I recently had the opportunity to meet a talented career consultant, Steve Dalton, at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Steve has written a new book called The 2-Hour Job Search. I know what you’re thinking: is he trying to become Tim Ferriss 2.0? Well, there are certainly worse goals. But I digress. I mention [...] Related posts:
Categories: Intuit QuickBase, productivity Tags: Intuit QuickBase, QuickBase
I had a question come up yesterday regarding what the Manage Users permission on a profile actually enables a user to do. It turns out that it allows a user to do a lot of things and should only be given to a select few users in any org.If a subset of...
Categories: Dreamforce, salesforce.com Tags: CRM, CRM Software, salesforce, salesforce.com
Google recently made a few enhancements to their Spam folder in Gmail, providing end-users with information on why messages land there. As an email marketer, you want to know not only if your messages make it to the spam folder, but also most importantly, why they got there and what you can do about it. [...]
Categories: Email Marketing, Infusionsoft Tags: CRM, CRM Software, Infusionsoft
I just love all the time and attention that our clients and consultants are giving to user adoption these days. Ten years ago, we consultants used to have to describe user adoption to our clients, explain that it was their single greatest risk for project failure, and try to convince them that the efforts built into our budget and project plan to facilitate adoption were indeed vitally important to the success of their project.
But it seems we've turned a corner in the last few years, and I'm finding more openness to that conversation on recent projects. While this new openness is real progress - and it's comforting to find in our industry - the practical steps of assessing and addressing threats to solid user adoption remain obscure to many project teams.
Here are five data points that I think are worth evaluation for every CRM user audience. If we can assess and address each of these five issues early and often, building user adoption into our project lifecycle as a separate and distinct discipline, the total risk of CRM project failure will drop significantly.
1. Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants
A guy named Marc Prensky coined these terms back in 2001. Kudos to him! The "digital divide" is of primary concern to a CRM project team. If our users are totally comfortable with technology, our job in designing software that is easy to use, and training users to perform specific tasks, is that much easier. But let's not think in terms of black and white; it is useful to consider both the median, and the lowest reasonable or acceptable, techno-savvy represented among our intended CRM user audience. Next, let's allow that assessment to constrain and inform our design and training efforts throughout the project. (For more information on educating across the digital divide, see Marc's website at http://marcprensky.com.)
2. Collaborative and Virtual Workspaces
Has your user audience been working with data silos, or are they accustomed to the "pile on" nature of shared content and data? Facebook is a great example of a very pedestrian collaborative virtual environment. If your soon-to-be CRM users have lived their entire corporate careers working one user at a time on data stored in Excel spreadsheets, you may need to help them along the capability maturity model to realize that when CRM is introduced, they will be sharing data with many other users. How do they perceive that change? It may scare them, and it is your task to calm, soothe, and reassure them that a collaborative workspace is a positive change.
3. Relational Databases
Many of us take for granted the ability to watch as another colleague diagrams boxes and lines on a whiteboard, labelling the connections with one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many tags that are in fact meaningless and complex to non-tecnical users. Your user audience may understand parent/child relationships within data sets when they are presented in the form of a report or print out, but may need your help translating that logical heirarchy onto the screen of a living, breathing, feature-rich CRM application. Don't take your own intelligence for granted. As CRM implementation consultants, it is our responsibility to close the gap between our soon-to-be CRM users and the nuances of the new software. Don't blame them if the relationship of a Contact to an Account is not second nature to them - they're new to the system. Look in the mirror - you built the thing.
4. Points of Pain
Moving away from the technical abilities of users, let's consider their expectations vs. what you are actually going to deliver. CRM users assume that you have made a promise to them - whether or not you have explicitly verbalized that commitment. They assume that if their company is investing time and money in this new system, that that same new system should make their lives substantially easier. It should provide a net gain in productivity for them. This is an entirely distinct user adoption risk that deserves serious consideration. For each user that will log into CRM, specifically which of their daily points of pain do you intend to eliminate in exchange for their daily use of the system? They assume there will be a quid pro quo. "I will use this system, keep the records up to date, track my stuff, and do my job using this tool. But, what's in it for me?" Can you answer that question, for each role you intend to support? The time to ask this question is before you begin to design the solution, while you are setting the overall direction for the project effort. A caution: Never bite off more than you are sure you can chew; ask for points of pain and priorities for them, and shoot for the low hanging fruit first. And another caution: Never assume that you know what the user would say without asking them; your arrogance would soon eclipse your ignorance.
5. Insight vs. Oversight
You know the Golden Rule, right? No, I mean this one, "The one with the gold makes the rules." Nothing could be truer in a CRM project. How often do we walk into design workshops for CRM, and the managers and executives in the room (the folks with the gold) begin driving our requirements towards improved reporting and data capture ("Those all should be required fields!") rather than focusing on removing bottlenecks and breakdowns for regular staff? When working with new CRM clients or delivering best practices seminars, I often point out that there are four types of stakeholders on any CRM project, and that their needs are often different, and sometimes conflict. Managers expect better data for reporting and forecasting; that makes sense, since a manager's job is to monitor and measure things. But end users expect real productivity gains from CRM, and they are far too often disappointed. In the heart of every sales rep I have ever trained to use CRM, they are begging, "Please... just help me sell more in less time." And for a support rep, "Help me resolve cases faster, with better customer satisfaction." Every CRM stakeholder could use better data, but we have to understand that data insight results in higher productivity, and data oversight results in more fields on every page in the software. There is an art to designing for productivity while still delivering data for measurement.
It is a mistake to consider user adoption as a late phase or effort in the overall project. No, user adoption is a thread that runs throughout the entire course of the implementation, influencing everything from hardware selection for users to cosmetic names of fields on forms.
This new and recent openness to proactively address user adoption during our CRM projects is comforting. But it is incumbent on us, as folks responsible for executing successful CRM projects, to leverage that openess and lead our teams to deliver substantial improvements on prior efforts. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Contact me here, at Webfortis, or online via LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/in/crmconsulting.
Here's to your success!
Christopher Bates
Categories: Training, Webfortis Tags: CRM5, Microsoft Dynamics, Webfortis
Each of our workplace experts has weighed in on the following question from a reader to give you four points of view. Here’s the question, with our experts’ responses below: I started my first real job about a year ago and have a good rapport with my coworkers (as is necessary when working in a collaborative [...] Related posts:
Categories: Intuit QuickBase Tags: Intuit QuickBase, QuickBase
At last week’s SugarCon conference in San Francisco, SugarCRM’s executives outlined a three-item set of ideals that their business would be built around. Two of them had to do with the idea of “openness” – an open ecosystem and an open cloud strategy. Those two items capitalize on the cultural and technical underpinnings of the … Continue reading »
Categories: CRM, SugarCRM Tags: CRM, CRM Software, SugarCRM
...or, mastering the black art of URL hacking the email page. Sending an email from Salesforce.com can be a clicky operation. You dig around for the Send An Email button, click it, click Select Template, find your template and click it, maybe type ...
Categories: Dreamforce, salesforce.com Tags: CRM, CRM Software, salesforce, salesforce.com
When someone on the “front lines” of a business notices a problem that requires fixing, too often it’s ignored because it will be a hassle to convince others to change the status quo. Niccolo Machiavelli said in 1515, “There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to [...] Related posts:
Categories: Intuit QuickBase, productivity Tags: Intuit QuickBase, QuickBase
With so many great capabilities delivered in CRM 2011, as a customer, it can be challenging to know what capabilities can be best combined to address the user’s needs. I came across one such situation last week when discussing a feature suggestion that came through our Connect feedback site.
Scenario
Here’s the high level scenario: There are often situations where two or more sales reps need to collaborate on an opportunity, sometimes referred to as the pursuit team. To accomplish this, there are a few challenges to work through:
1) How do I denote who are the salespeople working on the opportunity?
2) How can I make it easy for them to view the opportunities that they are working on?
There are several possible approaches that you might take here depending on what makes the most sense for your organization.
One simple way would be to add fields to the opportunity form to identify team members that are working on the opportunity. For example, in addition to Owner, you might have fields for “Sales Lead” and “Industry Lead” and so forth. If your requirements are static, this works. However, it’s not very flexible if the number of people that you might have working a deal varies from opportunity to opportunity.
Using Connections
Here’s where the strength of the Connections capability that was introduced in CRM 2011 comes into play. Connections allow you relate records together of all types – in a way it’s like an “any to any” relationship, with an added ability to annotate the relationship with the meaning of the relationship, or other notes. For example, you can use it to identify a contact as your “Colleague” or express the roles of the various contacts that are associated to an opportunity such as “Influencer” or “Decision Maker”.
Let’s take a look at how to address each of our questions using Connections:
Identifying the Sales Team
For our scenario, the simplest thing to do is to add Connections for each sales rep that will be working on the deal.
From the opportunity, click the Connect button
Fill in the desired user for the “Name” field:
That’s all that’s required. Save and Close.
These will appear in the Connections area for the opportunity:
Note: You may want to customize the Opportunity form to add Connections as a sub-grid, to make viewing this data inline easier.
You may even want to go a step further and define Connection Roles to express what role each sales person is playing with respect to the Pursuit Team: “Sales Lead”, “Industry Lead”, and so forth.
From Settings -> Administration -> Connection Roles, you can add new Connection Roles:
Back on the Opportunity, here are the roles used for the Connections to further clarify the meaning of the relationship to the users identified in the Connections:
Creating a Public View for My Opportunities
Now that you’ve denoted the sales reps that will be working on this opportunity and ensured that they have appropriate access, the next step is to ensure that there is a Public view that includes these opportunities.
Here’s where I ran into a bit of a snag. I had intended to just modify the “My Open Opportunities” Public View to add an OR clause such that it would show effectively “Owner Equals Current User OR Connected to Current User”. Of course, the problem is that the filter criteria doesn’t allow creating OR expressions across entities, so I couldn’t add the clauses to include Connections.
That’s ok though. What it means is that in this model, we’ll drive the view fully off Connections only, not Owner. Taking this approach does require that each sales person will need to be identified with a Connection, including the Owner of the opportunity, so you will want to automate this with a simple workflow or plug-in that creates a Connection for the Owner automatically.
Let’s start with the View creation first.
Creating the Public View
So, here’s what I did to create the view to enable the user to see opportunities that they are working on.
1. As the system customizer, go to Settings -> Customizations -> Customize the System, select the Opportunity entity.
2. I opened the “My Open Opportunities” Public view and chose Save As to create a copy of the view
3. I then modified the filter criteria as follows:
a. Removed the “Owner Equals Current User” clause, but kept the Opportunity Status Equals Open.
b. Added the following clauses to locate the Active Connections to the Current User:
Note: In this case the “From” side of the Connection represents the Opportunity, and the “To” side represents the User, hence the usage of “Connected To” Equals Current User. You may have noticed that this is very similar to the “My Connections” view that we provide out of box.
4. Be sure to mark this new Public view as the Default view by choosing “Set Default” from the More Actions menu for the list of views. This way, users will see the desired records by default.
Creating the Workflow to Automate the Owner Connection
As I mentioned above, to help your users adopt this model, a little workflow automation is called for. What we’re going to do is create a Connection automatically for the Opportunity Owner. Here’s the basic idea.
1. From Settings –> Processes, Create a Process of type Workflow for the Opportunity entity.
2. Set the scope as Organization and Start when the record is created or the record is assigned.
3. Add a Create Record step to create the Connection and set the fields as follows:
a. “Name” as the Opportunity Owner
b. “Connected From” as the Opportunity
c. “Owner” as the Opportunity Owner
4. Save and activate the workflow.
With this complete, individual owners won’t have to do any additional to work with their opportunities. If others are involved in the opportunity, they can list the additional users using Connections, optionally adding a Connection Role to clarify their role with respect to the opportunity.
Summary
The Connections capability, used in this context, gives you a flexible way of forming the pursuit team and to expand the membership when it is required (e.g. perhaps adding other SMEs at a particular stage in the process). Of course, once you head down this path, there are a number of other enhancements that you may want to make to facilitate ease of use. For example, you may want to have a workflow that creates placeholder connections for the various pursuit team roles to be filled in once it is appropriate to do so. You may also discover this pattern works well for other situations whereby you have multiple individuals collaborating on records in CRM.
p.s. If there are other creative ways that you use the Connections capability, we’d love to hear about it!
As an aside: The security modeling implications for how you grant access to the salespeople working on the opportunity (e.g. usage of CRM Teams, sharing, etc.) are something you should consider carefully to determine what will work best for your organizational needs. This topic is beyond the scope of this blog post.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
Categories: CRM, Microsoft Dynamics Tags: CRM, CRM Software, dynamics, microsoft dynamics crm
Sometimes there is nothing more irritating than those trite phrases like “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” When you’re having a tough time in life, your first inclination may be to tell those full of such homespun logic to go suck a lemon. Those people don’t have to deal with an ogre boss or [...] Related posts:
Categories: Intuit QuickBase, productivity Tags: Intuit QuickBase, QuickBase
I’ve been using Infusionsoft for nearly 15% of my entire life. I first started using it during graduate school for a business that still uses the software. Needless to say, being able to visualize everything from a high-level strategy down to the granular clicks within an email comes naturally. However, getting to that point where [...]
Categories: Customer Service, Infusionsoft, small business Tags: CRM, CRM Software, Infusionsoft
We’ve released a troubleshooting wizard to help you help yourself resolve errors configuring the Dynamics CRM Outlook Client. Give it a whirl:
http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/rc/2011/en-us/online/5.0/outlook-troubleshooting.aspx
Why did we create this wizard?
There are several reasons that you might receive an error attempting to configure the CRM Outlook Client. The most likely solutions can be different depending on the error and other factors such as whether you’re using Dynamics CRM Online or On Premise. Instead of having to search KB’s and possibly find articles that do not apply to your scenario, the wizard can help guide your to the most likely solution based on your symptoms.
The wizard was created by CRM Outlook Client subject matter experts. We can continually improve this wizard as we identify additional solutions so please provide feedback.
Categories: CRM, Microsoft Dynamics Tags: CRM, CRM Software, dynamics, microsoft dynamics crm
This is a Sales Best Practices article from guest poster Dave Kahle, author and leading sales educator. Follow Dave’s latest Tweets at @davekahle. By Dave Kahle I recently came across some research that confirmed what many of us in the profession of educating sales people have known for years: That purchasers would be “much more likely” [...]
Categories: Commence News, Sales Training, Social Networking Tags: Commence CRM, CRM, CRM Software
Do you and your team work more than 40 hours per week? When it comes to productivity, longer hours are not better. As Sara Robinson writes in “Bring Back the 40-Hour Workweek, ” decades of research during the 20th Century showed us that 8 hours a day/40 hours a week was the maximum workload for [...] Related posts:
Categories: Intuit QuickBase, productivity Tags: Intuit QuickBase, QuickBase
I’m happy to announce the new Infusionsoft Marketplace for our users so they can discover new apps and partners that helps their businesses succeed. The new Marketplace provides convenient access to community-rated listings of Certified Consultants and third-party apps that make their Infusionsoft experience even better. CEO and Co-founder, Clate Mask, declared at InfusionCon 2012, [...]
Categories: Infusionsoft, Partners, small business Tags: CRM, CRM Software, Infusionsoft
Joel Garfinkle is an executive coach and author of Getting Ahead: Three Steps to Take Your Career to the Next Level. Recently, I asked him some questions about some common problems faced by managers, and how best to deal with them. AB: Let’s say I’m a manager and my staff just isn’t meeting its goals. [...] Related posts:
Categories: Intuit QuickBase, management, productivity Tags: Intuit QuickBase, QuickBase
It’s not everyday that a software update from a cool software company drops the jaws of analysts, instills riot-like demand to receive the update and truly underscores the purpose of that company. The Spring 2012 Release is that moment for Infusionsoft as it redefines the way people use our sales and marketing software and talk [...]
Categories: CRM, Customers, Email Marketing, Infusionsoft Tags: CRM, CRM Software, Infusionsoft
By Chris Bucholtz I know the Outsiders has been a little quiet this week. That’s because I’m up to my elbows in SugarCon – which is a really great show, and I’d be saying that even if I wasn’t the show chair. If you want a great stream-of-exceptionally-elevated-CRM-consciousness peek inside the show, check out Twitter … Continue reading »
Categories: SugarCRM, Uncategorized Tags: CRM, CRM Software, SugarCRM
We want to let everyone know our blog site will be combined with the overall Microsoft Dynamics Team Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/ We will keep our past blogs up for existing linked resources for a while, however for upcoming news and updates please go to http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/.
We greatly appreciate your interest in our blogs and comments!
Categories: microsoft dynamics crm Tags: CRM, dynamics, Microsoft Dynamics, microsoft dynamics crm
In-person conversational interviews are notoriously ineffective for determining whether a new hire will be a good fit. In many instances, a second interview is needed to more completely assess whether a particular candidate is well suited to an open position. Work simulations, sometimes also known as case interviews, provide candidates with a real-life business problem [...] Related posts:
Categories: Intuit QuickBase, Project Management, productivity Tags: Intuit QuickBase, QuickBase
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