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SAP and Siebel have been rated the joint leaders in the $ 2.5 billion CRM market according to a report by the research house IDC. IDC states that SAP has managed successful sales of its CRM solution in segments that are already using its ERP solutions, such as manufacturing and transport.

Finance is the largest CRM applications maket in Western Europe, it is closely followed by manufacturing and communications. The two largest markets are the U.K and Germany. A report by the Yankee Group positions NetSuite as the market leader in business application suites meant for SMEs.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 and Microsoft CRM 1.2 have the MS Outlook client snap-ins. Microsoft Dynamics 3.0 also employs MSDE installed on local machine, which is usually the laptop of the traveling MS CRM user for the purpose of storing replicated MS CRM data for offline use. It is probably true statement for each MRP, ERP or CRM system implementation, that it is not an easy process, part of the complexity and challenge comes from the need for users to get used and accommodate themselves to new user interface of the system, being implemented. In this small article we will show the ways how Microsoft decides this problem.

Microsoft Outlook integrated with the CRM application allows users to make use of their existing felicity and sense of intuitive use with Outlook for the purpose of enhancing their experience with CRM 3.0. The Microsoft and SAP collaboration for combining mySAP & R/3 with Microsoft Office and other components of Windows platform will further enhance user experience.

Microsoft Business Solutions CRM has now new name, Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Microsoft Dynamics product series also include Microsoft GP (Great Plains), Microsoft NAV (Navision), Microsoft AX (Axapta), Microsoft SL (Solomon). However version number was not changed, Microsoft just mentioned that MS CRM 1.2 was actually version 2, due to large number of new features, comparing to first version Microsoft CRM 1.0. In this small article we would like to share our impression and as we see Microsoft messages to potential and existing customers with this new version of Microsoft CRM.

• Buyers are tired with complex and expensive traditional CRM solutions, MS CRM brings to the customers very attractive price and is very easy, we would say intuitive to use

• Users should spend most of their computer time, working with MS Outlook. Both – customer and Microsoft could capitalize on the large number of experienced MS Office / Outlook users. Microsoft made its CRM with Outlook client. In version 3.0 you can be assured that majority of the functionality is available in Outlook and only specific tasks would still require MS CRM web client interface.

Technical directions:

• Reporting. From Crystal Reports to Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services. You can still deploy Crystal, if you purchase Crystal Report viewer or designer license. If you do not have report you need in SRS reports set (and you do not want to create new report in Visual Studio.Net), you can export one of CRM views to MS Excel Pivoting Table and use it as report generator and data analysis tool. Both SRS reports and Excel Pivoting work in MS CRM security realm. The reason why? – MS CRM views have security restriction check in where SQL clause – you can check it by looking at the views definitions.

• Customizations. Before we dive to MS CRM SDK level we should mention that you can now store your Javascript and MS CRM SDK C# or VB code in Pre/Post callouts (to check for duplicate records, when you save new contact, for example). Plus end user can create custom MS CRM entities (stored in tables) and relate these custom entities to MS CRM objects. Imagine you need to create bank accounts table, which will store multiple accounts per account-customer. Bank account is custom entity and it might be made available for synchronized off-line Outlook client.

• Messaging. In version 1.2 messaging was tracked and automatically moved to MS CRM by adding and checking GUID in the message header. Antispam filters were blocking such messages under certain conditions. Now in 3.0 instead of GUID we have tracking token: CRM:0001001 or like this. Please, note, if you have custom messaging Exchange connector, based on GUID – you should consider redo this custom connector for version 3.0, based on tracking token or simply contact, account, lead email scan (matching with sender email address)

• Integration. IFrame will allow you to integrate all the types of URL with your CRM . Also Sharepoint is the future of advanced workflows and collaboration of your CRM and domain users

• Data Migration. The tool was improved substantially, however if you need history integration plus certain logic on checking duplicates, you still should consider third party solutions.

Happy implementing, customizing and modifying! If you want us to do the job – give us a call 1-866-528-0577! help@albaspectrum.com About The Author Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer at Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com ) – Microsoft Business Solutions Great Plains, Navision, Axapta MS CRM, Oracle Financials, SAP Business One and IBM Lotus Domino Partner, serving corporate customers in the following industries: Aerospace & Defense, Medical & Healthcare, Distribution & Logistics, Hospitality, Banking & Finance, Wholesale & Retail, Chemicals, Oil & Gas, Placement & Recruiting, Advertising & Publishing, Textile, Pharmaceutical, Non-Profit, Beverages, Conglomerates, Apparels, Durables, Manufacturing and having locations in multiple states and internationally. We are serving USA Nationwide: CA, IL, NY, FL, AZ, CO, TX, WI, WA, MI, MA, MO, LA, NM, MN, Europe: Germany, France, Belgium, Poland, Russia, Middle East (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, OAE, Bahrain), Asia: China, Australia, New Zealand, Oceania, South & Central America: Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, Chili, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico.

Customers are now in charge. Thanks to the growth of the Web, it is easier than ever to comparison shop and switch from one business to another with the click of a mouse. However, research has found that in the online market, customers yearn for trustworthiness more than ever.

Customer relationships are a company’s most valuable asset – worth more everything else combined as no customers = no business. Getting and keeping more customers who stay with you longer is crucial. If your customers are loyal to your business, they will be much more likely to choose you over your competitors.

Loyal customers will be much more likely to tell their friends about you. Loyal customers spend more and bring in even more new customers. Loyalty is immensely valuable. Research has shown that a 5 percent increase in customer retention rates results in a 25 percent to 95 percent increase in profits. It’s easy to say customers are our most important asset but turning CRM strategy into bottom-line results is hard work.

It means winning the battle for customers’ hearts and minds every day, with each interaction at every customer touch point. Long-standing relationships only arise from trust gained over many transactions and by customers’ belief that the company wishes to keep them around rather than drive them away.

Creating a customer-focused company starts with the definition of a CRM strategy, which must then be filled out with new work processes, organizational changes, and even a revamped corporate culture. To create customers for life, customers who will become advocates with the perception (and don’t forget that perception is reality) they need to believe that you do what’s best for your customers, not just what’s best for your bottom line. To do that you need to:

1) Find out what customers want and know what you are providing matches that. Do not start with the bottom line. Profit and cash flow are residuals of attention to the needs and preferences of your customers. Of course, profits are crucial. But long-term cash flow and profits come from regular customers.

2) Be honest and keep things simple, listen, communicate openly and keep your promises. Deliver what you say you will. Far too many businesses focus on ways to keep customers, only to lose sight of the fact that their product or service simply isn’t what it should be. Make certain that the core of what you do is deserving of long-term customer loyalty, and then look for ways to nurture it. Make it simple to do business with you.

3) Practice what you preach and preach what you practice. Treat your customers like you would like to be treated and then go even further by, in that classic phrase: exceeding their expectations. Give customers reasons to stay. Great service or products are terrific, but it never hurts to lure customers into the long-term fold. How about discounts for regular customers? Customer loyalty is needs to be appropriately valued and rewarded.

4) Nurture employees. “Old-fashioned” solutions still provide the edge. Research shows that a personal relationship with your employees is the key to keeping customers loyal and that happy staff keep customers coming back. Treat your employees as you would want to be treated year after year. Not only does that encourage staff to also do their bit to entice customer loyalty, it’s emphasises a supportive, responsive environment. Employee loyalty needs to be appropriately valued and rewarded.

5) Use sensible marketing practices. Not many people enjoy being inundated with telephone calls and mailings so don’t do it! Test, test, test and track the customers who come back. Once you know who your best customers are, the real work begins—convincing them to stay forevermore. Repeat purchase and retention rates capture the real financial ramifications of whether or not a company is delivering high value to its customers.

6) Know the value of your customers, segments and groups. Know who is likely to be loyal. Some customers are more trouble than they’re worth. Monitor what goes into keeping a customer satisfied; if it’s too costly or simply too much work – it’s wrong to say that everyone should be a lifelong customer.

7) Use effective CRM systems, don’t let the systems use you. Don’t be driven by the vendor or consultant – use them, they’re likely to know the technology far better than you. But let customers’ needs and everything above drive how you use the technology. Remember it is an aid not an end. That’s all there is to it!

About The Author Richard Hill is a director of E-CRM Solutions and has spent many years in senior direct and interactive marketing roles. E-CRM – http://www.e-crm.co.uk – helps you to grow by getting you more customers that stay with you longer. We provide practical solutions that pay for themselves. We help you to make sure that your marketing works.

"Marketing ROI" is a trendy catch-phrase these days, but what does it really mean? While many top managers we speak to think their marketing programs are generating positive results, in reality, most of them don’t really know.

Since Marketing’s top priority is to generate qualified leads for Sales, management’s focus should be on measuring the quantity and quality of leads which Marketing is driving into the sales pipeline, and which Sales is converting into revenue. The best place to capture and analyze this information is in your CRM (customer relationship management) system.

Yet getting this information from most CRMs is difficult, because sales orders typically bypass the CRM altogether and are entered into a separate Order Entry system. Too often, it is difficult to track sales orders back to the marketing program that originally generated the sales lead.

If you are serious about tracking the return on investment from your marketing efforts, here are some simple but critical steps you should follow to capture the right data, at the right time in the sales process: Make sure your sales people are accurately tracking each actual sale in your CRM system, by converting opportunities into closed orders, with accurate order values.

In addition to normal CRM entries, make sure your CRM has standard fields to capture the following data: Lead Source Campaign Market Segment Sales Region Win/Loss Reason for Win/Loss Competitor Train and require all marketing and sales personnel to fill in each of these fields in the CRM consistently, as leads are generated throughout the sales process.

Many companies program rules into their CRM workflow which makes these fields required. Take steps to collect, analyze and measure the results of each campaign, as soon as the campaign has been completed. This will allow you to capture the information while it is still fresh, and instill discipline and accountability in your organization to regularly report results. Proactively track and compile statistics for management which highlight Marketing’s contribution to Sales’ success.

At a minimum, management should be receiving quarterly reports with the following marketing data, sorted by campaign, lead source and sales region: Total leads generated Leads passed to Sales Orders from leads (number, dollar value) Close ratio Total campaign investment Sales divided by campaign investment (ROI) By creating and following these simple processes, you can be among the few companies out there that are actually measuring their Marketing ROI efficiently.

The benefits from such discipline are numerous, including: Continuous campaign improvement Better marketing budget justification Improved recognition of Marketing’s role in driving sales growth Better collaboration between Marketing & Sales Increased revenue and profit!

About The Author Cube Management (www.cubemanagement.com) provides sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies in the technology, manufacturing, healthcare and business service sectors. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results. info@cubemanagement.com

Initially this integration was created for Microsoft Great Plains 7.5 (now Microsoft Dynamics GP), later on Microsoft released the patch, which enables integration between GP 8.0 and MS CRM 1.2 (now Microsoft Dynamics CRM). Integration is created on the BizTalk platform and requires dedicated computer: Windows2003 server with MS SQL instance. You access settings forms via web interface. We will briefly review integration capability and give you some technical insights, based on our experience.

• Customers/Accounts. When you create account in MS CRM – integration automatically creates account in Great Plains Dynamics GP. It is a bit challenging to make all the features and settings work, especially if you plan to use default class, address, etc. At the same time it works as it should if you provide parameters, such as credit amount value in MS CRM – then this number goes seamlessly into GP. Somewhat non-elegant – it is difficult to design automatic increasing numbering for Great Plains customer record. Out of the box – integration generates CUSTNMBR from Account name in CRM – this means that you should take off CUSTNMBR from all the printed forms in Great Plains.

• SOP Sales Order. When you release sales order in CRM – it goes to Great Plains. The most common question is – why Order doesn’t integrate if Customer doesn’t have credit limit setup in Great Plains. You should find procedural way to deal with this problem.

• Historical customers. This is another common problem. When you launch/implement MS CRM – you import your existing customers from Great Plains into CRM. Then you typically want to move sales quote and order generation process to MS CRM, where you have nice mailmerge mechanism to print quote for customer in the form of Microsoft Word contract or quote template. When you import customers via MS CRM import tool – they will be automatically duplicated by MS CRM GP Integration. You need to delete new customer records in Great Plains and then update Integration records in MS GP CRM Integration database. We provide script below (please use this script only if you first analyzed it and if you are very comfortable with SQL scripting for MS GP and MS CRM, GREATPLAINSSERVER is linked server – you create it from GPCRM integration server side):

update IntegrationEntityInstance set EntityKey=b.CUSTNMBR from IntegrationEntityInstance a join [GREATPLAINSSERVER].[GPCOMPANYDB].dbo.RM00101 b on left(a.EntityKey,8)=left(replace(CUSTNAME,’ ‘,”),8) where EntityType=’Customer’

About The Author Andrew Karasev is Chief Technology Officer at Alba Spectrum Technologies ( http://www.albaspectrum.com )

Let’s talk more about sales process and integration with CRM. Lots of companies fail to see the connection between developing a well defined sales process that’s repeatable and scalable and the actual recording of sales activity, tracking and forecasting of sales results in a customer relationship, management or CRM system, also known as sales force automation or SFA. In today’s day and age, a company cannot afford to deploy a CRM system without first spending the necessary time in order to define their sales process. Likewise, other companies that have well defined sales processes, to the extent that they don’t do a good job of customizing their CRM systems–to integrate with that sales process- they’ll find many disconnects leading to frustration, poor data management, poor forecasting, poor reporting and poor pipeline visibility when it comes to sales management tools. So, now more than ever, it’s really important to integrate both your sales process with your CRM system to get the optimized results that you’re looking for.

The first step in this process is to start by defining your sales process. You can’t deploy CRM without first defining your sales process. And it’s really easy to do so. We’ve developed a set of tools that allow your company to actually go through the steps of defining all of the work flow and different field sales and inside sales definitions as well as opportunity stages so that they can be easily mapped into sales force automation or CRM. Once you’ve completed the complete sales process definition which typically defines the work flow, the different sales opportunity stages, as well as the different actions and sales tools to be used at each stage. It’s very easy to integrate those into your CRM system and deploy them and then use the CRM system as an actual tool to manage the workflow and improve your sales efficiency. That is the number one benefit that you’re going to get out of a well defined sales process and sales process integration is you’re going to get better efficiency from your sales force, you’re going to get better opportunity management, your also going to get better visibility over your overall pipeline and your overall sales forecast leading to better predictable revenues and better forecasting accuracy. These are just some of the benefits of integrating your sales process with CRM.

About The Author Cube Management http://www.cubemanagement.com, http://www.cubemanagement.info, http://www.cubemanagement.com/blog/index.asp) provides sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies in the technology, manufacturing, healthcare and business service sectors. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results.

In today’s day and age it’s very easy for you to establish to gain great visibility over your actual sales activity using modern CRM systems. We’ve deployed CRM systems like Salesforce.com for many different clients. They allow us to quickly establish a dashboard that gives us accurate accounts of all calling and customer proposal and visitation activity. If you run your sales by the numbers and look at that activity on the daily and weekly basis, it’s very easy for you to quickly see what patterns are emerging in your sales team performance and act accordingly in terms of zeroing in on corrective actions that need to be taken with individual team members in order to boost their overall sales results. Running sales by the numbers has never been easier using modern activity measurements systems such as those found in Salesforce.com. The key to setting up those systems is to make sure that you’ve got a clear understanding of exactly what matrix you want to track prior to designing your system and how they align with the accountability and individual responsibilities that you’ve assigned your sales team so that the activities that you’re tracking are the same matrix that you’re holding your sales team accountable for. But that’s quite easy to do as long as you do a little advance planning prior to deploying your CRM system and at the time you’re actually setting annual sales goals with your individual sales team members.

We’ve found that it’s really helpful to break down your sales activity into as much granularity as possible to be able to count the fundamental ratios between number of raw activities and number of more refined activities. When I talk about raw activities, I mean attempts at phone calls. When I talk about refined activities, I’m talking about number of actual connects with potential prospects that turn into qualified opportunities and of course, the even more refined activities where you take a refined activity and turn it into an actual opportunity and an opportunity into a sale. So, all of those different levels of activity, from raw to more refined, are possible with tract using a modern CRM solution. A lot of companies struggle in this area because they don’t have the expertise to integrate their sales process with their CRM system. This is one of the things that we specialize in and make it really easy for you to get the numbers out that you need in order to more effectively manage your sales force. So, running your sales force by the numbers doesn’t need to be guess work in today’s day and age. If you’re having problems finding a solution for this, it’s very easy to find a consultant to help you to do what we call sales process integration with CRM, allowing you clear visibility and clear accountability over your sales effort and your sales team’s day to day activities.

Cube Management (http://www.cubemanagement.com, http://www.cubemanagement.info, http://www.cubemanagement.com/blog/index.asp) provides sales acceleration services to emerging growth and mid-market companies in the technology, manufacturing, healthcare and business service sectors. The experts at Cube Management work across the entire spectrum of marketing, sales and business development to provide customized solutions that drive revenue and profit growth. Cube Management combines Strategy, Process & People to produce winning results.