SharePoint and the F.O.S.H. Life – Sales (part 4 of 4)

F.O.S.H. Stands for Finance, Operations, Sales and Human Resources and denotes four areas in an organization where SharePoint can have an immediate impact. SharePoint is a tool that can be tailored to any business to enhance communication and automate repetitive business processes within and across departments.

In ‘SharePoint and the F.O.S.H. Life – Human Resources’, we discussed how SharePoint can enhance and optimize HR processes, exemplified by the Employee Life Cycle. The second part in the series, SharePoint and the F.O.S.H. Life – Finance, focused on how SharePoint can help streamline some of the various Finance functions within an organization. The third installment in the series, SharePoint and the F.O.S.H. Life - Operations covered how SharePoint can help improve an organization’s Operations while helping it respond quicker to changes in its operational environment and manage internal requests. The final piece in the F.O.S.H. series will cover how SharePoint can assist an organization manage marketing campaigns, develop creative pieces, manage sales and client documents and in general improve its Sales and Marketing performance.

Marketing Campaign Management

Managing a marketing campaign is a complex process that involves many moving parts. By using a SharePoint Calendar a marketing department can keep track of all of the upcoming campaign events. This will allow the marketing department to plan and allocate resources for events and prepare to promote them ahead of time. The events can be color coded by type to enhance the visibility of events and make it easier for users to know what is coming up.

Approval of Creative Pieces

Creative pieces are central to any marketing campaign. These can include Print Ads, Website Designs, Radio Ads, and Promotional Videos (to name a few). All of these files can be stored in SharePoint for collaboration. An added bonus of using SharePoint is that Microsoft has integrated a media player into the system. By storing a video or audio file in SharePoint it can be streamed directly on the site for review.

SharePoint makes collaboration on creative pieces easy by using the document versioning functionality and the approval of workflows, discussed in part 2 of this series. Employees can view the draft creative pieces in SharePoint, comment and edit them while retaining previous versions for reference. Once a final draft has been agreed on it can be routed for final approval.

Internet Websites

SharePoint is a web based application and can easily be used as an internet facing site. Many of the top company and government websites are SharePoint based. One benefit of using SharePoint as an internet site is the reduction of the need for a web team. Once the site is set up the people that are responsible for publishing content to the web are the people that actually work on the content. Publishing workflows can be set up that extend the functionality of approval workflows. Once content has been approved it can be made visible to the whole wide world.

Sales Contracts and Customer Documentation

Sales contracts are legal documents which typically have legal implications regarding retention, access and security. It is important that contracts not be lost or deleted both to protect the company and to assist in legal discovery as discussed in part 3 of this series. SharePoint can integrate with Microsoft Dynamics CRM to relate customer information to their contracts and documentation stored in SharePoint.

This allows an organization to take advantage of the advanced tracking and reporting of a CRM solution while ensuring that important documentation is preserved and protected in SharePoint. If client portals are enabled then the client’s documents can be stored in a location that is secured but easily accessible by all stakeholders. To extend the ease of use for these stakeholders an organization can email enable the SharePoint libraries, as discussed in part 1 of this series, so that users can preserve important documents by emailing them into SharePoint.

This post is the fourth and final in the blog series focusing on the advantages of SharePoint within the F.O.S.H. areas. The first three blogs exemplified the many advantages of using SharePoint to enhance HR, Financial and Operational procedures and departmental collaboration.

For more information on SharePoint please contact FMT Consultants.

Written by
Josh Jackson, Senior SharePoint Consultant
FMT Consultants

Posted by: Jakob Bechgaard