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Your vendors and suppliers are crucial to ensure the proper procurement of products and services for your business. Proper vendor management practices contribute to long-lasting relationships with your vendors. Working in sync with vendors helps you fulfill your goals and achieve success faster. Ideally, effective vendor management aims for a win-win situation for both you and your vendors.

Earlier, vendor management would mostly depend on manual onboarding, and management of vendors’ information. The best companies could do was use phone calls and emails to manage vendor-related operations.

Then came the B2B vendor portal, a pioneering technology that not only simplified but also automated the vendor management process. Almost all the companies today are switching to a B2B vendor management tool to manage vendors and supply chains.

If you too are looking to enhance your vendor management, here’s your post. This post will walk you through the meaning of vendor management, its importance, and its stages. You’ll also learn about the features you must have in your B2B vendor portal.

So, here you go.

Overview of Vendor Management

Vendor Management is a collective term to describe all the processes an organization uses to manage its vendors (or suppliers). It encompasses choosing vendors, negotiating and controlling contract prices, mitigating vendor-related issues and risks, and several other tasks. There can be one or more vendors that can vary according to the nature of your organization. Vendors can also vary in size from sole traders to large organizations.

Importance of Vendor Management

Vendor management holds great importance for your organization. And a B2B vendor portal can help make vendor management more efficient.

Below are the benefits of effective vendor management for your organization:

1. Right Vendor Selection

Implementing suitable vendor management can help you select the right vendors. You can get automated bidding between vendors to get the best vendors at the best prices.

2. Enhanced Contract Management

If you have more than one vendor, the vendor management system helps reduce the issues in contract management, documentation, and other essential information.

Proper vendor management practices can help you manage contracts better. By tracking the current status of all contracts and other useful info with a centralized view, you can accelerate the decision-making process. It saves your time and adds more efficiency to your vendor management.

3. Better Performance Management and Visibility

Implementing a vendor management system like a B2B vendor portal provides a central view of all your vendors’ performance. This integrated view helps you get visibility and understanding of what works and what doesn’t.

Accordingly, you can take action to eliminate roadblocks in supply chain management. This helps boost the overall efficiency of your organization.

4. Improved Vendor Relations

Multi-vendor management can be tedious and challenging. To make the most of vendors and meet your business goals, robust vendor management is indispensable.

Easy access to all the vendor-related info in a single location via a B2B vendor portal can simplify your decision-making process. You can also communicate with them easily, which helps develop stronger bonding with your vendors over time.

5. Better Value for Your Buck

The end goal of vendor management is to achieve value for your investment. So, integrating a B2B vendor portal to manage vendors helps you save money and achieve long-term profitability over time.

If you are looking to manage your vendors seamlessly and enhance efficiency at every stage, our B2B vendor portal can help you out. It is a scalable and ready-to-integrate portal that you can customize to cater to your specific needs.

If you need help customizing it, we are there for you. You can even build a portal from scratch with our development team’s assistance if your specifications are very different.

Let’s make you the best portal for your business.

Stages of Vendor Management System

There are various stages that constitute the vendor management system, as below:

1. Vendor Selection - This is the first step in vendor management and includes picking the right vendors for your organization. For that, you need to research vendors, gather quotes via requests for quotation (RFQs) and requests for proposal (RFPs).

Once you have all the info and quotes, the next step is shortlisting and finalizing vendors. Though pricing will be a valuable factor, there are several other factors you should consider to select the vendors. These factors may be the vendor’s reputation, track record, capacity, communication ability, and more.

2. Negotiate the Contract - Getting the contract right is a must. Ensure that both you and your vendor agree to the terms that are mutually beneficial for both parties. Negotiating a contract may be time-consuming at times but it’s worth it.

This is because contract negotiation consists of defining goods and services to include, start date and end date of arrangements, and confidentiality and non-compete terms and clauses.

3. Vendor Onboarding - Vendor onboarding involves gathering the information and documentation relevant to on-boarding and approving a new vendor to your organization. You may also need to make sure that you collect all the vital contact and payment information. This information can include relevant licenses the vendor has, tax forms, insurance details, etc.

4. Tracking Vendor Performance - Once you on-board vendors, you need to continuously track and evaluate their performance. It includes evaluating their performance in terms of various key performance indicators like quality, volume, or delivery dates of goods.

5. Risk Monitoring and Management - There is a need to monitor vendors for any risks that can affect your organization. Some possible risks can be compliance breaches, data security issues, intellectual property loss or stealth, lawsuits, etc.

You should also identify if there is any bottleneck in the supply chain on the vendors’ side and how it can impact your organization’s operations.

6. Payment Management - Last but not least, on-time payment is also a step you can’t afford to avoid. Make sure you are paying your vendors in line with the agreed payment terms to maintain good terms.

B2B Vendor Portal - Your Key to Enhanced Visibility and Efficiency in Supply Chain

A B2B vendor portal enables you to track and view your vendors centrally all in one place. You can view different customized reports that your vendors upload for better insights into individual vendors’ performance.

Central management of all the vendors’ info, sales figures, and more helps you stay on track with respect to supplies and deficits. You can also spot overreliance on a single vendor, non-compliance of terms by a vendor, or other risk factors with everything in your B2B vendor portal.

Besides, automation of several business aspects like vendor onboarding, exchange of notifications like certification expirations, insurance certificates, affidavits, etc. helps expedite processes. They reduce the workload on the admin staff and increase the efficiency of the supply chain processes.

All in all, a B2B vendor portal helps you drive more efficiency and visibility in your vendor management operations.

Features You Must Look Out for In a B2B Vendor Portal

While picking a vendor portal, see to it that the portal has got the following features.

1. Online Registrations

Your vendor portal should allow you to register global vendors and suppliers and make them a part of your network without hassle.

2. Automated Filtering of Vendors

Manual filtering of vendors by certain criteria you decide is a herculean task indeed. Your portal should help you get rid of this by providing auto-filter functionality and enhance transparency in the process.

3. Management of Quotes and Proposals

Your portal should eliminate the need to send manual requests for quotes and proposals. Rather, it should let different vendors share their quotes and proposals directly via a secure login and stay assured of confidentiality.

4. Easy Comparison

There should be a means to evaluate the proposals based on their previous records easily within your portal. The portal should save your time by getting rid of the need for manual comparison and evaluation of proposals every time.

5. Automated Ranking

Your portal should also let you rate your vendors based on your defined comparison index. There can be factors like the history, compliance scores, delivery time, available inventory, etc. that you can rate your vendors on.

6. Invoicing & Payments

There should be the freedom to generate Purchase Orders and Invoices directly from within your vendor portal. It should take away the hassle of generating purchase orders and invoices separately and sharing them via email, fax, or post.

7. Secure CRM Access

Your vendors should be able to view their relevant data fields in the CRM in a secure way. Your portal should provide your vendors and suppliers with role-based access to CRM.

Hire Us - Your A-Team to Amplify Your Vendor Management

Now that you know how important vendor portal management is for your organization, it is time you got it right. If you need help, we’ve got you covered.

Our B2B vendor portal solution can be your ideal match. It features secure CRM access, proposal filter, automated proposal ranking, and more that you seek in an ideal B2B vendor portal. We can discuss your requirements and customize the portal to make it a perfect fit for you. If you want, our development team can take it one step ahead and build a portal from the ground up!

So, let’s connect and build the best vendor portal together!

Portal is a website that provides single-point access to applications and information. It not only helps in selling or ensuring an online presence but with many other purposes. Different websites having different purposes are built with varying approaches. For example, if you need a web portal to help you sort customer queries, you have a support portal. If you want to allow your partners to manage their activities, you have a partner portal. Similarly, the extent and use vary from industry to industry. 

However, the best thing is you can approach a custom web portal development company and customize your portal as per your needs. 

An online portal can be convenient for different industries. 

Let us explore the industries that can benefit from web portal development services. 

• Education

The education industry has a centralized database that holds information on the teaching staff, administrative staff, students, and everything else. A web portal could give them access to the information to carry out their jobs. 

For instance, teaching staff can 

• Manage various classes
• Mark students attendance 
• Arrange the timetable
• Upload important class
• Upload marks and grades
• Upload documents and details

Students can

• Check attendance
• Submit medical details
• Check marks and grades
• Keep up with notices

Admin staff can

• Keep the fee records
• Consolidate reports
• Manage staff and students details
• Have an overview of the school's operations

• NonProfit

Portals for nonprofits can help you streamline your organization's activities, handle donations, manage volunteers and members, track their tasks and schedules, and provide a hassle-free experience so that you can focus on changing the world. 

A web portal development services will provide you with features like:

• Donation Module
• Automated Fund Transfer Module
• On-Boarding Volunteers
• Volunteers Timesheet Management
• Knowledgebase
• Live chat
• Smart Dashboard

And help you interact, and scale at your own pace.

• Medical 

A medical portal means doctors would have all the information about the patient. They would have details of patients' history of diseases and treatments, allergies, and others. Administrative staff would know about the patients' demographic details along with payments. Patients would be able to contact doctors and the team anytime they need support. They can access their individual files and see their progress. 

In addition to this, a medical portal could help streamline the transplant and transfusion process. As hospitals would have all the details of the patients, they can match the recipients' blood group and match organs promptly.

• Pharma

In the pharmaceutical industry, a portal could be a great way for pharmacists to track a patient's history. A patient can request medicines according to the prescription, and pharmacists can fill them accordingly. Pharmacists can know about the patient's drug intake and can regulate it. They can even avoid misuse of a particular drug. 

A portal will also connect the pharmacist with the patient's doctor. So they can verify the prescription before approving a patient's request. 

They can also keep track of patient's allergies and avoid medicines that can cause reactions.   

• Real-Estate

A real estate industry consists of many stakeholders such as admin, realtor, agent, member, etc. Up of that, agents and admin require streamlined communication and a 360-degree overview to close the deals.

Managing it manually can be tedious, time-consuming, and unorganized. A web portal, on the other hand, can simplify it. It can help you

• Manage properties along with your stakeholders
• List properties on the website
• Enable buyers and sellers to manage their listings, selling, renting
• Build transparency by showing details to everyone involved
•  Generate leads for your properties

And more. 

A web portal development company can help you develop a real-estate portal with features like

• Broker management
• Property management
• Seller management
• User-centric features
• Geo-location
• Media

With a real-estate portal, you can automate your tasks and can serve customers in a better way.

Conclusion

Web portals are important for all B2B and B2C businesses. However, choosing the secure one is essential. So, make sure that your portal development company provides a secure gateway and doesn't store anything on the server.

Until a few years back, companies would hire a big workforce to handle their business aspects. Be it finance, customer service, sales or any other department; most of the tasks and processes would be manual.

With technological advancement, the landscape of the corporate world has changed dramatically now. A corporate web portal is among those few path-breaking digital advancements.

If you are also a business owner looking to integrate a corporate portal, this post has it all that you need to know. Learn what a corporate web portal is in detail, its types, objectives, and more.

First things first, here is the detailed concept of a corporate portal.

What is a Corporate Web Portal?

Before understanding what a corporate web portal is, there is a need to understand what a web portal is in detail.

A web portal is a web-based gateway that provides authenticated access to an organization’s data to different parties. In other words, a web portal is a web application that you embed into your website to serve as a gateway to your organization’s data repositories.

A web portal can be of different types based on the portal users. There are three major types of a web portal as below.

• B2B portal - It provides vendors, associates, etc. with access to the company’s relevant data. People typically refer to it as Extranet.

• B2C portal - It provides end customers (or clients) with access to their relevant data. People typically refer to it as a client or customer portal.

• Internal Portal - It provides the company’s personnel with access to various data fields. People typically refer to it as Intranet.

If you combine the functionalities of all these portals into one, you get what you can call a corporate web portal. You can also call this portal a hybrid of all the three major portal types that encompasses the functions and features of all of them.

Providing various parties in a business right from clients or customers to business partners, associates, or vendors to internal personnel with access to relevant data benefits a lot.

Now that you are familiar with the ABC’s of a corporate web portal, it’s time to discuss the business objectives and purposes it helps fulfil.

Business Objectives of a Corporate Web Portal

A corporate portal serves various key purposes of almost all businesses. It enables remote and authenticated access to crucial data to both business associates and customers as per their needs. It also helps eliminate the need to rely on physical mail, faxing, email, or call to access any information you urgently require.

Various types of B2B and B2C portals including a client portal, staff portal, sales portal, customer service portal, project management portal, partner portal, etc. are a part of a corporate web portal.

Let’s discuss in detail the benefits of a corporate portal you can avail of.

1. Easy Integration and Centralization - A corporate web portal helps integrate and bring all customers and corporate data on one platform. This integration of CRM data and customers together via a portal helps carry out administrative operations faster.

With all the crucial data in one place, you can get an eagle-eye view of your business aspects and manage them efficiently.

2. Consistency - Uniting back-end data across different portals remotely enables companies to store and depend on consistent data that you can share and collaborate upon.

3. Personalization - Providing personalized access to particular users helps you enhance the experiences of your internal staff as well as external customers or clients.

You can engineer your corporate web portal to personalize it according to the user. It helps all the parties involved have a unique view of the critical company data to make their work easier.

4. Security Benefit - As the owner or the chief admin of your company, you can fully control who can view what in your portal. You can decide on which parties to provide secure authenticated access to which data of your company. This secured access to different individual users or parties based on their roles or needs helps keep your company’s data secured.

5. Enhanced Customer Service - You can provide your customers and clients with secured access to the relevant information like purchase history, knowledge base, FAQs, from within a portal.

You can also let them generate tickets, track orders, or perform other customer-facing operations easily via your portal. This contributes to enhancing your experience and saves you overhead costs.

Also empowering your marketing managers will help you automate marketing campaigns with a corporate portal. All this helps you bring down the churn rate and boost your overall profitability and bottom line.

6. Reduced Load on Internal Staff - With a corporate web portal in place, the load on your customer service staff goes down. The automation of customer service workflows takes place which results in a drastic decline in internal communication requirements.

When your staff doesn’t have to handle redundant queries, they can focus more on solving bigger issues.

Also, the service hours that go into handling repetitive queries goes down. This significant reduction in manual handling of queries helps save the costs on time-intensive queries for basic operations.

Coming to the internal communication within your employees, it also improves a lot. Your company personnel can communicate, share, and update critical data directly on the portal for everyone to see. This reduces the need to arrange meetings and conferences to discuss small things every now and then. The efficiency, increases and benefits your company.

7. Enhanced Communication with Business Partners/Associates/Vendor

When your business associates, partners, or vendors view data relevant to them in the portal, it streamlines the communication with them.

For instance, a vendor portal makes viewing orders, documents, invoices, etc. easier for your vendors. Besides, it also makes viewing, managing, or updating your vendors’ details hassle-free for you. Similarly, a partner portal helps you engage your partners better by letting them view details like sales figures, project’s progress, or other things.

Steps to Build a Corporate Web Portal

1. Decide Who Will Build It - In-House or Outsourced Partners

Decide whether you want to build your corporate web portal by deploying your in-house engineers’ expertise or outsourcing portal development to trusted partners. For a start-up, outsourcing may be a better option as it helps you save time and costs on creating and maintaining the portal. This helps your internal staff focus more on the other critical roles.

2. Aim for Foolproof Security

Ensuring security of the portal is one of the critical aspects to consider. Robust security controls, secure coding methodologies, and various vulnerability and penetration tests can help you test the security of your portal before launch. You should also integrate authentication-based secure access mechanisms to retain security after launch also.

3. Decide How to Build It

There are two ways you can build your portal. The first typical way involves deploying an in-house or outsourced developer team to build your portal from the scratch. While this portal may give you an additional advantage of having full control over each functionality, there is a downside also.

It may be too cost-intensive for you to afford - especially when you’ve your business in its nascent stage. This is where a ready-to-integrate portal solution comes to rescue. Yes, there are several portal solutions by different portal companies that you can just buy, integrate with your CRM, and start off! You can also customize their features to cater to your specific business needs.

Looking for a ready-to-launch corporate web portal solution for your business? Our next-gen web portal can be your ideal fit to take care of your requirements. This portal can get your business off the ground instantly and easily. It is a ready-to-integrate and scalable solution that you can integrate and start off. If you want, we can customize it for you too.

So, let’s connect to get your portal ready!

4. Compliance with Data Laws

It is important that the portal you develop complies with data security standards - especially when you are building it from scratch. It’s because all the seasoned portal development companies typically follow standard data laws and regulations.

However, while building a corporate web portal; you may need to take extra care. This is because there may be loopholes in complying with security and data laws as you are new to this. Make it a point to keep privacy of all your parties intact and breach-proof. Don’t fail to comply with the local legislation of the country you are based in. As of now, 128 out of 194 countries have put in legislation to protect data and privacy as per the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

Get Your Corporate Web Portal Ready Now

A corporate portal is the key to optimized business operations, streamlined internal and external communication, and good profits. If you are all set to integrate a corporate portal, your search for the best portal development solution ends here.

We, at CRMJetty, can be your ideal portal development partner. We have our own web portal solution that’s got dedicated space, custom business logic, product/service integration, accounts and invoicing, and all the features that you seek for in your corporate web portal. Be your business B2B or B2C, stay assured you’ll get the best for both. You can manage all the parties - customers, partners, vendors, affiliates, and more.

Besides offering a launch-ready web portal, we also offer custom portal development services. There is a typical process that our company follows to get your feature-rich portal.

Our development team first collects your requirements. Our certified developers then analyze them first and determine if our launch-ready portal caters to them all. If there is a need to customize one or more functionalities to make it suit your requirements, they do it for you.

In case there is a large gap between your requirements and our portal’s features, we can help you build your unique portal from scratch too. We aim to make your portal development journey with us unforgettable and we promise that we shall!

So, let us help you build your best corporate web portal with synergy between you and us!

Customer experience is a crucial aspect that you can not afford to take lightly. Customer service is also among the factors that constitute customer experience. In fact, 89% of customers are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.

Although there are some differences in the processes and types of clients in the B2B sector, the clients are ultimately “customers” and customer experience matters for them too.

With a B2B portal, the process of providing a better customer experience becomes easier than the regular support system that you may provide via calls and emails. Ticket system, knowledge base, etc. are some of the most important aspects that can take your customer service experience to the next level. So, let’s understand what B2B portals can do for you B2B business in detail.

Benefits of B2B Portal Development

1. Cost-Effective Ownership - Highly Valuable for Startups and Small Businesses

One of the biggest reasons to consider B2B portal development is the cost. For small businesses and startups, budgeting is a crucial deciding factor for them in all their operations. A big MNC may be able to afford to hire a large pool of support agents to manage costumes’ queries, inventory, and more but a small startup may not. The reason is simple - they may not have thousands of dollars to spend on hiring a pool of support staff.

This is where a B2B portal can fill the gap. The cost of setting up a B2B portal is comparatively much less than that of hiring a support team. Even if on an hourly basis or outsourcing basis, a support staff may cost you more than a B2B portal.

Hence, picking B2B portal development over hiring a support staff is an ideal and budget-friendly choice. In fact, even big companies like DHgate, TradeWheel, Alibaba, etc. also provide a B2B portal.

2. Speedier Initial Setup

Everything like creating a catalog, handling queries, promoting every promotional sale manually will neither be feasible nor time-saving. If you hire staff, you may also need to train them to finish time-bound customer support tasks like consultation or client onboarding. You may also have to stay abreast of the daily progress by having them reporting to you every now and then.

Do you really want all this “mess” - that too when your business has just started? Of course NOT.

Ideally, your first goal is to get your business off the ground fast and without any hassle. And a B2B portal development can do it for you. This is because it enables you to automate every manual task and kickstart your business instantly. Right from creating a catalog, integrating your new system or functionality with your existing software, changing product listings, running a promotional sale, etc.; it makes everything a matter of minutes.

This way, B2B portal development proves to be a great time-saver for your business - especially in its initial phase.

3. Real-Time Analytics - Speedy Insights

Tracking everything manually right from queries to complaints or sales can be a tough job. Not with a B2B portal though. With a centralized view of every business aspect, you can analyze your business requirements in real time.

You can view the customers’ demographics, common queries or grievances, etc. with a B2B portal. You can also get insights into your clients’ requirements and customize your products (or services) accordingly with a B2B portal.

You can manage your inventory efficiently by finding out which products are in high demand and which aren’t. Accordingly, you can decide on reordering certain products and holding a sale on the others.

You can also update your FAQs or content according to your most common questions or queries by your customers. This helps you align your brand with customers’ expectations and get better results in the long run.

4. Enhanced Security

Security is a crucial aspect to consider for both small and big businesses alike. If you are the admin, you can’t allow anyone to access anything from your CRM. Instead, to upkeep security of your CRM database security, you should enable different portal users to view only what their defined roles allow them to.

With a B2B portal, you can define user-roles and grant access to different CRM entities based on their user roles. You can document the roles and implement them well right within a B2B portal and keep your security tight.

Looking for the best B2B portal development services for your B2B organization? Our customer portal can be your best portal to start with. This portal can get your business off the ground fast and easily. It is a ready-to-integrate and scalable solution that you can integrate and start off. If you want, we can customize it for you too.

So, let’s connect to discuss your portal requirements to proceed!

5. Boost in the Overall Speed of Business Processes

As we discussed above, initial setup becomes much faster with a B2B portal than without it. Even if you may still dare to manually manage business processes at the start, you can’t continue it forever. Simply because the processes and operations grow more and complex as the size of the business grows.

With too much on plate to manage manually, you may not keep up with retaining efficiency. As a result, it may lead to a sluggishness in your business operations and of course hamper your business productivity.

Consider a real-life scenario. You set up your business and within one year, your customers increase in count to become 10000. Great. But what’s next? The number of daily queries and tickets that you have to handle now is 1000 on an average.

You had started with a support team of around 5 agents in the beginning but what would you do now? Would you keep making them overwork and wear out or hire more support agents to expand your team?

In either way, you might end up losing more than you invested and expected in return. Here’s how.

If you make your small support team over-work and incentivize them, they’re still likely to make more errors. Afterall, they are humans and not machines! With this rise in human errors, your customer satisfaction rate may drop and deprive you of some high-value customers over time.

If you hire more support agents, you may succeed in keeping the customer satisfaction rate intact but at a huge cost. A team of say 30 agents will force you to shell out a much bigger amount as salary than a team of just 5. Simple Maths! This will lead to a drop in your ROI and profitability margins which you won’t want.

6. Convenient Service, More Efficiency

With a reduction in the redundant tasks through B2B portal development, your support team gets more time to focus on the big picture. They can focus more on big issues and queries instead of answering redundant questions and handling repetitive tasks manually. This helps manage customers better and handle tasks more efficiently.

Besides, when customers get what they want without much hassle, they welcome it. Thus, with B2B portal development; you can also enrich your customer experience with easy and speedy self-service.

Features to Consider During B2B Portal Development

There are a number of ready-to-integrate B2B portal development solutions available in the market. While they may fit some organizations, they may not fit others. This is where a custom B2B portal comes into the picture. A custom portal caters to your exact business needs and helps you optimize your business operations.

However, there are a few common features that you may consider while developing a custom portal or picking a ready-to-integrate portal.

1. Easily Navigable Product Catalog & Services Display

The portal should make it easy to display your products and services to your current and new customers. It should be available and running 24x7 for customers to check out the available products and services with easy navigation.

2. Hassle-Free Communication

Your portal should facilitate an easy communication between your customers and your organization. There should be varied ways to connect including chat bots, tickets, etc.

3. Multiple Payment Gateways

There should be the freedom to make payments directly from within the portal when they log in. Further, there should be a choice between multiple payment options to pick from.

4. Better Insights

If you don’t analyze your user data, you can better your products or services. The portal you pick should give an exhaustive view of users’ data like preferences, demands, common queries, etc. This information will help you upsell your products as well as tailor them according to the changing customers’ demand.

5. Security

Whether you create a B2B web portal development as an extension of your CRM or keep it independent of your CRM, it should be secure. The database should remain on your servers to ensure the security is intact.

If you are looking to enhance security with B2B portal development, our customer portal can help you out. If you want, you can also customize it to fit your business needs.

CRMJetty - Avail of the Best B2B Portal Development Services

Now that you know how B2B portal development can give wings to your B2B business, it’s time to get one ready. If you are looking for a B2B web portal solution, you are at the right place. We, at CRMJetty, provide a ready-to-integrate customer portal solution that you can integrate and start off.

Our developer team can also customize the portal to fit your business needs better. Even if you have completely different portal requirements, we’ve got you covered. Our developer team can render B2B web portal development services to get you a portal from ground up exclusively for your organization.

Let’s join hands to build the best B2B portal for your business!

Nonprofits hold great value for small regions and communities as well as the country as a whole. They support the local government bodies in addressing different local issues. At times, they are among the first to come to the rescue in emergencies.

As a nonprofit organization grows in size, challenges may start to surface. One of the significant challenges that can plague a large-sized nonprofit organization is donor management.

Nevertheless, there is a way to tackle this challenge - donor management software. To help nonprofits manage donors efficiently, Salesforce provides its own Salesforce Donor Management software.

Before moving ahead, it’s essential to understand the concept of donor management in detail. If you also run a nonprofit organization with many donors, this post is for you.

In this post, you’ll learn about donor management and its importance. You’ll also learn what all Salesforce Donor Management comprises and how a donor management software helps a nonprofit organization manage donors better.

What is Donor Management?

Donor Management, as the name indicates, is the process of managing your nonprofit’s donors. It is essentially a process of tracking your donors’ details, interactions with them, and utilizing the information suitably.

The better you utilize your donors’ information, the higher are the chances of good relations with them. In the long run, proper donor management not only helps retain donors but also adds more.

To manage donors better, you’ll need to gather some raw data, including:

• Donors’ contact details
• Gifts and contributions
• Interactions with your donors
• Donors’ preferences
• Events donors attended
• Your notes about individual donors, etc.

How Salesforce Donor Management Works

Salesforce Donor Management basically comprises managing your donors and establishing strong relations with them.

There are various processes involved in Salesforce donor management that together ensure a streamlined donor management as below.

Online Fundraising

Online fundraising is a crucial part of Salesforce donor management and requires a robust digital fundraising platform for nonprofits. It is because an online platform makes it easy for donors to donate on the go. You can include donation pages and payment services to make your donor management easy and seamless.

Centralized Donation Management

It includes connecting multiple donation channels on a single fundraising platform in Salesforce Donor Management. The centralized management eliminates the need to track income and donations from different channels individually. You can easily capture your income, allocate it to your programs, and track them through your accounting systems.

Moreover, it enables you to connect with more donors, boost repeat donations, and manage large volume gift entries. That too at a very nominal price and in less time!

Combination of Direct Mail with Digital

Salesforce donor management also includes making your direct mail fundraising strategy stronger. You should integrate deduplication of records, address standardization, and auto-updates of addresses.

You should also enhance donor acquisition and conversion with personalized communications with effective Salesforce donor management.

Acceleration of Big Donations

Salesforce Donor Management also involves crafting a cohesive and robust gift strategy. For that, you should enable your team to tackle the potential donors at every stage, from cultivating them to enduring stewardship. Provide the support for integration to tools like calendar, email, and mobile apps. All these integrations help the team attract more donations in less time.

Boost in Data Transparency

Sometimes, there may be a mismatch in the data of your finance team and fundraising team. This is because both the teams track and report gifts and pledges in somewhat different ways. Thus, there are chances that there are issues in the reconciliation of data at times.

With a robust Salesforce Donor Management strategy and software, you should prepare donation data for your finance team and help reconcile revenue. Meet all the financial reporting requirements and enable a transparent collaboration between your fundraising and finance teams.

Enhanced Visibility and Agility

Use insightful reports, centralized dashboards, analytics, and AI to analyze revenue productively. Finding out the opportunities and areas of improvement is also a part of Salesforce Donor Management.

Direct your fundraising teams to plan an action after gathering all valuable insights and analyzing them. They can share stories with compelling data to prove that your cause is worthy of the investment.

Benefits of Salesforce Donor Management Software

Before enumerating the benefits of this software, consider a hypothetical scenario first.

You are a nonprofit organization’s executive director. The organization is making good progress. And three new employees joined your organization last month. Certainly, it is exciting for you to see the team growing.

While everything is seemingly good on the outside, things are getting hectic inside. With more employees joining, new projects starting, and donations pouring in incessantly, tracking everything is getting harder. The level beyond which you can’t manage your nonprofit’s operations manually has already been reached. In the end, you find yourself sitting in a corner at your desk - helpless, frustrated, and clueless.

Maybe, it’s that point in time when you integrated a digital fundraising solution. This is where a donor management system comes to your rescue. Be it names, emails, tasks, deadlines, gifts, or anything else, such software, tracks it all.

Before you pick a donor management software, ensure that it has the following components.

• It should be able to track detailed contact info and interactions with your team members.
• It should enable monitoring of individual campaign metrics. You should be able to track donor-specific info like donation sources, gift sizes, donation amounts, etc.
• It should let you segment information and align it with your organization’s overall strategy and individual campaign strategies.

We can discuss your perfect donor management software!

Now, let’s walk you through a few use cases to explain how Salesforce Donor Management software can help your nonprofit organization:

1. Helps Manage Potential Donors

Event management is a very important aspect for nonprofit professionals. Let’s say you host a large event with a huge number of attendees. Seeing such a large gathering excites you and makes you hopeful. You take down their names and contact numbers to follow-up on them for donation requests. Everything ends well, and you return to the office the next day only to find out your hopes are shattered. The sheet of names and contacts is lost! Won’t it be painful?

Now, reconsider the same scenario in a slightly different manner.

You host an event, take down the attendees’ names and contact info. This time, you don’t rely on only a single sheet of paper. Rather, you upload that attendance sheet to your donor management software. Once you upload it there, you can sit back relaxed because you won’t lose it now. The next day you come to the office, you can start leveraging the attendees’ info and raise Salesforce nonprofit donations

Noticed the difference? With Salesforce Donor Management software, you can stay assured that you will not lose or misplace anything anytime.

2. Enables Fundraising Intelligence

Fundraising Intelligence means the processes and systems that provide nonprofits with insights into current donors. Fundraising Intelligence helps know more about the affinity, capacity, interest level of current and prospective donors. You can store it into a prospect’s or donor’s score.

Salesforce Donor Management software empowers you to:

• Prioritize prospects based on ratings and scores for affinity, capacity, and interest to donate.
• Cross-reference a contact with their worth and past philanthropic records.
• Segment thousands of records in one go based on scores with the feature of batch scoring.
• Streamline your communication with prospects and donors with a complete understanding of their profiles.

See, you are already there. You can now see how Salesforce Donor Management software makes fundraising smarter.

3. Helps Prepare a Better Fundraising Strategy

With all your past, current, and prospective donors’ data in one location, you can get an easy and comprehensive view. The centralized collection of data helps you segment both your potential and current donors to leverage them strategically.

For example, a donor Emily attended your small fundraising music concert last night. She also bought three tickets for her friends. Suppose each ticket costs $100. This means that she spent $400 for just one show. It indicates that she is financially strong and capable. And generous, of course. The next time you organize a music concert like this, Emily should be among the few who you invite first!

Want a donor portal to match up to Salesforce Donor Management software for your nonprofit?

Build a Next-Gen Donor Management Portal with CRMJetty

Salesforce Donor Management software is a paid component of Salesforce NonProfit Success Pack (NSPS). If you go to the pricing page of Salesforce NSPS, you can see the pricings. Even if you go for the Salesforce Cloud Enterprise Edition + NSPS, it will cost you $36 per user per month. This means you’ll need to pay $4320 per year if you want 10 users to access your portal. That’s a pretty hefty amount.

Our Salesforce portal costs you only $3999 every year. This payment will give you the ability to give CRM access to unlimited users. Our portal also supports the configuration of any number of standard and custom objects in your store backend. Thus, you can save more and grow fast.

If you have a legacy portal and want customizations, our developer team can do that for you. We can also help you build a portal from scratch if your requirements are unique.

So, let’s join hands to make the best donor management software for your nonprofit!

When was the last time you called a customer support agent for a trivial issue with your mobile or laptop? Or when did you call a customer support agent to cancel or track an order you placed on any e-store? I bet it must have been a long time back! Thanks to the revolutionary concept of self-service, there were dramatic changes in traditional customer support. The number of organizations providing the option of self-service is increasing day by day.

Rising to the occasion, Dynamics 365 also launched Dynamics 365 Portal or Power Apps Portals two years ago. Power Apps are external-facing websites that enable access to CRM data for various users outside the organization.

Earlier, a Dynamics 365 portal was separate and came as a licensed add-on to Dynamics 365 apps, or the licenses would include a default portal add-on. After October 1, 2019, a Dynamics 365 portal no longer comes as a separate licensed add-on. Instead, it is licensed based on usage and extends a particular functionality of a Dynamics 365 app.

The caching mechanism of Power App portals is different from that of the add-on-based licensed Dynamics 365 portal. There is also a difference in the provision method between usage-based PowerApp portals and add-on-based Dynamics 365 portal licenses.

In short, PowerApps portals are the next generation of Dynamics 365 portal’s licensed add-ons.

If you are looking for a cost-effective way to integrate one or more capacity-based portals with your Dynamics 365, PortalXpand can help you out. It is a highly customizable and scalable Dynamics 365 portal solution that you can use to manage portals for vendors, partners, customers, and other entities right from a single dashboard.

Types of Dynamics 365 Portals

1. Customer Self-Service Portal

A customer self-service portal, as the name suggests, helps customers serve themselves without any manual support. You can include knowledge articles to help them find answers to their queries. There are also other options like live chat, FAQs, online community forums, how-to guides, videos, user manuals, etc., that you can offer. Besides, you can also enable customers to comment, review, and provide their feedback to help you analyze their satisfaction.

2. Employee self-service Portal

An employee self-service portal can help an organization provide employees with a place to share knowledge, manage tasks, and interact with each other within the CRM. They should be able to use it to view answers to FAQs, submit feedback, and develop their community.

HR for Dynamics is a self-service portal for employees that helps simplify tasks - especially for HR and managers. Using this portal, employees can manage their interaction with the HR department regarding leaves, activities, reimbursements, etc. They can also update their info like bank details or contact details easily from within the portal.

Managers can perform their managerial tasks more efficiently with this portal. They can access the team’s summary, leave details, deadlines of projects, certification details, etc., in real-time. This quick access of information helps in accurate and timely analysis of the team’s performance.

3. Community Portal

A community portal is basically like a virtual community. A community portal of any organization or company invites people to collaborate, discuss, write blogs and articles, poll and review products, etc. This type of portal encourages users to promote the brand as they also feel that they have a say in the brand and are indirect contributors to the brand's popularity.

4. Partner Portal

A partner portal lends a helping hand to your partners to manage their work better. It provides access to various components like orders, invoices, payment, history, and other organizational entities relevant to them.

Easy access to this information helps partners get insights into leads, deals, opportunities, and more. Accordingly, they figure out a strategy to enhance their operations and eliminate any bottlenecks or issues with proper feedback. Partners can also manage their relevant details like contract or contact details and update them easily. Multiple partners can collaborate on a single opportunity to get good sales and experience with a partner portal.

5. Field Service and Project Service Automation Portal

A field service portal gives a 360-degree view of entities like assets, invoices, work orders, and agreements. When customers purchase the Field Service, Project Service Automation, or an Enterprise plan, it is available. The Project Service Automation portal provides partners with project information like quotes, bookable resources, invoices, etc.

Consider Portal Customization - To Smarten Your Portal

A legacy portal that you used for your organization may need customization to make it relevant. CRMJetty can provide customization for any Dynamics 365 portal type to suit your business requirements.

We typically help our clients customize their portals in one of the following ways:

• Technology/Platform Upgrades

If you want to upgrade to any technology or platform for your portal, our developer team can get it done for you.

• Repair and Maintenance

If you use an ancient solution and it gives problems often enough, we offer bug-fixing services to help protect your data from bugs, zero-days, and more.

• Technology Migration

If you are looking to migrate to new or modern technology, we have got you covered. For instance, you can get help moving your solution with a non-CMS backend to a modern and CMS-backed platform.

• Re-development of Your Current Solution

If you want changes in your current solution’s architecture to remove development roadblocks, we can provide you with the best possible solution as per your requirements.

Avail of the best customization services now!

Integrate PortalXpand - Your Ultimate Solution to Create a Next-Gen Portal

If you want to create a next-gen portal or upgrade your existing portal with the latest features, here are a few functionalities of PortalXpand that can interest you.

• Enhanced Security - PortalXpand lets you provide access to different entities in your Dynamics 365 portal to different users based on their roles. You can create different user groups first, define their roles, and then provide them with access to entities based on their roles. It will help you secure your CRM data better.

• 360-Degree Entity Management - With PortalXpand Dynamics CRM Portal, you can control the entities in both CRM and your portal. It also allows you to use all the default CRM entities and configure additional custom entities to suit your business needs in Dynamics CRM.

• Custom Dashboard - You can also customize your dashboard to make it easy-to-navigate with PortalXpand. It lets you set and configure multiple widgets like Recent Activity, Counter Block, etc., for one or more entities you want.

Integrate Knowledge Base - Your Easiest Way to Launch a self-service Portal

One of the key elements you should include in your self-service portal is Knowledge Base. By providing access to a knowledge base in your Dynamics 365 portal, you can stay in constant touch with your customers.

An exhaustive library of documents, white papers, and tools to explain everything about your products and services helps serve your customers more efficiently. It also helps you shift from passive customer service to proactive customer service. Instead of having customers call you every time, you can proactively address most of their concerns and queries with your knowledge base.

Consider SharePoint - A Valuable Add-On for Your Portal

There are different add-ons that you can integrate with your portal to streamline your business operations more. One of the best add-ons you can consider is SharePoint. With our portal solution, you can integrate SharePoint in your Dynamics 365 easily.

With this integration, both you (as the admin) and portal users can manage and store the documents like quotes, proposals, etc., associated with specific records. After installing the SharePoint integration plugin in Dynamics 365, users can create folders, documents, files and delete records.

Build a Dynamics CRM Portal Now - With CRMJetty By Your Side

If you seek to build a Dynamics 365 Portal for your organization, CRMJetty can be your right team for that. We can discuss your business requirements, analyze them, and provide you with a ready-to-integrate portal solution if it’s an exact fit. Our developer team can also gauge the scale of customization our ready-made portal solution would require to fit your business requirements.

Once the developers test the feasibility, they start the required customizations after your consent. We also ensure that you keep getting updates on the progress on a regular basis. Once the final product is ready, our QA team comes into action and tests it for limitations and glitches. Once your product is ready and glitch-free, we hand it over to you. We can also provide you with support for a limited period to help you understand portal features and get familiar with it.

All set to kickstart your portal development journey? Your alpha team is just a click away!

Have you thought about the outcome of a bad customer experience? It can cost your business and even affect the customer base. A research says that 25% of customers will switch the provider after one negative experience. 33% will share their experience in one way or another. 

In the eCommerce era, where every user prefers an online experience, businesses can’t risk letting their users down. And with digitalization, the traditional way of CX and providing support has changed. Customers now prefer to resolve their queries using online guides rather than waiting for a call or a message from the support team. The new era has brought in the need for a self-service experience. And that’s how Dynamics 365 Customer Portal comes into the picture. 

It helps identify client issues and deliver exceptional service.

A Dynamics CRM Customer Portal provides end-users a dedicated space to track and manage their support tickets. It connects them to the knowledge base and other resources. Overall, it bridges the communication gap between end-users and businesses. 

Here are some indicators that help identify whether your business needs to have a customer portal or not.

• There’s a continuous sharing and exchanging of data and documents
• You want to provide better support without increasing employees
• You are planning to provide your users with an automatic ticket generation system so that they can raise and track the status at their convenience
• You want to give your users the liberty to access their invoices and quotes 
• You want to let customers schedule and arrange their payments

If there’s a yes to even one of it, you must go for it. In fact, a study shows that 67% of end-users prefer a Dynamics 365 Customer Portal over a human representative. And this demand for improved CX is only going to increase. This is why businesses need to adopt portal solutions.

Let us see what are other reasons to go for a customer portal.

• Meets User Experience

Portals make it easy for end-users to find the solutions they are looking for. It gives them relevant information such as articles, new launch announcements, FAQs, promotion and update announcements, etc.

And this is how self-service solutions provide a better customer experience, increased brand loyalty, credibility, and customer retention. 

• Provides Immediate Solution

We know our patience level. We want an immediate solution to our problems. Hence, it is necessary to bring in a portal solution. Because it allows users to access it from any device and round the clock. It curbs the process of going through multiple sales reps to get the answer. 

If you go for Dynamics CRM Portal, you can deliver your end-users with quality, 24-7 support. Your customers won’t have to wait for answers.  

• Helps Build Community

The concept, “Be a helping hand. Let one support another,” is why you must go for Dynamics 365 Customer Portal. It can lead you to build a strong community for your products where users can help one another. A good community, in turn, will reduce your workload. You won’t have to increase your customer support team. In fact, at one stage, you could be free of 80% of support services. 

Besides, it can help you improve loyalty and brand name. Most customers are in the community for a long time and can even pitch for new features they would like to have. 

An effective solution will enable them to ask questions, suggest ideas, share experiences, and engage with other users.

In a Nutshell

Dynamics CRM Portal provides self-service, relevant information, and exceptional service. It makes it easy for customers to interact with businesses. Along with it, it helps build trust and brand loyalty.

Having a portal is directly proportional to the customer experience, and business success. 

What thought/brand crosses your mind when you think about CRM and portals? 

For us, it's always Salesforce. Not because they are in the industry for long and are widely popular. But they understand customers' pain points and needs. They also understand the business requirements and what solution can help them achieve profits. Salesforce knows the market. They launch products that would enhance customers and clients' interaction. They bring in products that complement their CRM. Mostly, those products are portals and communities. 

If you know about Salesforce or have used it, you might know about Salesforce Customer Portal and the other types. You might be aware of their functionalities like that of a Salesforce Client Portal.

However, sometimes they can raise a question like which one to choose? 

Should you go with a customer based or a partner one? 

Hence, in this article, we'll discuss two types of Salesforce Portal, i.e., Customer and Partner. We'll also help you choose one that's right for your organization. 

Salesforce Customer Portal

Salesforce Client Portal is an interface that helps your customers/clients solve their issues about your products/services. 

As an organization, you can create a custom solution for your customers with features like ticket generation, knowledge base, and so on. You can include sections, information, modules based on your requirements.

If you go for this solution, you can provide your customers - omnichannel support, easy integration, and an online forum. Besides, you can provide 24/7 support without any extra resources. Also, it can eliminate the drawback of having customers in multiple time zones. 

Salesforce Partner Portal

Partner portal allows your partners outside the organization to log in to Salesforce. It helps companies create indirect sales. Here, the partners have limited access to the interface and can only view the modules they have access to. 

With the help of PRM, companies can create, manage, and handle sales. They can invite partners to manage, track, and analyze campaigns, sales, and more. 

The benefits of using a partner portal include efficiency in the sales funnel, increased ROI, and data retrieval from anywhere, anytime. It means partners can access the data and insights while on the go. They can share documents, reports, and so on. 

Salesforce Client Portal V/s Partner Portal

Let us see what makes one better over the other. 

• Purpose

A customer portal aims to solve queries and issues without interacting or asking for a representative's help. Partner’ shows partners with leads and sales opportunities. 

• Audience

A customer portal is for end-users whereas partners one are for salespeople or third-parties. 

• Access and Cost

A customer solution is easy to access. They may or may not have advanced features as their basic purpose is to solve queries. Partner solution has access to core CRM features. Besides, it requires additional features to plan sales campaigns. And so it is expensive. 

• Role-based Access

In a partner solution, you can provide your partners with role-based access. For example, they can access sales reports but not invoice reports. This is not the case with the Salesforce customer portal. 

• Knowledge 

Salesforce customer solution has a huge knowledge repository to help customers solve their queries. The partner one may or may not have such a huge knowledge base. 

What You Should Choose? 

A solution that meets your company's requirements. There's a thin line between these two solutions. However, both have their own set of uniqueness and peculiarities. 

If you want a solution to solve your customers' problems, manage their activities, then go for a customer one. But if you want a solution to manage your partners, then go for a partner one.

That's all for now. 

If you still need guidance in choosing one, talk to a portal development team. They will guide you in the right direction. 

Also, you can leave a comment here. We will try to help you in every way possible. 

Serving customers with a hassle-free solution that solves their queries, manages their orders, and helps carry out other activities is the key to keep them happy. One that is essential. 

After all, it's the customers that make up your business. It's necessary that you fulfill their demands, provide exceptional service, and solve their problems. 

If they like your service and products, there are high chances of them returning back to you. If they don't, you might lose a customer. 

So, the question is, how can you provide them with a better service and quality products?

Web Portal Solutions! 

A web portal can act as their self-support and your digital support team. It can help you provide your customers with the best services and support without a human support team. 

Let us see how. 

• Increase Customer Retention

With a web portal, you can create support tickets, live chats, and schedule appointments with customers. Customers can learn about their order and ticket status. They can chat with the support team directly from the portal and clear their doubts or queries. Along with this, FAQs, documents, and how-to guides can help customers solve basic queries. 

Web portal development will streamline your operations. It will free your support team of unnecessary tasks and help retain customers. In short, your support team can work efficiently, and provide better customer service.

• Security

Data security is the most crucial factor. This is also the reason behind customers' hesitation to share data with businesses. Customers avoid sharing data with businesses. To curb it, many businesses use highly encrypted solutions to ensure customers of safe and secure data. 

Web portal solutions, for example, use the latest security standards. They come up with two-way encryption so that no one can retrieve the data. Additionally, they use market standards for purchases and payments to keep data secure.

• Custom Features

A custom portal development can help you customize your solution according to your requirements. You can add features like payment, invoices, quotations, accounting, and more. 

Web portals can help your customers to pay directly from the portal. Vendors can generate invoices and pay their remaining amount.

Along with it, you can assign role-based access so that no one without authority can access or manipulate the data. In addition to all these, web portals can help you conduct customer surveys. You can ask them for their problems in retrieving data or the features they would like to have in the portal. Similarly, you can do so for your employees, partners, and others. 

• Branding

Visibility is a sure-shot way to build a brand. You can do so with a custom web portal. With an intuitive logo, theme, UI/UX, consistent look and feel, web portals can help you with brand building. 

They not only provide a smooth experience and attractive designs but help build your reputation. 

Customer engagement is also another way for brand building. So along with consistency, they provide features like forums, discussion groups, and a knowledge base for engagement. 

• CRM Integration

No one likes handling multiple solutions—a CRM, a separate portal, and so on. 

Therefore, web portal development companies provide you with custom web portal solutions to integrate with your CRM. 

A custom solution has all the features and syncs well with your CRM. It makes sure that there's a single login point so that no one needs to go through multiple logins. Besides, any changes in the CRM reflects in the portal and vice versa. It means that you don't need to worry about rework or rechecking.

Wrapping Up

Web portal solutions can be your true companion in attracting and retaining customers. They can help you serve customers in a better way. A custom web portal will ensure that your customers don't have a bad experience.

Dynamics 365 has multiple types of portals. Each portal serves its own unique purpose. The one that you need will depend on the use case you have. You can choose the portal that addresses your exact pain points.  Here’s a breakdown of the different Dynamics 365 portal examples to help you make the right decision: 

• Customer Self-Service Portal

• Employee Self-Service Portal

• Community Portal

• Partner Portal
• Field Service and Project Service Automation Portal

Major Types of Dynamics 365 Portals

Customer Self-Service Portal

Customer Self-Service Portal helps you guide your customers even when you are not sitting at your desk. A streamlined knowledge base helps them get answers to their queries when they cannot reach the support staff. The basic availability of a webstore being 24/7, support or assistance should also be available 24/7. 

Such a self service portal encourages problem solving by providing relevant solutions without the intervention of your staff. This portal includes forums wherein customers can have discussions and there is community building through problem solving. Other interactions like polls, ratings and comments also help the company or organization get essential feedback. 

Employee Self-Service Portal

Employee self-service portal can be used as an internal space for employees to share knowledge, manage their tasks, and have certain interactions with the CRM. They can use it to access answers to FAQs, give feedback, and develop a community of their own. 

HR for Dynamics which is a self service portal for employees is an efficient platform that simplifies tasks for everyone, especially HR and managers. Employees have the freedom to manage their exchange with the HR department regarding leave applications, activities, travel expenses or other expenses etc, right from within the portal. Apart from that, they can easily change personal information in case of any changes in their contact details or bank details.

For the managers, this gives them the freedom to perform their managerial tasks. They can get their team’s summary front and center, including each members’ leave details, salary, deadlines, certification details etc. This helps them make a more accurate analysis of the team’s performance. 

Community Portal

Community portals are primarily like a virtual community, wherein they function like one. A community portal of an organization invites discussions, blogs and articles, and enables polls, ratings and provides a space for comments for feedback. 

Such a portal can encourage users to promote the organization as they become unofficial ambassadors and influencers. 

Partner Portal

Partner portal extends a hand to your partners to bring them on to your organization in a more meaningful way. They can access various components with this like orders, invoices, payment history, etc., all the things that are relevant to their functions in the organization. 

This helps partners get an insight into lead distribution, deal and opportunity tracking, so they use that feedback to improve their operations whenever possible. With account management capability, partners can update any relevant details, have access to their contract details etc.

Multi-partner collaboration facilitates a number of partners to work together on a single opportunity. This way, all of them can get the sales and experience.

The platform of partner lifecycle management can be used for recruitment and streamlines your operations of the partner channel.

The partner portal also maximizes on deal protection and authorization for discounts, and benefits and gives vendors visibility in the customer pipeline. This happens via deal registration.

Field Service and Project Service Automation Portal

Field service portal gives an all-around view of assets, invoices, work orders and agreements. It is available when customers purchase the Field Service, Project Service Automation or an Enterprise plan. 

The Project Service Automation portal, on the other hand, gives partners project information like bookable resources, quotes and invoices.

How CRMJetty Can Help?

So, you can see that there are different Dynamics 365 portal examples available to pick from, based on use cases. Picking a portal from the available types of Dynamics 365 portals requires you to analyze your business requirements. And CRMJetty can help you with that. 

We provide different types of feature-rich Dynamics 365 portals for different industries like nonprofit, education, insurance, real-estate, finance, etc. In addition to that, we also provide portal development services for different use cases and users like vendors, affiliates, partners, customers, etc.

The process we follow to develop is simple and transparent throughout. First, our developer team gathers all your feature requirements. Next, we check and find out if our base product can cater to your portal requirements with customizations. If not, we develop a complete roadmap for a custom solution for you and keep you posted about the developments. Before final delivery, we test it for limitations and confirm that the portal is exactly like what you wanted. 

In the end, we deliver the final custom portal to the customer and provide maintenance and support services as well. 

We can help you figure out the portal that meets your requirements and then customize one to match your exact needs. 

CTA - Get in Touch

When was the last time you visited a travel agency office to book your travel ticket? Or to understand holiday packages to pick from? Well, I am sure it was a long time back when the online travel business was in its nascent stage. This was a time when it wasn’t widely accepted and popular because people had apprehensions about such transactions being fraudulent.

Well, that time has passed and the online travel business is a thriving industry today. Big players like Airbnb, Expedia, Booking.com, etc., have revolutionized the travel industry. They have made online travel services reliable and secure and therefore gained people’s trust and support. 

After a drop in 2020 due to COVID-19, the online travel agency sector worldwide is forecast to snowball again. According to Statista, it is forecast to touch $820.18 bn by 2023. It is clear that the online travel business is a booming industry and will continue to be so. 

Rising to the occasion, even small travel agency owners are also looking to go online. For them, an online travel portal can be an ideal fit. It is because it lets them manage their agents, partners, and customers centrally and efficiently. 

If you also run a travel company or are looking to start one, this post is for you. In this post, you are going to learn about the importance of an online travel portal in detail. You’ll also know the features you must seek in a travel portal. 

Benefits of an Online Travel Portal

A travel portal based on your CRM can help manage your travel business easily. For example, a SuiteCRM customer portal for your travel business would be suitable if you use SuiteCRM. And Salesforce portal for Salesforce-based organization, and so on. 

• Reduced Running Costs

If you run a travel company, hiring several travel agents to explain tour packages and booking tickets may be costly. Instead, a SuiteCRM customer portal or any other portal for your travel business can save you expenses. 

Moreover, you can also cut down the effort of maintaining records of all costumes in spreadsheets. This is because you can view all your customers’ and agents’ details centrally and manage them better with a travel portal. 

• Real-Time Access

A travel portal provides real-time access to all details like prices of tour packages, hotels, rental services, flights, etc. to your customers. Customers can also vet and compare the prices of hotels and packages during peak season and normal times. It helps them make a more informed choice of a tour package, hotel, etc.

• Customer Care Support

A travel portal helps customers communicate and convey issues easily via a chat or call option. This helps customers get quick solutions to their travel-related issues or answers to queries. 

They can also get help in selecting the right package for their tour plan via customer care support. This way, a travel portal eliminates the need to call or visit a travel agency office for every small issue or query. 

• Enhanced Transparency and Convenience

An online travel portal helps display accurate fares with any hidden costs. This helps build customers’ trust in your company and connect with you more. A complete comprehensive breakdown of applicable charges brings more transparency. 

Besides, booking tickets and packages online is convenient. Customers don’t have to visit any office or branch to book their tickets, hotels, or rental services. They can do it all right from within the portal. Using a portal for this also helps get a much clearer view of comparison metrics like pricing, amenities, etc. This saves both their time and money and enhances their experience. Similarly, customers can also easily cancel or reschedule a booking without calling the company’s office or visiting there. 

All this helps takes customers’ convenience, and booking experience, to the next level. 

• Large Variety of Options

An online travel portal helps gain access to a large list of hotels, rental cars, flight or bus tickets, and tour packages. Customers can get numerous options to choose from unlike in the case of an offline travel agency. 

All this is not feasible with a travel agent due to time constraints and limited knowledge available on the internet. 

Features to Look for in a Travel Portal

The travel portal you pick should be easily accessible to the admin, agents, and customers. 

For Admin

As the business owner and admin, you should have control over the complete management of your customers and agents. For that, there are a few admin features below that you must look for when picking a travel portal:

• As an admin, the travel portal should allow you to view, manage, and update customers’ booking details on the fly. 

• You should also be able to manage hotel bookings easily and efficiently from within the travel portal. The portal should provide a centralized view of all bookings to help you get better visibility and avoid any errors.

• There should be a built-in process for the online identification of customers within the portal. It will help you avoid the hassle of manual identity verification after check-ins. 

• The portal should allow you to manage tour packages and their details like prices in real-time. You should offer the best tour package recommendations based on your customers’ preferences and budget. 

For Agents

If you provide an online travel service that supports individual travel agents and associates; your travel portal should have the following features:

• Individual hospitality agents and associates should be able to manage their commission for every booking. The portal should also let them track total bookings and negotiate the commission to pay to you. 

• The portal should let travel and hospitality associates and agents implement the credit systems for customers. It will help increase repeat bookings and expand the customer base. 

• The portal should also facilitate offering discounts on bookings for agents to attract more online bookings. This way, they can also adjust the commission fee according to the overall profitability of your company. 

For Customers

Last but not least, the travel portal you pick should be user-friendly for your customers.

• The portal should make the booking experience seamless for customers. It should let them check for the availability of travel tickets on specific dates and book them. 

• There should be a choice of multiple payment options to book. The portal should also provide the option to save a payment method for future bookings for fast transactions. 
• There should be an exhaustive list of hotels, ratings, charges, and facilities displayed. Comparison and filter options should be there to allow customers to vet and pick a package carefully.

• Your travel portal should let customers view travel booking history and update booking details. They should get to update, cancel, or reschedule their bookings without hassle. 

 Launch Your Travel Portal with CRMJetty

 If you own a travel company and are looking for a travel portal, we’ve got you covered. Our development team can help you develop a travel portal based on your CRM. 

 We provide ready-to-integrate industry-specific SuiteCRM client portal, Salesforce portal, WordPress portal, etc. If you want to expand your existing portal’s capabilities, we can help you with that also. We can discuss your portal requirements, analyze the feasibility of development or customization, test limitations,  and deliver the final portal. 

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Customer satisfaction is one of the top priorities of all businesses. To enhance customer experience, there should be a way to enable them to serve themselves. Customers and clients should be able to find the required information or solve their problems before seeking help. This is where a customer portal comes into the picture. If you are a business owner, you should pick the best client portal software suitable for your business requirements. 

In this post, we’ll walk you through the advantages of a customer portal. We’ll also explain how we can help you build the best client portal software for your business with our portal development services. 

Benefits of a Customer Portal

• High Levels of Customer Satisfaction 

A customer portal helps personalize the customer experience by letting you address each customer by their name at the time of log-in. By providing easy access to the information they need, you can engage them better. 

You can let customers view their history of product purchases or past service subscriptions. Besides, they can also access the knowledge (articles, posts, FAQs, etc.) they need to solve their problems. You can also analyze the most common problems and curate your content to address them.

This way, the right and best customer portal software contributes to increased customer satisfaction. 

• Enhanced Security

As the admin, you can control the access to various entities in the portal. You can decide on the entities you let your customers access. You can also provide limited role-based access to different users within your organization to upkeep security. 

• Reduce Operational Costs

Resolving every query of your customer or client over calls and emails can be both tedious and costly. Instead, if you pick the best client portal software for your organization, your customers can self-address their common issues. Your support team can focus on resolving major issues of customers rather than minor and common issues. This, in turn, increases efficiency and reduces operational costs. 

Why Choose CRMJetty to Build the Best Client Portal Software?

At CRMJetty, we can help you build the best customer portal software that suits your business requirements. Our customer portal has a number of features that can benefit your organization. 

With Product Catalog and Services Display, you can display your products and services to your customers. You can also enable your clients and customers to reach out to you easily anytime via chat, tickets, etc. You can create different customer groups on different criteria to see particular prices and make them feel valued. 

The integrated payment gateway lets your customers make purchases via payments right from within the portal. You can also analyze the portal data to find out what the customers are looking for in general. The tickets and cases customers generate can help you get insights into customers’ most common issues. 

Last but not the least, we can help you build a customer portal as an extension of your CRM. Or we can also develop a web-based portal independent of the CRM. Both ways, your security stays intact with the database on your server only. 

In short, we provide the best customer portal software development services you need for your organization. 

Get Best Client Portal Software for B2B and B2C 

There are basically two types of portal software - one for B2B and the other for B2C.

We provide portal development services for both types of portals.

If you run a B2C business, you need to provide access to your specific CRM entities to your customers. The requirements change depending on the type of industry. In case your requirements are generic and you don’t require many custom modules in CRM, we can help you out. We provide little customizations in our portal and get you the best customer portal software. 

If you run a B2B business, the audience you need to serve is smaller. However, you would need to allow your business partners to access quotes, purchase orders, invoices, meeting schedules, etc. We can provide customizations as per your business requirements and ready your B2B portal. 

Whether you are looking for a customer portal for your B2B or B2C organization, we’ve for you covered!

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More About CRMJetty: Service Models and Industries We Serve

We aim to provide you with the best client portal software for your business. We provide portals for all major CRMs - Salesforce, Sugar CRM, Suite CRM, and Dynamics CRM. We develop portals for Banking & Insurance, Education, Healthcare, Legal, Manufacturing, Pharma, Services, and several other industries. 

In most cases, we deploy one of the three service models based on clients’ requirements.

• Existing Customer Portals

If you require a customer portal without several special requirements, you can pick from our ready-to-integrate portals. We provide readily integrable portal plugins for SugarCRM, Suite CRM, Salesforce, and Dynamics. They all have cutting-edge customer portal features that you can deploy to enhance your business operations. 

• New Development

If your business logic is very different and requires more customization, we can help you out. Our team notes down your requirements, works out customizations, and develops the best client portal software to fit your business. 

Our developer team has vast hands-on experience in:

• Front-end technologies including HTML, CSS, Bootstrap, etc.

• Backend technologies including CorePHP, CakePHP, etc.

• CMS technologies, including WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, etc.

• Cross-Platform technologies including Ionic, Xamarin, etc.

Hence, you can stay assured of the best client portal software development services with our team. 

• Updates on Your Existing Portal

In case you want, we can provide update services as well for your existing portal. 

We can provide repair and maintenance services for your old portals. We can test your portal and fix bugs, enhance security, and help protect your data. We can also help you with migration to the latest technologies to facilitate easy maintenance. If you want us to re-develop your current solution and change its architecture, we can do that. 

We run feasibility analysis, define the solution, develop and test the portal, integrate it, and provide training and support throughout. 

All in all, we can upgrade your portal to the latest version with all the features. 

Ready to Deploy a Customer Portal for Your Organization?

A customer portal is a key to enhancing customer experience and increasing their satisfaction. 

If you are also searching for a feature-rich client/customer portal for your organization, you are at the right place. With CRMJetty’s team by your side, you are sure to get the best client portal software for you. Besides, you can avail of integration, training and continuous support throughout.

So far, we have developed portals for clients from over 25 countries. With 14+ years of experience in the portal development industry, we have accomplished over 70 custom portal integrations. With a proven track record of 1200+ completed projects, we assure you of the best-in-class portal development services. 

We can take your business to the next level with an engaging customer portal!

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Websites are the face of your business but maintaining that face requires a customer portal. Simply having customers be interested in your business is not enough. You have to have a way to be able to solve their issues, assist them and retain them in, long term. 

Dynamics 365 customer portal can do that when you a 1000 customers and when you have 100000 customers. For you to run your business, you need tools that can bring you this much versatility and scale.  

A great website, portal, or business needs much more than just good design. It needs a design that is equally functional. Dynamics 365 customer portal can give you that functionality with features like secure sign-in; roles-based access, drag and drop page builder, entity management, ready to use widgets and more.

What is a Dynamics 365 portal?

Dynamics 365 portal that is built on Dynamics CRM has an advanced content management framework. This framework allows you to surface expose and capture customer data. This tightly integrates with your customer data in Dynamics CRM, a robust, scalable, configurable platform that allows you to automate business processes and manage the entire customer life cycle.

It provides functionalities like customer self-service, community forums, partner engagement, employee self-service, etc. A Dynamics 365 portal can make your support tasks much easier. An often-misunderstood concept of a portal is that it is useful mainly at the end customers' end, but it is equally useful for the business that uses it. Support employees get their work in order and can become extremely efficient in handling customer issues. 

Dynamics 365 portal can be configured with powerful features that especially work for your business requirements. Let's look at a few benefits: 

Benefits

• Improves communication between customers, partners, and other relationships.

• Displays information from different sources in one place.

• Helps users to access information when they need it in a secure manner.

• Increases the revenue opportunities.

It helps external customers to view and create data on the company's environment, regarding their details, etc. The Dynamics 365 customer portal can give a customer access to their entire profile that your company has for them. This means they have access to their contact information, and they can easily update it, as well as access to their purchase history, knowledge base, and more.  

Who can use the customer portal?

• The company that wants to communicate order processing information like order status or accounts information from their Supply Chain Management system to enterprise customers.

Online stores that want to scale up and bring a more coherent experience to their customers can opt for a portal. The customer portal is the right complement to a website as it helps address things that a website or webstore cannot accommodate.  

The best part about a customer portal is that the Dynamics CRM customer portal can synchronize right with the CRM, making your management tasks a breeze! 

Role-based access makes the portal simple to use, no matter who is using it. Customers can get their individual profiles; employees can get a neat dashboard to keep up with their tasks and customer queries. The portal aims to simplify and streamline the interaction between employees and customers, and it does so by helping you employees put their best foot forward.  

End Words

Dynamics CRM customer portal can help make your management tasks simple, whether it is customer management or backend functions. You can also get easy to configure portal solutions for your partners and suppliers that can help you streamline all your communication and work with them. Portal solutions give a unique platform where all your business needs can come together to function cohesively so you can focus on things beyond management. 

Summary

This article provides details about the dynamics 365 portals. This also gives information about the customer portal on how it works and which organizations can use it.

Things are changing now - after one full year. COVID-19 cases have gone down, people are out again (with safety precautions though), and the new normal is well-accepted. On top of all this, various countries have already started vaccination programs to administer various vaccines by global vaccine manufacturers. 

With a view to helping governments, healthcare organizations, and nonprofits across the globe, Salesforce has launched Vaccine Cloud. A number of public health authorities, healthcare providers, and nonprofits are already using Salesforce Vaccine Cloud. 

This Vaccine Cloud by Salesforce for nonprofits, public and private healthcare providers helps them scale vaccine operations fast. Right from recipient registration to scheduling or inventory management, it helps manage things effectively. 

Vaccine Cloud by Salesforce for Nonprofits: Features & Benefits

The Vaccine Cloud provides a comprehensive view of the population's health status and current inventory levels from a single dashboard. This 360-degree view of vaccine management helps take data-driven decisions and respond faster to vaccine needs. 

Following are its features that can help mobilize and manage vaccine administration programs better.

• Vaccine Inventory Management

With vaccine inventory management, vaccination program organizers can keep track of the availability of vaccine doses, syringes, and PPE stock levels. It can help them maintain adequate vaccine doses and continuous supply of other equipment. 

This can also help forecast demand accurately. It helps reduce waste and divert surplus supplies in an area and limit supplies in any other area. 

• Vaccination Appointment Scheduling

Vaccinating a large number of people in a short span of time can be cumbersome. Vaccination Appointment Scheduling helps organizations manage vaccine administration to the public seamlessly. It provides centralized scheduling capabilities to ease the process of vaccine distribution. 

It helps organizations ensure that the vaccine type and protocol history are available as required. It can help clinicians perform health assessments, accept digital consent, and determine recipients' eligibility for vaccination. 

This way, they can schedule and prioritize vaccination appointments for optimum use of vaccines. They can also enable contactless visits and self-service or on-demand appointment scheduling.

• Clinical Vaccine Administration

It helps capture vaccine delivery information accurately and prepare for vaccine administration. It helps ensure proper training of medical professionals on vaccine administration before vaccine delivery. Support for pre-arrival screenings can also help prevent on-site issues and obstacles in vaccine administration.

Besides, artificial intelligence and data analysis tools enable agencies to assess readiness and manage community health. Administration agencies can also maintain a log of vaccine administration, analyze vaccine results, and monitor them community-wide.

• Vaccination Outcome Monitoring

With easy data capture, organizations can analyze and monitor the outcomes of vaccination efficiently. They can survey people and understand the health outcomes. They can also quickly follow up in case of a community health concern or side-effect arising from vaccination. People can also report their health outcomes on their own via a variety of digital channels and surveys. 

It helps plan a vaccination administration strategy and estimate the success rate of a vaccine. Organizations can respond to any widespread community health concern owing to vaccination, faster. 

• Public Health Notifications

Notifying the public manually for everything can't be feasible. Public health notifications can help public health officials notify the community for any update easily. This can help them execute the education and outreach campaigns in a better way. 

Automating notifications like second dose reminders, to-dos before vaccination, precautions, etc. can also reduce staff burden. Notifications can also alert site managers about when to re-stock based on the scheduled appointments. 

• Digital Health Credentials

Vaccine Cloud also helps integrate, create, and verify health credentials online for proof of vaccination. By managing cases and inquiries about health credential records, organizations can smoothen their administration workflow. 

How Can Our Salesforce for Nonprofits Portal Help?

Our Salesforce for Nonprofits is a next-gen portal that can help you streamline all your vaccine management aspects. 

• Single Dashboard View

You can get a holistic view of vaccines inventory, dosage details on a community level, equipment, community-wide health concerns (if any), appointments, etc. This single-screen view of all the vaccination management aspects and entities can help increase efficiency and give you a better idea of the vaccine drive's success.

• Secure Access

With our Salesforce for Nonprofit portal, healthcare organizations can let potential vaccine recipients track their vaccination appointment status. They can also upload digital proofs to generate credentials and confirm eligibility for the vaccine by themselves easily. They can self-report any adverse side-effects they face after vaccine administration. 

Secure login to the portal to fetch the required information eliminates redundant communication and manual errors. 

• Profile Management

As a healthcare organization's admin, you can manage all the recipients' profiles without any hassle. You can verify their credentials, screen their health condition before arrival, and update their profiles prior to vaccination. You can also track your recipients and analyze health concerns they face after vaccination. 

Accordingly, you can plan future vaccine administration workflow and strategy. 

If you want to get a portal to manage vaccine administration, we can help you out.

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Over to You

Vaccination is already going on in several countries around the world. However, there is still a major challenge of managing large-scale vaccination programs and scaling them efficiently. 

Vaccination Cloud by Salesforce for nonprofits, healthcare organizations, and governments is a good initiative. With consolidated data for all the aspects of vaccine management programs, it can help public and healthcare organizations both. 

If you are also a healthcare provider or a nonprofit organization, CRMJetty can help you build an advanced vaccination portal. Our Salesforce certified professionals will gather your requirements, make the necessary customizations in our portal, test it for limitations, and deliver you a tailor-made portal. 

With the 14 years of experience in portal development we have, you can stay assured of the best services. 

To know more about our portal and how it can help you out, click here.

The use of web portals varies according to the industry. For example, a university would have a portal with different access points: One for their students to register for classes and check their schedules. Another access point would be for faculties to manage attendance, submit grades, and so on.

Despite the nature of the industry, they prove useful in every business spectrum. They help businesses, including customers and staff to manage their workflows, contact information, and human resources affairs. That also includes documents, communication, and support.

A web portal, as whole, provides a structure to organize the content. It encourages visitors to engage more through blogs, comments, or social media.

In other words, it’s a bridge that joins customers to businesses. It covers the distance between user expectations and the actual services provided. 

This is the reason why many businesses are adopting web portal development. And the sole reason why web portal development services are in huge demand.

Let us find out more about it.

Benefits of Web Portal 

• Improves Interaction

Customers can use web portals to manage their activities. Instead of providing support through emails and calls that are quite tedious, businesses can help them virtually 24*7 without being present. 

As customers can sort the common queries, it would encourage them to engage more, resulting in better interactions. A smooth system like this can delight customers and help bring them back to your business. 

• Enhance Awareness

The internet is the biggest market for business and updates nowadays. The increase in competition of the business helps to improve strategies. Social media platforms help business organizations to recognize the current market and trends. By providing the latest information about the market, business services, and other knowledge guides, you can create awareness in your customers. 

With blogs and guides, you can keep updating them with the latest stuff. By engaging with the features, they can learn about the latest trends and technological advancements.

• Offering a single sign-in for a variety of applications

One of the essential business requirements is to have single access to handle entire business operations. Businesses often look for solutions that can sync the information between different modules and applications.

Hence, you should go for web portal development. Portals integrate with different business applications and prove useful in streamlining the process.

They offer you and your customers with ease of services. 

• Offers improved customization

Web portals are often useful for enhancing personalization. They even help customize various tools. With portals, customers can avail the best of services. They can give feedback on the kind of services they are looking for. This can then help businesses with customization. 

For example, if they know what a customer likes or dislikes, or what they mostly order, they can provide personalized recommendations. 

Even designs of portals are unique and make the interface user-friendly. Customers can customize their web portal look. If they want a news section on the dashboard, they can add it. If they don't, they can remove it. This customization services would help customers to avail services in a simple way.

• Provides services to a diverse domain

The main benefit of a web portal development is in the domain. The portal is the entry point for your customers to enter your website. And the domain would help customers find you from thousands of similar websites on the internet.

So, use a domain-specific portal. It would enhance your visibility. 

• Bringing visitors

Development companies implement a high-class web portal development service with specialists in development and technologies. These experts would make sure the portal is perfect to every inch, according to user expectations. This satisfaction would be the key to attract more visitors. It would ensure business with a constant increase in sales and profits.

End Words

Web portal development helps companies to increase visitors and earn profits. It can improve online presence and brand building. 

Portal can further aid in improved interaction between customers and businesses. There are numerous benefits of having a portal.

If you don't have a portal, you must get it developed now.

Partner with a company that provides web portal development services.

Summary

This article provides information about the benefits of a portal and how a custom one made using web portal development service can give you a solution that is worthy of your business. 

Salesforce is the world’s no. 1 CRM with over 150,000 companies across various industries as its customers. Right from small businesses to FORTUNE 500 companies, Salesforce is helping them all grow their businesses. It is a secure and scalable cloud platform and comes with world-class applications for commerce, service, sales, and more. 

There is, however, a common problem that businesses - especially small-sized and middle-sized companies often face with Salesforce. They find the Salesforce licensing cost structure a bit complex to understand. As a result, a large number of apps they install from Salesforce AppExchange, fail. The reason is the lack of complete understanding of Salesforce license pricing structure and failure to optimize licenses. To add insult to the injury, they sometimes end up paying more than they require for an app or more. 

If you are also a business owner with Salesforce CRM, this post is for you. We are going to go through ways you can reduce your Salesforce licensing cost and prevent app failures and over-expenditure. 

• Pay for Only What You Need

“The more, the better” sounds good in general but doesn’t suit Salesforce license pricing. Consider it with a Salesforce license pricing structure on Salesforce site itself. 

If you go to Salesforce licensing pricing for Service, you can see that there are four packages. They are Essentials worth $25 USD/user/month, Professional worth $75 USD/user/month, Enterprise worth $150 USD/user/month, and Unlimited worth $300/user/month. 

As you can see, Enterprise edition gives unlimited access to all the standard and custom applications. It also offers additional functionalities like offline access, Salesforce Identity, Advanced Reporting Features, and more. 

Most organizations don’t think much about whether they really need these many functionalities or not. They just think they are getting “more” and pay the cost. They find out several features to be of little use for their business requirements later, and realize they have paid more Salesforce licensing cost than needed.

So, don’t always run after more features. Evaluate the usability of an edition from your business point of view. Analyze all the editions, compare their features, and then decide which one would be the best for you. 

There is one more example that you can understand for better clarity. 

Salesforce, Salesforce Platform, Salesforce Platform Lite, are among the primary Salesforce licenses businesses choose.

• The Salesforce License provides full access to all the standard CRM apps and custom apps. In other words, it is full-blown access to anything and everything in CRM.

• The Salesforce Platform License provides full access to custom apps but not standard CRM functionality. A Salesforce Platform License user can access core platform functionalities like accounts, contacts, reports, dashboards, documents, and custom tabs. 

They, however, cannot access some standard tabs and objects like forecasts or opportunities. 

• The Salesforce Platform Lite license also is similar to Salesforce Platform license but comes with limits to monthly log-ins per user. 

If you have your own set of custom objects to handle new data, it is recommended to go for Platform or Platform Lite. In case you need full access to standard CRM, Salesforce Enterprise Edition is the ideal choice for you. 

To sum it up, make a smart choice and not a costly choice to optimize your Salesforce licensing cost.

To get help picking the right license and optimize your Salesforce licensing cost, you can contact us.

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Use Force.com Licenses

Your organization can save on Salesforce licensing cost by purchasing Force.com licenses instead of Salesforce Enterprise Edition licenses. While the Enterprise license costs you around $3000 USD per user per year, a Force.com license can cost as low as $300 per user per year. This means that your organization can save $2700 per user per year. 

In terms of custom objects also, Platform Starter License offers access to 10 custom objects with the same functionality as that in Enterprise. Platform Plus on Force.com is an upgrade that offers access to 100 custom objects for $1200 USD per user per year. It still saves you $1800 per user per year. Within Force.com license, there are two licensing options - Force.com One App and Force.com-Free. In One App, the users can access only one custom app. It is similar to Salesforce Platform License but is restricted to only one app and read-only access to Accounts and Contacts. With Free license, a user can run one custom app. It is similar to One App but doesn’t allow the user to access any standard CRM functionality at all. 

Adopt Salesforce Modular Build License Approach

If you don’t want to have it all at once, Salesforce also offers a flexible Salesforce License Pricing scheme for you. You can call it Modular Approach. To reduce your overall Salesforce licensing cost, you can pick an edition that has the features you need. Later as you expand and need more functionality, you can integrate add-on offerings. There are various functionalities like mobile functionality, visual workflow, community portal etc. that come for extra charge. You can pick one or more as per your business requirements later on. This modular approach helps save a huge upfront Salesforce licensing cost. You can begin with the minimum basic package and scale it up with add-ons. 

Embrace Pro-Active Management of Users

Whichever license you take, you still can get only one user to log in with one license. You also cannot share login credentials for one user with others. A way to circumvent this limitation is “License Reduction”. You can log a case with “License Reduction” in the subject field. When a user is deactivated, you can follow it up. This way, you don’t need to re-assign the license to someone else. Organizations that have a large number of licenses can use this technique to reduce Salesforce Licensing Cost over time.

Try Negotiation - A human Tactic

Keep track of actual app usage over time. If you find it low, negotiate with your  vendor to get some relaxation in Salesforce licensing cost at the time of license renewal. 

Use a Third-Party Customer Portal

Sometimes, a third-party customer portal can help cut down on your Salesforce licensing cost. If you have a third-party portal solution that lets your users extract CRM entities, it can help. If a user can access CRM objects at say $100 per month with a Salesforce license, it can sound  costly. If the same user can access CRM objects at a lower price, say $30 with a third-party portal, it can save you a lot on your licensing cost. On top of that, you can also define user roles and grant or restrict access to various objects just like with a license. You can manage your customers and their cases as well. In short, you can avail of all the functionalities with a feature-rich portal solution - that too at a much lower price. 

Over to You

It’s pretty evident that understanding Salesforce License Pricing is not a cakewalk. Nevertheless, you can always prevent extra expenses in the licensing cost by following smart tips and using a portal. 

Our Salesforce Customer Portal for Dynamics 365 is a fully scalable and flexible customer portal solution for Salesforce. It comes with robust ticket management, drag & drop builder, real-time notifications, access to unlimited customers, standard and custom object support, and more features that you seek in a portal. Our Salesforce-certified portal solution can help reduce Salesforce licensing cost and enhance the overall productivity as well. To explore the Salesforce portal more and integrate it, you can get in touch with us.