Block off your calendar for Thursday, April 29 2010 3:00 PM to 5:00 PM CST: we’ve got CoreMotives (www.CoreMotives.com) scheduled to present on its suite of integrated Internet marketing tools. And when I say “integrated”, I really mean “integrated smack dab in the cozy confines of your very own Dynamics CRM, regardless of whether you’re running Dynamics CRM 4.0 on-premise or Dynamics CRM Online”.

I’ve been giving their suite a test-drive over the last week, and already I’m liking it. After installing it, I dropped a javascript tracking-code snippet onto the main page of my WordPress blog (www.DynamicsCRMTrickBag.com ), and you can see the results here:

It does a LOT more than track anonymous visitors to your web site (e-mail marketing, for example), but the previous figure is a pretty good one-screenshot intro, for now at least. If you’re going to Convergence, Rhett Thompson of CoreMotvies will be there exhibiting, so stop by their booth and say hello. And use the following form (courtesy of DCRMUG member CRMInnovation’s excellent Web2CRM add-on) to register for the April 29 DCRMUG meeting and see CoreMotives integrated marketing suite first-hand.

Richard Knudson — richardk@imginc.net

Here are the add-on vendors we’ve featured at DCRMUG. Links to articles on their presentations are included in the sidebar, and many of those articles include links to the recorded session. Also: most of them will be at Convergence 2010, so block off your schedule now and join us in Atlanta!

How do you take the information submitted on a web form and pop it into Dynamics CRM? This feature – sometimes referred to generically as “web-to-CRM”, or “lead-to-CRM” – is not included in Dynamics CRM 4.0 on-premise, but has been added to Dynamics CRM Online. The built-in approach in the cloud version is better than nothing, but there’s a better solution, Web2CRM from CRMInnovation, if you’re willing to spend $495.

The Dynamics CRM Online implementation is a good start, but as I said it’s somewhat limited:

• The only entity a web form can push data into is the Lead entity. 
• Before going into the Lead entity, the data make a stop in a temporary holding place referred to as the “Internet Lead”. And these must be manually imported before they become “real” lead records. This is a big limitation, because it means you can’t have an auto-responder workflow run immediately after a visitor to your web site fills out a form.
• You can only have a maximum of ten lead capture forms.

On the positive side, the forms you can create are beautiful – much better than anything I could ever design, certainly. Here’s an example, the Dynamics CRM User Group February meeting registration form, in all its Emerald glory: https://img.leads.dynamicssite.com/DCRMUG-Registration.aspx

If you need a more flexible web-to-CRM capability, you should consider Web2CRM from CRMInnovation. (www.CRMInnovation.com). This add-on works with both Dynamics CRM Online and on-premise, and overcomes all of the limitations of the Dynamics CRM Online implementation. Here’s an article I wrote about it a while back: http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/2009/04/23/auto-responders/

Once you have a tool like this, you’ll be surprised at how useful it can be in various scenarios:

• You can use it to create surveys, pushing the survey results into a custom entity in Dynamics CRM. (Here’s one I made for the Dynamics CRM User Group Annual Member Survey)
• You can use it to create information request forms, allowing a visitor to your web site to request information on various products or services you offer. Here’s one I made that lets you select one of a couple CRM customization samples to get e-mailed back to you.  
• You could create a special offer form with a text field for an rsvp code. Send out the rsvp code in an e-mail so only your VIP customers get the rsvp. You’ll be redeeming rsvp’s for your VIPs ASAP! 

And of course, you can simply collect information from people who might be interested in your stuff. Here’s a form that lets you subscribe to the Trick Bag, created with the Web2CRM, humbly submitted for your form-submitting pleasure: http://www.dynamicscrmtrickbag.com/subscribe/

Dynamics CRM is the best place to store your customer information, and track all of your sales, marketing and service interactions with them. Unfortunately, it’s not the best place to perform some of those interactions, such as e-mail. Yes, it’s fine for tracking one-off e-mails (especially if you’re using the Outlook client), but when it comes to e-mail marketing, the out-of-the-box features of Dynamics CRM leave plenty to be desired. What we need is e-mail marketing integrated with Dynamics CRM. There are more options all for this all the time, and in this article I discuss integrations for both Exact Target and Constant Contact, and my recent experience with the Constant Contact integration.

First, why do we need integration with a third-party application? Here’s a quick summary of the limitations of a 100%-pure Dynamics CRM e-mail marketing approach:

• The e-mail editor is weak, and creating nicely formatted e-mail templates is difficult. It’s true you can use Word mail-merge, but that’s a bit clunky, and only really works well if you’re using the Outlook client.
• If you do send out an e-mail blast to hundreds or thousands of recipients, all of those e-mails will be sent out directly from your e-mail server, a fact that will neither endear you with the spam police nor get you a very high delivey rate.
• Finally, you will have no statistics on what happens to all those e-mails: How many are delivered, how many are opened, how many links get clicked and who clicks them?

All of these limitations can be overcome if you use a hosted e-mail marketing service, like Exact Target or Constant Contact. Once you get used to their features you’ll never want to do e-mail marketing any other way. That is, until you get tired of the hassle of continually exporting your contacts from CRM, importing into the e-mail marketing platform, and maintaining opt-outs in two different places!

Until Microsoft includes these important features into the core product, what we need is integrated e-mail marketing. This is available for some of the e-mail marketing platforms, including Exact Target and Constant Contact, with the following features:

Exact Target provides a direct integration of its e-mail marketing features with Dynamics CRM. I’ve never used it but have many customers who use it and like it. It’s been out for a long time, and apparently includes an “Exact Target” option in the marketing campaign “Channel” list, which if selected allows an elegant direct integration, so you can simply distribute an e-mail activity from you campaign and have Exact Target deliver it, track responses and synch them back to your Dynamics CRM. Two problems with Exact Target:

• It’s quite expensive.
• Worse (from my standpoint, this was the deal-killer), it only works with the on-premise edition of Dynamics CRM. My production CRM is in the cloud, so I can’t use it.

Constant Contact does not integrate directly, but a third-party, Zero2TenCRM, has created a solution. It’s called CRM to Constant Contact, CCC (pronounced C-cubed) for short. I’ve been using this solution lately, and while it isn’t quite as tight as the Exact Target approach, I like it. Basically, it allows you to flag a marketing list to “Synch with the E-mail provider”, in which case the members of the list get pushed automatically to Constant Contact (CC) as a “contact list”. In CC, contact lists are what you execute your e-mail campaigns against, so this automatic synching relieves the pain of exporting, importing and all that. Even better, after you send your CC e-mail, all of those great statistics (opens, clicks, etc.) display like normal in CC, but also get synched back to your Dynamics CRM. Plus, it meets my runs-in-the-cloud criterion, working as it does with both the on-premise and Online versions of Dynamics CRM.

The following figure shows one of the product’s customizations to my Dynamics CRM:

Notice the “Synch to e-mail provider” button at the bottom of my marketing list form. Select it, save the list, and the next time you go to your Constant Contact, you’ll have what CC refers to as a “Contact List” (essentially the same thing as a Dynamics CRM marketing list) automatically created and synchronized with the CRM list.

As I mentioned above, having my marketing lists synchronized between Dynamics CRM and Constant Contact is a nice feature and saves me a lot of importing, exporting and double list maintenance hassle. But it gets even better after I send out a marketing e-mail from CC. Here’s what I’m used to seeing, in CC:

With this integration, here’s what I can now see in Dynamics CRM:

This is the corresponding summary information for the “E-Mail Marketing” campaign that the CCC application automatically creates in Dynamics CRM when a Constant Contact e-mail is sent to a synchronized marketing list. Now, all the great response data I used to have locked up separately in Constant Contact is now available where I need it and where I can do something with it: right in my Dynamics CRM where it belongs.

No product is perfect, and here are a couple areas where this one needs-improvement:

• Synching is (quite!) asynchronous and there’s no manual synch capability. If you’re as impatient as I am to see all those opens and click-throughs, this is a bummer.
• In the CCC approach, the e-mail IS the campaign. Every CC e-mail creates an “E-Mail Marketing Campaign” in your Dynamics CRM. This is a little less flexible than the standard CRM marketing campaign, which can have multiple campaign activities (e-mails, letters, phone calls, etc.)

These are minor, however, compared to the time this product saves me and the valuable campaign response data I now get automatically synched to my Dynamics CRM, where it belongs. A representative from Zero2TenCRM will be presenting at the February 11 meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group, so if you want to check this tool out, please join us! Attendance at the meeting is free, and you should go here to register if you’d like to attend.

At the December meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group, I announced and encouraged members to fill out an online survey. It was a pretty simple survey, with questions on where members are located, what job roles they hold, what kind of organizations they work for, and the like. I also wanted to use the survey to get some guidance on what kinds of session topics were more (or less) popular.

The survey questions were pretty simple, but I thought the results were interesting. In the month after the session, we got 23 respondents, and I will report the aggregated results in this article.

From a Dynamics CRM perspective, the interesting thing about the survey is that I implemented it within Dynamics CRM. The step-by-step how-to of implementing a survey in Dynamics CRM is actually quite interesting, and absolutely worth a separate article.

For now, the actual survey results will have to suffice, so here you go!

What Certifications Do We Have?

We are definitely a well-certified group. I asked which of the Dynamics CRM 4.0 core certification exams people had passed, and here are the results:

70% of us have passed the Applications exam, 48% the Customization exam and 39% Installation/Deployment. The Applications exam was by far my favorite, too: In fact, I liked it so much I took it twice!

Where Do We Live?

Wow. 17% of us are from Europe or Asia-Pacific., and a bare plurality from my home time zone.

Who Do We Work For?

That’s a good mix: two-thirds of us almost equally split between end-customers and MS partners with the rest from ISVs, non-MS partner consulting firms and the “other” category.

What Do We Do?

Not surprising that a majority of our members are IT Professionals, but I was pleasantly surprised with how well sales, marketing and management are represented.

What Kinds of Presentations Do We Want?

These are averages of all responses. The three options were each ranked on a 1-5 scale, 1 being “Most preferred”, 5 least. No doubt Edward Tufte would object to my graphical display of the quantitative information in question, and he’d be right. But I wasn’t thinking that far ahead. So just remind yourself that the average of “2″ for Technical sessions indicates a higher preference than the “2.95″ for Introductory.

We celebrated DCRMUG’s first year with what I thought was an excellent meeting! It was different from our usual dedicated-topic sessions, since we covered a raft of different topics by way of reviewing all of the new features Microsoft included in the November Service Update for Dynamics CRM Online. As usual, along the way a number of interesting side-topics came up, questions were asked, so here’s a recap, with links to the recordings and other pages you might find interesting:

• I kicked off the meeting, and in the substantive part of my presentation covered two main topics: how to configure your (new) home page dashboard and how to use the Chart Designer: Introduction and Part 1.
• Jonathan Lee did a great job with a LOT of different topics. He covered the new & improved data import tool, the new tool in the Outlook client for importing contacts, Mobile Express, the built-in sampled data set, and a few others: Part 2 and Conclusion.

I announced the availability of our first annual DCRMUG Annual Member Survey. We’ve had a nice response so far, and if you haven’t filled out the survey form yet there’s still time! On Monday December 21, Kim Nogle & I will perform the ritual raffle drawing, and three lucky winners will get free attendance at their choice of one of my upcoming Dynamics CRM Essentials events.  If you like DCRMUG I think you’ll like these fast-paced one-day training sessions!

 Here are two links related to some of the other questions that came up:

•  The E-Mail Router now works with BPOS Exchange Server
• Dynamics CRM SDK article about programming Visualizations

Also, Ian Smith (I think it was Ian – apologize if not!) asked about data migration and integration tools. I mentioned that Scribe is probably the most popular provider of integration software, and nobody seemed to disagree with that characterization. For data migrations, one of my favorite ISV’s, CRM Innovation, has a new tool called Data2CRM that you should check out.

• Scribe: www.ScribeSoft.com
• CRM Innovation: www.CRMInnovation.com  

And in the “speaking of which” category: If you take the member survey, I’m sure it will give you a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that as soon as you click submit, your survey responses will create a brand-new record in a custom Dynamics CRM entity I created to capture survey responses!  Being able to survey customers, members, subscribers and so on is an important way to communicate, and I’m happy to recommend CRMInnovation’s excellent product, Web2CRM, which is what makes possible our DCRMUG member survey.

Finally, I want to close by thanking, on behalf of what passes for management of our little group, all of the members of the DCRMUG community for your participation in a great first year. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and I’m looking forward to a great year #2.

 Here’s my short list of “essential” links, downloads and various resources for Dynamics CRM 4.0 and Dynamics CRM Online. I hope you find it useful, and let me know if I missed any of your essentials.

The training’s so good, you’ll forget how efficient it is!

Even a casual reader of the Trick Bag will know that I never ever would have survived by writing ad copy. The headline of this article is another proof of this point, but I wanted something snappy to communicate the essence of the Dynamics CRM Essentials training series I’m delivering in the coming months, in conjunction with United Training. Here’s the spiffy new logo I had my designer (me) create:

The Essentials are a series of 1-day live online training sessions, delivered by yours truly. Here’s the schedule current as of late January, 2010

• Friday, Jan 29 2010: Building Workflows in Dynamics CRM 4.0
• Thursday, Feb 4 2010: Customizing Dynamics CRM and the XRM Platform
• Thursday, Feb. 25 2010: Building Value on Dynamics CRM Applications

I’ve designed the training content myself, and I think for a lot of people it will be just the right combination of efficiency and learning effectiveness. The one-day format is aggressive for a product as broad as Dynamics CRM, but here’s why (and for whom) it will work:

1. These sessions are targeted to experienced users, power-users, customizers and IT professionals. You do NOT have to be an expert to take these (the point is to turn you into one!), but if you don’t have any experience in Dynamics CRM you’d be better off with a more traditional training delivery.
2. I cover a lot of topics…but I use my editorial judgment about what are really the most important things for you to know. (Hence the “Essentials” bit). There’s no fluff, for one thing. For another, I’ll simply skip topics that would be covered in a longer format class (For example,  I won’t cover how to create resource selection rules for the scheduling engine, nor will I cover how to work with contracts. Not that those both aren’t cool feature areas…but for most people they really aren’t essential)

In fact, I believe in this training so much, not only will you get a full refund if you aren’t satisfied, but I’ll also give you my recipe for made-from-scratch buttermilk pancakes!

For more information (including downloadable PDF files with detailed outlines) or to register, here’s the Dynamics CRM Essentials landing page on our web site.  I hope to see you in one of these upcoming sessions!

I mentioned we’re doing these  in partnership with United Training, North America’s largest consortium of independent Microsoft training firms. Here’s a link to the United Training web site.

Dear colleague,

I’ve been busy lately, working on a project with Microsoft authoring updated self-paced E-Learning courses for Dynamics CRM Online. The courses are going to be great (if I do say so myself!), and I’ll post links to sample content as soon as I can.

With that project, plus my company’s somewhat rocky migration of our web site to a new platform (www.IMGinc.net), well…September got away from me, so without further ado, here’s the October edition of Dynamics CRM News You Can Use:

Upcoming Dynamics CRM User Group meeting

C360 is the leading provider of add-on products for Dynamics CRM, and we’re excited to have them lined up for a presentation at the October meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group. Representatives from C360 will kick off the session with a demonstration of their best-selling “Dynamics CRM Productivity Pack”, and Richard will follow up with a presentation on their “BI Analytics” product. The meeting will be held October 29 at 3:00 PM Central time, and you can attend online or in person at the Microsoft office in Downers Grove. For more information and to register, please visit this page.

Dynamics CRM and the XRM Platform

The emergence of Dynamics CRM as the platform for “XRM” application development has been an important theme lately, and at the September DCRMUG meeting, Microsoft’s Bob Piskule gave an excellent presentation on the topic. We were impressed by how well-developed the Microsoft messaging is; here’s an article on the session with a link to the recording. Here are a couple of related articles you might find interesting:

• The Emergence of Dynamics CRM as the XRM Platform
• More Thoughts on XRM; Taking the “C” out of CRM  

Cloud Computing with Dynamics CRM Online

Over the last 12 months, we’ve (almost!) completely migrated our IT services from on-premise to cloud-based. The transition was wrenching at times, but the result will be worth it! Dynamics CRM Online was (and is) by far the best part of our migration. Here’s an article I wrote about our migration, and here’s a more specific one on the Top 5 Reasons to Like Dynamics CRM Online.

Building Workflows in Dynamics CRM

The workflow engine is one of the very best things about Dynamics CRM, and it’s the same thing whether you’re using the on-premise or Online version. My book — Building Workflows in Dynamics CRM 4.0 — continues to do well; if you’ve purchased it I thank you, and if you haven’t, I recommend it!  If you’re wondering about how workflow will change in the upcoming 5.0 release, anybody who purchases the current edition of my book gets the updated 5.0 edition free when I publish it shortly after the new product ships.





Thanks again for your continued support, and let me know what you think of our new web site (remember: www.IMGinc.net). I know it isn’t fancy yet…but at least it’s always up!

Regards,

Richard Knudson, CEO, IMG
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner
www.IMGinc.net
www.DynamicsCRMTrickBag.com
www.DynamicsCRMuserGroup.com