Scenarios
If your small business is like most, you have a mountain of valuable information about your customers and sales locked up inside QuickBooks – information that could save everyone time, avoid countless questions, and keep everyone fully informed and on the same page – if only they could all see this treasure trove of data.
Open for Business makes that possible.
Now you, your sales team, and even your customers can simply look at the status of their accounts and orders – no more waiting for an answer from Joe, who is waiting for an answer from Mary, who is waiting until normal business hours on Monday to call Carl, and so on.
With Open for Business, you simply open up your web browser and find the answer to:
- What happened to that sales order?
- Has the product shipped yet?
- Has the pricing changed?
- Has the customer paid?
- What does the customer's sales history look like?
- What additional products should customer A be buying that my similar customers B and C are buying?
- And much more
How can Open for Business help a manufacturing or distribution business?
Business Managers
Open for Business allows the business managers to monitor sales and order bookings – anywhere, anytime. Whether you're at the home office, at a manufacturing plant, or with a customer, you can get the critical, up-to-date information you need with just a click. Designed with the non-accounting professional in mind, Open for Business provides a convenient dashboard view of all your critical sales and customer data, making it easy to view anything from total sales of widget X for the current period to dynamic graphs comparing one salesperson's results to the next – all in real time.
Key benefits to business managers:
- Anytime, anywhere access to sales and customer data previously locked up in QuickBooks.
- Easy analysis of sales or invoices organized by: customer, time period, product, or sales rep - just to name a few.
- Automated, data-driven alerts to your sales team, or even your customers, letting them know immediately of changes in pricing or availability.
The Sales Team
No longer will your sales team be out of the loop on last-minute changes in sales orders, shipping status, or customer payments.
Open for Business gives each salesperson a personalized, up-to-date view of relevant sales and customer data – limited to their authorized accounts, of course. Data for a given rep's customers is available to them anytime, anywhere. Other customer data is kept locked up and not viewable by that sales rep. And of course all other financial data within QuickBooks is off limits to the sales team.
Key Benefits to the Sales Team:
- Immediate, up-to-date access to sales and customer data to help the team to stay on top of their customers' needs and stop wasting time running down answers from the home office.
- No new process to learn. Keeps the team focused on increasing sales instead of training on a new software package.
- Powerful sales-boosting tools, like the "What other customers like this one have bought" analysis. These hidden patterns in your QuickBooks data are visible using Open for Business – and they allow your sales reps to recommend other products that are proven winners.
The Customer
Believe it or not, letting your customers look into your QuickBooks may be the most profitable thing you do this year. (A very controlled look, of course.)
While nothing will replace your skilled service team – allowing some customer self-service is a proven win-win and a huge time-saver for both sides. Increasingly, small and large business customers alike are either asking or demanding that they be provided self-service functionality.
Open for Business provides you with a special customer-service mode and that you can optionally turn on and configure for any customer. A secure sign-in process restricts the customer's access to the data you want them to see – such as the status of their orders and shipping.
Your customer gets the immediate gratification of an accurate answer – and your service team never has to field a phone call!
Key benefits of Open for Business to your customer - promoting loyalty and retention:
- Immediate, up-to-date status of their orders, any time.
- Sales rep visits can now focus on new sales rather than troubleshooting previous orders.
- Convenience and time-savings. When you are more convenient to work with than your competitors, you get the customer's next order.
