“Paralysis by analysis” means having so much data that it becomes difficult to take any action. And it is an issue that organizations frequently run into with getting users to adopt a customer relationship management solution. Users see long lists of activities, leads, opportunities, cases and accounts - and they don’t know where to begin to manage their day in the CRM system. The results can be devastating to the bottom line and often include: failing to work the best leads, opportunities slipping through the cracks, key customers being ignored and follow-up commitments aren't met. Ultimately, it may lead your team to abandon CRM and go back to more familiar ways to manage relationships.

Customer relationship management (CRM) projects are particularly difficult to successfully deliver. In fact, research into CRM project failures over the last 10 years has consistently found a failure rate between 30% and 70%. A quick scan of the proposals that we have delivered to new clients for CRM projects over the past 12 months shows that fully 59% of new clients who approach us are dealing with a need to administer CPR on their CRM implementation. This is true across all CRM products (we have seen failed CRM projects across virtually every CRM solution on the market). In this article I’ll take a look at one of the most frequent causes of failure that we have encountered and will offer some guidance for avoiding this (or for recovering if you’re already there). I will also be doing a deeper dive into this topic during our CPR for CRM Webcast. 

While many people have enjoyed the “You Might be a Redneck If” jokes by Jeff Foxworthy, few people are aware of the applicability to the IT community. As a professional IT consultant for C5 Insight, I have saved a number of clients from unfortunate situations caused by their previous, not-so-qualified consulting partners.

Successful user adoption, or the mental acceptance and use of something new, can be achieved in any organization. There are a number of methods that can be used to implement new systems, including "big bang" (single rollout) or "phased adoption" (gradual rollout). Regardless of the method you use to rollout user adoption in your organization, there are a few important items that must be factored into your plan.

There isn’t a day that goes by, where I come across some type of challenge, situation, issue, or piece of new learning that isn’t worth sharing with others. This article encourages you to blog, explains why it's important, and provides ideas on how to make it a natural part of your day.

A RAD Approach to CRM Projects

As a company that provides customer relationship management (CRM) services, we’re big advocates of using your CRM system to track and approve sales commissions.  But sometimes it can be impractical to do this.  This is particularly true in complex organizations, small organizations or fast-growing organizations where you need the flexibility to quickly adapt your commission model to a changing situation in the marketplace.  Long-term, everyone should aim to handle commissions in their CRM system, but what do these organizations do in the short-term?

The good news is that SharePoint is an excellent tool for giving you all of the flexibility you need, while still having an efficient process for setting, tracking and distributing commissions.  Here’s how it can work for you.

Today I want to welcome you to the world of Flows. We will break this down into a couple different blogs since this is a large topic to cover in one day. However, I first want to introduce you to them and explain how they can assist you in your SFDC organization.

Flows were designed by SFDC to help you create a more complex workflow without having to know or understand APEX. APEX can be very hard to jump into if you are a non-developer, so this is a great alternative for the everyday admin of SFDC. Basically, flows does exactly what it sounds like. It is a guided user experience based upon a set of steps and questions you predefine in your flow. For my example, I set up a flow that will guide a receptionist or a Tier 1 support user through a set of questions that will automatically create a case, activity and update my account with a last contacted date. The goal for setting up this flow is not only creating a better experience for the user to create a Support Case for your customer, but also creating a process in which your users will not miss any details when creating a support case. This also helps to save time for your users with their everyday duties.

Several days ago I wrote a post in response to the successful South Carolina cyber-attack (that earlier post can be found here).  Although the security benefits alone are enough to justify starting the move to the cloud, there are numerous other cost-saving and productivity improving reasons for state and local governments to consider making the move. 

Earlier this week it was announced than an international hacker had successfully made off with over 3 million social security numbers and almost 400,000 credit and debit card numbers from the state of South Carolina.  State and local governments have collectively spent billions of dollars trying to secure their data systems.  In spite of this investment, a hacker was able to identify and exploit a weak spot in their armor.  As public sector budgets are continuing to shrink, there is pressure to add more software applications to automate tasks and lower costs; increasing pressure to cut costs on security for these applications; and increasing pressure to extend the life of less secure and aging legacy computer applications.  The result is that our government agencies are at increasing risk of successful cyber-terrorism through a greater number of applications, lower security standards, and aging applications that should be replaced.

How could South Carolina and other state and local governments cost-effectively protect vital citizen, business and government records?  The answer comes from an emerging private-sector technology: cloud computing.

This is my third blog in a series concerning data integration. In my first two blog entries we overviewed some of the data integration hurdles as well as some of the common methods used to discover the net-change data that will need to be translated. Here in my third blog I’ll discuss some of the benefits of not integrating in real-time, but creating a batch job to perform the integration. We’ll also look at the Business Rules that may need to be applied within the integration process.

In my previous blog focusing on the hurdles of real-time, two-way data integration, I highlighted the hurdle of how to discover the data you need translated. In most cases, discovering the net-change data is all you want to translate on a real-time basis. Remember, a two-way integration means net-change data going in two directions or more (depending on the number of systems you’re integrating) at a rate determined by how many end-users there are on each of the systems being integrated. Business systems with a significant amount of end-users can create substantial volumes of net-change data.

In some cases, if not all too some extent, integration between Dynamics™ CRM , Salesforce® or/and SharePoint® with your back-office system is the key to user adoption. Real-time, two-way data integration allows all segments of the business to access the very latest transactional data, and the information that the data contains.

Do you see the person in the picture to the left?  She is a salesperson.  Why is she so happy?  Because she is using her CRM system right now, while she’s talking on the phone.  And it’s taking her less time than ever before.  And her manager is getting the reports that he wants at the same time!  And she gets her work done in CRM when she would otherwise have “down time”?  How is all this possible you ask?  Read on …

We frequently hear complaints from sales users that they don’t like having to take the time to track meetings and phone calls in their CRM system.  Many sales people feel that this just takes away from the time that they can spend in conversations with prospective customers.  While it is critically important that sales people are disciplined about tracking relevant activities in CRM, there are some helpful shortcuts available to save some time – or to make use of “down time” while driving or waiting for a meeting.

We all know that successful implementation and adoption is a major challenge with CRM implementation.  We all know many implementations never deliver the value that was promised.  However, I think very few people realize that the main culprit in derailing adoption is often the same group that approved the budget for the system and were the biggest proponents of everyone using the system.  Great requirements, great implementations and great training can and do get undermined.  It happens far more often than you might think.

Which clients should we focus more time on? Are there any clients that we should consider firing? How can we find new clients that look like our best current clients? Do we have clients that should be more profitable?

These are the questions that many B2B firms are asking themselves as they think through how they should prioritize their client list.  So read on for some of the how’s and why’s of establishing a client scoring system.

Our blogs, on-demand videos and events lists have expanded so much in the last year, that we’ve been asked if we can provide some options to follow selected topics only.

So if you would like to focus on information by product (Salesforce.com, Dynamics CRM or Microsoft SharePoint) or by role (Business or Technical) – you have options to do that.  You also have options to choose which channel you want to follow us on (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIN, RSS or e-mail).

If you’re already following C5 Insight – THANKS.  Take a few minutes today to visit the new follow us page and update the way you follow us so you will get only the information that you want.

If you’re not following us yet, now is the perfect time.  Follow us to keep up with the latest tips, techniques, best practices, on demand videos and live events.

AND … to sweeten the pot … we will be giving away 5 copies of our forthcoming book, “Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Administration Bible” to a randomly selected list of those who are following us.  More details are in the full posting.

All it takes is two or three quick clicks.  Click here to follow us: www.c5insight.com/follow

Cloud computing has been the subject of much conversation (and hype) for about a year now. Our 4 City Tour (www.successaccelerators.com/4city) focused on this, as did some recent research with one of our partners (white paper forthcoming) and our partner Salesforce.com has long led the charge in the cloud computing conversation.

This past week, cloud computing took center stage at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington DC. From all indications, cloud computing will be the number one area of focus for Microsoft for the next 12 months (or more). So just what is cloud computing, why is it important to you and what is Microsoft doing that will impact it?  Let’s tackle each of those questions in sequence.

The failure to understand and execute an effective activity management process is a leading cause of poor CRM adoption.  There are a variety of issues that can make activity management confusing and frustrating for users in ANY CRM system.  In this posting, I've detailed 11 suggestions for improving your activity management process. 

This is only a starting point.  Proper use of Queues and Workflows - in particular - are areas that can also improve your activity management efficiency and results.

I wanted to let all of our readers know about a cloud computing event that will be held in 4 cities along the East coast.  I admit, it is my company that is hosting the “4-City Tour” but this really is a going to be a good way to see many cloud platforms at work.

Highlights:

    Parallel sessions on Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, SharePoint, and Unified Communications
    Integration luncheon showing a live demo of integration between CRM, SharePoint, and UC
    Exclusive research on the top cloud challenges from CFOs and CIOs
    Exclusive demos of SharePoint 2010
    Exclusive session showing Microsoft CRM and Salesforce.com in a live side-by-side comparison

Cities:

    May 4 – Charlotte, NC
    May 6 – Washington, DC
    May 11 – Raleigh, NC
    May 13 – Atlanta, GA

Looking for a fast way to get a demonstration of Dynamics CRM, Microsoft SharePoint or Salesforce.com?  A new site: demos.c5insight.com has been setup for just this purpose.  You'll find a variety of demos on the site for different types of users including:

* Fundamentals of CRM, Document Management and Business Process Automation

* Integrating SharePoint and Dynamics CRM

* Comparing Microsoft CRM and Salesforce.com

Looking for a demo that's not available?  Post a comment in response to this blog and we'll try to follow-up on requests that we're seeing most frequently.

What is Batch APEX?

Batch APEX is a way to run code in a batch in Salesforce.com.  It can be scheduled or called to run asynchronously.  Batch APEX has three primary asynchronous methods: Start(), Execute(), and Finish() that handle all of the processing in the batch. 

After downloading the Salesforce.Com Connector for Outlook I noticed that it was hardcoded to what SFDC server I could connect to. I needed to do some testing and struggled to find where I could change the URL.  My end goal was to change the Server URL to point to https://test.salesforce.com/services/soap/c/10.0

After poking digging around in the registry I found a place that this could be changed. If you open your registry and go to “HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Salesforce.Com/SM” you will see an entry called “Server URL.” There you can change that link to point to your sandbox instance. Once you have done that you can re-open Outlook and type in your login credentials. Make sure that when you login you also add your Salesforce.Com token to your password.  Hope this helps you save some time!

Thanks to gokubi (a really great blog that I read often - it's written by a CRM consultant for non-profits, but has tons of good info for any Salesforce.com user), I just found out that the Summer '08 landing page and release notes are live! Multiday calendar events, inline editing on list views, filtered lookups, and lead conversion improvements are just a few of the many highlights. More info to come ...