QuickBase Expands Sales Team Functionality

QuickBase, a division ofIntuit, has upgraded its hosted-model product to make it easier for sales reps and sales executives — two user groups that often have competing application requirements — to use the sales module.

New functionality in the application, called “Manage Your Sales Team,” includes more advanced configuration, reporting and display tools. Another enhancement aimed specifically at sales reps is the addition of smart, or dynamic, forms that request information during the sales cycle only when necessary.

Time Is Money

“Adoption of a CRM system has traditionally been a tricky thing for a lot of companies to navigate,” Jana Eggers, general manager of Intuit QuickBase, told CRM Buyer. “For salespeople in particular, any system that requires a lot of input to keep a pipeline up to date is — in their view — simply money out of their pocket.”

The forms are designed to extract the minimal amount of data, based on where the rep is during the sales cycle, Eggers said. It doesn’t ask for information at the beginning of the sales cycle that is not necessary, or that the sales rep might not necessarily have at that stage.

For example, dynamic forms only require reps to fill out opportunity qualification questions when the status field changes to “contacted.” In a project management application, a time stamp with the current date can be automatically inserted when the task status field changes to “complete.”

Interactive Choices

QuickBase has also included interactive functionality in its chart and reporting features. “Users can drill down several layers of data,” Eggers pointed out. “They also have a lot of leeway in how the charts looks or how the data is presented to them.” The new charting functionality includes new chart types, as well as rollover, drill down and customization options.

The new application offers Dashboard functionality, a user interface that is becoming very popular among vendors and customers. “It’s a good way for a user to see — quickly — where they stand or where the company stands on areas important to them,” Eggers said.

QuickBase offers several packaged applications, many of which were upgraded along with Manage Your Sales Team. Manage Multiple Projects, for instance, now offers the ability to import from Microsoft Project with synchronization capabilities.

Manage a Project and Manage Multiple Projects have been enhanced with new resource allocation functionality, which identifies the workload of resources across projects.

QuickBase releases two major upgrades a year. The last release concentrated on supporting large corporations’ internal business proesses, Eggers said. The current release aims to streamline processes for users.