Here at The CRM Business we are passionate about our work with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and have started this blog to provide you, our customer, with the latest news and information from our company.
We are proud to announce our new CRM 2011 Cloud Delivery Pack.
When embarking upon a CRM project, many clients take advantage of our consultancy services to help shape the system to meet their business needs. Traditionally these consultancy services are carried out in face-to-face office meetings. We are now offering Cloud Service Delivery as an alternative for clients looking to maximise their benefit from our experts’ time. This innovative approach allows us to work remotely to deliver services including data migration, CRM system customisations, integration with existing systems, end-user and administrator training. This is a far more efficient method, giving the client more flexibility, lower costs and faster project delivery. With Cloud Service Delivery, remote sessions can be allocated as required ensuring that clients get the full benefit of every hour purchased.
Many of our clients use our consultancy services to de-risk their CRM projects. Often this involves customising the CRM system to fit their exact needs, migrating data, integrating CRM with other systems, and user or administrator training.
In Microsoft Dynamics CRM, business data is organised across several related entities, such as Account and Contact. These entities are organised into three business sections: Sales, Marketing and Customer Service to enable business users to quickly locate and manage the data relevant to their job roles in order to improve marketing effectiveness, boost sales and enrich customer service interactions.
Custom entities can be created to address specific requirements, however there are a number of standard entities provided as part of the default installation. These entities are available to all CRM users whether using CRM 2011 Online, On-premise or Partner-hosted and provide a strong foundation on which to develop powerful business solutions.
So, what exactly are the default entities?
Entity
Definition
Lead
Leads represent potential customers who have not yet been qualified by your sales process. As you qualify leads, you can convert them to other types of records.
Opportunities
Opportunities represent a potential sale to an account or contact.
Accounts
Accounts represent companies that your organisation may do business with.
Contacts
Contacts are people who represent customers or potential customers, or someone related to an account.
Marketing Lists
Marketing lists are lists of accounts, contacts, or leads that match a specific set of criteria.
Competitors
Competitors represent people or organizations that your business unit competes with for sales opportunities.
Products
Products are any items in the product catalog. You can link products to other records, including quotes, campaigns, and cases
Sales Literature
Documents that are created with specific information about products or services and given to customers to help increase sales.
Quotes
Most sales are preceded by a quote or a series of quotes. A quote might go through several revisions before it becomes an order. When you revise a quote by changing products or discounts, those changes are also reflected in your overall sales forecast.
Orders
When a customer is ready to purchase a product, you can create an order to record the potential sale.
Invoices
When a customer has agreed to the terms of an order for one or more of your products, you can create an invoice to record the upcoming sale.
Quick Campaign
Use a quick campaign to create an activity to communicate with a group of accounts, contacts, leads, or even to a marketing list.
Goals
Track sales performance with goal management using any metric that measures the performance of your team. For example, you can track things like sales revenue for a territory or the number of sales calls made.
Goal Metrics
A standard that specifies how to measure progress to a goal and from where the data comes for the measurement.
Marketing Entities
Entity
Definition
Lead
Leads represent potential customers who have not yet been qualified by your sales process. As you qualify leads, you can convert them to other types of records.
Accounts
Accounts represent companies that your organisation may do business with.
Contacts
Contacts are people who represent customers or potential customers, or someone related to an account.
Marketing Lists
Marketing lists are lists of accounts, contacts, or leads that match a specific set of criteria.
Campaign
Marketing programs that use many communication vehicles to accomplish specific results. For example, using advertisements and direct mail to increase market share, introduce new products, or retain customers.
Products
Products are any items in the product catalog. You can link products to other records, including quotes, campaigns, and cases.
Sales Literature
The following list contains links to procedures that show you how to create, open, view, edit, and attach sales information to sales literature records.
Quick Campaign
Use a quick campaign to create an activity to communicate with a group of accounts, contacts, leads, or even to a marketing list.
Customer Service Entities
Entity
Definition
Service Calendar
Use the calendar to create, view, and edit service activities and appointments.
Cases
A customer service issue or problem reported by a customer and the activities that customer service representatives use to resolve it.
Accounts
Accounts represent companies that your organisation may do business with.
Contacts
Contacts are people who represent customers or potential customers, or someone related to an account.
Articles
A text-based piece of content in the knowledge base.
Contracts
An agreement to provide support during specified coverage dates or for a specified number of cases or length of time. When customers contact customer service, the level of support they receive is determined by their contract.
Products
Products are any items in the product catalog, campaigns, and cases.
Services
A type of work performed for a customer by one or more resources. Services are schedulable activities.
Goals
Track sales performance with goal management using any metric that measures the performance of your team. For example, you can track things like sales revenue for a territory or the number of sales calls made.
Goal Metrics
A standard that specifies how to measure progress to a goal and from where the data comes for the measurement.
Rollup Queries
Rollup queries help you gather data about a given parent goal, including all the child goals under it, in one view.
Access to these different entities is controlled by Microsoft Dynamics CRM security roles, giving you the freedom to decide which employees can access and update which records in the system.
Microsoft yesterday released Update Rollup 6 for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011.
This latest scheduled update for Microsoft’s Customer Relationship Management solution contains well over 50 updates and enhancements, resolving issues which have been identified and improving system performance. As with previous update rollups, this latest release is cumulative and also includes all of the fixes issued in rollups 1-5.
As some changes are made to the database structure, update rollup 6 cannot be removed once it has been installed.
Microsoft are currently performing some infrastructure upgrades on their CRM 2011 cloud platform, and so anticipate on deploying this latest update around mid-February for CRM Online customers. Customers will be notified 5 days in advance of this change. CRM 2011 on-premise customers can download and install update rollup 6 now. Update rollup 6 will be distributed to CRM 2011 Outlook clients via Windows Update commencing 24th January 2012, however customers wishing to upgrade sooner can download CRM 2011 update rollup 6 today.
If you have any queries about CRM 2011 or this latest update please don’t hesitate to contact us at. The CRM Business: Microsoft CRM 2011 UK Partner
The CRM Business is proud to become the first Microsoft Dynamics CRM partner to achieve Microsoft Cloud Accelerate status to reflect our achievement successfully implementing CRM Online in the cloud.
“We are excited about The CRM Business joining the Microsoft Cloud Accelerate program which provides top cloud partners with technical and business support to build and sell cloud solutions based on Microsoft technologies, offering incredible value to customers,” said Josh Waldo, senior director in the Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft. “The partners in this program are doing amazing things and are looking to differentiate their business and better serve customers with Microsoft cloud solutions.”
As the leading CRM Online partner in the UK, The CRM Business has welcomed new customers of all sizes since the launch back in January 2011. Customers interested in experiencing CRM Online with the assistance of The CRM Business’ CRM Consultants can register for a free CRM trial today.
As the number of CRM 2011 users continues to grow, we are noticing some common questions asked by customers during the free trial period. We have attempted to answer some of these below, but please feel free to contact us if you have a question we haven’t covered and we’ll be happy to help.
Question: Where can I find a Microsoft Dynamics CRM user manual / training materials?
Answer: Microsoft have provided some fantastic documentation and training videos which can be accessed via the “Resource Center” area within CRM 2011. There are also some great resources provided online at www.democrmonline.com
Question:Can I use the free trial within Outlook? Answer: Yes, absolutely. You need to be using Outlook 2003 SP3, Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010 first. To get up and running, download the CRM 2011 Outlook client (links are provided on our CRM Resources page) and then run through the configuration wizard to connect it to your CRM Online trial site. Feel free to give us a call on 0114 286 6335 if you need any assistance with this.
Question: What if I subscribe to CRM Online, but later decide that I would prefer to host the software on-premise? Answer: CRM 2011 works in the same way whether you choose to an Online, On-Premise or Partner-hosted implementation. The product is very flexible, and so it is possible to move between these options easily.
Question: How long is the CRM 2011 Online free trial? Answer: The CRM 2011 free trial is for 30-days. After this, subscription costs just £29.50/user per month.
Question: How long is the contract for? Answer: The CRM 2011 Online initial subscription term is 12 months.
Question: Is it possible to have a CRM 2011 Online demonstration? Answer: Yes, we’d be delighted to show you around the system remotely and discuss how it could best work for your business. Simply contact us to arrange this.
Question: My data is currently stored in spreadsheets / other CRM / database systems. Is it possible to import it into Dynamics CRM? Answer: Yes. There are several ways to do this, depending upon what format the data is currently in. Have a read through the information in the Resource Centre within CRM itself, or call us to talk through your unique situation in more detail.
Question: I need some help customising the system to meet my requirements. Can you help? Answer: We would be delighted to. As a <a href=”http://www.thecrmbusiness.com”>UK-based Microsoft Gold Certified Dynamics CRM Partner</a> we offer a range of services, from intensive “Quick-start” packages to bespoke consultancy and training. Please contact us to discuss your needs and request a quote.
Question: How can I ensure that my CRM 2011 Outlook client has the latest updates applied? Answer: Microsoft CRM 2011 client updates are distributed via Windows Update. To ensure that you are up to date, simply run Windows Update on your local machine.
Question: I already have a CRM 2011 subscription, but need some assistance. Can you help? Answer: We’d love to. We specialise purely in Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and so are well-placed to help you out. From helping you get to grips to the basics through to building complex integrations with your existing systems, we have the experience. We also have a good track record in rescuing failed CRM projects. Please contact us to discuss the options available to you.
Microsoft yesterday released update rollup 5 for CRM 2011, including CRM Online.
Microsoft CRM updates are released periodically to address issues and to improve performance and platform stability. As well as improvements on the server side, updates are also provided for the Outlook CRM client to address known issues and improve performance.
In addition to the usual patches, update rollup 5 introduces some exciting new features to further boost productivity.
Additional charts and Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities, including dynamically-generated multi-series charts
Enhancements to dialogs, including support for lookups and dates
More flexible duplicate detection rules
Introduction of Activity Feeds, Microsoft’s latest social innovation for CRM 2011. Activity feeds in CRM simplify business insight and aid timely collaboration across internal teams and communities, by providing relevant updates in real time. Microsoft CRM activity feeds work in a similar way to popular social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, helping to drive user adoption.
And finally…. Mobile Activity Feeds! In addition to delivering the new internal social collaboration capabilities to desk-based users, Microsoft have also delivered a new Windows Phone 7 client to allow the real-time activity views to be accessed from virtually anywhere.
Microsoft yesterday released update rollup 4 for CRM 2011, including CRM Online.
Microsoft CRM updates are released periodically to address issues and to improve performance and platform stability. As well as improvements on the server side, updates are also provided for the Outlook CRM client to address known issues and improve performance.
Update rollup 4 for CRM 2011 and CRM Online clients will be applied automatically by Windows Update commencing 27th September 2011. Customers wishing to install this update sooner can do so by downloading it manually. Download links for this and other resources can be found on the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Resources page of our website.
So, you’ve heard how CRM can help increase sales and boost your business, and have signed up for a trial to see for yourself if the rumours are true. You’ve registered a LiveID and subscribed for a 30-day Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online trial. Now what?
Like any new system, you will need to invest some time in learning how the new system works. Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 utilises Microsoft’s familiar ribbon interface, which makes this learning curve much easier. If you know how to use Microsoft Office, you’re already most of the way there.
As one of the UK’s leading Microsoft CRM partners, we have worked with many customers taking the first steps getting to grips with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.
To help you get the most from the trial, we recommend that you:
Install the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Outlook client (latest links are always on our Microsoft Dynamics CRM Resources page). This enables you to use your Dynamics CRM trial system right within Outlook, including the ability to track emails and synchronise your data.
Import some of your existing data (accounts and contacts, for instance) to help make the trial system more relevant for your business.
Involve your colleagues! Having people across multiple areas of your business trialling the areas of the system relevant to them will provide a better experience than trying to understand everything single-handedly. Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online allows up to 20 users on the 30-day trial. Learn how to add users.
Find out how to query your data and create your own custom views using Advanced Find.
Don’t be afraid to experiment! The trial system is yours to play around with to learn how the different features work, and how it might meet your needs.
Add The CRM Business as your chosen partner, and claim your 4 hours FREE Microsoft Dynamics CRM consultancy. A member of our team will work with you to show you around the system and understand how it can be customised to meet your requirements.
Take a look at CRM Mobile Express, and learn how to access your CRM data from your mobile devices. CRM Online includes Mobile Express as standard, allowing you to access CRM from your HTML 4 compliant mobile devices including Windows Phone, Blackberry, Android, iPhone, iPad and many more.
Still looking for more tips? Check out the Resource Centre within CRM itself, or subscribe to our newsletter. Alternatively please contact us – we’d love to chat through your requirements.
Following on from the success of our “De-stress with CRM” session earlier this year, we are planning to hold another Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 event at our Electric Works, Sheffield, UK office on Tuesday 11th October 2011.
This free event will provide the ideal opportunity for UK businesses to discover how a CRM system can help drive productivity and increase sales.
The agenda for the day will include:
– Keynote speech from Tom Brookes, Dynamics CRM Technology Advisor, Microsoft
– Top tips for CRM project success
– Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 demonstration
– Microsoft Office 365 demonstration
– Cloud computing & CRM Q&A session
Date: Tuesday 11th October 2011
Time: 10am – 3pm
Location: Electric Works, Sheffield Digital Campus, S1 2BJ
Cost: No charge
