Building a sales portal using Microsoft Business Portal
Updated: April 21, 2005
By Roy Jacobsen
See how to customize the Sales Center of Microsoft Business Solutions Business Portal to collect separate sales resources into one central repository. Not only does this enable your sales team to share data and collaborate more efficiently, it also provides team leaders and members with immediate business-performance measurements.
Microsoft Business Portal features a default sales portal named the Sales Center, which can serve as the workplace for sales professionals in your organization. This 27-page white paper describes how to easily customize and adapt the Sales Center to funnel individual sales resources into one central repository.
Channeling all your sales resources into one Web repository, or portal, makes it easier for your sales team to share information and collaborate on documents, meetings, and projects. In addition, team leaders and members can use this sales portal to gather immediate business-performance metrics.
Using a customized sales portal can help you meet your business' unique needs. For example, consider the following scenarios:
| • | A salesperson preparing to make a prospect call can go to the document libraries in a customized sales portal. With a few easy clicks, she can gather the product brochures and specifications, service plan information, price lists, and other material she needs for the call. Because all the product information and sales tools reside in one place, she can rest assured that she's not overlooking anything. |
| • | A salesperson planning a trip can view the information pages in the sales portal to find the receivables balances and sales history of the customers he'll be visiting. He knows he's getting the latest information directly from the back-office application because Microsoft Business Portal queries get their data directly from the source (the back-office database). |
| • | A sales manager can use the information pages, queries, and reports in the sales portal to view up-to-the-minute numbers on sales performance. He'll know right away if those new sales promotions are working well or if there are any problems he needs to address, such as stock shortages or territories falling short of their goals. |
Microsoft Business Portal can do all these things and more for your sales organization. It provides access to business applications and immediate information from Microsoft Dynamics GP and Microsoft Business Solutions–Solomon, including the following:
| • | Flexible, role-based access to business information |
| • | Report publishing and distribution |
| • | At-a-glance access to key business metrics |
| • | Self-service portal applications |
This white paper explains the various features used in a sales portal created in Microsoft Business Portal and includes both planning information and a sample sales portal.
Roy Jacobsen is a senior editor on the Microsoft Business Portal team. He has been developing documentation for Microsoft Great Plains products since 1992. Roy lives in Fargo, N.D., with his wife and three children. He likes to spend what free time he can reading and writing, or enjoying the great outdoors in his family's camper.
