Earlier this year, popular CRM provider Salesforce, which offers on the cloud everything from marketing automation, a contact database, customer service, social media monitoring and engagement, analytics and forecasting and more, announced an alliance with Intuit.
Now there’s offspring from that marraige: Salesforce for QuickBooks, which lets users enter data just once and have it automatically sync between QuickBooks and Salesforce.
The new app:
- Gives sales reps a 360-degree view of customers with a look at current deals alongside up-to-date financial information
- Closes the gap between sales and marketing and lets you track and cultivate leads from various online, offline and social media campaigns using dashboard reports to measure performance across channels
- Speeds order processing and reduces double data entry by automatically creating a transaction in QuickBooks when a deal is closed in Salesforce
- Pinpoints a customer’s needs with insight into all interactions a customer has had with the company including a history of what the customer owns, what products they are interested in and a history of warranty claims or open issues
The Salesforce app news comes as part of Intuit’s QuickBooks 2012 product announcement. Intuit gave me a demo of QuickBooks 2012 and it does have some impressive enhancements.
For instance, Alex Hood, Intuit product management leader, said one thing that has frustrated QuickBooks users in the past is the number of screens that needed to be completed when setting up a business on Quickbooks, especially when some business data might not be immediately available.
On the contrary, users of Mint, which Intuit acquired in 2009, really liked the fact that they could establish an account very quickly. Intuit copied that approach with this new iteration of QuickBooks.
“We only have two or three required fields now so now you can be up and running in a matter of minutes,” he said.
It also has a new calendar feature that keeps track of things like customer-related to-dos or payments due, as well as an Excel formatting retention capability so you don’t have to redo complex spreadsheet customizations and can can reuse them over and over.
What’s particularly impressive about the new QuickBooks 2012, though, is the vastly increased number of report templates it offers. In the past the software shipped with 125 of them. It now has a Contributed Reports Library which adds 1,000 more templates created by QuickBooks users. So if you’re a manufacturer, for example, you can search for report templates that other manufacturers have used and when you pull it up you can see how other users have rated it.
QuickBooks 2012 is available for online purchase on Sept. 26 and in stores on Oct. 9. To read about other new features in QuickBooks 2012, read the press release.
