Unitek Microsoft CRM Blog

One of Microsoft’s strongest selling points of Microsoft CRM 3.0 was its integration with Outlook. Microsoft correctly deduced that many Users were used to managing their day to day activities through Outlook. This not only included email activities but contacts, appointments and other tasks as well. Many Users had become dependent on Microsoft Outlook’s calendar as their primary visual tool for managing their appointments and tasks. In Microsoft CRM 3.0 emails and appointments could be synchronized in CRM but not other activities (the biggest complaint was the lack of synching of phone calls). But my experience in teaching CRM 3.0 Applications to end users has been User frustration about not being able to fully use Outlook to manage all of their day to day tasks. They did not like having to go in and out of Microsoft CRM to schedule common tasks such as phone calls. They had grown used to scheduling phone calls as tasks in their Outlook Calendars and getting convenient pop-up reminders.

Well Microsoft has addressed this in CRM 4.0 with the ability to synch not only emails, but phone calls, faxes, letters and tasks. Users can now function primarily through their familiar Outlook interface using the Outlook Calendar to schedule tasks in CRM. They also get the benefit of being able to schedule useful pop-up reminders that Users have grown use to (or in some cases dependent upon) to remind them to do daily tasks. When a task is scheduled, the “Track in CRM” box gives the User a Drop Down option to select which type of task to be tracked in CRM. CRM tasks are viewed in the Outlook Calendar as all other tasks in Outlook. When tasks are scheduled within CRM they are automatically pushed out to the User’s Outlook Calendar. There is only one drawback to scheduling tasks directly in CRM and that is inability to schedule a pop-up reminder within Outlook. An Outlook pop-up reminder will still occur for those tasks directly scheduled in CRM but it will be for whatever the Outlook default pop-up reminder setting is set for. This new feature should make Outlook Users much happier and more comfortable using CRM.

KE
Microsoft CRM Consultant
Unitek Microsoft CRM Services

The three most important factors in being able to insure revenue maximization through proper management of your sales processes are:

1. Visibility
2. Visibility
3. Visibility

You may ask visibility to what? Visibility to the measurement patterns that are created by the data collected through your Microsoft CRM Sales Automation modules.

Patterns that show:

• What is the average # of days it takes for your deals to close?
• What is the average Close Ratio?
• How is every single sales person doing compared to these averages?
• Who your star sales rep is based on their average CloseRatio?
• Which sales reps need to be let go? Without this information you might let go of a good sales rep who is just hitting a slump. Hiring and training new sales reps are costly.

Without these kinds of metrics:

• How would you be able to determine who is doing well and who is not? Furthermore, how would you define what does doing well means at your organization?
• How would you be able to discover inefficiencies with you sales processes?
• Let’s say that you do find inefficiencies and correct them, how would you be able to tell if they worked and by what degree? Even if you find ways to tell, how long would it take you to get this information?

Your Microsoft CRM system is a gold mine of business data and as with any gold mine you have to dig for the gold and then process it before you can really have something of value.

Reports are the gold mining tools for your CRM gold mine. Reports are such vital part of any Microsoft CRM implementation that I would venture to say that it should be the first thing you start with when planning for your implementation. First thing is to know what types of report you would want to get out of the system. Keep in mind that even though Microsoft CRM collects lots of data, it does not collect all of the data that you might need to provide you the ultimate visibility that you would like to have. So by deciding what kind of reports you need a head of time, you will be able to insure that all the data needed for the report is collected.

We are going to have a free 3 hour Microsoft CRM Reporting live web clinic in the next couple of months. If you are interested in participating please contact us.

RM
Microsoft CRM Consultant
Unitek Microsoft CRM Services

In December of 2007, Unitek was chosen by Microsoft to instruct an elite group of Microsoft Partners throughout Canada. Our CRM Practice Manager, D.G., traveled to Toronto, Canada to teach Unitek’s 6-Day CRM Readiness Boot camp. With 18 students representing several of Microsoft Top Partners throughout Canada, Unitek was honored to be selected as the Training Partner for this International CRM Adventure.

Aside from the cold weather (that us Californians aren’t quite used to), we managed to deliver a GREAT training session. Each partner has since told us of how beneficial and valuable the training was for them and their CRM implementations.

The training was SO successful that Unitek has been invited back to Canada teach another 6-Day CRM 3.0 Readiness Boot camp in February of 2008. We are glad to see that CRM has been so well received by our partners of the “Great White North” and we hope to continue to provide Superior CRM Training to the “Best of the Best” that Microsoft & Canada has to offer. This time, we can only pray for warmer weather!

A special thanks to the Canadian Microsoft Partners who were there to experience the adventure with us. We look forward to seeing all of you again in 2008!

JH
CRM Consultant
Unitek IT Education
Unitek Microsoft CRM Services

One of the unusual quirks with Microsoft CRM 3.0 is the hard-coded default Views. For example, while in a Contact form and you click History, the default view is for “Last 30 Days”. This has been one of the most disliked features of CRM 3.0 and we are sad to report the same condition exists in the new CRM 4.0 version. The good news is we’re going to show you how to change these Views.

Let’s start with the CRM 3.0 method . The code we’re going to use was borrowed from Michael over at stunnware. He has a great explanation of how we build the code, but we’ll just get straight to the code and enhance it a little. Our adjustment will modify 3 related entities, Activities, History and Opportunities. For each one we will make the default View “All”.

Assuming it’s the Contact’s View that you want to alter, in the Customization area, open the Contact form. Go into the Form Properties and then the OnLoad event. Copy this text and paste it into the OnLoad window:

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One of the most desired and long awaited features for Microsoft CRM is duplicate record detection. In Microsoft CRM 4.0 (formerly Titan), Microsoft has added duplicate detection capabilities at multiple levels. One of which is Duplicate Detection Rules which can run automatically to safeguard the system from users entering duplicate records. Duplicate detection can take place only if duplicate detection is enabled in Duplicate Detection Settings and if at least one duplicate-detection rule (A rule that specifies criteria for identifying a record as a duplicate.) exists for the record type. Rules interact differently depending on if they are grouped together or separately.

We can take a look at how this works by using an example that I’ve found many clients have desired which is duplicate detection of Leads to existing Contacts. The criteria I use in this example are to check for identical email addresses, first name and last name. In the Duplicate Detection Rules area (located in the Data Management area in Settings) we start a new rule and choose Lead as the Base Record Type and Contact as the Matching Record Type. Then we select the email, first name and last name attributes in both of the records and set the criteria to “exact match”. We have created one rule for all of these criteria which will cause duplicate detection to detect a possible duplicate Contact record when a new Lead is entered if ALL criteria are met. So if a Lead is entered with a different first name but the same email address and last name are correct, duplicate detection will NOT detect the possibility of a duplicate Contact record.

Let’s try two rules that involve both entities. Again the Base Record Type will be Lead and the Matching Record Type will be Contact. In this case we will create two separate rules. One with criteria matching exact email addresses and one rule that matches exact first and last names. When we run both of these rules together, duplicate detection will detect if a newly entered Lead has an email address that matches an existing Contact OR if BOTH the first AND last name of the newly entered Lead matches a Contact.

The way I think of this is similar to groupings in the Advanced Find. When using one rule with multiple criteria it’s like grouping your criteria with an “AND” grouping in the Advanced Find. When using multiple rules on the same entity(s), it’s like using an “OR” grouping in the Advanced Find. One last thing to consider is that there is a maximum of up to 5 rules per entity in Microsoft CRM 4.0

KE
Microsoft CRM Consultant
Unitek Microsoft CRM Services

While it is best to keep the name of the Microsoft CRM system entities such as Account, Contact, Lead, etc the same, sometimes the benefit of doing so out ways the negatives. One of the benefits of changing the entity name is that it helps users understand its function/use better and cuts down on confusion. Also it would be useful to adopt Microsoft CRM to fit the terminology used by the organization. Most of the time the name change is required for the following two entities:

• Account
• Contact

In Microsoft CRM Account is used to store information about companies an organization interacts with. These could be customers, partners, resellers, distributors, etc. Contact is used to store information about people. They too could be customers, partners, resellers, distributors, etc.

A common name change for the Account entity is “Company”. A possible name change for Contact is “Individual”. Renaming a Microsoft CRM entity requires a number of manual steps to ensure that all references to the entity are consistent. Following are the areas that need to be changed:

• Entity Name
• Entity Form Labels
• Entity View Names
• Entity Attribute Display Names
• System Messages
• Online Help Content
• Reports

Some areas where the entity name cannot be changed are:

• Platform error messages and messages that are displayed in Trace or the Event log.
• Strings in “Add Users Wizard” for adding multiple users at one time.
• Strings in “Environment Diagnostics Wizard”

Tip #1: Sub-Account and Sub-Contact

The steps that one would have to go through to make the Microsoft CRM entity name changes have been outlined by number of sites and I will not go through them here. However, I want to make sure to point out that if you decide not to make the name changes in System Messages and Online Help Content in the interest of saving development time and cost, do make sure to change Sub-Account and Sub-Contact strings. These strings show up in the left pane of An Account or Contact record. These strings are in the System Messages section. So if you don’t change any of the systems message do this one

RM
Microsoft CRM Consultant
Unitek Microsoft CRM Services

One of the biggest questions a company can have when implementing CRM, concerns the use of the various entities; Account, Contact, Lead and Opportunity.

Every company and industry will have its own special sales process with specific needs to track industry or company specific information. Microsoft CRM can be customized to many of those needs.

Questions arise, particularly about the Lead and Opportunity entities, about existing customers, marketing and CRM procedure. How does the sales process work when an existing customer places a new order? Much of what procedure is followed is based on the goals intended for the company’s sales process and the CRM system; what data is being tracked and reported. Is the company closely tracking sales data such as sales pipeline or campaign sources?

In this scenario, a customer calls up and says he wants to place an order. Most of the time the standard course of action is to create a new Opportunity from the customer record. The customer tells you what he wants and when he intends to buy. Is the company tracking campaign sources? A company’s marketing department usually likes to track why someone makes a purchasing decision. If the order is the customer’s standard order, there’s really no need to track this particular order’s marketing history. In fact if the customer is ready to order and pay for the product or services immediately then there’s little reason to even to create a new Opportunity, just create a new Order because there’s no need to track the sales pipeline for sale forecasting because this sale has already closed.

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As full featured and rich as Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 is, you will invariably find yourself needing to customize Microsoft CRM to meet your specific business requirements.

When you start customizing Microsoft CRM, do yourself and your organization a favor and implement the following two simple guidelines:

Tip #1: Change the schema name prefix for customized entities and attributes.

Microsoft CRM adds a default prefix, “New_”, to custom entities’ and custom attributes’ schema names. As a best practice, change the default prefix to reflect the name of the company or consultant who will be doing the customization. Over time you might have different consultants work on the system and taking this extra step will greatly help in case you might have to go back to that consultant to get more information about the work they have done. If you are the consultant, doing this will help you distinguish your work from that of other consultants and help clear any disputes that might arise.

1. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0, on the Navigation Pane (left hand side of the screen), click Settings, on the Main Grid (to the right of the Navigation Pane), click Organization Settings, on the Main Grid, click System Settings.
2. In the System Settings dialog box, click the Customization Tab.
3. In this tab, change the prefix from New to the name of the consultant or consulting firm who will be doing the customizations. Click OK to save your changes.

Tip #2: Make use of the Description field when adding new attributes.

Require anyone who adds a new attribute to put their name, date and reason for the new attribute addition in the Description field when adding the attribute.

If you have any questions in this regard, please feel free to contact us.

RM
Microsoft CRM Consultant
Unitek Microsoft CRM Services

Unitek’s Microsoft CRM Team would like to wish you a Happy New Year filled with happiness, success, and joy!!!