Tracking the history of Sales Stages

[Tim French]

Not sure how other users feel about this, but we feel that it would be great
if BCM would track the user and date of any change made to the Sales Stage.
This would also be true in cases where an opportunity drops back a Sales
Stage. Of course this information would not be useful particularly without
the ability to report on it. A typical example of the report would be to
understand how many opportunities have progressed from one Stage to another
during various calendar periods. This would give an early feel for any
slowing / expansion of the business.

Do other users find this limitation? Am I missing some existing
functionality?

Regards, Tim

 

[Carol L.]

We are a tiny company of 3 professionals and need a business contact program
that will: 1) enable us to sement and contact our prospects via mass
emailings and mailings 2) resend individual emails as folks often "lose" them
and 3) make followup notes following a conversation or email reply from a
prospect/client and 4) give us a detailed history of how we met the prospect
and where they stand in the sales process (sounds like a weakness given your
note below).
Would you be so kind as to provide us with some insight re the above needs.
We were about to buy salesforce.com, but think BCM MAY work for our needs.
Appreciate your input.

 

[Luther]

Not sure how other users feel about this, but we feel that it would be great
if BCM would track the user and date of any change made to the Sales Stage.
This would also be true in cases where an opportunity drops back a Sales
Stage.  Of course this information would not be useful particularly without
the ability to report on it.  A typical example of the report would be to
understand how many opportunities have progressed from one Stage to another
during various calendar periods.  This would give an early feel for any
slowing / expansion of the business.

Do other users find this limitation?  Am I missing some existing
functionality?

Regards,  Tim

What you are asking for is a feature called "repudiation", the ability
to tell who changed what when in a system. Apart from accounting
applications, that's generally a feature desired only by large
organizations for critical systems, but not something desirable in
desktop applications. Office Accounting tracks every transaction, but
Excel doesn't. All features take resources, and securely logging every
transaction would slow everything down for the majority of users who
don't care for that feature.

As with user permissions and roles, another feature that very
important to large organizations but less so for small businesses, you
should probably into mid-size CRM applications for that feature. I
expect Microsoft CRM has what you are looking for.