CRM in SAP Business One: what the sales side already does, where a sales person gets stuck, and what to check before adding a CRM

What B1 already has for sales.

• Customers and leads are the same kind of record: a business partner with a type (customer, lead or supplier). A lead becomes a customer by changing the type; the code stays.
• Contact persons sit on the business partner, with position, phone numbers and email.
• Activities: conversation, meeting, task, note, email, campaign or other, with date and time, priority, reminder, a closed flag, a sales employee and a link to an opportunity or a document.
• Sales opportunities with stages you set up yourself, a closing percentage per stage, a potential amount, a weighted amount that B1 calculates itself, an expected closing date, and won or lost with a reason. Also source, industry and competitors.
• Quotations and orders are ordinary sales documents. You copy an order from a quotation; B1 takes over items, quantities and prices and closes the quotation lines.
• Sales employees (sales person code) hang on customers, activities and opportunities, so "my customers" is a filter and not a separate administration.
• Microsoft 365: B1 10.0 has an integration of its own with Outlook calendar and mail; an activity can carry the id of a calendar event.

That is a complete set of objects. It is the working surface around them that is thin.

Where a sales person gets stuck.

• One customer, five windows. The business partner, the contact persons, the activities, the opportunities, the quotations and the open invoices each have a window of their own. Finding out where a customer stands means opening them all.
• "What do I have to do today?" An overview of your follow-ups across all customers needs a filter or a query, every time. Nobody builds that for the sales people.
• Everything is a form. Moving an opportunity through the stages means opening it and adding a line on the stages tab. You see the pipeline as a list or a report, not as a board you can drag across.
• The quotation does not hang on the opportunity. The link is on a line of the opportunity (document type and number), not in a field on the quotation. A quotation can exist without anyone updating the opportunity, and then the pipeline knows nothing.
• On the road. Out of the office most sales people fall back on the contacts and mail on their phone, and copy it into B1 later. That "later" is where the data stays out of B1.

Three ways companies fill the gap.

1. The B1 client, Outlook and a spreadsheet. Where most small companies are. The customer is in B1, the appointments in the sales person's calendar, the opportunities in an Excel list that is updated every Monday for the meeting. B1 knows about the opportunities what someone retypes in a quiet hour.

2. A CRM suite with a connector. HubSpot, Pipedrive or Salesforce, with a link to B1. Good tools, but you get two systems that have to stay equal: duplicate customers, a sales person who works in the CRM while inside sales works in B1, and a quotation that is right in neither. The big suites are built for sales organisations of a hundred people, and priced that way.

3. A work surface on top of B1. Not a second system, but a screen that reads and writes the B1 objects: the customer card, the day, the board. Everything the sales person does is an ordinary activity, opportunity or quotation in B1. The sales person and inside sales see the same thing, because there is only one place where it lives.

What to check before you choose.

• Where does the customer live? In one place, or in two with a synchronisation? Ask what happens when the same customer is changed on both sides, and who cleans up the duplicates.
• What does it write to B1? Activities, opportunities, leads, quotations, orders: through the Service Layer, or with SQL in the database? The first is supported by SAP; the second is not. Ask whether it creates fields and tables of its own in your B1 database.
• What happens when a write fails? B1 can refuse a document or be unreachable for a while. Does the change stay visible with B1's error message, or does it disappear? And does a change after a time-out not arrive twice?
• Which licences do your sales people need? SAP licenses by named user, also for indirect access through an add-on. Ask a vendor how the link signs in (one technical user or a user per sales person) and talk through the rest with your B1 partner. See our guide on licences for scanner and app users.
• Who sees what? Does a sales person only see their own customers and opportunities, and the customers without a sales person to pick up? Is that enforced on the server, or does the screen only hide buttons?
• Mail and calendar. B1 has a Microsoft 365 integration of its own. Look at what it does before you pay for a second one. A mail button that prepares a draft in your own mail program is simple and asks nothing of your Microsoft environment; a link through Graph needs an app registration at your end.
• Phone. Is it a website that works on the phone (installed from the browser, no store), or an app from a store? The first is quicker to install and update; the second can send notifications.
• SQL Server and HANA. Ask whether it was tested on both. Filters and capital letters in the Service Layer behave slightly differently.

How KCRM approaches it.

KCRM is our option 3. A light CRM for sales people, built on the customers, opportunities, activities and quotations already in B1: a 360 customer card, My day, a pipeline board where dragging is a stage change in B1, converting leads to customers, quotations and orders from an opportunity, a small forecast and a mail button for your own mail program. Everything goes through the Service Layer; there is no customer database of its own, no import and no synchronisation. The own database holds only users, settings, preferences, a log and the queue for writes that B1 could not receive; the queue retries by itself and shows B1's error message. KCRM signs in to the Service Layer with one technical SAP user; the sales people sign in to KCRM and are linked to their sales person code in B1. Three fixed roles, enforced on the server. It runs on your own server and works as an app on the phone too. It is in development: all functions are built and tested against a simulated B1; the next step is the test on a real B1 and a pilot at a first sales team, with no price and no date. The product page says exactly where it stands.

Sources: SAP Business One help documentation (business partners, sales opportunities, activities, sales documents); the SAP Business One 10.0 database reference (OCRD, OCPR, OCLG, OOPR, OPR1, OOST, OSLP, OQUT, ORDR); the Service Layer $metadata of SAP Business One 10.0 FP 2608 (BusinessPartners, Activities, SalesOpportunities, SalesStages, SalesPersons, Quotations, Orders); SAP's Service Layer guide; the License Guide 10.0 for the licence question.