Have you ever wondered how to compare prices between CRM systems? Microsoft has made it simple to see not only the price comparisons, but also the value of Add-ons that factor in the price. Microsoft Dynamics CRM has many built in add-on's that other CRM systems charge extra for.

Sales CRM to outsmart your competitionSales teams can share: real time news, information and best practices, web conferencing, IM and real-time sales collaboration

Sales intelligence and social media target profitable opportunities and have more relevant sales conversions. Sales can shorten their sales cycles with a guided sales process and modern experience that is sure to please. And also provide flexibility and allow them to consume information however they prefer- within Outlook, on a mobile device or in a browser- all delivered in the cloud or on-premise.

Customer Care is CRM's heart

Customer Care is delivering exceptional attention to win the hearts of your customers, and your employees. Microsoft Dynamics...

A CRM system can be customized to any industry, but what are the most important items for the auto industry? Primarily it is the customer, and that holds true for every CRM implementation out there. But automotive customers are different than most other types of customers. Buying a car is a big deal! And this is true for many reasons. It is a necessity, it needs to be reliable, it needs to fit your personality and cars cost a lot of money, they can be very expensive. These are just a few of the reasons why the CRM for an auto dealership is so important. Potential car buyers have a lot of information and this information needs to be accessible immediately. A good auto dealer CRM will feed this information all the way from the ILM (Internet Lead Manager) to the secretary needing to send out thank you notices. Personalized interaction across all customer touch points is crucial to making a sale. This means all manner of communication must be used, telephone, email, Web, wireless devices, and in-person meetings....

There were some interesting keynote speeches at eXtreme CRM 2013 Rome. I am going to highlight a few pieces of information that peaked my interest; see Surviving CRM’s blog post for full details.

The next big update to CRM is codenamed Orion and is slated to be released sometime during the last half of 2013. Orion will:

1)      Remove the Ribbon UI

2)      Remove Classic Forms Completely

This may be alarming. While we don’t know all of the details yet, we do know that there will be more extendibility than there currently is in Polaris. Jscript will be supported on the new UI forms. Although the Ribbon will be completely removed, it will be replaced with a Command Bar to which Custom buttons may be added. Orion is an exciting update, but it is very likely that most customized CRM instances will need some updates. As always, please let us know if you have any questions or need any help.

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Not yet suffering from three-letter-acronym fatigue? Here's a new one for a lot of people: PSA, or Professional Services Automation. Most people have never heard of it, but quickly understand it conceptually just from the name. What almost no one considers, though, is that it makes a lot of sense to automate and manage professional services from within CRM.

 

The biggest problem with any new software implementation, especially with CRM, is company wide acceptance and use. Why is this? Because the 3 crucial steps to making a CRM implementation successful and productive thereafter are almost always overlooked. A CRM is a database geared towards sales, so it needs to be used for that. Let's get started:

It's all about the reports, you must have reports! A good sales manager will know what reports are valuable and be able to produce them from the CRM. The primary purpose of a CRM is to give you the reports that will make your company successful. If you make sure your sales team knows what reports are available, what those reports say, and how to use them correctly, your company will embrace your CRM and make it a success. There must be a dedicated CRM administrator! A CRM system is huge and if used properly will become surprisingly large. Even the small out of the box solutions have this potential to become very large. The successful...

If you have Office 2013, you may be expecting an updated SharePoint Workspace 2013. If you are harboring such a hope, you will be sorely disappointed. However, Sky Drive Pro 2013 comes to the rescue. Sky Drive Pro 2013 is included in Office 2013 and provides streamlined syncing between SharePoint and offline copies of documents accessible right from Windows Explorer. I found this to be a much better solution than SharePoint Workspace.

 

Here's how to get up and running:

Open Sky Drive Pro 2013:

1a. If you haven't opened Sky Drive Pro 2013 before, open it from the Start Menu.



1b. If you have previously opened Sky Drive Pro 2013, you may set up syncing from the task bar:



Enter your SharePoint URL, confirm where the...

You may be wondering what happened to your Jscript with the most recent "Polaris" update to CRM 2011 (automatically applied to online instances or RU 12 for on-premise systems). The most recent update brought the long awaited cross-browser functionality. However, some functions that previously worked have been deprecated. As such, some of your form Jscript may be broken. Thankfully, Microsoft has made it easy to identify the deprecated functions via the CRM 2011 Custom Code Validation Tool. This tool is a managed solution that you import into your system and provides an interface to check to see if your system is using deprecated code.

One you import the solution simply navigate to Settings>Solutions and double click the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Custom Code Validation Tool Solution. This will open an interface which allows you to step through your code and identify any issues. We're of course happy to help with any...

We are growing and have outgrown our humble beginnings! We will be moving into a bigger space as of March 1^st, 2013. We love and appreciate all of our customers and welcome you to stop by in the upcoming weeks to visit our new space! Our new address is: 7135 S. Highland Dr. Suite 203, Salt Lake City, UT 84121. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to send us an email.

Field security can be enabled on custom fields, but not the default fields. To enable field security in CRM 2011, do the following steps:

Customize an Entity, and select the "Fields" list.

Double click the field name that you want to edit and select Field Security "Enable" radio button. Click "Save and Close" the form. Repeat the above step for each field that you would like to use Field Security on. Click "Publish All Customizations" on the Customize Entity Screen. Head down to the Field Security Profiles section of the Component editing window. Create a new Field Security Profile, or select an existing profile.

Adjust the Teams or Users section of the Field Security Profile page give access to the desired group or user. Click "Field Permissions" on the dialog to see a list of fields that have been setup for field level security. For each field, modify its Read, Update or Create properties as appropriate....

"Spray and Pray" is still a term used with derision among sales hands in describing the penchant of some in sales to vomit up features, functions, and related gobbledygook when they are desperate to sell to a customer but don't know what that customer is buying. Yet we're being told that "social selling" is the wave of the future when it comes to selling. Isn't this just the same old spray and pray, but this time using Twitter and Facebook?