My Odoo Journey - EXIT 4: The CRM Review

My long awaited test drive of Odoo 's CRM is here! Being a firm believer of SMARKETING throughout my career, my priority has always been to be at the service of our Sales Team.

In fact, my closest friends in business are VPs of Sales. And from all of them I have learned one thing: sales people resist CRMs because most customer relationship software systems are too complex. My hope was that Odoo would crack the "simplification" code... so did they?

The Good

• Ability to customize the stages of the Pipeline
• Creating Sales Teams and assigning users to them, so they only see their team's activities (and managers have a higher, macro view of all teams)
• Cool tools in the Internal Notes section (even has ChatGPT integrated!)
• Integrated with Contacts (Customers) module (crucial for B2B businesses)
• Mobile app for Odoo seems good, and the CRM module looks functional (no loss of features)
• A great set of Reports provided to hit the ground running with

The Not-So-Good

• No app exists for salespersons to simply scan a business card and have the Contact automatically created in Odoo (and ability to assign that Contact to an existing Company when scanning)
• The odd design of the sales document structure, where a sales order that is only SAVED is a quotation, and when CONFIRMED is a sales order; both having the document number starting with "S"
• Expected Revenue field requires manual entry and doesn't dynamically populate based on Quotations related to the opportunity

Our Approach to Using the CRM

For our implementation, we've decided to use the CRM module exclusively for creating Quotes. This allows us to better-track our Opportunities (which we call Projects) and trigger Quotes from them and see what's in our pipeline and measure conversion rates.

Due to this, we have also decided never to create quotes in the Sales module.

Based on this it would have been really nice to have the documents created in Odoo to match the document type: "S" for any sales orders and "Q" for any quotes. Every other system behaves this way, but somehow Odoo's structure combines both quotes and sales orders into one document type that starts with "S", differentiating them only by Saving or Confirming, and through a status tag that you can see in lists.

I think this is a case of oversimplifying in a bad way.

Cool Setup Features

There are some really cool setup features that give you the ability to setup a structure to capitalize on the CRM:

• Creating Sales Teams so that they can be easily tracked separately in the CRM.

• Setting each user's access/visibility of documents so that they can focus on what relates only to them.

• Creating custom Activities that can be triggered for internal collaboration or client outreach.

• Creating Tags that can be used to tag Opportunities for better search and reporting capabilities.

• Setting up Lost Reasons to understand why you lose your Opportunities, helping to improve future processes.

• Customizing the Opportunity Pipeline to have custom stages that meet your business' specific workflow.

Creating an Opportunity

Creating an opportunity is super simple. It's like creating a task in project software such as Asana. Identify the customer, put the usual info related to the opportunity and you're done. One really cool feature is in the Internal Notes section: Odoo lets you select from many different functions such as links, columns, emojis, images... and even ChatGPT to enter notes related to the opportunity. Might be a bit of an overkill, but I definitely think they're onto something here...

Moving It Through the Pipeline

Adding a Quotation to the Opportunity is also very easy. And once you have saved the quote, you can see from the Opportunity that there is a quote associated to it. This is really good.

However, what is not as intuitive is that the Expected Revenue in the Opportunity is still $0.00 despite a quotation being associated to it. Looks like the user is expected to manually enter the Expected Revenue. However, I think it would be way smarter if the Expected Revenue field automatically added up all of the amounts of quotations associated to the Opportunity. This would give a true view of the revenue that is expected, without requiring users to type it in.

As your sales team does their magic, the opportunity is easily pushed through your pipeline to the eventual goal of winning the Opportunity. And throughout the process, there is a "Chatter" function that logs everything that contributed to making the sale: notes, messages, and activities are all logged so that anyone can jump in and know the story behind the deal to help close it!

Mobile Use

We can't forget that creating Contacts or Opportunities are functions for our sales friends who are usually Road Warriors. Odoo has a mobile app, and it looks pretty decent. No functions seem to be missing in it (vs desktop). The only thing I think is missing is the ability to add Contacts from the mobile app by taking a scan of the business card, then have the system prompt us to relate the contact to an existing customer or create a new one.

How's the Reporting?

Out-of-the-box there's quite a few reports already:

Forecast (which deals set to close when, and how much).

Pipeline, which is best shown using the pivot table function which really lets you go granular.

Update (thanks to Fabien Pinckaers for pointing this out!)

If you go out of the CRM module and into the Dashboards app, you will see premade reports for all modules. They include Top Leads, Top Salespeople, Top Sales Teams, etc., and even Top Reasons Lost which is a big one in our business.

The best thing about the Dashboard view is that everything on it can be clicked to the record in the CRM module for you to drill into more, if desired.

One thing I did not see is the Quote Conversion report (but I see Closing Rate stats, but I don't this it's the same thing). Hopefully there is a way to track in a report when a Quote is CONFIRMED into a Sales Order.

Next Steps

The goal is to make the CRM worthwhile for our sales team to use. If they use it, they will add Contacts. And adding Contacts helps drive our marketing engine, where these Contacts will be engaged through Odoo's Email Marketing and Marketing Automation apps.

My hope is that through the Contacts app, I will be able to see who engages with our email content, and hopefully Odoo even grades Contacts based on their level of engagement. I haven't gone there yet, but many other systems I've used do this. I am hoping Odoo doesn't fall short there.