UpShot Corp. will announce on Tuesday an addition to its hosted sales management applications that combines partner relationship management with sales force automation capabilities.
Dubbed Extended Relationship Management, or XRM, the new Web-based application, is designed to bring together a companys internal and external sales channels so that sales executives can monitor and forecast sales across all business channels, improve collaboration among teams, and recruit new partners, UpShot officials said.
Sales executives can use XRM to measure their partners sales performance and forecast their sales in real-time. It can be configured to create deal stages for different partners and also features drill-down capabilities to give sales executives a historical view of all channel activity associated with a particular deal. The drill-downs also can provide an overview of all pipeline and real-time forecast information for the entire unified selling enterprise, said UpShot officials in Mountain View, Calif.
UpShots XRM also supports team selling, lead management and partner recruitment.
Business Engine Inc., a developer of collaborative applications for project, budget and resource management in San Francisco is already using UpShot XRM.
“We can track the relationships between contacts and accounts,” explained Heidi Shigematsu, director of global enterprise lead development at Business Engine. “Before [with UpShot] we could see the contacts but not specifically see what the relationship was, just a quick overview. Now we can see what the function of the contact is—whether a decision-maker, executive sponsor, VAR [value added reseller] or Big 5 consulting group—and assign them to a prospective account.”
The new function allows Business Engine to do a better job profiling and tracking of its business opportunities, Shigematsu said. She did however add that UpShot needs better reporting capabilities of this information, which she expects within the next six months.
UpShot XRM is available now. Pricing for UpShots hosted service remains unchanged at $65 per user per month.
Dennis Callaghan collaboration software and can be contacted at dennis_callaghan@ziffdavis.com.