CRM in Odoo

CRM is Customer Relationship Management

Now a days competition in business field is increasing day by day. So it is very essential to retain existing customers and expanding business.In order to achieve this CRM approach is being used today.

It is a strategy for managing all your company’s relationships and interactions with your customers and potential customers. One important aspect of the CRM approach is that it collect data from different communication channels, including a company’s website, telephone, email, live chat, marketing materials, and more recently, social media. It helps you improve your profitability.

CRM in ODOO

Odoo CRM is a powerful and easy-to-use app. Its suite of applications includes lead management, sales automation, marketing campaign management and business reporting features.

The lead management feature can be used by sales divisions to define criteria for assigning leads. Using these criteria, sales divisions can select most appropriate and available sales representative for leads to improve the quality of sales. Odoo CRM also features marketing campaign management that help users design marketing campaigns for lead generation and brand promotional activities.
It helps to manage the leads, opportunities, and customers of our organization and to simply track the workflow from the starting to the end in sale.

Installation

Normal way of installing modules will work with CRM also.Another preferred way to install it with all its dependencies is using pip

Configuration and Usage

1. Sales Team

We have to create a sales team first.Default sale team is  Direct sale team.To create a new team, go to  Configuration ‣ Sales Teams and click on Create.

Here we can specify the fields :

   Name of your team
   Team Leader
   Team Members
   Email Id of Team

After the creation of the Sales Team, it will be visible in the dashboard.

2. Sales  Person

If we want to create a new sale person ,from the Settings module, go to the submenu Users ‣ Users and click on Create.

Under the section access right, you can specify access right to your users for different applications. For the Sales application, you can choose between three levels:

See own leads: the user will be able to access his own data only
See all leads: the user will be able to access all records of every salesman in the sales module
Manager: the user will be able to access the sales configuration as well as the statistics reports

3. Sale Pipeline

It is the graphical representation of different stages of sale process.It helps us to give a 360-degrees view of your leads, opportunities and customers.In Odoo CRM, leads are brought in at the left end of the sales pipeline and then moved along to the right from one stage to another.Each stage refers to a specific step in the sale cycle and number of stages varies from one company to another.

From the Kanban view of your pipeline, you can add stages by clicking on Add new column. If you want to rearrange the order of your stages, you can easily do so by dragging and dropping the column you want to move to the desired location.

4. Lead

Lead is someone who becomes aware of your company or someone who you decide to pursue for a sale, even if they don’t know about your company yet.Some companies use a pre qualification step to manage their leads before to convert them into opportunities.It is Lead stage.To activate the lead stage, go to Configuration ‣ Settings and select the radio button for lead. It will create a new submenu Leads under Sales that gives you access to a listview of all your leads.

5. Lead Generation

Lead generation is the process by which a company acquires leads and collects relevant datas about potential customers in order to enable a relationship and to turn them into customers. Generating a constant flow of high-quality leads is one of the most essential requirement for the development of the business organisation.

Leads can be captured through many sources – marketing campaigns, exhibitions and trade shows, external databases, etc.Storing leads information in Odoo CRM will help you to automate your lead generation process, share information with your teams and analyze your sales processes easily.

Odoo CRM provides you with several methods to generate leads:

   a) From the incoming mails
   b) From website visitors
   c) Importing from csv files
   d) Manually creating leads

a) From the incoming mails

One of the best way to create new leads is from the incoming mails.In Odoo CRM, each one of your sales teams is linked to its own email address and every email sent to it will automatically create a new lead into the sales team

Configuration : The first thing you need to do is to configure your outgoing email servers and incoming email gateway from the Settings module ‣ General Settings.Then set up your alias domain and click on Apply.

Set up Team Mail : Go to  Configuration ‣ Sales Teams and select required sale team.Into the Email Alias field, enter your email alias and click on Save.You can also access sales team form through dashboard.Each email sent to this email address will generate a new lead into the related sales team.

Additionally to your sales team aliases, you can also create a generic email alias that will also generate a new contact in Odoo CRM. Still from the Sales module, go to Configuration ‣ Settings and set up the email.

b) From website visitors

Company website is the best Lead Generation Tool.In Odoo, the Website and CRM modules are fully integrated, meaning that you can easily generate leads from various ways through your website. However, even if you are hosting your website on another CMS, it is still possible to fill Odoo CRM with leads generated from your website.

c) Importing from csv files

In Odoo CRM, you can import  leads from csv files.When the lead stage is activated a new submenu Leads is created under Sales, from which you can import your new leads using the Import button.

d) Manually creating leads

Under the submenu Leads, we can see all your leads from which you will be able to create a new contact.

Lead can be directly handed over to specific sales team and salesperson by clicking on Convert to Opportunity on the upper left corner of the screen.

We can directly add a contact into a specific sales team without having to convert the lead first. We can also create a contact directly on a specific stage.On the Sales module, go to your dashboard and click on the Pipeline button of the desired sales team.From the Kanban view, just click on the + icon at the right of your stage. The new opportunity will then pop up into the corresponding stage and you can then fill in the contact details by clicking on it.

Odoo 10 vs Odoo 11

There are some difference in CRM module for Odoo 10 and Odoo 11

1. In Odoo 10 Sales module includes CRM.In Odoo 11 Sales and CRM are separate.
2. No dashboard in Odoo 11
3. Sales Team is known as Sales Channel