Event celebrates and promotes small business success with professional workshops, networking events, giveaways and more

SALT LAKE CITY--June 17, 2013--Customer Dynamics is proud to announce that it has been invited to lead groundbreaking Microsoft Dynamics CRM workshops during Microsoft's Small Business week, June 17 to 22, at the Microsoft Store at City Creek Center in downtown Salt Lake City, Utah.

"As a Salt Lake City-based technology company focusing on full-service customer relationship management software and solutions, Customer Dynamics is pleased to have the opportunity to not only celebrate local business but also help them boost their bottom line," said Deborah Deragon, Business Development Manager and Social Media Ninja at Customer Dynamics. "We're looking forward to showing businesses how the fast, flexible, and affordable...

Sharing records among users in different business units may at first glance seem impossible. However, teams can allow users to access records outside of their business unit. For exceptional instructions see Using Teams To Solve Complex Record-Sharing Scenarios on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Blog.

You know that one of the foundations of your business is your ability to coordinate your marketing, sales and customer services teams. You streamline operations, increase efficiency, and seize opportunities to build the kind of long lasting relationships with your customers that translate to bottom-line success.

But the foundation of the best CRMs is, we've found across the board, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It was designed from the ground up with industry-leading Microsoft insight. And it works to give your teams, from marketing to sales to customer service, the tools they need to increase sales and improve service levels. All without ever leaving Outlook.

Why is Microsoft the industry-leading CRM technology provider? Microsoft Dynamics CRM gives you the capability to easily create and maintain a clear view of customers from first contact through purchase and post-sales—along with a native Microsoft Office Outlook experience.

A critical...

A customer relationship management system (CRM) for auto dealerships has a very basic, fundamental use: to keep you focused on your customers. To sell more cars, get more service appointments, and just get more customers through the door, a CRM makes the difference.

Deciding what CRM to choose (and which software provider to partner with), is an important decision that will affect your sales, your sales force, and your customers right from the start. When it comes to choosing a CRM, you need to start with a checklist of must-haves.

User Interface

One of the biggest barriers to an effective use of a CRM? The salespeople and managers who are required to use them. Your users are working on the fly, so they need a fast, efficient, easy to use and intuitive interface that lets them interact with your system quickly and make decisions on their feet. Beyond cost, usability is probably the most important...

Occasionally very large solution imports in on-premise CRM organizations will fail because they time-out. This time-out issue can often be resolved by following the instructions in this Microsoft Knowledge Base article.

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...