Tinton Falls, NJ -- (ReleaseWire) -- 10/23/2006 --According to Larry Caretsky, President of Commence Corporation (www.commence.com/mfg./), “Integration is a word many vendors are afraid of, and with good reason if their software can’t support it. But industrial distributors and manufacturers need to carefully think about integration before they write it off as a “nice-to-have”. Depending on your functional requirements, integration may be a necessity.”

There are two main kinds of integration to consider: back-end and contact management. If manufacturers choose to integrate sales and marketing database with back-end accounting, ERP, or manufacturing software, then the ability to provide the sales team with a complete view of the customer, potentially including order history, pricing requests, and ship dates. Integration can also significantly help with quote entry, follow-up, and tracking. By increasing the availability of product and pricing information, important tools are given to an industrial sales force to serve customers while gaining efficiencies. Once a manufacturers has a significant volume of reliable data, it can start to feed the data entered in the sales system to the back-end system to facilitate improved purchasing and manufacturing forecasting.

Caretsky suggests that Lean CRM is has many important variables. “If you choose to integrate contact management, then all relevant contact-related data, including calendar, will be available in software such as Microsoft Outlook and able to synchronize to the sales team’s PDAs or Pocket PCs. The main driver behind contact management integration is to make sure users don’t have to type the same piece of data more than once, an obvious waste of time, and something that most sales people are unlikely to actually do. “

In an effort to help industrial distributors and manufacturers thrive, Commence Corporation presents Practices That Pay: Leveraging Information to Achieve Industrial Selling Results, a compendium of smart practices from the leading industrial sales and marketing experts and organizations that are growing in today’s challenging environment.

Commence offers lean industrial companies complete “Freedom Of Choice” to select the solutions and platform that best meets the business requirements of manufacturers and distributors. The comprehensive CRM Industrial application suite is available for use on premise or on-demand as a hosted service. Industrial leaders often build departmental lean CRM solutions with the award winning Commence Lean Industrial CRM Framework. These choices are why so many industrial companies choose Commence as the solution for managing customer relationships. All Commence Industrial solutions support mobile or wireless connectivity and integration to back-office accounting and ERP systems.