Or…too much of the Company Kool-Aid can be a Bad Thing

Here’s the Wikipedia definition of E-mail marketing:

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience.

(Read the full article here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_marketing)

For a lot of small to medium-sized firms it’s become one of, if not the most important component of the overall marketing strategy. It’s inexpensive, can be relatively effective, and an efficient way of reaching out and touching lots of customers and potential customers at once.

But it’s a mistake to think of it as a replacement for sales. At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, sometimes you have to pick up the phone and talk to somebody to close the deal. (For that matter, an email will work as well. Just not an email marketing email!)

I guess it’s not surprising that email marketing firms might themselves rely heavily on email marketing. Come to think of it, you probably wouldn’t want to buy from one that didn’t! But here’s a case study of an e-mail marketing firm that seems to drink a little too deeply of its own Kool-Aid, and is missing opportunities to make sales in the process.

Case Study: Exact Target

The firm I’m thinking of is Exact Target. They are the self-described “leading provider of on-demand email marketing software, services and solutions“, and have a hosted service you can use to do the heavy-lifting for your email marketing efforts. For example, their servers, rather than yours, will send out the emails to your contacts from a marketing campaign activity. The emails will still be sent from your address, but your servers won’t be burdened, the chances of successful delivery will be higher, and so forth…In addition, you can see lots of interesting statistics, such as who clicked what link in the email, the time they clicked, and so forth.

ET has some competitors – Constant Contact is one I’ve used before – but one of the things I like best about ET is that they have an integration with Dynamics CRM….at least I think they do: I’ve been told by some clients who use it that it works well, and I’ve seen it advertised and described on ET’s web site. Here’s the landing page for it: http://email.exacttarget.com/Products/ExactTargetIntegrated/MicrosoftDynamicsCRM/default.html)

Plus, they use email marketing to very good effect. They send regular emails out to their contact database, and the content is quite good. I’ve learned a lot about email marketing from their marketing efforts, and in fact their email marketing efforts had the desired effect, at least in my case: I want to find out more about their product and in particular its Dynamics CRM integration, I want to find out how much it costs and how it works so I can use it myself and possibly recommend it to clients and help them use it.

But here’s the rub: I’ve reached out to them three different times over the course of the last 9 months, basically asking them to have a sales rep contact me to provide me the information I need to make a purchase decision…and although I keep getting their nice email marketing emails, nobody ever calls me to close the deal. I’m not such a fogey that I insist on a phone call, either – a direct email (specifically to me) would be fine. The first time I contacted them, I filled out a form on their web site requesting to schedule a demo (http://email.exacttarget.com/RequestADemo/Default.html ). The second time I called into the number on their web site (866.362.4538) and left a voicemail asking to be contacted. Last Wednesday I noticed that they had a live chat feature on their site and had a lovely chat with a helpful representative. I got some of my questions answered, but when I got to the “what’s your pricing model and how can I purchase?” question, I received the response I’d hoped not to: she was going to have someone in sales contact me.

You can probably guess I’m still waiting. Granted, it’s only Monday, and my chat was last Wednesday, but I generally expect faster turnaround time than four or five business days. And based on my previous experience, I’m not all that optimistic about a quick response from the ET sales team.

I don’t use my blog as a way to elicit a particular response from an unresponsive vendor. I use it to write about things that interest me and that I think might interest the people who read it. [Once, however, I posted a bit of a rant about how frustrating an on-boarding experience I had with Microsoft's BPOS (hosted Exchange and SharePoint) service, and I was blown away by how responsive the BPOS team got after that! Now my company is a happy BPOS customer and I'm soooooo glad I don't have to host my own Exchange Server anymore!]

But that being said… if anybody from the Exact Target sales team reads this, please contact me – I’d love to learn about how I might give you money to use your product! (And if anybody else reading this knows of any other hosted email marketing services with nice integrations into Dynamics CRM, please let me know about them!)

My takeaway is this: unless you have a “frictionless” sales process, making it super-easy for a potential customer to find out the necessary details about your product and actually purchase it, don’t rely 100% on E-mail marketing. Sometimes you have to sell. Or at least, let your customers buy!

Richard Knudson — richardk@imginc.com; 312-513-9401

Gartner Reports Eye-Popping Numbers on Dynamics CRM in its Recently Updated CRM Market Share Report

From the standpoint of Dynamics CRM, Gartner’s just-updated CRM market share report is very interesting. Here’s a link to the article: “CRM Software Market Share Analysis, Worldwide 2008“. Here are my biggest takeaways:

• Even in a down economy, the CRM category overall grew by 12.5%.
• The move to Software as a Service (SaaS) was one of the big drivers, increasing from 15% to 20% of the total market between 2007 and 2008.
• Salesforce.com and Dynamics CRM were the growth leaders, with Salesforce growing revenue by almost 43%. Dynamics CRM grew at an eye-popping 75% rate from 2007 to 2008! 

The market share numbers are interesting as well: according to Gartner, only Microsoft (from 4.1 to 6.4%) and Salesforce (from 8.3 to 10.6%) gained share. SAP, while still the overall share leader (22.5%), actually saw a revenue drop of almost 1%.

Based on my experience, it’s not surprising that a lot of Dynamics CRM’s rapid growth is being driven by the movement to “cloud” computing. I’ve been impressed with Microsoft’s SaaS offering — Dynamics CRM Online — since it was first released over a year ago, and I finally pulled the trigger and migrated my company’s production CRM environment to CRM Online.

In addition to the standard arguments in favor of moving to a SaaS/hosted platform (rapid time to value, no infrastructure or installation requirements, automatic updates…), Dynamics CRM has an important unique advantage: regardless of which way you go – on-premise or online – it’s the same fundamental architecture. With a few relatively small exceptions, all of the customizations and configurations you make in one environment work and can be easily migrated to the other. I’ve talked to plenty of clients in the last few years who went with Salesforce.com simply because they wanted a SaaS solution and Microsoft didn’t have one. Now, not only does Microsoft have an increasingly popular hosted CRM option, but they’re unique among the leading vendors in separating your choice of CRM architecture from your choice of a hosted or on-premise platform.

When to Customize Dynamics CRM, when to Extend it?

With the emergence of Dynamics CRM as the “XRM” application platform, I get a lot of questions about the techniques you can use to build those applications. By convention, we use the term customizing to mean “things you can do without writing code”, and extending for “things that do require code”. There’s a three-day training course — Customization and Configuration of Dynamics CRM 4.0 — that covers the no-code side of things. It’s a great course, and I use it as the foundation for private training, workshops and mentoring engagements.

You can only go so far without code, however. With some .NET programming and a little Jscript you can extend Dynamics CRM in some very powerful ways. Extending Dynamics CRM 4.0 is a great 3-day course that’s a natural follow-on to the Customizing topic. If you need to learn things like application event programming, customizing the CRM UI, programming web services, custom workflows, plug-ins, and building custom ASP.NET applications on top of Dynamics CRM, you should consider this course.

Here’s an article I recently wrote that describes the training content we use for Dynamics CRM
(and SharePoint), and the advantages of our skills-centric service delivery model.

For more information about how we can help get you & your team up to speed on customizing and extending Dynamics CRM, please visit our CRM Developer landing page.

Dynamics CRM User Group Meeting on Mobility Solutions, July
30

The DCRMUG July meeting is all about mobility solutions for Dynamics CRM, and we’ve got SoftBridge and CWR Mobility lined up to present. I hope you can join us at 3:00 PM, Thursday 7/30. In person at the Microsoft Downers Grove office, or online. Register here: www.DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com/register

Everybody wants six-pack abs, but you have to do a lot of crunches to get them. And alas, the Body by Jake Ab Machine is no longer on the market. Flabby, unsightly (Dynamics CRM) data are significantly easier to tighten up, and if you follow the simple 3-step program I describe here, your data will be the envy of everybody at the next Dynamics CRM User Group meeting!

In a more serious vein, I think the approach I describe here really can help improve your data quality, and the requirements that drive it are in my experience pretty commonplace. It will help you if

1. you want all of your contact records to be associated with a parent account; and
2. a significant chunk of your contact records are converted from lead records.

Here’s my three-step program guaranteed to get you that perfect data you’ve always wanted:

1. Customize the Contact entity, by making the Parent Account lookup field required.
2. Customize the Lead entity, by adding a lookup field allowing users to tie a lead record to an existing account.
3. Make a workflow that runs when a new contact record is created, checks to see if it originated from a lead, and if so, associates it with the appropriate parent account.

“Out of the Box” Dynamics CRM Lead Conversion

I’ll provide detailed instructions in a minute, but first I’ll provide some background on an important and often misunderstood piece of this: the lead conversion process. In out of the box, un-customized Dynamics CRM, leads are essentially standalone records – they aren’t associated with any other records (such as a parent account), and no other records (e.g., opportunities, invoices, cases…) are associated with them. For example, here’s a pretty-much out of the box lead form:

Notice that not the Topic, Last Name and Company fields are required. Many people don’t like the fact that the text field “Company Name” is required, since users are forced to enter a free-form text field for what may already be an existing account. (One of the customizations I describe below will fix this.) After you save a lead record there’s a Convert button you can click, and if you do, you’ll see that you can convert a lead record into one or more of three different record types: Account, Contact, Opportunity:

Most of the information you’ve entered about the lead (basic information on the lead form, a history of your activities) gets carried over to the records you create during the conversion, which is why you’d go to the trouble of converting in the first place. But since there are lots of permutations of the different records you can create with those three checkboxes, here’s a summary:

It’s the last of these that can get confusing. You can see it if you try to convert a lead to an opportunity and notice you can’t click OK unless at least one other field is filled in: you either have to also convert at least one of the other two convertible records (account or contact)…or you have to select an existing account or contact from the “Potential Customer” lookup field. One potential glitch I’ve noticed is that you can actually select an existing customer to attach the converted opportunity record to, and after doing that, click one of the other two options (or both!):

Yikes! It turns out that if you do this, Dynamics CRM ignores the Potential Customer lookup, and performs the steps described in the last row of the table above.

Besides being confusing, I think the main problem with this out of the box lead conversion process is that it requires you to enter a free-form text field for Company Name that has no tie to any existing account records. All too often, one of these two things happens when a sales rep creates an opportunity record by converting a lead:

• Since they’ve provided a company name on the lead form (they didn’t have any choice, after all), they simply use the account checkbox on the Convert Lead dialog (after all, they’ve already supplied the company name)…and if it’s an existing account, they create a duplicate record.
• They forget to select an account record from the Potential Customer lookup and just select the Opportunity and Contact check boxes. Again, the new opportunity record won’t be attached to the correct account, plus in this case you’ll have a standalone contact record created.

Effectively, this lead conversion process encourages users to enter bad data, by requiring that free-form “Company Name” field on the lead form. If you get a significant number of leads that are in fact contact records at existing accounts (say, collecting business cards at a trade show), this can lead to poor data quality and frustrated sales reps.

Three-Step Summer Workout Program to Whip Your Data into Shape

Try something along these lines:

1. Customize the Contact entity. If you really want all contact records attached to a parent account, change the Requirement Level to “Business Required” for the paretcustomerid attribute (Display Name “Parent Customer”). It’s not required out of the box, but it’s easy to make it required. Open the Contact entity for customization, click Attributes, locate the Parent Customer attribute, and make the change shown in the following screen shot, then save and publish the customization.

   

    

2. Customize the Lead entity. This involves just a little bit more customization. Here are the two most important:
   1. Add a custom N:1 relationship from Lead to Account, and add the lookup field created by Dynamics CRM to the lead form. Give it a display name of “Existing Account”, to make it obvious to your users what it’s for.
   2. Change the requirement level of the companyname attribute (display name “Company Name”) to “No Constraint”, and change its display name to “New Account”, to make sure users only use this free-form text field if they don’t think the account exists.

   After you save and publish those changes, you can make your customized Lead form look something like this:

   

3. Finally, create a workflow that runs automatically when a new contact record is created. (The one I show below is written for the Contact entity, has a Scope of Organization, and runs automatically on the “Record is created” trigger.) It will have logic like this:
   1. Check to see if the new contact record is a converted lead record. (The Contact entity has a sweet attribute – “Originating Lead” – that is designed for this purpose!)
      1. If it is a converted lead record, check to see if the “Existing Account” lookup was filled in. If it was, then the workflow should update the new Contact record by filling in its Parent Customer lookup field with the value of “Existing Account” from the lead record.

   Here’s a screen shot of my workflow’s Step Editor, in its unpublished state:

   

    

After you publish this workflow, create and convert a few lead records to see how it works. By requiring contact records to have parent customers, and by allowing your users to associate lead records with parent customers early on in the sales process, you’ll have happier, more productive sales reps, and your data quality will be the talk of the CRM neighborhood.

If you found this helpful, my book on Building Workflows in Dynamics CRM 4.0 has detailed explanations of topics like this one plus lots of others, and downloadable versions of the example workflows. Here’s a link to the page on Lulu.com where you can find out more and buy the book. 

Cheers – Richard Knudson, richardk@imginc.com

* For SharePoint 2007 and Dynamics CRM, anyway

As I’ve said more than a few times, SharePoint 2007 and Dynamics CRM have some interesting similarities and just as many important differences. Both have emerged as strategically important application development platforms, and I recommend a “right tool for the job” mindset when you’re trying to decide which one to use. Here’s a short article I wrote on Integrating Dynamics CRM 4 and SharePoint 2007, and here’s a link to an instructor-led training course I wrote for Microsoft on the same topic.

On important similarity has to do with the skills an organization will need to realize the potential business value of each application. Generally speaking, I like to characterize the skill sets like this:

• End-users – people who “live” in the applications every day and need to be productive in using the core feature sets.
• Installers – IT professionals who need to install, deploy, upgrade and maintain these applications, support users, and the like.
• Customizers – people who need to configure and customize the applications, but aren’t necessarily .NET developers and don’t necessarily write code.
• Developers – .NET/Visual Studio developers who need to extend the platforms and write custom applications.

My company (IMG – www.IMGinc.com ) provides consulting and learning solutions for SharePoint and Dynamics CRM. We’ve replaced the traditional open-enrollment one-size-fits-all public training schedule with something we think is better: training and mentoring customized to your requirements, delivered privately to your team, when and where you need it.

We’ve got a comprehensive curriculum for all the skills you need for both products – from end-users to advanced developers – and I encourage you to use the curriculum as a starting point to build just the skills you need. The following table lays this all out for each skill set and includes links to the detailed course outlines. I’ve also included the traditional instructor-led-training (ILT) course durations:

Our Delivery Model

Our delivery model bears little resemblance to traditional public training, so you should take the course timings in the table with more than a grain of salt! Our custom training and mentoring engagements are … well… custom, so while the timings give you a reasonable idea of how much learning content each course contains, they generally will not correspond to the actual calendar days of any particular engagement. Here are some of the most popular ways we customize our training and mentoring engagements:

• We work with you to determine the exact topics you need covered.
• We deliver a blended combination of live online and live in-person training and mentoring.
• We can use your data and examples to make the training more relevant.
• We provide ongoing support in the form of subscriptions to online classrooms with content, recordings and more.
• We combine our training and mentoring engagements with the delivery of custom solutions.

Basically, we can provide the assistance you need in installing, configuring or building custom solutions on SharePoint or Dynamics CRM, combined with the skills you need to be self-sufficient going forward. Whether your organization is an enterprise trying to realize the potential of these products or a Microsoft partner building a practice, I encourage you to contact me to discuss how we can make our skills-centric services work for you.

Regards,

Richard Knudson — richardk@imginc.com

Since I first posted some practice test content for the CRM 4 certification exams, I’ve been hard at work writing more questions, and QA’ing the existing ones.

Here are links to the demo versions of the most recent practice tests for the three core Dynamics CRM 4.0 exams. I call them demos since they have fewer questions than my full-blown practice tests, and they don’t randomize questions. Links to all of the practice tests can be found on the new Certification Prep page hosted on www.IMGinc.net 

I’ve authored a l0t more test questions than the ones in the demo tests, and I include the complete set of prep questions for each exam in the corresponding Skill-Pack subscription. These Skill-Packs are an outgrowth of my last couple years of delivering the CRM 4.0 Certification Bootcamps, on behalf of Microsoft, to the U.S. partner community.

Let me know what you think — I’d love to get your feedback on the questions!

Richard Knudson – richardk@imginc.com

When to Wait, When to Timeout?

When it comes to workflows in Dynamics CRM, timing isn’t the only thing that matters, but it’s definitely up there. In the 4.0 release we have lots of flexibility in this area, and I know from the questions I often get (not to mention my own learning experience!) how confusing it can be to keep the different options all straight. In particular, the “Wait” and “Timeout” conditions are both important ways of pausing a work process, and they seem similar, at least at first. As it turns out, they serve quite different functions, and I’ll try to clarify them here with a brief explanation and a couple examples:

Use Wait when you want a work process to pause until a condition changes. Some common examples of the kinds of conditions you might Wait for include:

• Wait until an assigned task is completed
• Wait until the status or status reason of a record changes
• Wait until the value of an attribute in a related entity changes

Use Timeout when you want a work process to pause until a specified date, for a specified period of time, or until you reach a date relative to the value of a CRM record’s date field. Some examples of these include:

• Timeout until an Opportunity record is “overdue” (the current date is greater than the opportunity’s estimated close date)
• Timeout until September 1, 2009 (maybe there’s a conference coming up on September 8 and you want to send a one-week reminder email to attendees)
• Timeout until one week has passed since a new Account record was created

In Dynamics CRM-speak, we can say that a Wait condition will be met when the attribute value of some entity changes. On the other hand, a Timeout condition will be met when time passes: either clock time or time relative to the value of a date attribute of some entity. My little mnemonic to help me remember is that of the two conditions, only Timeout contains the word “time”. Clever, eh?

Using a Wait in a Workflow

Here’s an example of a Wait condition: a simple sales process might have stages, and one or more stages might assign tasks. There’s nothing about creating and assigning a task record in Dynamics CRM that makes a workflow pause, so if you want to make sure the task gets completed before going on, you can add a condition, to the effect “Wait until activity status=completed”. The following screenshot shows a simple sales process implemented as a workflow on the Opportunity entity. It starts automatically, when a new opportunity is created, and has these characteristic Wait until conditions in each of the first two stages of the sales process:

Using a Timeout in a Workflow

I understood Waits before I understood Timeouts – probably because the latter are a little harder to find! One of my favorite examples of using a Timeout in a workflow is another aspect of a sales process: making sure that opportunities don’t go past their estimated close date (or at least, if they do, make sure you take appropriate action!). Here’s a simple implementation of that logic, in an automatic opportunity workflow that starts by timing out until one day before the “Est. Close Date” of the opportunity and sends a reminder email. Next, it times out until seven days after the opportunity was supposed to close…and closes it out if it is. (Implementing a process like this might be a culture shock for some sales organizations, so you might want to warn them in the reminder email that this will happen.)

If you clicked on the second of these two Timeout conditions, here’s what the condition looks like:

Like I said, this is pretty well hid! In order to add the Timeout condition, you first have to select Wait Condition from the Add Step menu, and only when you open the Specify Workflow Condition dialog do you actually configure the Timeout! Within the Specify Workflow Condition dialog you do this by selecting the somewhat cryptic “Workflow” value from the first column’s drop-down menu, and then selecting Timeout in the second column, as the previous screenshot illustrates. After selecting Timeout, you’ll see that “Equals” is your only option in the third column, and then you use the Form Assistant to configure the Timeout. In the example I show here I followed these steps to configure the condition:

1. selected “7″ in the Days field
2. selected “After” in the next field
3. selected the Opportunity entity in the Look for pull-down
4. selected “Est. Close Date” as the field to make the Timeout condition evaluate

This takes a little getting used to, but after you do it a few times you get the hang of it.

(In my opinion, this would be easier to understand if you could select either Wait Condition or Timeout Condition from the Add Step menu directly, but then I didn’t design the CRM 4.0 workflow design UI.)

If you found this helpful, my book on Building Workflows in Dynamics CRM 4.0 has detailed explanations of topics like this one plus lots of others, and downloadable versions of the example workflows. Here’s a link to the page on Lulu.com where you can find out more and buy the book. 

Cheers – Richard Knudson, richardk@imginc.com