Salesnet Upgrades Dashboard Offerings

Salesnet is getting an early jump on CRM hosting upgrades in 2003 with the release of its graphics-rich welcome page and new reporting functionality, which will be generally available on January 6, 2003. Unlike traditional software solutions, there is no cost for the upgrade or time to implement. When Salesnet's customers log on January 6, they will automatically access the upgrade--one of the benefits of the hosted model over other nonhosted enterprise platforms, Salesnet says. Comparing his sales force automation tool to the enterprise vendors' offerings, Mike Doyle, chairman and CEO of Salesnet, says "We don't have all the bells and whistles that an SAP (AG), PeopleSoft, or Siebel have, but that's on purpose. Our solution is modifiable and changeable over time." One of the key modifications of the new release is a welcome page called Dashboard, which enables users to display sales and marketing data with bar graphs, area charts, line charts, and pie charts representing data from accounts, contacts, deals, deal steps, appointments, and tasks. Salesnet Extended--edition users can also identify and react to trends happening within the sales pipeline. Users can drill down for more granularity, as they can click on any chart or graph to home in on specific data. Salesnet's interactive reporting tool, Snapshot, and comparison engine facilitates the analysis of historical sales and marketing data by combining two report outputs into a color-coded comparison report. This enables managers to compare the sales activities of users, teams, and regions over time to analyze performance levels in the sales cycle. Users can take a snapshot picture of the data at any moment in time to capture and store the data taken at the time of the snapshot, even though the data changes over time. In addition to comparing sales pipeline and forecasting data, users can evaluate the success of marketing campaigns over time, and redistribute resources as needed. Erin Kinikin, vice president of CRM at research firm Giga Information Group, says she hasn't seen many of her clients standardize on Salesnet, but she is seeing some beginning to bite. "The whole value proposition of an application service provider is that I can get a CRM solution faster and cheaper than if I did it myself," Kinikin says.