Follow Us:
I’m in the midst of two different major workflows for clients right now, one of them being an HR New Hire Onboarding request and approval process. One small but critical requirement of the process was that each level of approval needed a two business day wait period. In this post I'll demonstrate 2 easy ways to be able to calculate working or business days inside a SharePoint workflow.
Read the rest of entry »
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.
Recently, I was asked to create a button on a Salesforce.com form that would take data from the existing form and create a new Salesforce Lead record from it. Sounds simple enough, right? However, intermittently an error was being produced with a somewhat unclear message. This blog details the encoding function I used for the fix!
It’s been a packed week at Microsoft Ignite, and in this final post of my daily recaps, we’ll validate the awesomeness of Visio for dashboards and data-connected data graphics, review the common problems encountered when performing the initial configurations of Office 365 service for your organization, and finally share how search works in SharePoint 2013 plus how to scale it properly.
As we near the end of Ignite, day 4 was still filled with some great technical sessions. I’ll give you a rundown of everything from SQL High Availability, best practices for branding and page design in SharePoint Online to scaling SharePoint 2013 search. One of my favorite sessions that I’m excited to share dealt with navigating the landscape of Office 365 tools.
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.
In today's tales from the field, I take you through each session of my day, but also give you a quick look back at something I omitted from the day 1 keynote. The sessions cover the gamut from information architecture and governance, to search, to OneDrive for Business and best practices for farm solution development.
It’s still spring time here in Chicago, but it’s also time for Microsoft’s first ever all-in-one product conference named Ignite. Throughout the rest of this week, I’ll do my best to share with you insights from the day, and highlight innovations or other content I thought was interesting.
This Ignite conference is the first (but not last I’m sure) time Microsoft is taking most of all of the other individual product conferences and bringing them all under one roof. These include TechEd, Exchange, SharePoint, etc. Content and information is being shared across all 5 days this week, ranging from the normal breakout sessions to hands-on lands, ask the experts sessions with the product teams, exam preparation and certification testing, live-streaming from Channel9, community theaters and of course the expo center. New this year also is the MyIgnite mobile app, providing the same experience from the web to your mobile device with maps, session info, your customized saved calendar and other goodies.
Companies continue to spend countless hours focusing on how to better articulate their value proposition, in order to increase both the volume and velocity of sales. There is potential for greater impact by focusing some of that time on an often neglected piece of the sales puzzle. Have you considered how hard you are to work with?
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 days of the production-line worker, the inbox/outbox process and any other repetitive task for humans to perform – are vanishing quickly. With automation, apps and robotics replacing humans at an unprecedented rate, our ability to collaborate to innovate, inspire, inform and to discover new insights might be one of the last ways to differentiate human labor from an automated workforce. But there is a problem. Most organizations have only a vague notion of how they are doing with social collaboration – let alone a vision and measurable goals for how they will make improvements.
One blog reader recently asked us about affordable options for migrating data from CRM 2011 to CRM 2015 when upgrading. This article provides a number of options to consider.
Warren Buffet once said that “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” In our daily work, we talk a lot about value. However, the truth is, a lot of organizations spend a lot of time, effort, and money trying to measure ROI – the precise financial impact of an initiative - without first understanding the value to the business. This blog entry breaks down how to generate both organic ROI and real business value.
If you’ve started to track contacts, accounts and your pipeline in CRM, then you’re ready to start tracking activities too. Most CRM solutions provide a way to track activities such as calls, appointments, emails and tasks. This article provides some quick tips for tracking your activities.
One of the most important benefits of a CRM solution is that it allows a Sales Rep to track their pipeline. Sadly, this is also one of the areas that many organizations tend to make overly complicated and so painful, that reps often revert back to using a legal pad. This article will provide some tips for using your CRM solution to track your pipeline – and why this is important – regardless of the condition of your CRM solution.
You know how the story goes... We were prepping for a CRM 2013 on premise client going live and it was Outlook client configuration time. I was doing some last minute Outlook client testing and hit the sync button to test my Outlook filters when I got this message. Read more to find out how to activate data encryption when syncing Outlook to CRM.
Are your customer care or inside sales reps straddling CRM (customer relationship management) and ERP (enterprise resource planning, or accounting) systems in order to get their jobs done? Is it slowing them down? Are they missing opportunities to collaborate with your field sales reps because they don't have enough time to keep things updated in CRM? Are your outside sales reps asking for more information about order history to be visible in CRM?
Maybe you didn’t even know, but if you are using Office 365 or OneDrive, you can use Excel to create a survey, share it with others, and easily get the results. This blog details why you should use Excel to create a survey. Using Excel won’t be for everyone depending on your requirements, but it does serve a purpose in the landscape of survey tools. Find out what you didn't know before!
Many improvements to Dynamics CRM were announced last week at Microsoft Convergence 2015. But CRM isn't really just one application anymore - there are a host of things that companies need to consider in order to work together better both externally with customers and internally with employees who are striving to serve those customers. This article looks at recent and upcoming improvements to Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM), Social Listening, Parature and Unified Service Desk; as well as some of the more standard products such as Excel, SharePoint and Outlook.
The complementary paper includes over 12 years of research, recent survey results, and CRM turnaround success stories.
Request Download
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.