Presales / Functionality Question

Question

Presales Question…

I’m trying to determine which features can be turned on & off with this CRM system, so I have a couple of questions I need to ask based on the scenario that I’m trying to solve for the project I’m working on.

Scenario:

I’m designing a website for a business group that I belong to that “refers” each other clients based upon each of our specialties. The goal of the site will be to help each other know how effective each of these referrals actually end up being.

While there will be no monetization towards each of the members within the group, the concept will be to track that Member A referred Client B to Member C. And that Member C made whatever amount of money from Client B. Then subsequently Client B referred Member C to however many people (call this Tier 2 referrals) and they made additional referrals and so on.

The goal is to show (long term that Member A actually should be credited with the total sales volume that Member C made from the down line of that original referral of Client B.

There are no actual commissions to be paid back to Member A since Member C actually is the one that generated the income from that entire referral chain.

Questions:

So based upon what I see, CiviCRM is a traditional CRM with some added features that could potentially be utilized to achieve this is sort of a referral tracking. How do I allow Member C to keep track of their sales activities with Client B (and their referrals) while at the same time allowing Member A to show a referral accumulation (number of referrals and the money generated from them all) for all of the members within our group as a single item. In this case there are 36 of us that are members of this group.

Are these features able to be visual shown across the dashboard as well for each of the members?

Is CiviCRM able to track a Many-To-Many relationship? In this case the scenario calls out Member A tracking an associated "credit" for Client B and all of the subordinate tiers of referrals from that original referral to Member C?

And lastly is there a summary report that the admin (me for now) can actually utilize to generate a consolidated report for all of the members to see/have?

Thanks in advance for your response.

Answer 1

from a quick read I would expect you to be able to get most of the way, if not the whole way, but using Activities (or possibly Cases) to store the data for referals, and use Drupal Webforms to capture the data for referrals, and Drupal Views along with the Permissioned Relationships ACL extension which Fuzion created, to manage the job of who can see what at various levels of these daisy chains.

Others might suggest doing this directly via the Civi UI etc but we have found that Views + Webforms + Permissioned Relationships can get you a long way past what 'out of the box' civi can do, and without requiring custom coding.

Alternatively, or if required in addition to the above, I expect a developer could fill in any missing steps with an Extension.