Want to add some sizzle to you form configuration? David Reinsvold recommends using visual controls with calculated fields to create a nice looking dashboard in your Dynamics 365 Unified Interface form. The following is an example of an investor form that visually displays relevant investor data.

Let’s take a closer look at how this is built:

1. Current Year return

• Calculated Field
• Data Type: Decimal Number
• Field Type: Calculated
• ((new_investmentvalue – new_investmentvaluejan1) / new_investmentvalue) * 100
• Control: Arc Knob
• Value: hsl_currentyearreturn
• Min: .1
• Max: 15
• Step: .1

2. Return vs. Goal

• Data Type: Decimal Number
• Field Type: Calculated
• (new_investmentvalue / new_investmentgoal) * 100
• Control: Arc Knob
• Value: hsl_goalprogress
• Min: 0
• Max: 100
• Step: 1

By combining visual controls with calculated fields you can easily add visual context to a record and give your users a richer user experience.

Thanks for the tip, David. Do you have a tip for us? Send it to jar@crmtipoftheday.com.

(Facebook and Twitter cover photo by Paula May on Unsplash)

Microsoft has published a release preview guide for the October 2018 major cloud update for its Business Applications.

In this post, we've highlighted the main themes and new features that caught our eye across the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps.

1. All Users Will Be On The Same Version

Microsoft recently made a change to the way it manages cloud updates which requires all users to be on the same version. As such, there will no longer be an option to skip a major update.

This next major update is scheduled to roll out between October 2018 and March 2019, once released, admins will need to schedule this.

Any remaining sites using v8.2 must plan to be on the latest version by 31 January 2019 for all Customer Engagement apps.

2. Prepare for the Unified Interface

In v9, Microsoft rolled out a new Unified Client Interface which uses responsive design to provide a uniform experience across any screen size, device, form or browser.

For most users, the UI is hidden as the v9 release had several important gaps in comparison with regular web UI.

As a result, relatively few sites have enabled the new experience in their production instance, instead using a refreshed version of the legacy interface.

These gaps are closing, and may disappear entirely in the upcoming release. Specifically, administrators will soon be able to add controls to the UI for:

• Bulk edits
• Advanced find
• Merge records
• Share records
• Running on-demand workflows.

Further performance and usability improvements are also promised for the Unified Interface.

This is important for several reasons:

• The Unified Interface is the future of the product
• Microsoft are introducing new functions that are only available within the UI
• New instances are now deployed with the Unified Interface enabled by default
• From the October release, the UI will be the only option when building new app modules
• At some future point, Microsoft will switch off the classic web user interface

For the October 2018 update, admins will be able to choose between enabling the new Unified experience, or retaining the legacy classic web UI.

To determine which user experience is best for your organisation in this upcoming release, we recommend taking early action gain familiarity with the UI.

3. Dependent Option Sets

The October update introduces dependent option sets.

Using native functionality, this will more accurately capture data with option sets that are contextual to previous field entries without the need to involve custom code.

This is just one example of new functionality that will be exclusive to the Unified Interface.

4. Custom Controls in Process Flows

For both the Unified Interface and classic web UI, sliders, switches and other custom controls will now be supported within guided business process flows.

By enabling administrators to apply greater customization these processes can be made more interactive.

5. Closer Integration with LinkedIn

In v9 with Sales Navigator connected, LinkedIn widgets can be added that provide added insights about contacts and companies within the Dynamics interface but these offer limited scope for customisation.

By using the new customizable controls for process flows it will now be possible to embed LinkedIn insights within process flows.

Within the initial stage of a lead, this could promote LinkedIn data to highlight conversation starters to support connection requests.

At each stage, controls can be configured to show LinkedIn insights about individual contacts and companies.

This includes Teamlink that leverages your organisation's LinkedIn network to identify colleague who may be able to make an introduction.

6. Web Portal Integrations

New SharePoint integration for web portals will enable document libraries to be shared with users within the Portal UI with controls to manage uploads and file deletion permissions.

Additional controls will enable Power BI visualizations to be embedded within portal pages. Personalized views of dashboards and reports will be presentable via the portal UI - even if portal users don't have a Power BI account.

7. Microsoft Teams Integration

Initially available through a public preview, the October 2018 release will introduce new integration with Teams.

This will make it possible for a D365 record to be pinned to an associated Team and be accessible to all members within the Teams UI, even if members aren't Dynamics users.

8. Set Regarding Enhancements

Using the 'Set Regarding' control in the App for Outlook will be made easier by filtering the entities that appear.

As a result, this will avoid users having to scroll through a long list of irrelevant entity types.

9. AI Capabilities

The October 2018 preview guide references a slew of new Artificial Intelligence capabilities that introduce more prescriptive and proactive insights.

These are most in evidence within the Sales app and the next update will include previews of new AI powered controls to:

• Recommend follow up tasks and other actions immediately when notes are added
• Promote conversation starters by identifying talking points from tracked emails
• Help sales managers quickly gain performance insights across their team via a new AI for Sales app
• Provide predictive lead scoring

10. Resource Scheduling

The Universal Resource Scheduler used in the Field Service app will now offer additional flexibility to assign work orders to resource groups.

New 'Crew' scheduling means that people and other resources can be grouped together for a specific period of time.

This is designed to fit scenarios where a team remain together in carrying out a series of jobs during a day.

Further scheduling enhancements include:

• Associate resources with a resource pool and schedule work orders to pools in the first instance
• Schedule job to take place at a designated facility
• Use resource capacity match work order effort required with available resource capacity
• Split the schedule board into for easier navigation
• Mix and match pools, crews and individual members as required

Finally, the URS will now be available in the Customer Service app to replace the legacy service scheduling functionality.

11. New Power Platform Capabilities

Through continuing investments in the Power platform, these capabilities combine across Power BI, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow underpinned by the Common Data Service for Apps.

This provides an unrivaled array of tools to extend, customize and integrate Dynamics 365 apps and Office 365 into your environment.

In the October 2018 update, Flow, PowerApps and CDS will be unified in the same interface to help administrators more easily trade app activity and usage.

12. App Solution Checker

A new solution checker will help to identify PowerApps performance issues and highlight any API's that are due to be deprecated.

These actions will be rolled up into a scorecard to prioritize the most critical improvements needed

13. Embed Canvas PowerApps into Entity Forms

Canvas apps support connections to more than 200 data sources including cloud services.

App designers will now be able to bring these capabilities directly into model-driven D365 entity forms in the same way that custom controls are added with support for look-ups and option sets.

Further controls will enable the size of each canvas app to be customised, or create apps with a responsive layout.

14. Social Engagement

A new set-up process will help new users quickly get started with Microsoft Social Engagement.

Microsoft say this will include a guided experience to define search topics. Historical data will then be acquired and immediately loaded.

We've shared more detail about what's coming soon in the October 2018 update across these Customer Engagement apps:

• Dynamics 365 for Sales App
• D365 for Customer Service App
• Dynamics for Field Service App
• Dynamics 365 for Marketing App

About Preact

Preact is a Microsoft Gold Partner implementing and supporting CRM solutions since 1993.

Check our blog for more information about Microsoft Dynamics 365 and CRM.

The post 14 Highlights In The Dynamics 365 October 2018 Update Guide appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

In Dynamics 365, we have the option to modify the charts by changing its XML. I recently created a new custom chart in Dynamics 365, and I had to modify its XML based on my requirements. However, during the solution deployment to another instance, the deployment kept on failing. Following is the message that was being displayed.

In the log file, there was a message that says “The 'distinct' attribute is not declared”. It was happening because of the chart which I had customised the XML for. That chart was also a component of the solution that was getting deployed. While modifying the XML of that chart I added the keyword ‘Distinct’. Following are the steps for workaround this issue:

1. Export the solution with the chart which isn’t using Distinct keyword.
2. Import the solution in the target instance.
3. Import the chart with Distinct keyword in both instances. In my case, I imported the charts to and from the same solution that I deployed.

After following the steps above, I was able to successfully deploy the solution and the charts in the target instance.

Being a developer is hard, being a good developer is very hard and being a bad developer is merely difficult #HoskCodeWisdom

Code is bad. It rots. It requires periodic maintenance. It has bugs that need to be found. New features mean old code has to be adapted.  Code is the enemy – Skrentablog

Microsoft are talking about the citizen developer, improving PowerApps and Flow. Should developers and companies invest time and effort to master PowerApps and creating no code/low code solutions.

Customers question the levels of customisation and the cost of creation and maintenance of code.  Everyone line of code costs to create, maintain and extend, code has a yearly cost.

With no code solutions like Flow and PowerApps, Azure manages the lifecycle and performance, leaving the developer focusing on what they should do.

• Security
• Scalability
• Performance
• Retrys
• Lifecycle
• Memory

No code makes the skill level needed to create and maintain lower but how much knowledge do you need to create PowerApps?

Simplifying creating customisations is like moving from C to C# and memory management/Garbage collection. You get better performance doing it yourself but takes more skilled developers but increases complexity in creation and maintenance.

It’s simpler to let a computer manage memory than write the garbage collection routines yourself.  Delegating garbage collection gives the developer more time to focus on creating business functionality code and less time focused on creating plumbing code (which enables business functionality code)

As a Java developer, I hated doing framework code for security, database writing, passing making web pages.  These plumbing code enabled business functionality but took time to write and created extra code to maintain.

When I saw Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4 it was amazing, which is impressive because Dynamics CRM was not amazing!  CRM had lots of out of the box functionality, this meant creating less framework code and I focused on creating customisations to deliver business functionality and Dynamics CRM did the framework and security functionality.

The framework benefits of no code solutions are great, so why isn’t everyone using them?

Managing complexity

I have never worked on a project which didn’t need a plugin or JavaScript/C# code, I imagine this is because the Dynamics projects I work on are larger and need developers.  There are lots of smaller Dynamics 365 projects which can use out of the box functionality.

I work on complex projects with complex requirements, out of the box functionality is limited to the flexibility of the solution it can create.  Can the users change their processes to fit with the out of the box process or do they need custom validation and functionailty.

Requirements and validation are bespoke to each business. A solution should help people do their job, a good solution will automate and validate for users.  Technology should not dictate solutions, it should enable solutions.

When a user selects a field on a form, it should set other values on other fields or validate values, update other fields in the solution. Automate the creation of data, speed up processes and ensure quality data.

These are bespoke to each business but there lies the value. It’s complexity of business requirements which requires JavaScript and plugins.

Design patterns are common patterns to common requirements, can workflows achieve the common problems addressed by design patterns?

Workflows struggle to deliver complexity, they are limited to simple tasks.  Anyone who has created a complex workflow in Dynamics 365 knows they are unmaintainable beasts, as is trying to create smaller focused ones and intertwining them is also difficult. This is due to the workflow editor and trying to visualise complexity with workflows.

Why is hard to deliver complex requirements with workflows, lets understand what does complex code does?

• Retrieves, complex retrievals possibly using multiple records
• Sorts, filters
• Updates
• Updates and creates related records
• Validates
• Deletes

Code should not be complex, it should be focused steps put together. Codes ability to do complex things and combine them makes it powerful.

GUI customisations struggle (Workflows, Business rules) to do complex solutions.
Workflows cannot sort or filter, they can retrieve records which have a direct link to the entity being processed.

Business rules and workflows struggle to validate multiple fields at once and can’t combine fields.

Strengths and weaknesses

The citizen developer is being mentioned, PowerApps and Flows are being seen as the future companies and projects should be heading.  Is this being asked for by customers or pushed by Microsoft?

Flows connect different systems and data sources, they connect and move data between systems/service.  This is mapping and moving data,  standard repeatable process.

PowerApps, Workflows, Business rules are simple customisations but struggle to carry out complex customisations.  When you mix multiple simple customisations, you can end up with a complex customisations which is very difficult to manage.

PowerApps work for one simple app but 500 PowerApps? will citizen developers understand over lapping PowerApps integrate to create one solution.  Will Citizen developers manage PowerApps in different environments (because despite what Microsoft sells, it’s not good practice to make changes directly in production).

These are the things Software Engineers do

• Unit tests
• Data Set
• Integration
• Design and create simple designs
• Security
• Performance
• Overlapping customisations
• Naming
• Create long term customisations which can be maintained and extended

Postives of No Code

There are positives of no code and in certain circumstances it could be the best choice

• Simple customisations can deliver simple requirements
• Lower level of knowledge\skill needed to build no code solutions
• Services manage performance
• No servers needed
• Lower maintenance

Code offers solutions which can match the needs of the clients but expensive skilled software engineers need to create, support and maintain it.   The increased flexibility of code costs more.

No code solutions can deliver simple needs and smaller, less complex projects.  The benefits of reduced cost and complexity increase the longer the solution takes to create and maintain.

Comparing the cost of no code/low code and bespoke code should be done over years.  Bugs can hide in both but code means bugs are harder to find and fix.

Summary

further reading

• The Best Code is No Code At All
• Code is our enemy 
• Why developers become frustrated and companies can’t find talent

Mobile phone apps ruined everything. As a result of minimal processing power and small screen size, mobile app developers had little choice but to keep things basic. Given that mobile devices are used by everyone on the planet, including a lot of people who are not particularly smart, mobile apps also had to be “simple”. Now everybody thinks that everything should be as simple to use as a mobile phone app.

Simple = Simple?

What may seem simple to a hard-core coder, does not seem simple to me. What may seem simple to me, may not seem simple to you. What may seem simple to you, may not seem simple to your Mom. So “Simple” does not equal “Simple”.  The dictionary defines simple as “easily understood or done; presenting no difficulty“, but again… for who? I think of it as the “Simple Continuum“, with the coder on one end, and your Mom on the other. The rest of us fall somewhere on this continuum.

Simple vs. Powerful

Simple and Powerful are in an ongoing tug-of-war in every part of our lives, but since I write about Business Applications, I’ll narrow the conversation here. In looking across the business applications landscape, most providers have chosen a path. They are either Simple, or Powerful. Those that claim to be both, are usually neither. Microsoft has clearly chosen the “Powerful” path for Business Applications, which makes sense for their Enterprise customer focus, and their competitive targets. But they do make some “Simple” claims here and there.

Microsoft’s Simple

One area where Microsoft is staking a “Simple” claim is with Canvas Based PowerApps. Many of us have seen Microsoft’s Ryan Cunningham dazzle us with his ability to build a complete Canvas App in minutes on stage. It’s actually either real, or an illusion of simplicity, depending on where you fall on the “Simple Continuum”. What I have found interesting about Canvas apps is, that it appears that having too much knowledge is actually a handicap. The hard-core coder will take three times as long, to build an app that is not even as good, as what a novice can do. My guess is that they over-think it.

What is Powerful?

Powerful is another loaded term, that means different things to different people. Clearly, there is no question that the Dynamics 365 First-Party apps like Enterprise Sales, Customer Service, PSA etc. are Powerful applications. These applications have the power to solve extremely complex business scenarios, for even the largest customers in the world. But what about companies, of any size, whose needs are not particularly complex? For them, Powerful might be defined differently, they might consider the ability to create a Project in a few minutes to be quite “Powerful”. In fact, the number one reason companies with less complicated needs often suffer with Business Applications is that they are offered “too much” Power. More power than they need, more power than they can understand, more power than they can adopt. This is particularly acute with companies that are new to Business Applications. It is also not specific to Microsoft, many customers of Salesforce.com, and any Enterprise Business Applications vendor, struggle with this same issue.

Our Choice?

In designing our RapidStart CRM application, we wanted to walk the line of Simple, yet Powerful. This was no easy task, and it required us to first define our ideal customer. In our case, it was a customer who did not have complex needs, and defined Powerful differently. It could also be a customer who had the potential for complexity, but wanted to start simple, and work their way into it. So our Power would come from our Simplicity. Fortunately, the only other Business Applications out there that one might consider simple, are dead-end products that would require migration once outgrown, whereas RapidStart CRM can simply be upgraded to the Dynamics 365 First-party apps at any time. But let’s circle back to this idea of “Simple”, and how you get there.

Less is More or Less

Fortunately for us, RapidStart has a strong brand, both inside and outside of Microsoft. When we undertook to re-imagine RapidStart on the Power Platform as RapidStart CRM, we had a significant head-start. We also had the benefit of hundreds of past deployments of our original model, to really understand what our ideal customer was looking for. The biggest issues were, adding more features, and making it even simpler to use. Again, this presented a conundrum, adding features increases complexity, which is the natural enemy of simplicity. We opted to further simplify our sales capabilities, while adding Case Management and Project Management to our new application. To insure we were meeting our goal of “Simple”, we enlisted the help of… Pat.

What About Pat?

Pat, is a fictional persona that we created. Pat is an intelligent person, who knows their business, but is not particularly tech savvy. Pat might be the owner of a small business, or a division manager of a large business. Pat just wants the team to be successful, whether the team is sales, service or project management, or a combination of all of them. Pat is looking for something simple, but with the kind of power Pat needs. Pat has neither the time, budget nor patience for anything “Complex”.

Over time, internally we got a pretty good idea of who Bob is, and we actually became friends. We never did figure out if Pat was a male or a female. Whenever anyone on our team came up with a new idea, we would ask: “Could Pat do it?”. It is amazing how many things Pat either can or can’t, or will or won’t, do. In a way, you could say that Pat built RapidStart CRM, but I’m still taking full credit for it.

Beyond the Application

Building a Simple to use, but Powerful application for our Ideal customer was  huge amount of effort, but it was only one part of the effort. For aspiring ISVs, there are a few more things that you will need to do to succeed, some of these are complex, but the customer-facing parts still need to be simple. For example, you need to build a commerce engine for people to buy your application. On the backend. connecting to payment processors, auto-provisioning, subscription management, etc, are all complex things, but on the front end, it needs to be simple enough for Pat to buy your damn product. While Marketing campaigns can be costly and complex to design and run, they may ultimately drive traffic to a website that has to be clear and simple enough for Pat to understand. Without knowing in advance exactly where Pat will fall on the Simple Continuum, you will need to be able to provide varying levels of support and training. For all of these, and many other things I did not get into, I suggest you create your own Pat… then just run everything by him, er, or her.

The post Dynamics 365 – The Battle for Simple appeared first on Steve Mordue.

With Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement (Online), Microsoft provides most customers with one free instance of the Dynamics Portal Add-On. One of the main content features of Dynamics Portals is the Entity List.

The Entity List is the equivalent of a View in Dynamics 365. These Entity Lists can be defined to show lists of records based on system views that are already defined in Dynamics 365, and they can have additional filters added over and above what is defined in the system view.

Use Case

When the Portals add-on is configured, you can select from several pre-defined web sites including a Partner Portal. This Partner Portal allows you to setup a website for your Partners to log in and enter Opportunities, create support cases, search knowledge, and other record types to be created or retrieved directly from your Dynamics 365 instance.

One use case for this filter condition feature can essentially give you the ability to create a My Opportunities view that will show Opportunity records assigned to the current user logged into the portal. Here are the steps to creating the My Open Opportunities Entity list for display in the portal.

1. Create a system view with the columns that you wish to surface on the portal. Set any basic filter criteria to start with (e.g. Status = Open).

2. Navigate to Portals > Entity Lists and click New to create a new entity list.

3. Set the Name, Entity Name, Website.

4. In the View iFrame, click + View.

5. Select the system view that you created in a previous step.

6. Save the record (Do not Save & Close just yet).

7. Set the other appropriate values for the entity list:

• Page Size
• Web Page for Details View
• ID Query String Parameter Name
• Enable Entity Permissions
• Key
• Etc.

8. Scroll the form and Find the Filter Conditions section.

9. Set the Portal User Attribute to an appropriate relationship.

• For our example, we will set this to Partner Contact (msa_partneroppid) to filter based on the contact record associated to the Opportunity.

10. Scroll to the Options Tab and Grid Configuration iFrame. Here you can decide if you want to allow the user to create new records, edit existing records, etc.

11. Save & Close.

The main concept to take away from this scenario is the Filter Conditions where we tell the Entity List to filter the records based on the current user that is logged in to the portal. This concept can easily be adapted to other record types such as Leads, Cases, Quotes, etc. by creating or editing existing Entity List records and setting the Filter Conditions.

Be sure to subscribe to our blog!

Happy Dynamics 365’ing!

The post Direct Sales IT Leaders: These 2 Tools Will Help Your Sales Leaders Increase Distributor Performance appeared first on CRM Software Blog | Dynamics 365.

Lookup Filtering Options and Gotchas in Dynamics 365

When it comes to lookup filters, sometimes the out of the box related Records Filtering doesn’t quite make the cut. You may want to filter by common values on the entity other than lookups or by more than one lookup. This is where you can utilize two functions in field controls to change filters or even the view that your lookup uses. These methods are AddCustomView and AddCustomFilter. What you use is dependent on what you need.

How to Use AddCustomView

If you want to filter by not only your primary record type but also a related record through a link-entity you will need to use AddCustomView. If you will not be using linked filtering, then you can use AddCustomFilter. In this example we are looking for accounts that have open cases and the cases have a primary contact equal to the one we have specified. We could have taken this contactId from another field on our source entity.

The parameters of this method are:
• A guid this must be unique among the ids of the other views on the account entity lookup
• The name of the entity
• The name the view will have
• The view fetchXml
• The view layout, this defines the fields that will appear in the view along with the space that they will be allowed. If you need help constructing this, you can grab it from an existing view in the customizations.xml file when you export a solution.
•    Whether or not this view will be the lookups default view

Example Filter:

Example Layout:

How to Use AddCustomFilter

This will add your filter to the filtering already applied to your default look up view, so if you’re going to use this you should ensure you either know you default filters or have them blank so you don’t get any surprises in your results.

The parameters of this method are:
• Filter criteria this does not contain the whole fetchXML definition. Instead it is only the filtering criteria.
• The entity that the view will look up to.

Example Fetch:

An interesting and annoying issue that I came across. See the example layoutXml below:

I have mistakenly used the wrong id field name as the result when an account is selected. When you select a record while this view is in use, it will appear to be selected but will not submit anything to the database when you save the record. If your lookup is required, you will be told to add a value to the lookup even though it looks like you have on the screen.

Thousands of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement and legacy Dynamics CRM users are marking their calendars as busy for October 15-18. Why, you ask? To gather in Phoenix, AZ for the CRMUG Summit Phoenix conference, of course! Are you still scheduled to be in the office? Don’t delay your CRMUG Summit registration – you can save $200 with Advanced pricing through Thursday, September 6. Register now: CRMUG |D365UG

If you're not already registered, can we tempt you to join us in Phoenix? Here is a preview of what you can look forward to onsite:

Learn from the Best.

Take advantage of the kick-butt content and learning tracks. Check your user group schedule to start planning: CRMUG | D365UG 

P.S. Can you guess who our keynote speaker will be this year?

Eat, Drink, and Network.

Enjoy the Welcome Reception, sponsor events, and great eats. Did you know, there are 150 restaurants within walking distance of the Phoenix Convention Center? We hope you’re hungry!

Reset Your Mind.

Take time to pause and reflect after these jam-packed days. Consider hiking Camelback Mountain or enjoy a couple hours at the Desert Botanical Gardens. Return to the office fresh and invigorated to take on any challenge.

Talk to the Experts.

You’ll have access to product gurus and a chance to see what the future holds for our favorite technology platforms. One past attendee said it best: “To be able to speak with the people that write your product... That is an unparalleled level of support!"

CRMUG Summit is only as good as its attendees. We can’t do this without you, so let’s do it together. 

Register now and save $200: CRMUG | D365UG

Blog originally posted at www.d365ug.com/news 

PowerMap is a PowerPack add-on by PowerObjects that allows users to get a visual representation of their records in CRM. In this D365 In Focus video, PowerPack Pro, Zach, guides us through the three best features of PowerMap. Check it out!

In different industries, different challenges are experienced. This is common knowledge (and sense) in the world of business.

For Lubricant Marketers, a common struggle is having a way to gain 360-degree views of their customers.

That begs the question: Is all of your customer information in one place and are you struggling to compile it into one organized system?

This is why leading lubricant marketers in the Oil and Gas industry use CRM to gain 360-degree customer views.

Keeping track of customer information in multiple ways tends to lead to frustration and disorganization, and prevents time-savings and efficiencies, all of which prevent your company from moving forward into a fruitful future within the Oil and Gas industry.

You may currently be using sticky notes, spreadsheets, binders, etc. to keep track of your customer information.

Though it works for you now, and perhaps on an individual level, consider how your manager or a future sales rep will access the information you store, or how you may have trouble finding it yourself in the future after you haven’t looked at it in a while.

Will they have problems getting the information they need? Will they know where it is? How long will it take them to find the information they need? Will it consume most of their time? Will it lead to duplicated efforts?

Odds are all of these things will happen, but, in CRM, when all of your customer information is input, the right people can access the right information at the right time to produce time-savings, increase organizational efficiencies, and enable smooth transitions for the future, among other key benefits.

By having 360-degree views in CRM, lubricant marketers are able to see their accounts’ basic and detailed information.

If you’ve never worked in CRM before, it may be hard to imagine seeing all of your account information in one place. Trust us – we understand!

In CRM, you can see order history, related information, notes from conversations other reps had with the account, and more.

CRM eliminates hours of searching for information for lubricant marketers. With a few simple clicks, you will have the information you are looking for about your accounts.

With a 360-degree view, you can also see invoice data, open activity tracking, which is extremely valuable and a favorite among lubricant marketers, and 12-month product summaries. This information is especially helpful for customer service reps in the Oil and Gas industry to have access to, as well as your sales team.

In CRM, you can give access to the people that need this information cross-departmentally. CRM isn’t just for one department. It’s for your whole organization and can do wonders for the future of your Oil and Gas business and teams.

Over time, you will notice increased efficiencies and a fantastic ROI.

Learn more about how Lubricant Marketers are using CRM to Drive Success in Ledgeview’s NEW eBook for the Oil and Gas industry!

Download it here.

When you truly understand the role an inside sales program can play within your organization, you can begin to identify the facts around what makes a successful program.

According to Dave Elkington at Inside Sales.com, Inside Sales Programs are growing 300% faster than Outside Sales.

It’s not a surprise, then, that organizations across industries and of different business sizes are continuing to ramp up their investments with inside sales!

With Inside Sales, the more information you have at your disposal, the more likely you are to succeed with it.

Inside Sales Reps and Programs are certainly the future looking at sales teams, processes, and strategies. They are an integral part, surely, but are not the only part.

In Ledgeview’s new eBook, we provide the insight and tips you need to build, revitalize, and grow a successful Inside Sales program unique to your organization.

Take a deep-dive into the future of sales with Ledgeview.

Greg Dove, Director of Business Consulting at Ledgeview Partners, attests to the power of Inside Sales Programs.

“I think Elkington’s statistic shows that while many companies adopt and understand the benefits of inside sales early on, it is still a very present trend that continues to evolve and show its relevance over time,” Dove says.

The future is clear with inside sales. The facts don’t lie.

THere is a lower cost per sales call with inside sales at only $50, whereas an Outside Sales Rep call comes in at about $308. As you can see, an Inside Sales Program is not only huge for cost-savings but efficiency when it comes to making calls to customers.

Since it takes about 8 attempts to reach a customer, Inside Sales Reps can focus solely on reaching them, which cuts these attempts almost in half.

This makes processes much more efficient, allowing Outside Sales Reps to work on bigger clients and opportunities while Inside Sales Reps can work on upkeep and administrative tasks.

Inside Sales Reps can more effectively reach customers for a variety of reasons, but the primary one is their focus on this task.

Though high-end solutions are predicted to take over the sales process in the next few years because of the growth of the digital world, customers still need consultants because they provide the guidance and human interaction customers need.

Inside Sales Reps will help move your customer through the buyer journey while increasing your sales team’s efficiencies.

The future is still human despite the digital world in which we live, and Inside Sales Reps are the people that will help you fly!

Learn more about creating an effective Inside Sales Program in Ledgeview’s new eBook, “21 Tips to Building a Successful Inside Sales Program.” We cover everything from best practices to key benefits to doing things right.

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Today’s tip is from Marius “flow like a river” Lind. (And you can also become a tipster by sending your tip to jar@crmtipoftheday.com)

A great man once asked,

can I set a custom schedule for when to run my flows?

The answer is yes, and like so many other solutions it involves nesting flows.

1. First, create a flow which has a timer trigger, I created one which triggers once per month.
2. Next, I create parallel branches inside this flow, for each branch you initialize a new variable.
3. Now add a “do until” loop which says loop until variable equals whatever you need.
4. Next you add a/multiple start flow action(s) which triggers the flow(s) in question.
5. Add a delay action which delays for the time period you need.
6. Finally add a variable incrementor.

Now you’ve got a flow scheduler which can start your flows in whatever fashion you need. Happy pillaging!