PeopleSoft, Siebel launch CRM upgrades

PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems this week announced upgraded versions of their respective CRM products.

PeopleSoft launched version 8.9 of its sales, marketing, and partner relationship management (PRM) suites at its CRM Customer Summit in New York.

PeopleSoft’s upgraded Sales suite includes new modules for managing customer portfolios and tracking service orders. The Strategic Account Planning module lets sales teams create business plans for different customer segments and measure their progress against corporate goals. The Services Management module tracks changes to existing service orders and maintenance agreements, then can share the data with PeopleSoft’s enterprise billing software.

PeopleSoft’s Marketing suite adds new tools, including a drag-and-drop designer for building multi-step interactive marketing campaigns, and a customer segment designer for focusing marketing investments on populations that are most likely to buy.

PeopleSoft’s PRM suite is aimed at companies that sell through brokers, dealers, agents and other third parties. A few of its multiple modules are Partner Sales, which is for distributing leads to partners and monitoring what becomes of those leads; Partner Commerce, which lets a company’s partners browse individualized product catalogs and directly capture orders; and Partner Planning, which lets users create joint partner business plans and track specific goals.

For its part, Siebel announced the availability of its latest sales force automation suite. New features in Siebel Sales 7.7 include compensation-tracking tools which tie employee performance to pay, as well as user adoption monitoring capabilities.

With Siebel Sales 7.7, a company can create individualized sales dashboards and planning tools to make it clear what it expects from each of its sales representatives. Further, these tools tie compensation to a sales rep’s performance metrics.

Siebel’s revamped Usage Accelerator application helps companies measure and manage user adoption of the vendor’s Sales suite. It includes a user adoption methodology based on best practices gleaned from successful Siebel implementations.

New features for mobile users include the ability to use Siebel Analytics in the field, without requiring a network connection. In addition, Siebel bolstered its wireless connectivity with support for store-and-forward technology. This capability guarantees messages are delivered to wirelessly connected field personnel.

Siebel Sales 7.7 also features tighter integration with Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Exchange Server. Now users can embed the Outlook Calendar within the Siebel user interface and link Outlook records to data in Siebel’s database.