I want to install a CRM system because last year we got in a muddle over which employee worked for which account, and some sensitive information which should not have been shown to one in particular ended up losing us an important customer. It was all managed by a Google Docs spreadsheet. Yeah, i know… that’s why i just installed SuiteCRM and am planning on using it fully for 2017.
However the business is a little quirky - we sell services to exhibitions, so the most important thing to us is the date of the exhibition and the free calendar slots we have leading up to it. They are limited for a reason I can’t state here. If one slot is booked ahead of time by one customer, that slot cannot be used by any others. We have many existing customers, every one being a repeat so we know what we do works, but when prospecting often only see the exhibition title, venue and date, so although these are targets we want to track we can’t put them is as people. Sometimes they never become so, e.g. we just fill a “contact us” webpage on their site and never hear back.
The goal:
I need to enter all existing Accounts and employees of those accounts. That’s OK. I then need to enter the dates of all exhibitions those Accounts are holding through the year. … not sure about this. Then I need to make sure we have contacted them 8 weeks prior, 6 weeks etc and most importantly the 1 week before, because in practice we’ve seen many hold off our services initially only to cave in the week before when attendance isn’t what they expected. Not sure about how to do that.
I need also to enter all new exhibitions (i.e. for non-Accounts) as targets and convert to leads when they respond, as quite a few do even if its just to ask the price. I think SuiteCRM looks good for this. Again they are all on their own date cycle, so the 8 week, 6 week etc pattern applies.
I’d like a master calendar view showing the dates and locations of every exhibition in the system, last year it was almost 1000 and I am certain it will be higher this time.
A way of classifying the exhibition event would be nice, e.g. medical, office supplies, travel etc. So we can report on which were the most profitable.
Thanks. So far it looks very good.