Unitek Microsoft CRM Blog

No matter how you divide your target market among sales people invariably there will always be situations where you have to commission more than one sales person for a sale. Out of the box Microsoft CRM does not have any way of handling split commissions. So if you are using the Sales Module of Microsoft CRM and relay heavily on it as your main sales automation tool, you’ll need to devise a way to be able to split commissions.

Following is one way of accomplishing this:

Provide a “Split Commission” button in the action bar of the Opportunity Form of Microsoft CRM and make it accessible to the Sales Admin role. In case of a split, the sales admin would open the related Opportunity and would click the “Split Commission” button. A pop up window will collect the required info; percentage of the split, name of the other sales person, etc. Once the required info is collected, a clone of the Opportunity gets created and percentage of split, the actual split-ed commissionable sales amount and the name of the sales people are recorded in both Opportunity records.

When writing reports you will want to be sure to take the existence of the split opportunity in mind so that you do not double count the number of your won opportunities.

If you are interested in getting the sample code, please e-mail me at royam@unitek.com.

RM
Microsoft CRM Consultant

Many customer relationship applications provide the users an automated process to populate City & State after the user enters a Zip Code, but CRM sadly does not. If your business needs this functionality the following tutorial was written with you in mind.

Using the following methods, we’ll add a new entity in CRM, populate it with zip code, city & state info and then we’ll show you how to make CRM fill in a Contact or Lead’s City & State after a user enters a zip code.

Step 1 - Create the Custom Entity

• Name the Entity “Zip Code”
• Choose “Organization” as the Ownership type
• Unselect Notes and Activities (do we need an activity for a zip code?)
• Choose the Areas to display the entity. (I chose none but you may want to display it initially for any troubleshooting)

Click over to the Primary Attribute tab.

• Make the display name & schema name “zipcode”.
• Change the max length to 20. This should be plenty for most of us.

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Here’s an easy to implement customization that can save users time & clicks. We’re going to force CRM to put a Contacts phone number in the form Title bar, enabling users to view History, Activities, Opportunities, etc., all the while having a view of the phone number:

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Reporting is a vital portion of CRM that is often overlooked. Many reports are needed on a regular basis by CRM users and if we stick with the pre-defined methods, users must go to the Reports section of CRM.

We’ve implemented a more user friendly method that you too may like. We design and deploy our SRS reports in Visual Studio.

Once deployed we modify the Site Map, adding links to the reports on the CRM main navigation bar. Since we’re using Site Map, we can put the same link in multiple sub-sections like Workplace and Sales. With a single click, the report opens in CRM’s main window.

Our customers love this easy method for reporting!

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