The Power of CRM & BI Combined for Distributors

How Can Your Teams Effectively Use Your ERP Data?

As distributors, you love your ERP system. The software is designed for processing and storing large volumes of business transactions, such as customer orders, vendor purchases, and invoices. However, the complexity of ERP data cannot quickly provide insights into customer buying patterns, track vendor performance metrics, or monitor sales trends.

Furthermore, how do you get the data out of your system for your sales and executive teams? Well, you can get the data out if you have someone on staff who can write custom SQL or crystal reports. However, wouldn’t it be easier if you had a tool that provides integrated built-in sales and business intelligence tools? That’s where the combined power of CRM and BI for distributors can bring this information to light that drives revenue.

What exactly is CRM, and how is it going to benefit me? CRM, like White Cup CRM, is software that gathers customer data from your ERP and other places and houses it in one place. CRM is designed for your sales and marketing teams and can help manage customer, prospect, and even vendor relationships. When used at its full potential, CRM is a revenue-driving engine that your team will use for the long haul.

If you’re looking for sales and marketing tools to keep deals moving through the funnel, then CRM is what you need. But if you want to see business insights into data like pricing reductions, inventory and supply chain management, or market trends, then a Business Intelligence tool is what you need.

Business intelligence tools tools are built to pull multiple data points from various business systems (accounting, purchasing, warehousing, marketing, and sales) and visually present the data as actionable reports or dashboards. For example, the customer life cycle can show you when churn happens and why. In addition, BI can help you identify and address pain points to reduce churn and uncover additional sales opportunities. Further, BI tools can help improve margins and increase profitability.

Some BI tools are cumbersome to implement and use. In contrast, others have built-in reporting and dashboards for specific industries. It leaves you with just the critical data to make decisions for your business. Some benefits of BI tools include:

• Zero-in on customers that warrant appropriate discounts to retain the customer, but at a profitable margin.
• Identify product lines that are trending up or down in sales and profitability.
• Easily view critical P/L and expense score cards in real-time for making data-based business decisions.

While CRM and BI systems can operate on their own, together, they offer the most powerful use of your data. We’ve made it possible to seamlessly move between White Cup CRM and our industry-leading White Cup BI solutions to take action quickly.

For example, with White Cup BI data front and center on the White Cup CRM home dashboard, a sales rep can quickly identify late orders, jump into White Cup BI with a single sign-on, determine the vendor causing the delay, return to White Cup CRM, assign tasks to teammates to investigate the delay while also setting a calendar reminder to call the customer to discuss options to mitigate the situation. All with just a few clicks. That’s power. That’s White Cup CRM with BI integrated.