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Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, Customer Engagement, Sales, Customer Care and Marketing
Next week, both of C5 Insight’s Managing Partners will be at CRMUG Summit in Reno, NV discussing both CRM and Collaboration failure. The truth is, over the last 5 years or so, we have become somewhat obsessed with failure, not necessarily by choice, but because nearly 60% of all new client work for us is what we call CPR work - in other words, project rescue.
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After working with hundreds of companies and investing hundreds of hours into CRM success and failure research, there is one thing we have never heard from organizations that have successfully implemented CRM: “Our CRM was such a good tool for our sales team, that they want to use it.”
In other words, CRM is not going to be your Field of Dreams. If you build it, they won’t come – no matter how good it is.
Wine. I love it. And I love visiting wineries whenever I can. Wine and wine making are such rich sources of history, have an element of the artistic, and just feel closer to the basic and raw elements of the earth. Like farming, there are a lot of simple lessons in wine making that apply to everything else in life.
But the lessons learned when my wife and I visited a wine maker on a recent trip still came as a surprise – I wasn’t expecting to see the connection between making wine, and improving customer relationship management (CRM) projects with solutions such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com.
The truth is, the “training” methods we have been using for decades are dying. And if your organization is still hoping to train users on SharePoint, CRM, or any other technology by sitting them in a room to watch recorded videos or a live individual, I want to offer some suggestions that I believe will transform the way end users adopt and learn new technology.
Everyone wants to know which of their accounts have not been followed up recently. But using the Neglected Accounts report is just sooo 1995. Nobody uses reports anymore – we want everything as a view, chart or dashboard! But until the most recent release of Dynamics CRM, the only way you could create a Neglected Accounts view was thru installing add-on products or developing code.
Ever received a trade show list after an event that has email address but doesn’t have website, with a request to import it into your CRM solution? You know those website URLs are locked up inside of the email addresses, but you need to get them imported in a hurry, so you just import it without concern for the website. The problem is that the website can contain critical information. This article explains how to use an Excel formula to quickly pull the website URL out of an email address before importing into your CRM solution.
The latest technology out there today is compelling and can do great things. And it’s true, a few could revolutionize the very way you do business. But in an effort to do more with less, move faster than competitors, be agile and lean, and choose “best of breed” technology, we often see organizations forget about the very ones who will make the investment successful and worthwhile.
Let’s face it, customer relationship management applications can be confusing. There are lists of lead, accounts, contacts, opportunities and – in some cases – other things like products, quotes and orders. With all of these things you can do, we are frequently asked, “where do I begin and how do I start each day with my CRM application?”
The answer is simple … but how you arrive at the simple solution takes some discipline.
It costs about 7 times more to win a new customer than it does to retain and grow a relationship with an existing customer.
But most Sales Reps receive very little training on how to prioritize different customer relationships. Just a little bit of work with your customer relationship management (CRM) system can mean a boost of 10% or more to standard commissions – and to overall sales!
Microsoft has added a lot of functionality to CRM since version 2011. If you’re on Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 (or earlier), Dynamics CRM 2013 or are on Dynamics CRM 2015 but have not yet applied Update Rollup 1, this article provides a useful list of resources to help you understand the new benefits for your users.
The release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM – Spring 2015 includes a helpful new feature; Immersive Excel. This functionality allows a user to manipulate Dynamics CRM data in MS Excel, without the cumbersome "Export to Re-import" process required in the past.
Is Exception Handling one of the easiest ways to track values of variables used in C# plugin for Dynamics CRM Online? It was really helpful for me, when I found that developers can use the Profiler in the Plugin Registration Tool to debug a C# plugin. Here is a step by step guide for the whole process.
Inside Sales teams are rapidly replacing traditional sales teams. This approach to sales is resulting in significant productivity gains, improvements in responsiveness to prospects and customers, and cost savings. It also introduces an ability to have a much tighter and more buyer-driven sales process. But it also requires some rethinking of the tools used in CRM to support the sales function.
Activity planning and management is one of those areas. Learn how queues can boost the productivity of the Inside Sales team.
When performing a migration or integration of data, one consideration that should be high on your list is translation performance. Today's blog will discuss how to address the processing of multiple records simultaneously, as opposed to a single-threaded process.
With the advent of Business Rules beginning in Dynamics CRM 2013 we now have the ability to implement client-side business logic without having to write javascript functions. How can I determine whether to code my business logic using business rules, javascript or both?
Did you know it takes an average of 7 contacts to convert an unqualified prospect into a sales qualified lead? And did you know that 60%-95% of sales leads are never worked at all? That’s a huge amount of untapped potential!
In this article, we will look at the "3 C's" of lead management using customer relationship management.
It’s your data. Don’t let great on-line transactional systems limit your analytics needs. Bring the cloud down to earth, then slice and dice to your heart’s content. This blog will discuss three ways to accomplish this.
If you’re not using CRM as a tool to plan your day, week, month – or more – then you’re missing out. You’re leaving valuable referral sources in the cold. You’re letting opportunities slip through the cracks. And you’re letting your competitors snap up your best customers.
This article takes a look at how to use CRM as a planning tool.
A client recently found he could not enable a user he needed to use in one of our sandbox organizations. Every time he tried, he got “The user ID associated with the current record is not valid”. This blog explores the fix.
One common CRM challenge is keeping your development environment in sync with the production environment. Coding in a development environment that is not in sync with production can lead to many hours of frustration trying to find the ghosts in the code. I find this especially true working in Salesforce.
If you’ve been wanting to get some more information on SharePoint 2016, today’s recap is for you! I’ll briefly review some tips from the great duo of Todd Klindt and Shane Young on upgrading to SharePoint 2013, then I’ll dangle some awesome new not yet released tools for Dynamics CRM and Office 365 straight from the mouth of the great Girish Raja. I then got some great insights from the master Spence Harbar himself on OneDrive for Business migrations, then rounded out the day diving deep in the new hybrid search service application for SharePoint 2013 / 2016.
If you currently have a production CRM 2013 Online instance, Microsoft wants you to upgrade to 2015 by the middle of June at the latest. It is important to perform full UI and customization testing in 2015 prior to approving your 2015 online production upgrade. The more customizations and managed solutions you have deployed, the more the need for good quality assurance (QA) and user acceptance testing (UAT).
For one of my recent projects there was a requirement where I had to check the logged in user’s security roles, to find out if the user had been assigned a particular security role. If the user had the security role, there were several JavaScripts that would run. If the user did not have the security role, the JavaScript would not run. This blog explores my efforts to trouble-shoot and cross-test across multiple browsers.
The complementary paper includes over 12 years of research, recent survey results, and CRM turnaround success stories.
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This 60-second assessment is designed to evaluate your organization's collaboration readiness.
Learn how you rank compared to organizations typically in years 1 to 5 of implementation - and which areas to focus on to improve.
This is a sandbox solution which can be activated per site collection to allow you to easily collect feedback from users into a custom Feedback list.
Whether you are upgrading to SharePoint Online, 2010, 2013 or the latest 2016, this checklist contains everything you need to know for a successful transition.