1. More SaaS (Software as a Service, Storage as a Service)
We are not talking about the obvious such as how much of your budget to spend or about technical considerations, we are talking about what questions to ask and what decisions to make before searching for the Customer Relationship Management system that best suits your organization.
For the last few months we at KTL Solutions (me in particular) have been promoting our upcoming “Empower the User Conference” a free one-day educational event for Microsoft Dynamics GP, SL, and CRM users. And while it is a great educational event that you have learned about through a number of emails, landing pages, and tweets from KTL there are other benefits to attending this event:
Microsoft Dynamics’s Convergence, a gathering of 12,000 customers, partners and Microsoft employees, was great this year. Almost transformative, and as an experienced Convergence attendee, here are my five takeaways that make me think this was a great Convergence:
1. The president of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, attended and was the keynote speaker. Ballmer was absent the last two years, which for me, was not an issue, as his messaging was stale and confirmed in my mind he did not understand business applications. See number five below for more detail about why the keynote was so transformative.
Initially when Dynamics CRM Online was introduced it was tied to windows live id, Microsoft’s online authentication platform. Since then it has been replaced by Office 365 login. And it’s not just that Dynamics CRM Online authentication that has moved to Office 365, now there is lot more integration between these 2 systems. The latest one is the connection between Power BI and Dynamics CRM using Office 365. You can find additional details of the same at
I was extremely fortunate to have KTL send me down to Atlanta, Georgia for one of Microsoft’s largest conferences, Convergence. Here I was able to really understand concepts involving both marketing and sales that pertained to us as partners using the solutions we not only implement and sell, but use in house as well. My knowledge grew with many of the sessions provided, but one stood out from others. Not because it was more technical or that I learned something specific that I have been wanting to learn more about; it was that this particular session put a retrospect on what KTL’s Director of Sales and I deal with on an everyday basis: the connection and dependence between our two departments.
Often when discussing a Dynamics CRM it is not uncommon to think of the application solely in the terms of how it can be used for the Sales and Marketing departments. As marketing to prospects and building potential sales are the first interactions companies usually have with a customer it is easy to see why these tend to be focal points for a CRM system. However, critical interactions with those companies do not stop after the sale, they continue on well beyond closing the opportunity and invoicing the order. If you have heard the adage, “It is easier to retain current customers than to acquire new ones,” you know I am speaking of customer service. The customer service module in Dynamics CRM is often forgotten in conversations when speaking of the capabilities of the application yet it is quite a robust piece. To bring light to this often overlooked module of Dynamics CRM over the next few articles we will highlight some of the features.
I often get asked about Business Intelligence and related tools, as dashboards and data integration have become so common today, and everyone wants “instant information”. After all, aren’t we all information workers today?
Since my company is a Microsoft Partner, doing Dynamics (GP, SL and CRM) business applications, my first recommendation is to “look close to home”. You may be surprised how much existing BI you already own and are not utilizing if you use Microsoft products. (Dynamics, SQL, SharePoint, Office) The Microsoft BI toolkit is not a lightweight player in the BI market, as you can see from the 2013 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant graphic below.
Here are three pertinent reasons your business needs and can benefit from having a CRM.
1. YOU NEED METRICS
How many successful projects have you had in the past week, month or even year? What is your conversion ratio and what are the best methods to make sure you are reaching your customers? Knowing your business metrics is critical to your business growth and success. A CRM will give you instant metrics of dozens of aspects of your business plus it allows you to create custom reports to better track metrics to your specific needs. Once you have those reports at your fingertips, you will never look back. Just think. No more time wasted on excel spreadsheets!
A recent request tasked me with adding functionality to the form ribbon of an Order in CRM 2013. The goal was to capture information from two fields on the Order’s associated Account and based on that information enable or disable a button on the ribbon of the Order which for the purposes of this article we can call Has_Value. I was not able to pass the values to the Order when it was created as these values could change some time after it had been created. Additionally, if the associated Account were found to be a duplicate, it would have to be merged and updated on the Order that could also change the results of the information I was capturing. This left me with having to query for my information using Javascript when the Order form loaded. With this Javascript query, I then updated a hidden Boolean field on the Order if the criteria was met or left it blank if it was not. This might not seem important now but having to take these actions in order to meet the requirements affected how this customization had to be modified at later steps in the functionality.
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