Channelinsight has announced the latest in its SaaS-based CRM-add on tools, this one called Lead to Ship Opportunity Management for the Channel, and will be demonstrating it at the end of the month at Salesforce’s Dreamforce show at the San Francisco Moscone Center.
The new product is used by channel sales reps to automatically link a sales opportunity with a shipment and instantly showing updated data in Salesforce’s CRM tools along with sending out mobile alerts via the Chatter social networking service.
“Channel sales reps spend an inordinate amount of time tracking shipments and manually applying shipment information to opportunities,” said Dan Petlon, CIO, Enterasys Networks and a big customer of Channelinsight’s services. “The channel has long needed a solution that automates this process and provides real-time alerts. The combination of Lead to Ship and mobile alerts through Chatter will enable our sales reps to focus less on searching for shipment data in POS and more on new business.”
And while you may not want to invest in Channelinsight’s tools just to get this integration, it is an example of what is to come with cloud-based CRM services that are beginning to move into using more than just email to send out notifications of tasks and activities. Lead to Ship also allows users to leverage Chatter to send real-time feeds to a desktop or mobile device, ensuring that sales reps receive immediate alerts when the status of an opportunity changes. There are lots of other products, some from long-time mainstream enterprise software vendors such as IBM’s CastIron and Information Builders’ iWay that do this, as their video above shows.
