Pivotal CRM Benefits

Pivotal CRM Benefits

Know What a Pivotal Upgrade Means for You: A Look at Pivotal Analytics

When we provide Pivotal consulting to clients, one of their primary goals is always to empower their team members to know more about their customers so they can engage with them more profitably. At the same time, we see first-hand the range of business benefits that result when our clients move to the latest version of the Pivotal CRM platform and applications. Today’s post covers the common ground between these areas and provides some detail around the enhanced customer insight that comes with a Pivotal upgrade in the form of the robust Pivotal Analytics module.

At its core, Pivotal Analytics allows clients to gain maximum benefit from their investment in Microsoft in the form of CRM analytics based on the Microsoft Business Intelligence Platform. The module provides users with a toolkit that allows them to efficiently and effectively analyze customer data and make better and faster decisions around how, where, and when to engage with these customers to maximize relationship, revenue, and profit.

Using an industry leading OLAP engine (Microsoft Analysis Services) as well as a robust server-based reporting solution (Microsoft Reporting Services), the customization tools that come in Pivotal Analytics are simple to use, provide a range of deployment options, and ensure a vendor-agnostic front end that can be used with virtually any business intelligence viewer.

And of course, standard requisite sales and marketing analytics come out of the box and ready to use, ensuring teams are up and running without delay, beginning to experience the full benefits of the module’s functionality almost immediately.

So whether our clients choose to implement the complete suite at once or incrementally by module, the bottom line around Pivotal upgrades is the same: the results for our clients’ businesses is often dramatic. For more information Pivotal upgrades, Pivotal Analytics, or other elements of Pivotal support we provide, please contact a member of our Pivotal consulting team at info@tokarasolutions.com.

Know What a Pivotal Upgrade Means for You: A Look at Pivotal Analytics

Think Outside the Office: What a Pivotal Upgrade Brings to the Mobile Salesforce

As a Premier Pivotal partner, the seasoned team at Tokara Solutions provides the full range of Pivotal support and consulting services our clients need. But as we’ve noted in previous posts, there is almost no area of Pivotal support we encounter that can ultimately make more of a difference to our customers’ success than the Pivotal upgrade. This week, we’re taking a look at why a Pivotal upgrade may provide exactly the tools your business needs to empower your mobile salesforce.

Almost irrespective of the industry segment your business is in, there’s no escaping the fact that today, mobile is everything. So business software that seamlessly provides mobile users the tools they need to do their jobs outside the office can make the difference in how competitive, and ultimately how successful, a business is. With a Pivotal upgrade, mobile users are able to benefit from the enhanced reliability and performance the latest versions of the software provide, enabling them to be as productive outside the office as they are inside.

As many of our clients already know, Pivotal Mobile Sales™ delivers a fully functional mobile CRM solution. In addition to accessing robust CRM functionality outside the office, mobile users can access the prospect, customer, and product data they need to do their jobs, even when they’re not behind a desk.

And what about administration? Using Pivotal SyncStream™, it’s as simple as a single-click client install package for mobile as well as office users, effectively reducing both the complexity of deployments and the administrative costs associated with them. Pivotal Mobile Client synchs in the background as soon as users in the field connect to their corporate network, so they can maximize productivity, even during the synchronization process. And say goodbye to resource-heavy updates that require users to be in the office — Pivotal’s mobile synchronization sessions also send out any necessary data changes, application updates, and service packs/hot fixes.

So whether you’re taking advantage of Pivotal’s tight integration with Microsoft Office applications or its ability to provide comprehensive CRM functionality to your business’ mobile users, it’s clear that the Pivotal upgrade can provide impressive return on your software investment, making your business more productive, competitive, and profitable. For details on any of the benefits outlined here or other elements of Pivotal support, please contact a member of our Pivotal consulting team at info@tokarasolutions.com.

Think Outside the Office: What a Pivotal Upgrade Brings to the Mobile Salesforce

What a Pivotal Upgrade Brings to Your Business: the Benefits of Office Integration

As a trusted Pivotal partner to the many clients we provide Pivotal support to, we see first-hand the real business benefits that result when they move to the latest version of the Pivotal CRM platform and applications. From within this set of benefits, today’s post covers some of the ways in which Pivotal integrates with standard Microsoft applications to bring users enhanced capability and productivity and allow developers greater customization options.

There is no question that embarking on a Pivotal upgrade means heightened productivity – and one of the primary ways this occurs is via robust bi-directional integration with the ubiquitous Microsoft^® Office^® suite of products so heavily relied on by end users. Enhanced web services support means relevant data from Pivotal can be accessed directly from within Outlook, Excel, Word, or PowerPoint. It’s as easy as highlighting a word or phrase and clicking to see associated Pivotal data – and the data you’re looking for is brought directly into the Microsoft application you’re working in.

A Pivotal upgrade also provides seamless integration between Pivotal and Outlook, allowing team members to create, edit, and manage emails from within Pivotal, as well as to link emails and attachments to ‘business objects’ that include contacts, opportunities, service requests, and companies. Perhaps best of all, this functionality can be accessed both in the workplace and while users are fully disconnected from the corporate VPN, providing a substantial boost to the productivity of increasingly mobile workforces.

Moving from benefits to the end user to benefits for the developer, a Pivotal upgrade also provides support for software customizations written in any Microsoft .NET language (including C# and Microsoft Visual Basic .NET), speeding the development and use of higher quality code and the ease with which customizations can be made. Pivotal even provides sample code to ‘jump start’ developers in writing custom CMS Application Server Rules in .NET languages.

So whether our clients choose to implement the complete suite at once or incrementally by module, the bottom line around Pivotal upgrades is the same: the results for their business can be dramatic. For more information Pivotal upgrades or other elements of Pivotal support we provide, please contact a member of our Pivotal consulting team at info@tokarasolutions.com.

What a Pivotal Upgrade Brings to Your Business: the Benefits of Office Integration

Considering a Pivotal Upgrade? Know What’s in It for You

As a Premier Pivotal partner, our team at Tokara Solutions provides the full range of Pivotal support and consulting services our clients need. But there is virtually no area of Pivotal support we see that can ultimately prove more critical to our customers’ success than embarking on a Pivotal Upgrade that moves them to the latest version of the Pivotal CRM platform and applications. This post provides a high-level outline of just a few of the benefits a Pivotal upgrade can bring to organizations that choose it; subsequent postings will cover several of these benefits in more granular detail.

What we see first-hand from clients who engage us for Pivotal support is that a Pivotal upgrade actually involves an exceptionally low total cost of ownership (TCO), while also ensuring these clients are able to quickly and efficiently customize, integrate, and deploy a solution to match their current and evolving business needs.

When we provide this type of Pivotal support, we have clients who choose to implement one module at a time and clients who implement the entire suite. Regardless of the implementation strategy they choose, they achieve a number of immediate benefits in functionality, usability, administration, and customization that can literally be game-changers for their business, including:

Greater productivity
Simplified end-user experience
Improved mobility & streamlined administration
Extended reach
Smarter and faster decision making
Enhanced customization options

As a proven Pivotal partner, we have an exceptionally experienced and fully certified team, with members of our Pivotal consulting team averaging 10+ years of experience delivering Pivotal support. Collectively, we have successfully delivered hundreds of Pivotal upgrades. This is why we feel qualified to share the benefits we see first-hand when our clients upgrade to the most recent version of Pivotal.

Tune in next week for a more in-depth look at several of these benefits and a discussion on how they deliver tangible business results. For more information on any of the benefits outlined here or other elements of Pivotal support we provide, please contact a member of our Pivotal consulting team at info@tokarasolutions.com.

Considering a Pivotal Upgrade? Know What’s in It for You

Boosting Business Productivity: A Look at Pivotal CRM Navigation, Shortcuts, and Portals

As a Premier Pivotal partner providing Pivotal support and consulting across a range of vertical industries, we have many opportunities to see first-hand how the software’s architecture not only maximizes performance speed of the software itself, but also the ‘speed’ of business productivity, defined and measured as the length of time required to complete an end-to-end business task within the software. This post covers how Pivotal’s navigation structure and easy access to user history, shortcuts, and portals combine to dramatically boost business productivity.

Navigation: When we provide Pivotal support to clients, one of the greatest areas of productivity enhancement we see is related to its navigation structure, which is modeled around business structure rather than around a database. This provides it with the adaptability required to accommodate unique business use cases and while at the same time providing users access and functionality based on profiles that reflect their roles within the company.

Simply stated, Pivotal CRM’s navigation structure means fewer clicks to access data as well as data provision through context-driven task pads and portals that deliver critical functionality like real-time reports, KPIs, and alerts. So as users navigate through the system, they are provided with dynamically updated information in task pads and portals that reflect the most common requirements of the specific area they’re working in. Pivotal also shines in its ability to support non-linear multi-tasking, which allows users to view and interact with a variety of forms simultaneously, as well as save them for later use or create shortcuts to them.

History, Shortcuts & Portals: Another way in which Pivotal speeds business productivity is linked to how easy it makes it for users to access to history, create shortcuts, and aggregate information and functionality critical to their specific role through portals. Pivotal keeps user history close at hand, with easy access to both the last few items accessed as well as the most recently loaded records. Users can then organize and store this data in whatever structure makes the most sense for them based on their organizational role and working style.

Similarly, users can easily create custom shortcuts to data or functionality they access frequently, as well as configure custom portals, which aggregate all the data/functionality they’d like to see in on one centralized page – a ‘one stop shop’ customized to their unique organizational role and tasking. These features not only minimize clicks required to access desired locations, information, and functionality, but also reduce server load as steps required to complete tasking are reduced.

As a Pivotal partner, these are just a few of the ways we see the software’s architecture reduce the time required to complete business tasks. Tune in next week for details on how business productivity is dramatically increased as Pivotal provides users with the ability to easily configure smart forms; establish access and security parameters, and perform diagnostics. For more information on any of the benefits outlined here or other elements of Pivotal support, please contact a member of our Pivotal consulting team at info@tokarasolutions.com.

Boosting Business Productivity: A Look at Pivotal CRM Navigation, Shortcuts, and Portals

Architected for Speed: the Design behind Pivotal CRM Application Performance

Because Tokara Solutions is recognized as providing some of the highest-level Pivotal consulting and support across the globe, we have unique insight into not only the benefits the software provides to our clients, but also into the actual architecture that sets the software apart.

In other words, when we act as Pivotal partners during a Pivotal implementation or even a Pivotal upgrade, we see firsthand that the performance speed clients enjoy has been designed into the core of the software. This blog entry outlines just a few of the major design decisions that yield Pivotal CRM’s dramatic performance in both speed and responsiveness – the next entry will examine in greater depth the business productivity gains that result from this unique architecture.

Optimization/Minimization of Server Round Trips: Pivotal CRM is architected with clear definition (and separation between) its three tiers of architecture – the database layer, application server layer, and presentation/user access layer. The ability to delegate a degree of business logic and workflow to the presentation layer/tier allows for some processing to take place there, without the need to engage the application server. This reduction in server round trips means faster, ultra-responsive performance for the end user.

Stateless Web Application Design: Because so much of our business lies in providing Pivotal support, we are enthusiasts about the applications ‘economy’ as it relates to hardware resources. As a stateless web application, Pivotal CRM uses network resources only when a request is made, freeing these same resources to process other requests more quickly, and enabling hardware sizing considerations to be made based on number of concurrent rather than actual users.

Client-Side Caching: Anyone experienced with the robustness of the Pivotal CRM application is aware of the myriad of forms users can access to enable powerful customer relationship management. Pivotal CRM has been designed to cache these forms on the user’s computer so that they are instantly accessible when needed rather than having to be retrieved from a more distant location on the server.

Smart Client Speed: As a smart client application, Pivotal CRM can take advantage of increasingly robust local hardware resources (e.g., CPU, hard drive, peripherals) to perform work at the local level, typically resulting in increased speed and responsiveness for the user, as compared with thin client applications.

And of course these elements only begin to scratch the surface of how Pivotal CRM design drives both speed and performance. Providing Pivotal support and consulting across a range of industries, we also see other architecture decisions in the software that yield similar benefits, including middle-tier caching, ‘n-tier’ deployment of satellite servers, as well as indexing and full-text searching. For details on any of the benefits outlined here or other elements of Pivotal support, please contact a member of our Pivotal consulting team at info@tokarasolutions.com.

Architected for Speed: the Design behind Pivotal CRM Application Performance