlook message window.  Simply track a new or reply message and the drop down is available for use.

Like many dropdowns in the CRM toolbar, your most frequently used attachments are stored in a quick pick list.  Those that are not listed can be easily found using the familiar CRM search window.

Just select all the attachments you want and click OK.  Magically, all the attachments will be put into your email with no further hassle.  If you often send certain documents together, say a credit application with every new customer promotion flyer, you can group those attachments so you don’t even have to select multiple attachments.

If you are interested in additional details on a sale attachment, just click the document’s hyperlink and you can see more information.  Say the document is outdated with the previous model information?  Well at least you know the Employee Contact to send a kind update reminder.  In addition, CRM has an Expiration Date feature to help out the marketing and document control departments.  No longer will Sales be sending out expired promotions or product comparisons which are two generations old.

Now what to do with all that extra time?  Did I mention that football season has started?

Good Selling!

Richard Wu