What is the best setup of suiteCRM for a company with services.

We are now at the stage of setting suiteCRM to our needs for our service company.
It is to me not clear, what is the best way of having our workflow diagram, in the CRM system.

In short I will give some of the elements in the workflow.

  1. Lead coming in
  2. First contact is being made with the lead, for additional info. Depending on the info, we assign it to a person that will have the follow up.
  3. The person that has the follow up, get in contact with the lead to schedule a meeting with the lead.
  4. The meeting is finished. Lead is dead or becomes prospect.
  5. The prospect receives a quote / offer by email and the prospect becomes an opportunity.
  6. Opportunity does agree and continues to step 7 or disagrees. Opportunity died.
  7. Opportunity agrees with the offer, and therefore has to sign a contract at the office.
    8 ) Once signed, first upfront payments is directly being made. Opportunity is converted to client. (Contracts are for a year and upfront payments are each month.)
  8. A notification is send to the service scheduler to schedule our service for the client.
  9. Repeated payment notification should be send out by the system (email or sms) a set time before ending of the current month.
  10. If there is no payment made in time, the system should give an alert to the back office. So far the system repeats step 9 and 10 until the end of the contract.
  11. Shortly before the contract ends, a notification is being send to the service scheduler. The scheduler get in contact with the client for a renewed contract or send out an exit email.

I hope the company workflow is clear. Of course, there are some other sub-workflows, but this is the main diagram.

What is the best way to automate as much as possible, yet flexible enough, to change it without to much trouble in the CRM.
We will have only a few different kind of services (Products), and all the workflows are identical, with the exception of that the service will be for a set amount of time (Short term) or with an open end, renewed each year.

I am just beginning with suiteCRM, and still have a lot to learn. Still green as grass. I see that there are many ways to get things done. I see things being done by workflows and filters, and I also see things being done by projects. At our company, we are still thinking about how to set up the CRM program for our best needs. I was thinking to handle our service as a project. With each project having the complete workflow. The end of the workflow, means the project is finished. But at our company we do not all agree about this approach. What is the best way?

Any advice is more than welcome.

Thanks in advance.

Hi Bosgraaf,

With the detail you have gone into, I believe you would benefit far more from consultation on how to refine your CRM, rather than me(non business-minded community member) try to answer your questions fully.

Thanks,

Will.

Hi Will, thanks for answering.

Well, as you maybe have noticed on my other several topics on the forum, we are now step by step getting more familiar with the system and also solving the errors in the system. Recent update would not complete on our system and did exit with an error. I have not yet started a topic about that yet, since I first wanted to see what others experience because the update was only out for just one week.

Your suggestion crossed my mind.
We will keep it in the back of our mind, and when we feel confident the system is running correctly, we will request a quote for consultancy.