Caterpillar is pushing dealers to develop (and more importantly track) plans at the customer level. Sales Link has some functionality currently in the profile page, but it has limitations such as being at the account and division levels only (no ability roll it up to the parent level). Also, "Customer Plans" is not linked to the data in the profile page that I can see. Lastly, there is not an overall view of customer plans...you have to go to each one individually. Short term, it would be great to have the profile budget functionality built into hierarchy. Second, I would like to see some requirements developed based on dealer input on how to enhance this to give us a better view of our customers relative to business plans vs targets, action plans, etc. This supports developing Sales Link into a true CRM tool, giving a 360 degree view of our customers...globally and at the customer level. One more thing...any thoughts to building hierarchy like functionality (or similar customer visibility) into Sales Link so we don't have to go to another module?
Mike Love
It would be so helpful to be able to have the Budget (year) in Expenditures under Basics/Customer Profile have the ability to get more granular by Product Family and/or model, by the number of units expected.
It would be even better if these numbers would then feed to the Pipeline/sales performance summary -MSR/Performance/Budget/New Deliveries (budgeted) year. That way we can build it based on individual customer projections, as well as general projections we may build into the New Deliveries budget.
Again it would be great if you could get granular both by Product Family and model, as with our Annual Business Planning, it is by Family, not model, but it would be great to sum both, and sum together unique customer plans plus general plans.
However, I don't see where unassigned customer profile budgets (not likely, but possible) or where each Reps New Deliveries Budget would roll up to. Ideally we'd be able to build a customer budget by family and/or model, which gets added to a MSR New Deliveries Budget, that can have its own additional non customer specific projections by family and/or model, which then should get rolled up to a division sum of all the MSR budgets, but also allows additional units to be added in by family and/or model.
This would eliminate so many emails with numbers, and multiple spreadsheets, and would allow SalesLink to be a place to truly help build out an annual business plan.