A customer of mine log all incoming and outgoing comunication with his external relations in an excell spreadsheet. I find this a very good thing to do. He confirms it has helped him numerous times in the past where his customer or vendor gets into a i-did-say-this argument. He can fall back on the communication log an say you said this and that on that day an such.
The spreadsheet did however pose some problems, keeping him from getting the efficiency he needed.
These were his problems:
- When multiple users accessed the sheet, they had to be very carefull not to overwrite each others entries.
- The master data for contacts is in their Microsoft Dynamics NAV system. It is a shame he has the same data in multiple places.
- He cannot run a report from the contact card in NAV to see a log of the communications
- Some users of the Communications Log do not require access to Navision. They don’t even want access. Fact is that NAV licence pricing is user based.
So, he came to me to see if I could address these problems. Of course I could. The first idea we had was to just write some custom solution in NAV. Then I started seeing an opportunity. Surely other businesses could benefit from such software.
Because we wanted to enable non NAV users to use the software we were pushed towards an external app anyway. So, I decided to write an app in ASP.NET. In this first release, I’m focussing on NAV as a the backend. The software is designed pluggable however. This means that I can write a module to access systems other than NAV in a jiffy.
As a marketing stint, I said to the customer that for avery lead he can generate that leads to a sale, he will get free services from me. I tend on pursuing this further for all paying customers.
The software is priced at 500€ ex vat. For every buying lead, I will give back 125€ ex vat in services on the software (such as customisation or maintenance or upgrades).
If anyone is interested in this, please contact me. I have other reward programmes in mind for lead generation.
