iSite

Sales is a poor word for what we do …

“Sales” is a big conversation right now in most companies. And it can be a challenging discussion, as managers try to figure out what exactly needs to be done to grow sales. Sales is hard to talk about. In fact, “sales” or selling are poor words for what sales operations and salespeople actually do. They conjure up an image of the people who do the work, rather than images of what the people should be doing.

If we want to grow sales, a good starting point is to define the whole job. Try this and see if it resonates:

Sales = Activity times Effectiveness

or

Sales = A x E.

Activity refers to the number of times we do something e.g. the number of lead-generating emails we send; the number of dials we make; the number of book appointments.
Effectiveness refers to how we do our work, e.g. the qualifying questions we ask about decision-makers and timings; the content of the opening three minutes of our conversation.

It’s a zero-sum game; if either A or E is at zero, it will lead to a zero result.
If we want our sales people to sell more, we need to help them to see where they stand – today - in terms of their A x E. Until this happens, they will not grow sales. Were we to do this today, for example, with a sample of 10 salespeople, here is the likely outcome:

Note: The missing “10%” are on A x E i.e. too little of both!

1. Two Big Lessons: We salespeople instinctively choose A x E as our most common daily pattern. E seems the easiest. The typical symptom of E-based selling is focusing on one or very few opportunities until we’re forced to drop them. It works if the economy is supplying plenty of new opportunities, but it is very limited in a low growth environment.
2. In the formula, A is more immediately open to influence than E: It can be changed quickly (E cannot). It is easier to change and is open to everyone on the team. And the more “A” we do, the better our “E” gets. But, A x E is the least instinctive choice for me as a salesperson, because A seems the hardest. And contrary to popular perception, “A” requires some finely tuned skills; try securing ten appointments next month with CEOs!

If you’re a manager, you now need to ask yourself these three questions:

1. What is the right level or balance of A x E for each sales role?
2. How do I get my salespeople to really see where they currently are in terms of A x E?
3. How do I support my salespeople in reaching the right balance between A x E?

The next time that a sales growth discussion comes up in your company, think A x E and the gaps in sales performance will start to emerge. Once this clarity comes about, solutions become easier. For example, you may need to increase lead generation capacity or even divide up roles, between A and E. When we hire salespeople, we assume that they come programmed with the right balance of A and E, but they nearly always focus only on E. Therefore, this little formula will even affect how we coach and who we hire.

Now that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 has been released, it is a good time to kick off with a look at some of the application’s new features.

The new edition of Dynamics CRM has so many improvements, new features and productivity wins. We think it is the simple things that go a long way like a really smooth set up procedure!

As Outlook integration is one of the strongest features of Dynamics CRM, let’s start with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Microsoft Office Outlook Configuration Wizard.

The new configuration wizard has the following improvements:

1. The Ability to test the connection to the server while configuring the client.

2. Connect to the Cloud - Dynamics CRM 2011 Online

3. Multiple connections and multiple authentication scenarios

4. The Ability to change Organisation Display Name

5. Synchronise your Organisation

Let’s take a look at each in turn.

• The ability to test the connection.

This new facility allows the user to test the configuration of CRM, identify connection problems and solve these at the early stage.
Configuring the client for CRM 4.0 was problematic in certain scenarios. 

Test Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook Connection

• Connect to the Cloud - Dynamics CRM 2011 Online

The new Outlook client provides the ability to connect to the Cloud edition of CRM 2011.

Note that as part of this setup, you will need a Windows Live ID to login.

• Multiple connections and multiple authentication scenarios.

When setting up a connection, you can choose to use multiple user credentials. This handy feature allows multiple connections to be defined and these connections are available simultaneously in Outlook.
In CRM 4.0 only a connection to one single organisation was possible.

• The Ability to change Organisation Display Name

The display name for the organisation is displayed in the Outlook client, so the ability to change the name can help to better manage multiple organisations. The renaming option is helpful, as multiple organisations can now be displayed in Outlook. We recommended you give your organisations full descriptive names.

• Synchronise your Organisation

One organisation can be set as the default for Data Synchronisation. The Microsoft Dynamics CRM for Outlook client regularly synchronizes the data from the CRM Server.

The options includes: Appointments, Contacts, Faxes, Letters, Phone Calls, Recurring Appointments, Service Activities, Tasks.

All records that you choose to synch may have dedicated filters with conditions for data synchronisation. In CRM 4.0 filters were available only for Contacts.

Another restriction in CRM 4.0 has been removed, where only activities owned by Outlook user or attended appointments were synchronised. In CRM 2011, full filtering options, similar to Advanced find, are available. and there are no ownership limitations (based on a Full Client Access License).

We hope you find this useful and more to come on this topic.

Tomasz

Over the past few months, as part of developing our CRM proposition we have focused hard on 3 things:

1. The launch of Dynamics CRM 2011

2. Becoming a Gold Certified Partner in the CRM Competency

3. Finalising our CRM Improvement Framework

In this post, I’ll outline how we are using each of these to help our clients get more from CRM, and then talk in depth in three seperate posts in the coming week on each topic.

1. The launch of Dynamics CRM 2011

 Dynamics CRM 2011 has reset the goal posts for a CRM package.

Some backstory - SFDC (SalesForce.COM) were first into the cloud and to be fair, were the early visionaries. Their financial success shows that first mover advantage can pay off. They were heady days though, and as cash rich companies expanded, from 2006-2009 they doubled their business year on year.

These days, a large chunk of their clients feel they are paying too much for the privilige, and the Microsoft price-point of 31 euro (just under half the Salesfcorce standard edition) will hurt the bottom line over the coming three years. SFDC are also being forced (no pun intended!) to move into areas where Microsoft are traditionally very strong - the developer community. I know which company we are betting on there!

As we said, Dynamics CRM 2011 has reset the goal posts for a CRM package.

Without looking at the features, we believe Dynamics has all the capabilities to easily fulfill the Sales, Marketing and Customer Care needs of a modern enterprise. It goes way beyond this; with its native Outlook integration and support for Extended CRM - using .NET tools that thousands of developers have spent their careers using.

Our clients are seeing the benefits of this capability - especially ones that already have Microsoft Techn0logy in their estate. Recent research suggests that organisations can gain a 300% ROI when they invest into an existing technology platform. That’s an incredible payoff.

We also firmly believe that the xRM development platform will become the business end of the Microsoft Stack - and being able to develop applications over 5 times faster than using traditional methods really says a lot. Combine the 300% ROI with a metric of 5 times faster and you can quickly see why companies like BWG are choosing Dynamics CRM 2011 as their enteprise platform.

2. Becoming a Gold Certified Partner in the CRM Competency

As part of their realignment of partner strategy, Microsoft have changed the way they certify partners. It is now more stringent and more difficult to become Gold Certified, and a company has to have a minimum of 6 resources highly qualified in being able to provide expertise to clients on the Dynamics CRM platform. There are Consulting Exams, and Sales Exams and also Customer References which much be obtained.

This process involves the partner making a large investment.

iSite have made this investment because we believe fundamentally that our customers will get serious benefit from choosing the platform over the longer term, and that this will result in opportunity for us to provide services and expertise. The classic win-win scenario.

3. Finalising our CRM Improvement Framework

We are very excited about our CRM Improvement Framework. We think this is a first worldwide.
Yes, for sure, Gartner and Forrester have their frameworks, but none of these align in a highly complementary way to a particular technology.

Our Rapid Business Assessment can highlight both gaps and opportunities within an organisation to exploit CRM to its full potential.

We see CRM as a way to get everyone in the business to be focused in the right direction, pulling together to give a strong customer experience and to drive success.

More on this in a future post and I will include a hyperlink from this post for easy reading.

Dave

We have been reviewing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 as part of the beta program.

First impressions?? Seriously good!

The Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 User Experience

The new release offers the best Microsoft Outlook client experience yet. It enables CRM information to take full advantage of native Outlook functionality including previews and conditional formatting.  A feature which is especially useful is the ability to highlight and flag CRM records – just as you would with an Outlook email.

A new contextual CRM ribbon for Outlook and browser clients delivers consistent Microsoft Office navigation and user experiences while the “reading pane” provides the user with an instant view of a record without having to open a new screen. Just as with Outlook, some people like this feature, others prefer not to use it, but either way it delivers user choice.

The user experience is also improved through guided process dialogs. This also saves time and means that organisations and businesses can provide Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 users with step-by-step guidance through any business process or interaction.

Personalisation

New advanced user personalization in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 allows users to create personal views, add commonly used records and design personal dashboards to measure performance. Building on the considerable success of the role tailored client with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, the role-based functionality, using role-based forms and views ensures users have fast access to the relevant information that they need. It also means they are prevented from seeing data that they are not authorized to view or don’t need to see.

Business Intelligence

The new business intelligence (BI) features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 add to the excellent reporting, search and data accessibility features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. These include full drill-down and high quality data visualisation.

The new real-time dashboards in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 are ahead of the curve compared with other CRM software solutions. They plug a significant gap in previous versions of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and offer true business intelligence capability in an easily digestible, quick and simple to use format.

The dashboard functionality enables organisations and users to rapidly configure multiple real-time dashboards and actively monitor business performance. All this improves the speed and quality of decision-making. Coming back to personalisation, the dashboards can be set up by each user and shared between users.  They can also include inline charts with drill-down intelligence to visually navigate data, identify trends, and uncover new insights.

A further BI capability of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 is flexible goal management. This allows businesses to define key performance and business health indicators, and then accurately track and measure their progress against any organizational goal or metric.

Connecting to other Applications

It’s always been possible, with the right skills and resources, to connect or integrate Microsoft Dynamics CRM with other applications.  However the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 new features and functions make it a lot easier to integrate the software with two other major Microsoft products: SharePoint and Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Microsoft SharePoint Server is a natural bed-fellow for Microsoft Dynamics CRM as it provides a wide range of beneficial and complimentary functionality.  Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 provides “out of the box” integration with SharePoint document management, embedding contextual document repositories within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

The release of Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009 R2, again due in the next couple of months, will provide “out of the box” integration between Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This will enable significant productivity improvements on the interaction between front and back office in any organisation.

Flexibility and Configuration

Although Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 provides tremendous scope for configuring and developing tailored solutions, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 takes this to a new level. Microsoft have listened to feedback from users and business partners worldwide and incorporated many small, yet significant changes. From a Microsoft business partner point of view, this gives us the ability to provide our customers with more options and new capabilities to meet their needs. Some of the highlights include:

• Custom activities and communications (we can add in new activity types)
• Field level security
• Data auditing
• Tailored form experience
• Improved knowledge base and sales literature repository

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is Microsoft’s own hosted version of the application, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 helps business partners and end-users that are interested in developing the product in the cloud.  We are also excited about Microsoft Dynamics Marketplace.

This will make it easier to find, evaluate and deploy custom solutions and extensions for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. More on this in future posts!

The iSite Dynamics CRM team

And so the iSite pups made their way to Belfast… to complete their third year in the fast 50.

Titanic Innovation Center was the first stop, where iSite will soon open their second office. Once we navigated the rush hour traffic, our tour guide Mat dropped us off in the Europa to settle in.

The most bombed hotel in Europe was showing no signs of wear and tear as we entered… Phil Ryan drew the long straw, floor 8 and the executive suite (complete with jacuzzi mind) … no prizes for guessing who ‘booked’ the rooms.

Donning our attire, emerging into reception was a blast as the entire crowd had gathered in the foyer… version 1 were lamenting their recent public sector tender loss… leaf consulting were quaffing the champagne on offer (congrats guys!) and everyone was generally having a good time. When the gong went for dinner to be served we glided expectantly to the function room where Deloitte had their logo’s on every fork, table, curtain, plate … ah well not the time to disrespect the sponsors! Their fast 50 programme gives huge exposure and credibility to a large number of emerging businesses. They must gather huge intelligence from getting the financial statements from the entrants though.

The meal was deliciously adequate, standard for these occasions, the beef was superb if a little overdone (I like mine pink in the middle) although the raspberry dessert thing was amazing.

Top ten! Wow. The buzz intensifies on table 2 as none of the people seated have been up to collect a prize yet!

Top 5. Fantastic! what a feeling as  they slow down the pace and give much more exposure to the recipients and even a chance to say a few words on the podium.

2nd on the night!! a tremendous buzz… everyone delighted, and for about 8 hours we forget where we are and just enjoy the moment.

A sincere thanks to anyone reading this as you have most probably contributed to our success. If we have not acknowledged it then shame on us, but just in case .. thank you. As you have in some way helped the guys and myself on the way to becoming a real player in the IT Services market in Ireland. We intend sticking around for a while and giving something back to everyone who has helped us.

Dave

Last evening, Diarmaid and I attended the PMI “Great debate” held in the (once fashionable) Four Seasons. The ice bar was defrosting in the October sunshine.
The panel included Dr. Leo Varadkar (my own TD from Dublin 15) and the Labour Senator Ivana Bacik. The evening’s motion was that: “This House believes that Universal Healthcare in Ireland should be funded through direct taxation”.

After a short business meeting in the bar, and some jolly introductions to new faces in the foyer, down to the serious business of debating the motion.

First up Senator Ivana Bacik pleaded with us to support her vision of Universal Healthcare. She started well, but lost me after hello. The other side responded with a well intentioned and polite rebuttal. This was turning out to be all very above board and mannerly.

At last Leo’s turn, and at once I couldn’t help thinking of Gift Grub. A few moments in, though, Leo landed some punches by presenting his vision of the alternative to funding Healthcare through Direct Taxation. As opposition to the motion, he described though somewhat thinly, how an Insurance Premium could be used to make the cost of healthcare provision more equitable.

The little nugget in his short speech arrived in the middle when he described the plan to “gradually dismantle the HSE”. Hurrah! I cried to myself. And shuffled, a little bored.

The highlight of the evening came when Peter Mas Mollinedo described his experience of the NHS. It had been held up as variously the best and worst of healthcare models. Peter eloquently dispelled a few myths.

And so, on to my own conclusions of the night’s motion.

It seems to me that the Irish Healthcare system is a lot like Irish Rugby before the arrival of the professional era. Everyone had an opinion back then, but the results were consistently shocking. Comparing the 1990’s in rugby terms with now, is a lot like comparing apples with oranges.

And we all know, you can’t criticise an apple from trying to be the best he can be.  But an orange he ain’t or never will be.

In order to modernise our healthcare system we have to bring in a professional era. The amateurs (in this case the HSE) have had their day.
Just imagine.

Like the Rugby, with the right players, setup and the right approach, within a decade we could be hailing a healthcare “golden generation”… and celebrating a grand slam?

Dave

It may seem straight forward to import data with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Import Wizard, however you may experience numerous problems during the process.

First consideration

While preparing your data in Excel, we need to make sure that we are using unique column names. This is a a Common mistake and will cause the following error:  “A duplicate column heading exist.”

Second consideration

During the data map preparation, and we try loading a sample file to map column headings to our target Microsoft Dynamics CRM attributes; we may get the following error:
“The file is too large and cannot be uploaded. Please reduce the size of the file and try again.”

As a result, we cannot proceed any further unless we modify our sample file. There is a system limitation that only accepts up to 105 rows of data. Having more rows than this thros the error.

Third consideration

While preparing the customisation please keep in mind that the wizard uses ‘Display Name’, not ‘Label’ name. We cannot use duplicated Display Name for multiple fields of our entity. If we have multiple fields using the same value for Display Name, then we will have problems choosing which to map to the column.

Fourth consideration

While trying to save our Data Map we may also get the following error:
“The data map already contains this list value mapping.”
This error results from a picklist value mapping.

When we have all the picklist values mapped, the only way to get rid of our mapping is to remove that picklist mapping by setting it to unmapped or ignored. It will clear the mappings, enabling us to redo them properly.
In the case above the error is a result of having the same value typed both in lower and upper cases in the sample data file. We need to make sure that our values have the same formatting as the same value, but typed once with lowercase and then with uppercase, this will be displayed twice in the Corresponding List Values.

Proceed to importOnce we have our Data Map prepared without errors and saved successfully, we should be able to proceed with the import.

The import wizard may show certain warnings, clicking  on the ‘View details’ link below ‘Data map’ field will display the details of the issue.

At this stage, we can still go back and resolve the issue. We can also decide to skip proceed with the import, and the import log will show the successful imports and any failures.

Good luck
Tomasz

Fixing a problem resulting from a content type modification

In SharePoint, a site content type describes the attributes of a document, folder, or list item. Each site content type can have the following:

• A set of properties.
• Forms to edit the properties and display them.
• Workflows to be available for the document or list item.
• The document template to use.

Members of the Owners group (Administrators or Developers) can change the content types for a site.

But beware… changes to content types at list level can have site wide implications!

There is a restriction in SharePoint, where by default, any content types that inherit from a content type that you change, also are updated with the changes.

Let’s take an example.

We create a new content type based on an existing content type in your site e.g. The standard ‘Item’ content type. The ‘Title’ column is a default column present in each list.

If you then change the ‘Title’ column name on your new content type, you may unexpectedly change the column name of the parent content type.

This can cause a serious problem because other content types inherit from that root content type. This change will affect all content types from List Content Types group: Announcement, Contact, Issue etc, and can mean a serious issue across your site collection deployment. All columns and forms fields will be renamed to the name you entered on your custom content type.

Let’s step through the problem first to show how this issue presents itself.

When we create a new content type we have to choose a parent content type. The Standard ‘Item’ content type is a root content type for many other content types. It has one column, ‘Title’, which is inherited by other child content types.

When a new content type is created, it inherits columns and settings from the parent type, in this situation it is the ‘Item’ content type.
Now, if we wanted to modify the ‘Title’ column name of our custom content type, we can click on ‘Title’, link and then ‘Edit site column in new window’ (see figure below).

We choose the options shown and click OK on the following screen (two screenshots below)

We will also create a new site column group for your column to display it on Site Columns page called “Filing List” (example below)

After we save our changes the new custom content type is present on the Site Column Gallery page (See screenshot below)

Now… when we click on the ‘Item’ content type, we notice that ‘Title’ column has been renamed to our custom name! The same applies to any content type that inherits from the ‘Item’ content type.
This is a common issue with SharePoint deployments and changes to content types must be carefully planned.

If we try to reverse the change, we now experiece two issues

We cannot update the column name back to ‘Title’, we receive the following warning:
“The column name that you entered is already in use or reserved. Choose another name.”

Also, when we try to move the column back to ‘_Hidden’ group this group is missing from the ‘Existing group’ list

The solution

The following steps will present a way to reverse this change and recover the parent content type’s original format.

Step 1

Type ‘_Hidden‘ into ‘New group’ field. This will results in hiding the field from the page.

Step 2

Now we have to solve the problem with wrong column name. The method described below requires a change to the database. Microsoft Corporation does not support a direct change to the WSS database, so note that you carry out this step at your own risk, please take your time and be careful!

Open Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio and we connect to the database server hosting our content database.

Expand the content database for your web application and edit ‘ContentTypes’ table. Using the ‘Definition’ column find the row with holds information about the content type. It should look like this:
<Field ID=”{fa564e0f-0c70-4ab9-b863-0177e6ddd247}” Name=”Title” SourceID=”http://schemas.microsoft.com/sharepoint/v3″ StaticName=”Title” Group=”_Hidden” Type=”Text” DisplayName=”File Name” Required=”TRUE” FromBaseType=”TRUE” MaxLength=”255″ Version=”2″ />

In this entry we change DisplayName value to “Title”.

Step 3

Lastly, we go back to our SharePoint site settings and check the name of the ‘Title’ column on name for ‘Item’ content type and also inheriting content types.

This should  have resolved the problem.

Good luck!
Tomasz

You may experience the following error while installing Windows 2008 Server.

“Windows cannot install required files. Make sure all files required for installation are available, and restart the installation. Error code: 0×8007045D”
This error happens while the installer is at the ‘Expanding Windows files’ stage. If you run your installation from DVD install set, then the most likely cause of that error is corrupted data on your install media.

We recently came across this on a brand new installation DVD.

To check if there is an issue with the install set try to copy files from the DVD onto your PC. If you experience an error copying the files you should get another DVD with Windows 2008 Server setup or use an ISO as an installation source that can be downloaded from MSDN.

Once you have an installation set that is not corrupted you should be able to proceed with the installation process without any other issues.
Tomasz

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 and Microsoft SharePoint 2010’s lists and libraries provide the very useful option of reporting from the list data within Microsoft Excel 2007 PivotTables. If you want to store information that you would like to analyse and present in a graphical way and/ or to have the ability to refresh the data while it changes; using Microsoft Excel 2007 PivotTables should be your preferred option.

In this article, I will provide you with a simple guide how to use PivotTables and SharePoint 2010. I will use a list with sample quotes. I will create a report which presents ‘quote amount’ based on quote status and ‘bill to US state’.

First, let’s navigate to the list storing the data.

To use Excel PivotTable you will need to change the view to Datasheet. In SharePoint 2010 you can change a view by clicking on List Tools -> List and then Datasheet View.

Please note that while you are in Datasheet View the following options are active:

• New Row
• Show Task Pane
• Show Totals
• Refresh Data

In previous versions of SharePoint, these options were available from the actions menu. In 2010, they are more accessible. If you click Show Task Pane, a familiar side menu will appear on right hand side.

From that menu choose Create Excel PivotTable Report. Microsoft Excel will be launched and you will be prompted to enable data connection.

Once you enable the connection, Excel PivotTable options are displayed in Excel

 
Now we can quickly build the report.

In this example, we would like to know what are the total amounts quoted by ‘US state’, showing also the ‘quote status’.
I can quickly build such a report by dragging the proper fields to the appropriate report areas.

As a result, I have a table with a summary of quote values grouped by ‘bill to US state’ and by ‘quote total amount’. Now I would also like to present this in a chart. To achieve this we can click on the PivotChart button located on the Excel ribbon.

Le’s choose a column based chart and click OK. We can then format the chart.

We can exclude values using Categories and Series filters. I will exclude blanks value and Active, Closed, Drafts as I am interested only in quotes that were Won with US billing address. I will also Add Data Labels to have exact quotes totals.

From our chart we can clearly see that majority of my Won quotes are for NM (New Mexico). Once designed, the report can be saved to a local drive or published to Excel Services, with the latter being the preferred option. This report provides an option to refresh data, so if there is any change it is just one click for you to update the chart.

Using SharePoint lists for storing data can be very effective way to share information. It empowers business users to analyse data and graphically report from that data. This can reduce time and effort versus creating similar reports via SQL reporting services (which would require significantly more effort). It is also worth mentioning that data in SharePoint lists can also originate from business applications like CRM or any ERP or back end system, and these can be easily integrated into SharePoint.

Good luck!
Tomasz