UpShot Links Partners and Sales Data

UpShot Corp. last week made available a hosted sales management application that combines partner relationship management with sales force automation capabilities.

Dubbed Extended Relationship Management, or XRM, the Web-based application brings together a companys internal and external sales channels so 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 partners and features drill-down capabilities to give sales executives a historical view of all channel activity associated with a particular deal, said UpShot officials in Mountain View, Calif.

UpShots XRM supports team selling, lead management and partner recruitment.

The new functionality in XRM allows Business Engine Inc. to do a better job profiling and tracking its business opportunities, said Heidi Shigematsu, director of global enterprise lead development at the San Francisco software developer.

“We can track the relationships between contacts and accounts,” Shigematsu said. “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 … and assign them to a prospective account.”