B2B
Engage® —
Customer Relationship Management
Six Important Questions to Ask a CRM Vendor.

The robusticity and flexibility of B2B Engage is powered by X2 Engine—combining customer relationship management, marketing automation and workflow—all managed on a single platform. You can now break down silos, collaborate with partners and customers, leverage resources, and maximize your strategies and relationships with uninterrupted business engagement and unnecessary “add-on” software.

B2B Engage was developed by Business U, Inc., the nation’s recognized business engagement subject matter experts in the pubic-sector. The CRM comes with built in modules, saving you time and money. You do not need to spend additional sums of money on customization for your day-to-day managing, measuring, and monitoring business engagement efforts and the services you provide customers; including interacting with teams within and across your organization.

The features and functions below are native in B2B Engage, cohesively designed to interact with each other. This provides a comprehensive view, review and reporting of your customers’ journey with your organization as well as real-time data of your team’s internal and external interactions.

To learn more about B2B Engage or to request a live demonstration, please contact Business U at [email protected].

B2B Engage Features

Functions as a project plan to help users monitor and complete tasks.

Actions

The social element of B2B Engage to communicate and share information with your colleagues across the platform. Users communicate in real-time by creating a post, uploading a document, announcing news, and importing social media feeds from customer accounts.

Activity & Social Feed

View, document and schedule meetings.

Calendar

Used to manage, track and communicate activities. Identify activities and performance indicators that are important to manage, monitor and measure.

Convert Spreadsheets

Identify activities and performance indicators that are important to manage, monitor and measure.

Customize Reports

Rich text editing tool and a document management system to create generic email templates to share with colleagues, other B2B Engage users, and eMarket to customers.

Documents & Media

Email accounts are fully integrated into the platform so that there is no need to click out of B2B Engage to send or receive emails; this allows tracking of email opens and click-throughs with customers and team members.

Email Integration

Users can easily upload documents, large files and media. Files can be “related” to an account, contact, activity, action and/or housed in “Documents.”

Importing

Fully integrated eMarketing automation that allows the development of lists and the creation of templates and campaigns with full-service analytic functions.

Outreach

Allows for ease of monitoring how programs/initiatives/required forms move through various action steps and processes.

Process Funnels

Enables users to write notes about engagement and outreach interactions, log phone calls, schedule deadlines and make assignments within and across the platform, all of which can be “related” to an employer contact and/or account.

Publisher Box

Robust sorting and look-up features across the platform to minimize time searching for contacts, accounts, documents, files, etc.

Sorting & Look-up

Create actions assigned to other users in B2B Engage as well as view and manage your own assigned actions for events, meetings, and other important engagement activities and outreach efforts.

Task Management

Allows for the automation of workflows including triggers and notification.

Workflow Processes

Six Important Questions
to Ask a CRM Vendor
Hidden CRM Costs —

Organizations struggle with how to objectively evaluate customer relationship management (CRM) platforms currently on the market to determine which one provides the best value for their operational structure and outreach efforts. Without knowing the right questions to ask a CRM vendor, there are predictable outcomes that lead to unnecessary costs, inefficiencies and low adoption rates.

Question to Ask the CRM Vendor Why Ask the Question How B2B Engage® Answers the Question
What is the user license and hosting cost per year?

If the answer is “free,” then you definitely need to ask the remaining questions as some vendors are bundling the cost of user licenses and hosting costs into configuration and customization. Make sure to ask the vendor for a detailed line-item budget that includes the vendor's specific tasks, the number of hours needed to complete the development of the CRM as well as the per hour cost for complete transparency.

Business U offers discounted rates to non-profits and public-sector organizations. We provide a line-item budget that breaks down the cost of each element for the development of your CRM and training your staff.

Do you use a separate app for eMarketing automation?

This is such an important question, as many organizations use eMarketing to conduct outreach.,You will find that many CRM vendors have to “bolt-on” an app that doesn’t have all the functions of an eMarketing platform like Constant Contact.

The Vendor’s CRM eMarketing apps may use different languages and databases creating duplication of effort in maintaining your various lists/databases. An extra- burden is placed on your organization when you need to automate workflow processes so that the two databases can “talk” to each other.

B2B Engage has eMarketing automation built into the CRM software. You can say “good-bye” to those 3rd-party marketing vendors, and you will no longer have to manage two separate databases. Isn’t that one of the main reasons for a CRM—to have a single database to maximize your customer engagement and outreach efforts?

Does the CRM vendor charge for the number of contacts you add to the CRM?

If yes, what is the cost?

You may get a free seat/user license in the CRM, but you may have to pay for the number of contacts in your database. For example, the more contacts you have or import into the CRM, the more you have to pay. Get the breakdown of contact costs upfront.

B2B Engage does not punish you for building more relationships. Engagement strategies such as increasing your interactions to get more contacts are exactly what we teach in our professional development programs and during our CRM training.

And we highly encourage you to go out and get more contacts! Your expanded reach means more opportunities—Business U would never charge you for that!

Does the Vendor allow software-to-software-interface such as an API (Application- Programming Interface)?

Organizations depend on other databases to evaluate, analyze and aggregate data and not duplicate efforts. The vendor’s CRM software should allow you to interface with other databases (software-to-software) using an API tool. If they don’t, it could be a red flag and a sign that they want to hold you to their proprietary systems and customization costs.

If the vendors from the various software applications your organization uses allow APIs, then B2B Engage can interface to maximize your productivity by allowing your software applications to “talk” to each other.

What is the process and timeline for getting data out of your organization’s CRM?

The CRM vendor should explain to you a step-by-step process as to how to get your data exported back to you when your contract has expired or would like to terminate it. And don’t forget to ask if there are any costs associated with the export.

You own your data. There is no cost to export your data nor are there any penalties attached. Your administrator/super-user will be provided with a step-by-step process to export at your convenience, 24/7.

If we want to automate a workflow process, do you have to learn proprietary “CRM language” to do so?

This is a key question as most CRM vendors use closed source proprietary programming language that only their coders and/or their 3rd party vendor will know, which might mean that every time you want a configuration change, you are at the vendor’s mercy such as being charged when you need to configure a new workflow process, module or form.

You don’t need coding knowledge or experience to understand B2B Engage’s user-friendly, drag-and-drop steps to automate workflow processes or make changes to your CRM.

Business U will train (and empower) your organization’s administrator/super-user to make changes, edits and updates.