The Industry Challenges

Within industries like Professional Services and Manufacturing (Industrial Equipment & Machinery) there are several challenges that companies within these industries are facing. From our experience at Absalon we summarize them as below:

The Absalon Approach

When designing and developing AbsalonCRM™ 2009 there was three main design elements important in this solution: How to dramatically improve the way companies Direct, Create and Execute their businesses.

What do we mean by that?

These three principles are supporting the views of what the next wave of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is all about in a market place that changes faster than ever before in business history. When referring to the term CRM it often relates back to Planning, Executing and Reporting Sales Calls and related Opportunities. But in a time when customers demand more and better experiences from their suppliers it becomes important to broaden the concept of CRM into all business processes that are customer facing.

One key question to ask oneself is of all the internal attention, resources and time you as a company put in managing and developing leads, prospects and customers, how much of this do the customer experience and makes your relationship stronger with them? CRM of today is too often focused only on closing new deals and/or to respond to customer after sales distress calls when things have gone wrong.

The long-term positive experience and relationship with your customers is more often related to their experience of your ability to execute on the agreement you just signed. When forming a consistent structure in how to approach the CRM challenges Absalon included the following design principles for AbsalonCRM™ 2009:



  • Direct the Business.
    • The tools to support you in your business planning activities and the goals you need to reach in order to grow in the marketplace. It includes organization of the Markets and Segments you are targeting, the solutions you want to provide for those markets, the Campaigns your will run, existing customer base, competitors and the people from your organization that are set to work with these critical tasks.
  • Create new Business.
    • The tools to deliver structured and effective CRM processes including Sales, Marketing and Opportunity Management. Both when “hunting”, entering new Markets or Segments, and when “farming” of growing your existing Key Accounts over time.
  • Execute your Business.
    • When the contract is signed the work begins to deliver the services and products agreed in the agreement. As this is a critical part of your business to keep you going and growing the Absalon-solution includes support of running the Projects with the right people, managing issues and risks, executing activities and keeping project deadlines and budgets. As it’s most often a people-focused process we include the tools to manage your Workforce, recruit new people and to follow up on time reports etc.

Industry Focus

As you can understand from this Whitepaper a lot of the functionality that Absalon adds to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM-platform can be used in many different business processes and industries. Our intention is to support those companies that most often work in long and complex sales processes and that is not only shipping a product after the sale is closed but also support their customer in a delivery process. It can be a delivery of expert services if you are a lawyer, installation services combined with products if you are in Industrial Equipment & Machinery or as an IT-consultancy firm supporting customers with services, installations and long term maintenance agreements. To be precise the software can best be used within the industry SIC- Codes of 35, 36, 38, 73, 80, 81, 87.

Therefore a big portion of what Absalon ads into this industry specific solution is how to secure that the right agreements gets in place, the right resources are allocated to fulfill the agreements and that the services provided to your customer is performed in the best practice you as a company have defined.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM – The application platform

AbsalonCRM™ 2009 is built within the integrated development of Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It’s an Independent Software Vendor (ISV)-solution that follows all the SDK and standards in regards to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM certifications standards. It’s developed to be licensed both as a Software-as-a- Service (SaaS) service and as an on-premise installation. There are no third party components.

The product includes:
  • Absalon Customization of Standard Entities from standard Microsoft Dynamics CRM
  • Absalon development of new Custom Entities
  • Absalon developed JavaScript-code in “On-change” Events
  • Absalon developed Workflows
  • Absalon developed Reports
  • Absalon Customization of the standard Microsoft Dynamics CRM Sitemap


    • Absalon refer to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM documentation for general system requirements, installations and configurations.
    www.absaloncrm.com