Avidian Releases Prophet Ultimate On-Demand Edition
Avidian Technologies' release this week of Prophet Ultimate On-Demand Edition builds on the company's efforts to meet the business needs of its target base—those who "do fifty to sixty percent of their client-touching activities in Outlook."
Available on-premise and now also as a secure cloud offering, the Prophet Ultimate On-Demand Edition includes features like Prophet Instant, a social component that allows users to "follow" a specific sales rep, contact, or company, and to receive instant notifications on opportunities or contact activity.
From a managerial standpoint, heads of sales teams can follow team members and keep up to date on leads, campaigns and actions. Through a new user interface, contacts, companies, opportunities and projects in a table view can be viewed with drag-and-drop functionality.
"Once you install the software inside of your Outlook, everything you do inside of Outlook and anything you've done in the past becomes part of your CRM data," explains James Wong, cofounder and CEO of Avidian Technologies. "We know CRM is successful if you actually use it, so we wanted to do something that was familiar, easy to use, and fast to implement."
The Opportunity Manager can organize campaign information based on parameters like territory, stage, and priority. Opportunities are also configurable around use-case, Wong says, if, for example, "you want to see everything related to promotional products." Users can also organize opportunities in a contextual sense through marketing, prospect, or multidepartmental views.
"Anytime you're ready for an email campaign, all you have to do is highlight the information, right-click, and send a group email," Wong says. "We wanted to put the power of marketing right in the salesperson's hands" without rerouting them to another email program.
Also included in the edition is SharePoint support for Prophet Ultimate. This allows organizations to pull contacts and sales information right into the SharePoint dashboard.
The Prophet solution comes in three editions: Premium, designed for the individual user; Enterprise, for teams, and the aforementioned Ultimate, a fully customizable edition for cross-organizational usage. The features and enhancements just added to the Ultimate product will next be configured for Premium and Enterprise.