Endeavor Commerce has recently announced the release of SmartCatalog Portal Edition for Sage SalesLogix and Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
The release offers "out of the box capability to extend Sales Configuration and Guided Selling to customers, partners and distributors via the Web," company officials say.
With the addition of Portal Edition, SmartCatalog now enables companies to deploy what Endeavor officials say are "100 percent accurate quote and order generation across all sales channels -- including employees, partners, distributers and customers."
SmartCatalog helps companies with their partners' and distributors' processes, as well as internal sales processes, in making channel boundaries transparent to customers.
SmartCatalog Portal Edition is a Web-based application integrated with CRM to allow external users to create their own quotes and orders as well as manage their online profile. The Portal Edition may exist as an addition to SmartCatalog Sales Edition or may function as its own standalone application.
"Portal Edition is the result of collaboration with our partners and customers and offers significant and immediate benefits," said David Reeder, Vice President of Sales and Marketing. With Portal Edition, our customers can offer the same quoting and ordering tools directly to their customers and partners making the complex sale simple across all channels."
Reeder considers Portal Edition "a great example of our CRM acumen."
At the beginning of July Endeavor announced version 6.1 of its SmartCatalog for CRM application.
SmartCatalog has seen "significant market growth" in 2007, company officials say, having recently won five new global enterprise customers. For the first half of 2007 overall revenue grew more than 90 percent, with software sales revenue growth at 155 percent.
SmartCatalog 6.1 offers a new end-user application containing features making the product more flexible, scalable and easier to use for both on-line and off-line users. SmartCatalog's new end-user application is architected using the ASP .Net 2.0 Framework.
Using an Outlook style of navigation, the user experience of SmartCatalog is designed to be consistent with Microsoft Office applications. The new sales messaging guides on-line and off-line CRM users through the quoting process offering rules-based alerts. This enhancement lets users to take advantage of cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
SmartCatalog is billed by company officials as allowing enterprises to "increase revenue, decrease cost, and increase customer satisfaction by enabling intelligence at the point of sale."
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David Sims is a contributing editor for ContactCenterSolutions. To see more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.