Posted by Bill Goulette on Tue, Jun 15, 2010
Dynamics CRM may have some neat features in it, but Microsoft clearly leaves room for functional improvement which leave space for enterprising ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) to create what Dynamics CRM users crave.
Take for instance solutions offered by Stunnware. Recent offerings from Michael at Stunnware include things like filtered views, filtered lookups and a host of other tools. The solutions offered from Stunnware include those for consumption by the end user but also many more geared to the developer and administrator of a Dynamics CRM system. Indulge yourself at Stunnware's website, walk away with some great java script samples and see what else they have that may fill a functionality hole that your organization has been wrestling with.
Posted by Bill Goulette on Tue, Apr 06, 2010
I get asked frequently all sorts of questions on how to use Salesforce CRM. Recently the same question came up twice in regard to using the account hierarchy. The question is: should I use the account hierarchy and why is it valuable?
Let me answer the second part first. Account hierarchy will allow you to view your accounts in a visual hierarchy. This will allow you to see which objects like contacts, opportunities, and activities are associated with a specific site. There are some disadvantages though. If you want to see all the contacts for an entire organization combined you would have to create a report. In addition it does require a little more diligence to maintain. Finally, you have the issue of a contact being associated with more than one site.
The answer to the first part of the question is that it depends your industry and your commitment to maintaining the database. There are also other considerations such as if you actively use the partner portal. I recommend talking it through with your staff. If you need additional assist feel free to contact us or post a comment below.
Posted by Bill Goulette on Wed, Mar 31, 2010
I think that we all know that every CRM system has limitations. If the limitations aren't in the functionality offered in a specific product suite, then you have to consider the effort it will take to configure the application to fit business needs vs. upgrading to a suite with more functionality.
When I am asked about whether or not a system can support some particular business need, I will usually respond with "yes, but at a cost". Selecting applications with required functionality, that provide easy configuratioun and setup, and low complexity for administrators and end users seems like the panacea and frankly is more achieveable today than ever. Today, I would like to point out a few things relative to Salesforce CRM and technical limitations.
Salesforce CRM is quite possibly the most powerful CRM application in the market today. Being an implementer, it makes a lot of MY job easier from a technical standpoint so that I can focus on the customers business needs.
Occasionally, I get caught up with an unexpected technical limitation though. While all the salespeople on the teams that I work with are certified in the application, not all details of the client needs or system limitations are aired out in the sales cycle. This is generally a no-fault scenario that can cause bumps in the road of the project initially. So in the interest of full disclosure, I offer this link to the website that I use when discussing Salesforce limitations related to specific editions as well as general limitations. It answers the vast majority of questions posed during business analysis and system design sessions. It is also a good reference for the person who is responsible for the technical buying of a new CRM application.
Posted by Jay Rivard on Thu, Feb 25, 2010
As you may know salesforce.com upgrades their application at least three times a year. While they are not always major upgrades, it is an impressive feat compared to the traditional on-premise applications which may get upgraded once every 2 to 3 years.
Salesforce.com goes to great lengths to minimize the impact of these upgrades and does a tremendous job in notifying their install base of things that may need some client preparation. For example, in the Spring 2010 edition they are discontinuing support for Microsoft Internet Explorer V6. Salesforce.com has made many attempts to get everybody prepared for this eventuality.
Salesforce system administrators should take a little time to address these issues well in advance of the scheduled upgrade. We also recommend that you test out the upgrade in the salesforce.com sandbox. This is especially true if you are planning to enable new features that may impact some existing functionality.
If you do not have this level of technical expertise within your organization you may want to consider contacting us.
Posted by Jay Rivard on Thu, Feb 18, 2010
Salesforce Content is a useful feature of Salesforce CRM and often over-looked. Content is an on-demand content management system that is handy for both Sales and Marketing folks.
- FOR SALES
How many times have you spent looking for a presentation, fact sheet or other sales document and then found out it was an old version? Or have you ever wished that you could see what presentations other sales reps at your company are using successfully?
With Salesforce Content, you can search for a relevant sales document much like doing a Google search. It will pull up matching documents, show you how people within your company rated the document, any comments that were made and how often it was downloaded. And outdated documents? You can subscribe to the document and be notified when a newer version is uploaded.
- FOR MARKETING
What's more annoying than spending weeks developing what you think is terrific content only to find out that the content doesn't exactly hit on what the marketplace is demanding.
With Content, marketers can see the comments that reps make on a sales document it and how they rate it and make the appropriate changes in a timely fashion rather than weeks or worse -- never.
Recently, we started using Salesforce.com Content which quickly turned into a question of how we will use it. In addition to the traditional use of Content, what value will it lend to our organization and will users adopt it? Like most organizations we create a lot of documents and send them out the typical way -- attached to an e-mail. Proposals in particular fly out of here on a daily basis. We decided to try content for proposal delivery which has worked quite well. It is solved two issues for us: (1) it circumvents file size limitations on mail servers and (2) it tells us if they've read the proposal and downloaded it.
Although setup of the product is fairly straightforward, we do recommend that you read the documentation or take the pre-recorded training sessions. There are settings in several areas within the application of which you should be aware.
We continue to look for new ways to take advantage of Content and would welcome any feedback you might have and how you use it.
Posted by Sid Lejfer on Wed, Feb 17, 2010
A dropped fly ball in baseball, a fumble or interception in football, or a turnover in basketball, all can be momentum killers. It is difficult to regain your momentum when a negative change happens in a positive pattern.
The same is true with implementing and maintaining a CRM System. You can take all of text book steps for selecting, implementing, and maintaining a CRM system, but something unexpected happens. Let me give you a few examples and suggested remedies in regaining your CRM momentum:
1. Change in the executive management team. One of the important steps in getting approval of a CRM system within an organization is executive sponsorship. As an organization, you want to make sure you have broad based support for a CRM system so if any one executive leaves, your have organizational commitment to move forward with your CRM system.
2. The CRM advocate who initiated and drove the project leaves the company. As noted above, the key is to get broad based support for your CRM initiative throughout your organization. If one person leaves, other people within the organization will step up and drive the process.
3. Major shift in the way your business goes to market. With the pace of technology and changes in the economy, business needs change all of the time. You can protect yourself by selecting a CRM system that is flexible and can be modified very easily.
4. You are acquired or merge with another organization. Again, if you have selected a CRM system that is flexible and modified easily, you will be able to make rapid changes to adjust to requirements of your consolidated entity.
5. You company has financial issues. This is a difficult one to address. Depending on your contract arrangement with your SaaS solution, you will be able to decrease the licenses you have on a yearly basis. This will allow you to control the cost. In addition, the maintenance cost of a SaaS solution is less expensive than an on-premise solution and upgrades are included. SaaS solutions definitely give you more flexibility if your company goes through a financial issue.
6. Technical issues with your system. Solutions like Salesforce CRM provide a company with a solid technical solution with great up-time. The key is to take a phased approach to your implementation, have a pilot program and address any technical issues that come up, and properly train your staff. This approach will avoid any momentum killers.
7. Poor data quality. You can have the very best CRM system in the world, train all your people properly, and have an initiative that fails because of poor data quality. People get frustrated when they are working on a system that does not provide them with accurate information. To avoid this momentum killer, you need to address data quality issues before the data is imported into the new system. There are a variety of data cleansing solutions and approaches to addressing this issue.
8. Poor end user adoption. One of the biggest momentum killers is the final step - poor end user adoption. This can occur for many reasons. You need to make sure that end users are involved in this process from the beginning, the system addresses their day to day needs, and easy to use. If you address these three steps, you will have good end user adoption.
By being aware and limiting your momentum killers, you will have a useful and productive CRM System.
Posted by Sid Lejfer on Mon, Feb 15, 2010
Choosing a CRM solution for an organization is a very big decision. Over the years, we have seen our prospects and clients go about this process in many different ways. If you see your organization using CRM for sales, marketing, and customer service, we suggest using a selection committee to review and select a CRM system for your organization.
This committee should be made up of end-users, management, and executives. Each user is going to have different requirements and you want to make sure the solution you select is able to accomodate your requirements. The involvement of all groups within your organization in the selection process will pay dividends in the future and you will have a better chance at end-user adoption.
You also want to make sure you have a firm committment from the executive team that the CRM solution selected by the committee will be funded and implemented. From past experience, you don't want to engage people within your organization in a process that takes time away from their day to day responsibilities that does not results in a CRM system being selected and implemented.
Human nature plays a role in selecting and implementing a CRM solution. People want to feel part of the process. We have found that end-users and managers can be resentful on having to use a system that they had no input and does not meet their specific requirements.
Each group of users are going to use the CRM differently. End-users are going to want an easy to use and easy to navigate system. They want to be able to work efficiently and input and retrieve information as easily as possible.
Managers want to be able to get reports on the productivity and results of their sales, marketing, and customer services departments. Executives want to be able to get key indicators in real time if possible.
We have seen less involvement from IT in the selection process with the popularity of Software as a Service (SaaS). You still want IT involved to make sure you have the appropriate bandwidth and security. If you are considering an on-premise solution, IT needs to have more involvement because of infrastructure requirements.
The selection committee should determine, document, and prioritize the requirements of each group of users. This document should help you narrow your selection of potential software solutions and implementors. By doing a thorough screening, you will be able to narrow your search. You want to be respectful of your committee member's time and avoid over analysis of solutions that just don't fit.
If possible, you should narrow the potential vendors to three. Each product should be evaulated to make sure that your requirements are met. Many CRM software products provide a free trial version that can be very helpful. Some software vendors are willing to create a customize demo if the size and complexity of the opportunity warrants it.
You also want to maintain a tight timeline. As time passes, you won't have the recall to compare all of the CRM solutions. In addition, you will lose momentum. If possible, I would suggest that you begin your implementation as quickly as possible after the selection has been made.
Involving end-users, managers, and executives in the CRM selection process, priortizing requirements, narrowing potential solutions as quickly as possible, and having a tight timeframe, will increase the probability of a successful CRM system.
Posted by Cathy Boudreau on Mon, Feb 15, 2010
There are quite a few manual adjustments necessary to properly accomplish the installation of Update rollups for CRM. Each update article really must be read in its entirety before applying the rollup.
The following link is an example of a manual adjustment that must be performed in order to apply the fix to a not-so-well-known issue. This issue deals with performance issues and the AsyncOperationBase and WorkflowLogBase tables: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/968755/
Questions or comments on the Microsoft CRM Update Rollups? Post it below!
Posted by Jay Rivard on Thu, Feb 11, 2010
One advantage to working with an application hosted in the cloud is that there are few limitations imposed on it by hardware and software. However, there is one area in particular that you DO need to pay attention -- your browser.
Salesforce works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari but not all editions are supported. For example, Internet Explorer V5 is not supported by Salesforce. In fact Google Docs will not support IE V6 shortly. In lieu of this, here are some best practices:
- Standardize on one browser. Support will be much easier especially if you have a large number of users.
- Inventory all the applications that are browser dependent. For example, in our organization, our time and billing application only runs on Internet Explorer.
- Benchmark the browser for performance. We have found that Firefox 3.5 runs significantly faster than IE 7 or 8. This may be in part due to our antivirus application.
- If you standardize on a new browser make sure you train the users on the new browser. Its functions may perform very differently than the previous product. For example, downloading using Internet Exlplorer is significantly different than in Firefox.
For additional information please download the browser cheat sheet@salesforce.com. He can be located at:
http://www.salesforce.com/community/crm-best-practices/administrators/implementation-resources/browser-settings.jsp
Posted by Sid Lejfer on Tue, Feb 02, 2010
I have been playing golf for along time and to be blunt, I am not very good at it. A couple of years ago, I made a conscious effort to try to get better at the game. I had an old set of clubs. I thought the best place to start would be to purchased a custom set of clubs. I went to see a golf pro, got measured, and a few weeks later, a beautiful set of new clubs showed up at my house. I took my new clubs, ran off to a local golf course and played a round of golf. Guess what - I still am a terrible golfer! What I forgot in my effort to improve my game is to get the appropriate training. I would have been better of keeping my old clubs and taking golf lessons instead.
How does a set of new golf clubs relate to CRM? You can have an excellent CRM solution deployed in your organization. You went through the appropriate selection process, had a well thought out and executed implementation plan, and trained your end-users on how to use the system. Essentially, you have a great set of golf clubs.
But unless your sales team is properly trained in a sales methodology and adhere to that methodology, you are not going to take full advantage of your CRM system. Similar to my golf analogy, training is just as important, maybe even more important than the CRM system itself.
There are soft skills that are neccessary for your salespeople to be successful. Your sales team needs to know how to qualify or disqualify an opportunity, manage the sales process, present the appropriate solution to address the needs of their prospect, manage expectations, provide a well written and professional proposal, and have the ability to close the opportunity. They also need to manage their own internal team including sales engineers and sales management.
Over the years, we have worked with a variety of local, regional, and national sales training organizations. We can provide you organization with an introduction to a firm that will address your specific needs and requirements.