The 3 Elements Necessary For Guaranteed CRM User Adoption
Clients often ask me what's needed to guarantee user adoption on a new or re-designed CRM system. Over the years, I’ve whittled my response to these three essential elements.
Want to Automate Your Webinar Invites?
ClickDimensions recently announced that its February 2013 release will include integration with GoToWebinar. While so far there’s only been a sneak peek released, this feature looks very promising.
Upcoming Social Media Capabilities Will Expand Sales Intelligence Capability Within Dynamics CRM
Social media continues to be a huge investment for Microsoft, particularly for the Dynamics CRM group, which will continue to step up its social media capabilities throughout the rest of 2012 and beyond.
A Lesson in Bulk Deletes and Selectively Restoring Data
We developed a Dynamics CRM Solution for an enterprise-size client that leverages E-mails, Cases, and Queues in the Service Module. The client has users and customers worldwide.
Managing A Project Based Business in Salesforce - Video
In a previous post we outlined some of the steps to build and manage a solution to manage a project based business in Salesforce.
Using Salesforce to Manage a Project Based Business
Quite a few of our customers are professional services firms that are looking to manage their business in Salesforce. Here’s a quick overview of a model we’ve developed and some customizations.
Calendar Interface for Salesforce
One of the areas where we focus on a great deal is on developing custom interfaces in Salesforce that allow users to see the underlying data in a way that fits exactly how their business operates.
Dynamics CRM 2011 JavaScript “Access is Denied” Error With Ajax Call
In a recent upgrade of code from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011, after importing the upgraded customizations one of my developers had checked in...
Product Grids in Salesforce
The single most common issue we see for people who have been using Salesforce for a while and struggling with getting the most out of the platform is that the sales team finds adding products to be tedious or confusing.
A Customer Portal for Sample Kits from Salesforce
Salesforce has become an incredibly popular tool for managing business processes inside companies.
Designing a Sales Coaching App for Salesforce.com
When measuring sales productivity, revenue per quota bearing head has typically worked as the ultimate metric, but how does one measure results specific to training and development activities?
Salesforce.com: Forecasting Monthly Revenue
Many of our customers earn revenue as their service is used instead of at the point in time when a sale is made. Salesforce.com provides basic revenue scheduling.
Salesforce.com Chatter Approvals: An Approach for Contract Management
One size does not fit all. The beauty of the Salesforce.com Platform is that you can tailor it to fit the complexity of your business. Out of the box functionality for simple, standard processes and a more customized approach.
Broken Ribbon Icons and Jscript code when using IP Address/Organization with CRM 2011
I noticed odd behavior whenever I used the IP address in the URL in my CRM 2011 environment. If I used the server name (or on my VM, localhost) everything worked as expected.
Easy Windows Phone App Development with the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK
In the Windows Phone 7.1 SDK , Microsoft has included a number of template start-up projects to accelerate development on the Windows Mobile platform.
Salesforce Analytics Spring ’12 Release – A Business Analyst’s Wish Granted…..Almost
Let’s just be up front about this. I’ve been waiting four years for sibling reporting – or as Salesforce calls it, “Joined Reports”.
Dynamics CRM & Bing Maps Integration
Many of the clients we speak with wish to have Microsoft Bing map integrations, but want to use standard address fields instead of latitude / longitude.
SalesForce.com: Round Robin, Round Robin, Assign Me a Record – For Free Please
Are you spending your valuable time assigning Salesforce.com Cases or Leads manually when you could be spending your time doing something more productive? Would you like for your Cases and Leads to be automatically assigned?
CRM 2011 Logging to Event Viewer Application
Recently, one of our clients decided to move their CRM installation to an internal server. Their team had been using CRM Online, but the reporting limitations (fetchxml) and a few other problems became high priority issues.
Salesforce.com’s Winter Release Brings Easy Access to Social Networks
Traditionally our interactions with customers and the profiles we create from those interactions have been gathered and managed from within our CRM solution; regardless how well or poorly it was implemented.
Scribe for Excel to Microsoft CRM 2011: Optionset / Picklist Value Lookup
Sometimes, we just need a good example of how to write some simple code. We don't have the time to parse / read / undertand all the possible ways of doing something - just tell us what to do for this one thing.
Creating Pivots From Excel Exports of Reports Made With the Report Wizard
There is an error generated when users try to pivot on an Excel export generated from a report made with Ad Hoc report wizard in CRM.
Duplicate Detection Rules Automatically Unpublished
I have been discussing the need for some duplicate detection rules for our custom entities with a client.
The Truth About Front Office/Back Office Integrations
Front office / back office integrations set my teeth on edge. For anyone that has spent a significant amount of time working on them, you know that they often elicit fear from those involved.
A Process Framework in Action
In this month’s blog, we will look at a case study illustrating the power and importance of using a process framework to implement working solutions that achieve results.
Using Conga Composer with Salesforce.com
Several months ago we posted a review of the Quote capability that was added to SalesForce.com. In particular we discussed the template editor.
How To Migrate Attachments From One Salesforce.com Org To Another
We were recently asked to split a client’s Salesforce.com Org into three separate Orgs and migrate/improve the associated business processes and data into the appropriate new Org.
A Critical Framework to Turn Goals into Results
Without clarity into how your company operates, it is easy to make uninformed decisions, which materialize in costly projects that deploy poor solutions that produce little benefit.
Nucleus Research Confirms Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Salesforce.com as Top CRM Applications
Nucleus Research recently completed a technology value matrix for CRM applications. This matrix utilizes overall application functionality and usability to rate CRM applications.
Dynamics CRM 2011 Auditing
Microsoft has provided out-of-box auditing functionality that far exceeds what was manually available in Dynamics CRM 4.0. In CRM 4.0, audit logs had to be created manually with custom entities and subsequent mappings.
Showing Related Entities on a Form in CRM 2011
Frequently, businesses want to see 1-N and N-N entities displayed on related forms. In CRM 4, this required custom coding with an i-frame, but CRM 2011 provides this functionality thru out of the box configuration.
Fetch XML - 2000 Character Limitation
FetchXML is among one of our favorite tools within the Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform.
A review of the SalesForce.com Template Editor
When the Salesforce.com Spring 10 release hit sales organizations last year, we finally had the ability to generate a quote and send it via a PDF to a customer, using native functionality called Quotes.
Dependent Option Sets in CRM 2011
It is a very common businesses requirement to limit the values in one Option Set (called picklist in previous versions of CRM) based on the value set in another one.
Dynamics CRM 2011 Security Features
Many of our clients have complex business requirements associated with the security of their CRM application. Here's a look at some of the more prominent Dynamics CRM 2011 Security Features.
CRM for Professional Services
CRM for Professional Services
This is another of a series of posts we'll do exploring how to best setup a CRM system to fit a specific organization's needs. A few specific business challenges to keep in mind w
CRM for Publishers
CRM for Publishers
This is one of series of posts we'll do exploring how to best setup a CRM system to fit an identified business need. We will provide&n
Keys to the Adoption of a CRM Platform
Having seen hundreds of CRM implementations, the most common complaint that crops up over and over is "We invested a significant amount of energy and money, but our team (particularly sales) just isn't using the system the way we expected, and as a result we don't get much out of it".
Keys to a Successful CRM Strategy
There is always more than one way to deliver great CRM tools, and there are many, many ways to design and deliver an application that sits idly by while people go about working in email and spreadsheets.
Managing CRM Projects
In this post, we'll outline an approach we commonly use for organizing resources to roll out a CRM platform.
