Ten reasons companies choose Tour de Force:

1) Account Management + Business System Integration

Closing the loop between your back-office and your front sales force is crucial to implementing a successful sales force automation strategy. The Tour de Force Business System Integration module connects your business system with Tour de Force, providing a seamless flow of real-time sales performance information. Tour de Force currently supports most distribution industry business systems including Activant Prophet 21, Activant DISC, Activant Array, Activant Acclaim, FACTS, NXTrend, SXTrend, Solomon Software, Navision, Prelude, Dataflow, FourthShift, Tribute and Streamline .

2) Outlook Integration far beyond any other CRM/SFA software.

Tour de Force is truly integrated with Microsoft Outlook.

Tour de Force is more heavily integrated with Microsoft Outlook than any CRM/SFA solution on the market. Why is Outlook integration a big deal? Good question! When your CRM tool is integrated with your contact management tool (i.e., Outlook), you don't need to store the information in two different applications. Plus, your sales team is already familiar with Outlook, which helps to minimize training costs.

3) Built on 100% Microsoft platform (Office/Outlook/Exchange/SQL Server)

Some companies chase after every new technology that comes along, resulting in "islands" of data. Because these "islands" often cannot communicate with each other, salespeople eventually return to their old personal data habits (spreadsheets!), while time and money are wasted. Tour de Force builds on a common Microsoft architecture, ensuring that none of the information you create using Tour de Force will ever be stranded.

4) System Configurations

The Admin Console enables administrators to design and edit screens and reports used by their entire sales team, while User-defined Fields add tremendous flexibility to the screen design by allowing administrators to create fields unique to their company.

Tour de Force lets you keep your company's naming conventions.

5) Scalable Architecture

The scalable architecture of Tour de Force helps bring the cost-to-value ratio of Tour de Force to a very low level. Since all necessary administrative utilities are provided with the product, there is no need to pay more for custom development whenever you make changes to your sales process or add a significant number of new users.

6) Manager's Console

Tour de Force was designed with salespeople in mind, but that doesn't mean there aren't features for managers as well. The Manager's Console provide dynamic views of your company data that may have taken hours to gather manually,

7) Opportunity Management

Tour de Force offers perspective .

The lifeblood of any distributor is the sales funnel. Opportunity Management in Tour de Force offers perspective into the sales funnel, such as the ability to see opportunities associated with each phase of the sales process, as well as where "bottlenecks" are hindering the process. Through the use of Outlook tasks, Tour de Force monitors the Next Action Step of every opportunity.

8) PDA/Wireless Device Integration

Tour de Force provides extensive functionality for users using wireless devices able to connect to Microsoft Outlook. Appointments, Tasks, and Notes created on a wireless device can be easily synchronized back to the Tour de Force database, providing global access for all users.

Appointments and Tasks created within Tour de Force are easily editable and accessible from your wireless device.

9) Total Cost of Ownership

The cost of ownership of Tour de Force is low for a few simple reasons:

First, Tour de Force builds on the technology that your company already uses . Tour de Force works within Microsoft Outlook and stores its data within Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server, so you won't need to spend a lot on new hardware and server software.

Second, because Tour de Force is based within Microsoft Outlook, you won't need to learn any exotic new user interfaces. Training costs are kept low.

Finally, Tour de Force is easy to configure. By using Tour de Force's Dynamic Control Editor , you can quickly and easily create and modify the data input forms and reports used company-wide by your managers and salespeople, without the need for extra consulting and programming dollars.

10) E-mail Logging

In Tour de Force, every email sent through your Exchange server to or from a customer contact is automatically logged. This means that any manager or sales person can easily find any and all email communication with a customer.

(Your administrator can define restrictions on email-logging, if necessary.)