Closing the deal - TeLeVell's Seamless Sales Suite sales management software - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, May, 1997 by Wayne Kawamoto

Seamless Sales Suite

RATING: **

Look behind any sale, and you'll find a lot of work. To help organize this effort, sales management programs such as TeLeVell's Seamless Sales Suite track your customer dealings, schedule related appointments and to-dos, and more. The suite is a powerful tool, but it's not that easy to use, and it's a pricey solution that will only appeal to offices with large networks.

The suite's contact manager, the Salesperson Module, is the heart of the product (it may be purchased separately for $195). The contact manager's features let you track contacts, schedule appointments, maintain detailed client histories, and create reports.

Besides the capabilities found in most contact managers, the suite offers modules for proposal generation, sales forecasting, order entry and tracking, evaluating leads against sales, and tracking customer service problems. All of these work well together in networked offices.

As a contact manager, the Salesperson Module displays company, contact, history, and address information in individual windows. These windows are flexible to use but are somewhat clumsy, as resizing them causes overlaps. We liked that the software let us track companies and then allowed us to work with multiple contacts within them. The program also tracks detailed sales information, such as how you met contacts, and sales status. To write letters, it integrates well with Microsoft Word to fill in contact information, but we found the program's built-in word processor second-rate and hard to use.

The Salesperson Module lacks the finesse of competing contact managers, such as Act! and GoldMine. It lacks graphic calendars to display scheduled appointments in weekly or monthly formats; it can't record and close out completed actions; and in our testing, it couldn't alert us to scheduling conflicts. We also found that the product isn't intuitive to use--for example, it msorts to awkward function key commands to perform such tasks as entering contact notes. In a glaring omission, the Salesperson Module can't import existing databases unless you separately install some suite utilities. That means if you purchase the Salesperson Module by itself, you can't import your current database. We found no reference to this in the manual or online help and had to call the company.

If you own a rapidly growing business or a company with many salespeople, Seamless Sales Suite might be worth a look. But for small offices where business owners wear all the hats, this far-reaching suite is too expensive and intricate. You'll be better off buying separate contact manager and accounting packages.

Seamless Sales Suite

Publisher: TeLeVeil, 408-467-010Q

List Price $495

Requirements: Windows 95, 8MB of RAM, 40MB of hard-disk space