In friendship, listening is about hearing and remembering what is said. In business, remembering is about data.

In friendship, we all have one or two scatterbrained friends who can never seem to remember anything. Almost every business is more scatterbrained than their employees and customers wish they were!

Here are six surprising statistics about listening to customers:

We have not yet learned how to plan to listen across channels.

• Only 11% of CMO’s have omni-channel strategies. (Source: The CMO Club and Rakuten Marketing, “The CMO Solution Guide: Demystifying Omnichannel Marketing to Create a Winning Strategy for CMO’s,” 2015.)

Our employees have found that problems with listening across channels are keeping them from meeting goals.

• 40% of sales and marketing teams say that multiple data sources are hurting results. (Source: SmartFocus, “Marketing Pain Points and How to Overcome Them,” 2015. Harvard Business Review, “The New Science of Sales Performance,” 2014.)
• Poor integration or master data management (MDM) is decreasing the ROI of CRM projects by 25%. (Source: Gartner, “MDM is Critical to CRM Optimization,” 2014.)
• CRM practitioners site a lack of integration as the leading cause of CRM failure. (Source: C5 Insight, “CPR for CRM Study,” 2014.)

And not only are these problems hurting customer relationships, they are also hurting employee engagement.

• The satisfaction of customer-facing employees drops by 14.5% when they have to use more than 2 systems to get their jobs done. (Source: C5 Insight, “CPR for CRM Study,” 2014.)
• The average worker has to use 20-30 applications per week to get their jobs done. (Source: ZDNet, “The digital workplace 2014: Plight and promise of today’s employees,” 2014.)

Want to learn more?Click here to download the full infographic on omni-channel listening.

Today, the process of engaging customers can't be one-size-fits-all. It needs to be adaptive across all touch points and within the context of who your customer is and what they are doing. Microsoft Dynamics CRM helps companies delivery exceptional customer experiences that create long-term relationships based on knowledge and trust.

But where do you start if you are not familiar with the power that a CRM solution like Microsoft Dynamics CRM can provide your company? We start at the core of CRM. We start with the ABC’s.

Acquiring Leads – Building Relationships – Closing Deals

As a Microsoft Gold Partner for Dynamics CRM we have a lot of conversations about CRM every day with companies of all sizes, across many industries with a wide variety of goals they hope to achieve.

When you talk about acquiring leads, building relationships and closing deals, it stems from three functionalities within CRM: Marketing, Sales and Customer Service. All three that we will examine in more detail.

Marketing:

If you are in sales, what do you ALWAYS want from marketing? More leads. In order to grow your business, your sales team needs a healthy pipeline and a list of qualified leads to work with. Within Dynamics CRM we will show you how a Marketing Manager can effectively use the tools in CRM to manage, track and report on their campaigns, generate qualified leads and assign follow up for sales to drive new opportunities.

Sales:

With all those new warm leads now coming from Marketing in CRM, we pass the baton to sales. Learn how sales can quickly engage, build relationships, track and move opportunities through a structured business process pipeline, create easy reports that will allow them to focus their time on their customers (and not in the office working on administrative tasks) and ultimately close deals faster.

Customer Service:

We all (hopefully) know that retaining current customers is cheaper than getting new ones and if companies want to grow their business it’s all about building long term relationships – and that starts with taking care of them from day one. In Dynamics CRM, service is a growing feature that Microsoft is really putting a lot of emphasis on with recent (and future) releases. In this session, you will see via a live demo how to enter, track and follow up on service cases, how to efficiently and effectively manage those cases through reporting and dashboards and keep your customers continually singing your praises (and providing recommendations to their network).

Join us on Tuesday, August 23rd as we dive into the ABC's of Microsoft Dynamics CRM with a free webinar showing how Marketing, Sales and Service work together by utilizing Dynamics CRM to create a customer journey that will maximize efficiency, productivity and profitability within your organization.

• Webinar:ABC's of Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Date: Tuesday, August 23rd 2016
• Time: 11:30am CDT

Can't Attend the live webinar on August 23rd? This webinar will be recorded and provided after the live session "on-demand" to everyone that registers.

The post Ledgeview’s ABC’s of Microsoft Dynamics CRM appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

MS Dynamics CRM vs Salesforce    Sign up for a free CRM course!

Learn more about CRM's features

Retrieving data and metadata for reports In Microsoft Dynamics CRM can be done using SQL views. In Dynamics CRM, users can run queries on SQL views that are automatically created. As the image below shows, names within the SQL views are easy to identify. A Microsoft tip sheet notes that SQL-based reports in Dynamics CRM use the filtered views provided for each entity to retrieve data for the reports.

To obtain the query, users can download the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) online.

Apart from being automatically created, Filtered Views offer the benefit of being updated for custom entities, having security embedded in the view, and being supported after patches, service releases and upgrades.

To learn more about how WebSan Solutions can support your Dynamics CRM projects and implementation, visit our Solutions page or contact us.

Linz Tan, Web Marketing Assistant, WebSan Solutions Inc. a 2014 Ontario Business Achievement Award Winner for Service Excellence.

The post Retrieving Data in Microsoft Dynamics CRM appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

By now, you have probably already heard that Project Service Automation (PSA) is a new solution offered in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online 2016 Update 1. As most of us in this space know, it's been a frequent request, and has often been met by bolting on third-party solutions.  No longer.

For service-based companies looking for a Project Management module within their CRM, this solution is a pretty impressive, in that it offers a fairly comprehensive set of functions to aid sales, project management, and delivery teams in delivering billable projects on time, while working efficiently and staying within budget.  There is enough going on here with this solution that we will break this topic into three parts - this post is Part 1.

If you have not yet installed it, check out our one-minute video on the Success Portal by xRM to learn how to install the trial CRM project service automation solution.

After installing, it will appear as an additional tile within your CRM menu (shown below). You'll notice there is quite a bit of content within this menu item that is specific to Project Service Automation. In fact, while you still have things like Contacts, Leads, and Opportunities, the majority of the content in this menu came with the Project Service Automation feature.

Don't let this overwhelm you; it's a lot of content, but we're going to help you get started with this series of three blog posts. First, though, let's talk about what project service automation really is in CRM when you break it down, and why it could become something your business relies on.

For companies that treat the delivery of their services in a project-style manner, this new module allows you to work your way from the beginning of the sales process, all the way through to the final client deliverables, tracking all necessary metrics as you go. It contains three distinct sections: Planning and Delivery, Billing, and Resources, which are clearly defined in the menu shown in the screenshot above.

The Planning and Delivery section, in a sense, resembles Microsoft Project. This is where you can create projects, complete with timelines, team members, estimated and actual costs, and status. You can go back in and edit those projects as you get more information or get further along in them. And you can see what phase of a project you're in at all times, with really easy-to-understand visuals. Our second post will dive into this part of the solution in more detail.

The Billing section is where you track finances involved in a project. Invoices, actual costs, and journals are kept here. The information entered here strengthens reporting, as it ensures financial information is tracked uniformly throughout each project. At the same time, it simplifies things such as overrides and expense approvals, since they can be done by the project manager, all within the same system where timelines and tasks are being tracked. Our last post in this series will cover Billing in more detail.

We encourage you to give this solution a spin, since it has been a long time coming and will satisfy many requests over the years for a robust project management solution within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

The post Getting Started with Project Service Automation in Microsoft Dynamics CRM appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

Unquestionably, nearly every person has a mobile device within instant reach. It’s no easy task to walk down a New York City street (or most any street, anywhere) and avoid people staring down at their screens or having animated conversations with themselves. On the plus side, mobile phones help us to be highly informed and uber-connected—both personally and professionally.

On a personal level, we use mobile apps every day for entertainment, education, communication, and convenience. Despite the massive growth and use of apps in our personal lives, however, companies have been reluctant to embrace the fact that mobile apps can be equally as useful in our professional lives. A good mobile business app can help you stay organized, track performance, access collateral, and help you respond more quickly to customer issues.

From a recent App Annie report: “Apps, in general, are still blowing up, with total time spent in apps growing by more than 60 percent on Android phones from 2014 to 2015. During 2015, global downloads across all stores hit 111 billion.” (Fabien Pierre-Nicolas, App Annie VP of MarCom)

Impressive numbers, wouldn’t you agree?

However, while some businesses are becoming more mobile, in our experience, far too many have yet to take advantage of one of the most useful and technologically sophisticated tools ever created. A properly designed mobile business app will allow you to do business anywhere, at any time. And now, more than ever, mobile apps are easier to create, configure and deploy.

Here are 6 ways mobile CRM apps can improve the way we do business:

1. Mobile CRM apps boost productivity

Nearly everyone has one or more mobile devices. Whether it’s a tablet or smart phone, we’re constantly connected. With a mobile CRM app, users can more quickly respond to customer needs, respond to leads, and manage existing accounts. If your users can’t access customer data at any time, from any location, then business is effectively on hold when they leave the office or are away from their desktop or laptop. With a mobile application, your sales and support teams have more options for when and where they conduct business.

A properly designed mobile CRM app should only take seconds to update. Just to fire up a laptop or PC usually takes several minutes while a mobile device is always on. Mobile CRM can utilize those dead time moments that happen during our work day; that 1-minute break in a meeting, those 10 minutes waiting for an Uber or those 30 minutes while waiting to board a plane. These dead time moments can be significantly reduced when using a mobile CRM app.

2. Offering more real-time updates, mobile CRM apps keep us ahead of the curve

Many managers and business owners are running their business by looking in the rear view mirror. They review stats on a weekly or monthly basis. During that time things can and usually will change. Many organizations have CRM and it provides insight into detailed forecasts, performance and activity reports; however, something important is missing.

Try driving to a place you have never visited by looking at a map, last week. Hmm, not very easy, is it? Thankfully, we have instant access to maps, driving directions, and even real-time traffic reports. A properly designed mobile CRM app will take full advantage of your mobile device, including the GPS, camera, and voice entry, providing real time access to what’s happening in your business.

A properly designed mobile CRM app should be easy to use and take seconds to update. It should also provide recommended tasks and next steps. This will provide not only more real-time data; it will also increase the accuracy of that data, as most of us have short-term memory loss to yesterday’s—or last week’s—events.

3. Mobile CRM apps improve data accuracy

Almost every company tries to keep their CRM application up to date; unfortunately, many have failed. Keeping data accurate and up to date is not easy. One of the primary reasons for poor data is not aligning with how your users operate. This results in inaccurate and irregular CRM updates.

Users who don’t have access to mobile CRM will use hand-written notes, email, and other ways to track information. At some point, if you are lucky (or diligent), they’ll update that information into the system; however, these post interaction updates provide more chance for errors. Poor customer data is as bad as no customer data (just ask the Marketing team). With a mobile CRM system, users can enter information quickly and efficiently wherever they may be, reducing errors and contributing better data.

4. Customer service is improved through mobile CRM apps

We no longer live in a nine-to-five world. Customers expect instant access to and rapid responses from the companies they work with. When a customer has a complaint, there is a small window of time to respond before they get anxious – and now publicly on social media channels. Mobile CRM allows your users to quickly access relevant customer information and respond in a timelier manner, regardless of the time of day or their location. Without a mobile application for CRM, customers may have to wait hours or days for somebody to return to the office or gain access to their laptop, pull up the information, and respond to their query.

5. Mobile CRM apps produce more engaged users

There is a ton of research that proves employee satisfaction and commitment significantly impact a company’s success. Providing a great customer experience requires teamwork and the right tools to help users engage with customers. Tools and systems that are fast, easy to use, intuitive, flexible, and fit our mobile lifestyle are more likely to be used. These aspects are the primary factors in the huge growth and use of mobile apps.

Taking advantage of the popularity of mobile apps by extending them into your customer facing systems and processes results in higher CRM use and adoption. In our experience, a mobile CRM app is as necessary as email or phone; mobile CRM apps are one of the most powerful tools you can adopt for increasing sales and enhancing customer service.

6. Collaboration increases with mobile CRM apps

Providing mobile CRM apps increases collaboration across teams. It provides real-time insight into what is happening in the field and provides for quickly assigning tasks and asking colleagues for help. Cross-team collaboration improves by allowing Marketing to instantly distribute leads and follow up tasks to team members wherever they may be. Or, assume a critical customer service issue occurs while the account executive in traveling or at lunch. Instantly notifying of and assigning them to the issue results in faster response times. Faster response times result in happier customers, especially when critical issues arise. That is true efficiency at work.

Elevate the way you do business with mobile CRM apps

Mobile technology has significantly impacted our personal and professional lives. It has undoubtedly changed the face of business, creating new industries and business models, empowering customers, and opening new avenues to productivity and efficiency. Companies are rapidly adopting mobile technology and equipping their users with powerful mobile apps. Are you ready to take advantage of these powerful capabilities?

To learn more about how you can leverage Microsoft Dynamics CRM mobile apps in your organization, join us for a complimentary webcast, How Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile Apps Improve the Way We Do Business.

The post 6 Ways Mobile CRM Apps Improve How We Do Business appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

Paul Greenberg is the managing principal of The 56 Group LLC, author of CRM at the Speed of Light...

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What is my team doing today? What am I doing today?  Are we pacing towards hitting our goals this month, quarter, fiscal year?  These are all questions that anyone who works in sales asks themselves.  Whether you are the CEO or President, Vice President of Sales, a Sales Manager, or a Sales Agent.  Many times the answer to these questions are unknown or a “best guess”.  With Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016, sales will know the answer to these questions.

This article will walk you through how sales can take advantage of the Activity, Account, Contact, and Opportunity tracking/modules of Dynamics CRM to understand next steps and the health of the sales pipeline.

Activities:

Let’s assume your company has implemented Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 and all of your customer and prospect’s data is already entered in the system. You want to make certain that you are following up with your customers and prospects as you agreed you would.  Utilizing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 Activities is a great way to accomplish this.  You have agreed to a follow up phone call or appointment and entered that Activity into Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016.  Now you can view what Activities need to be completed.

Here is an example of an Activity view that shows Activities by Owner and Priority:

You can easily view what Activities you have to complete as well as by Priority. When drilling into a High Priority Activity, simply click on the purple bar under Owner, you will see what High Priority Activities you have to complete.

Here you can see that there are four High Priority Activities to be completed:

You can simply click on an Activity to open that Activity and review your notes from your previous discussions:

Click here to visit our website to continue reading about how to utilize Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities for organizational sales insight.

To learn more about how Dynamics CRM can help you and your sales team work smarter, not harder, please contact Kevin Brown at kbrown@hbs.net or (920) 687-4124

By Kevin Brown, Heartland Business Systems / Avastone Technologies, Microsoft Dynamics CRM& Microsoft Dynamics GP Partner – Fox Valley, Milwaukee, Chicago

The post Dynamics CRM: The Backbone for a Day in the Life of Sales appeared first on CRM Software Blog.

FINAL REMINDER!

Today - Thursday, August 4 - is the last day to register for CRMUG Summitand save money with the Advanced Pricing discount!

Attend CRMUG Summit 2016 and have access to:

• 150+ Breakout Sessions. Excel in your role, industry, product version, and more with peer-led sessions.
• The largest expo for Dynamics users. Explore an expo designed to help you network with your peers and get the most out of your investment.
• Pre-Conference Academy. Experience hands-on training and make the most of your trip to Tampa by taking advantage of focused, instructor-led classroom training before Summit 2016 officially kicks off.

Don't hesitate! Register for CRMUG Summit today and join thousands of Dynamics CRM users in Tampa on October 11-14.

One of the most important upgrades that Microsoft has added to Dynamics CRM since CRM 2011 is business process flows – or the ability to visually see and follow business processes.

About Relationship Processes

Relationship processes – such as sales, marketing and customer service – are unique. Like other business processes, they must be rigid so that they can be repeated, improved, measured and scaled. Unlike other processes, they must also be flexible so that they can address the human element. 

The simple way to remember this: customer-facing processes should be like a wheel: rigid at the cord and flexible at the edges. And they should have RIMS (repeatable, improvable, measurable and scalable).

Video: Business Process Flows in CRM

Here is a 3 minute video to provide a very brief overview of the power of business process flows in Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

If you’re still on CRM 2011 or earlier, you should consider upgrading so your team can benefit from business process flows. If you’ve already upgraded and you’re not using business process flows, you should take the time to upgrade your processes.

How is your team applying business process flows?