I must start by saying the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Q2 2012 service update is going to provide a lot of great things but for now, I'd like to focus on the Mobile update, as Microsoft is standing by their "CRM Anywhere" tagline.

This is not just a tiny tweak; Microsoft has created Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile, a new, cloud-based mobile CRM service, for Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers. Any user with a license will be able to access Microsoft Dynamics CRM from up to 3 different mobile devices, regardless of your Internet connectivity (on most devices). This is fantastic considering how many devices most people have nowadays. 

One question I keep hearing is, "What limitations will the mobile service have?" Everything I have seen, heard, and read points to a fully functional Microsoft Dynamics CRM instance on every mobile device, yielding no limitations. I believe they have been able to do this by not using a web browser to access CRM, but by creating an actual web application that gives you access to your entire CRM system. Here's an iPad view:

Other questions I've heard pertain to security. For example, I have sales guys with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM application on their laptop, mobile phone and iPad. What happens if one of them leaves the company? They may turn their laptop (if it is company owned) in but they may own their own mobile phone and/or iPad. What happens to all our company data? Fear not! Because Microsoft Dynamics CRM Mobile is centrally managed, your administrator has the ability to remotely wipe devices of CRM data. This is also highly convenient when a phone is lost, or stolen. You can give your team the information they require wherever they are, and you can take it away from them, as you see fit.

As best described by Jan Sysmans, Sr. Director of Product Marketing for SugarCRM, when asked about the updates to SugarCRM 6, in SugarCRM 6.4 he said, "A lot of changes below the hood". The SugarCRM 6.4 release is sporting a REACH theme: Extend Your Organization's Reach with Sugar 6.4. What does this mean? Let's drill it down...

• Better import capabilities, including direct LinkedIn sync, allowing you to better reach your customers
• With support for DB2, Sugar reaches more IBM customers
• Section 508 compliance road map: extending the reach of SugarCRM to visually-impaired customers
• New Calendar Module allows Sugar users to more easily reach out to co-workers and customers
• Sugar Private Cloud is a new deployment option

What else would help you extend your organization's reach?

What I have heard over the years is simply that it takes too long. Really? Let me share the steps to tracking lost sales. Let's assume that your CRM is setup for now. When a sales person is closing an opportunity, on most of the top CRM applications, there is a pull-down list of reasons in the same box. Select the reason and that's it. So, to track the reason for lost sales in a CRM it requires adding two, possibly three, clicks. I don't believe that three extra clicks are over-burdensome.

Sage SalesLogix, ACT! and Microsoft Dynamics CRM have pop-up windows. SugarCRM has an additional tab and requires the extra click.

Remember, we assumed that your CRM was setup. Ok, let's backtrack for a minute. The only setup required is for management to determine some reasons and to get them into the list. All of the CRM systems come with reasons. Some reasons are generic and everyone can use them. You will need to determine if there is anything specific about your business that you will need to add. Don't kill yourself creating the list. Spend an hour and go from there.  

Here is a great starting list:

• Poor Follow-up
• Indecision
• Wrong Decision Maker(s)
• Lack of References
• Lack of Expertise
• Lack of Resources
• Unknown
• Column Fodder (Not a true competition, you were just brought in as an extra bid)
• Other
• Out-sold
• Wrong Target

(For the following, I would be inclined to have an ROI check box at the opportunity level but that would require some customization)

• No/Lost Budget - ROI Discussed
• No/Lost Budget - ROI Not Discussed
• Insufficient Budget - ROI Discussed
• Insufficient Budget - ROI Not Discussed

Seven to twelve reasons is a good start. Be careful not to use something as general as 'bad fit.' Bad fit could mean a whole host of different things such as, not a cultural fit, a company that isn't in your sweet spot, either too large or too small. Also be careful not to get to granular and have too many values.  If a reason is not on the list, then we use the 'other' value and then require some keywords in the description. You may find that 6 months down the road, you are noticing other reasons for losing sales, so just go add them then.

Normally, I would say that once you start gathering data (I'd give it a few months), then create your dashboards and reports on why sales are lost. However, if you are starting a new process, it's actually better to at least understand if your sales reps are inputting the data.

Create the following dashboards, views/groups or reports (depending on the CRM system you are on:

Lost Sales missing Reasons - I would view this as a list

• Opportunity or Actual Close Date = This Year
• Opportunity Status = Lost
• Opportunity Reason = Does Not contain Data

Reason for Lost Sales - I would view this as a pie chart or graph
• Opportunity or Actual Close Date = This Year
• Opportunity Status = Lost

In my research I came across this very interesting, differing point of view. 
There are only 2 reasons why you lose a sale.

Tracking lost sales can actually help you generate more revenue. How you say? Only by understanding why deals are lost, can you continue to improve your sales processes, products and sales team’s performance. I am personally addicted to data and as a former salesperson, I always tracked my sales, both won and lost. By having data, you can see trends and analyze your wins and losses. Only through improvement can you generate sustained revenue growth.

As a consultant however, I rarely found companies that would take the steps necessary to track the data and I needed to understand why. I recently started a discussion in two LinkedIn groups to try to gain some insight into why a company wouldn't track the reasons for lost sales. The title of the discussion was "Do you track the reason for lost sales? Why?"

I got some great responses as to why you would track the reasons for lost sales, but no one would actually admit to not tracking their lost sales. What a disconnect! In most of my 10 years of consulting, it was rare that a company actually took the steps necessary to track a lost sale.

What I have heard over the years is simply that it takes too long. Really? Let me share the steps to tracking lost sales. Let's assume that your CRM is setup for now. When a sales person is closing an opportunity, on most of the top CRM applications, there is a pull-down list of reasons in the same box. Select the reason and that's it. So, to track the reason for lost sales in a CRM it requires adding two, possibly three, clicks. I don't believe that three extra clicks are over-burdensome. Click here to see more on Best Business Practices for Tracking Lost Sales in CRM.

What you will find is that sales people that really want to excel will want to track both their won and lost sales. Here are some great quotes from the LinkedIn discussion:

 "I've learned over the years that I've never ‘Won’ a deal, I just ‘Lose’ very few of them because all deals are ours to lose."  What a novel concept!

 "... Great insight can be gained from understanding losses, competitive insight, process deficiencies/inefficiencies, relationship issues, pricing and general funnel management. But it is also important is to understand why and how you won as well. It’s the full 360 view of your customer engagement that provides healthy balanced corrective actions. "

 "Sales people should always learn and adapt to improve their skills; feedback from their prospects or existing clients is one of the best ways to do that, as these are the targets of our sales actions and the sources, indicators of the success or failure of our actions."

 "The ability to learn from a past failure can help a salesperson improve his/her skills and compensate with future closed deals - but this if and only if the salesperson in question adapts and really learns and implements the knowledge from the mistake."

So now that I've made you feel guilty, go set-up your list and start the process. 

For your research, here is a great white paper that goes into win/loss analysis in-depth.
Why Companies Should Implement a Win/Loss Program

Join the LinkedIn Discussions

Do you track the reason for lost sales? Why? - LinkedIn Sales Management Association Group

Do you track the reason for lost sales? Why? - LinkedIn Sales/Marketing VP's Group

We all should! Seriously, regardless of your role in your organization, dashboards are an excellent, quick view of the information contained in your CRM system. We take the time to put the information into our CRM system, why not allow it to present the information we want to see most, back to us, in a clear, concise manner.

I’m a Marketing user and I have a plethora of dashboards I view on a daily basis, but my top choices are:

• Leads by Lead Source

• Opportunities by Lead Source 

• Actual Revenue by Lead Source

For me, it’s important to see that:

A) My department is generating leads

B) The leads we’re generating are warm enough to become opportunities

C) And that we’re closing leads and can calculate a positive ROI

For Sales, dashboards are very important from both a sales management reporting perspective, as well as a sales user perspective. Here are some examples of useful dashboards for sales:

• Pipeline Charts

o Opportunities closing this month, next month, this year 

• Opportunities by Product

o Opportunities closing this month, won opportunities, lost opportunities 

• Sales Leaderboards (to see how your entire team is doing)

• Top Customers

• Actual Revenue (by month, by quarter, by fiscal period)

• My Open Leads or My Open Opportunities

For those in the customer service area, dashboards provide a compact view of your tickets/cases and allow you to prioritize your efforts. Some customer service centric dashboards include:

• Tickets by Priority

• Tickets by Customer

• Tickets open more than 30 days

All users have the ability to go in and create any dashboards they want and then share them with whomever they’d like. For example, a CEO could share their high level dashboards with the rest of their management team, or the VP of Sales could share some with their sales team, or individual users. The bottom line is, all users can have many dashboards and create, delete, share and hide whichever dashboards they see fit, making dashboards very effective for each individual user.

If you have specific dashboards you think others would benefit from, please share them with everyone!

We are all living in a mobile world and all we want is to quickly and easily access all the information we can possibly get, right at our fingertips. That's not too much to ask, right? 

Sage SalesLogix Mobile is quick and easy to use, as it is built on next generation web application technology. Because Sage uses its Sdata web service to communicate directly with your main database, there is no syncing of data necessary. I'm definitely not the most technical person in the world, or anywhere close, but I do know that not having to sync definitely speeds things up. Plus, with a single URL to access your data, end-user installation is not required.

I recently watched a demo of the new Sage SalesLogix Mobile v1.2 and here are my favorite/most useful take-aways:

• Enhanced productivity
  • Improved visibility
    • Single-press pick lists and lookups
      • No more multiple clicks to validate actions
      • More of a "click" and "go" approach
    • "Clear" button on text fields = No more backspacing
  • Faster data entry/lookups
    • Custom keyboard for URLs, Email and Phone data entry
      • Example - A ".com" button exists when you're typing URLs
    • Faster search with hash tags (Sdata handles hash tag queries)
      • Example - Opportunity: "#closed ab" --> Closed opportunities where name starts with "ab"
  • Localized for multiple languages (French, German, Italian, Russian)
    • Multi-lingual support through single portal
• Calendar Improvements
  • New week view
  • Month view shows activity count and selected day details

What else would you like to see in SalesLogix mobile?

Does it drive you crazy that Microsoft CRM doesn't give you more information about where opportunities came from? Our marketing team, as most are, is tasked with a quota of how many leads we need to generate in a given time period, and we are always trying to tie our sales back to our marketing efforts.   

Humans are visual by nature and most people can really sink their teeth into charts. Unfortunately, out-of-the-box, Microsoft CRM gives you one chart that has opportunities by revenue and by source campaign called ' Won Opps by Source Campaign'. This is valid data when tying marketing dollars spent to effort. The biggest issue is that marketing can't be responsible for the revenue generated by a lead.
 
What marketing is responsible for is getting X leads generated. So, I wanted to see how our closed opportunities were broken down by source campaign. How many opportunities was each campaign bringing in?
 
So, here is how to create a chart to see visual evidence of our efforts:

Step 1 - Go into your Opportunities

Step 2 - Select the list that you want data on (I am interested in Closed Opportunities.)

Step 3 - Open the charts by clicking on the < (on the very right hand side of MSCRM)

Step 4 - This just happened to be the last chart that I looked at. This is the chart that shows revenue by source campaign - not very helpful to me to see if we are hitting our lead quota.

Step 5 - Click on Charts at the top of MSCRM
Step 6 - Click New Chart

Step 7  - Select the Pie chart

Step 8 - Name the Chart and select the data fields that you are interested in - in this case it is Source Campaign. (If you can’t see the image, both fields have the Source Campaign field.)

Step 9 - Save and Close

Step 10 - Viola - of course I had to protect the names of our innocent campaigns, but you get the drift!

With the arrival of 2012, our Marketing goals have been set and now it is time to get down to business. One of our major goals for 2012 is to have 12 webinars, which will be a major feat considering we only had 2 in 2011! Why 12 webinars? We figure one a month will be plenty to swallow. One of our biggest struggles to having webinars was just having a formula in place.

As I have been reading and planning, I ran across this great article: Webinar Promotion that Delivers: Use Email, Social, Viral Referrals and Video to Boost Attendance, Drive Lead Gen.

This article was great because it showed...

• The ability to measure traffic
• Advertising webinars using banner ads on your own site
• The creation of a "Webinar Alert" mailing list which had an average open rate of 42.6% and accounted for 39% of registrations
• The "Refer a Friend" promotion in registration confirmations
    The page includes 4 fields:
  
  •      Registrant's name
  •      Registrant's email address
  •      Friend's email address
  •      Text box to write a personal note about the event
• The importance of removing registered users from the promotions for the same event - this may be evident but many companies mess this up and just keep promoting and banging people in the head
• Automated event reminders - both one day and one hour before
• Webinar exit polls - Love these!
• The posting of newsletters to your website to continue to drive traffic

Dave Wallace, Director of Product Management for Sage SalesLogix CRM, provided Technology Advisors’ customers a preview of the new SalesLogix v8.0 coming out next year.

Dave dove into the updates in the Web Client from a Usability perspective, highlighting:

• List Management
• Account List View
• Detail View
• Scrollable Grids in Tabs
• Copy Text to Clipboard
• Move & Copy Contact
• Mail Merge

He showed Activities and Calendaring, calling out the ability to update multiple opportunities at one time and the new configurable pop-up alerts.
Next, onto the LAN improvements which included updates to the UI, the Windows 7 Thumbnails and how to mark a resource as a location and manage those resources. Then the big one, how to Add a Field!

In the Mobile version, we looked at the Month and Week views as well as new features including:

• Support for custom keyboard types on supported devices
• New date/time picker control
• Support for events
• Plug-n-play customizations
• Roles/secured actions

The discussion led to Data Safeguarding where we saw the addition of security to SpeedSearch indexes and password security for the web.

The hour flew by quickly as we only covered a portion of the new features and functionality in the SalesLogix v8.0 release. What else does everyone want to see?

Normally when data is deleted from a database, it is simple enough to have a programmer write a DELETE statement in SQL to wipe out a bunch of records from a table. This technically works okay, but has some issues that one should be aware of.

SalesLogix maintains the schema of the database in its own system tables and uses this data to keep track of data structure and relationships. When data is removed using a straight database call, any child records to the records being deleted still remain in the database leading to orphaned data.

Even though this orphaned data may not be visible anywhere, from a data quality standpoint, this is not a good idea and eventually leads to useless records piling up in the database. Luckily, SalesLogix provides a purge data wizard that allows for purging a set of data and their child records - based on conditions that you might want to specify.

To purge data, launch the Tools --> Maintenance --> Purge Data Wizard

It will walk you through a series of steps that help you specify the exact data set that needs to be purged.

Depending on which record you are on, the wizard will automatically check the box that matches that record type. For example, if you launch the wizard from Contacts, the default Contacts button is checked as in the screenshot below:

The wizard will allow you to select one of the following methods of selecting the dataset for deletion:

• Based on the value in a single field
  • Allows for selection of a field, an operator and a value that will be used as a condition for the deletion.
• Based on the values in two fields
  • Same as above, but allows for 2 conditions to be created.
• Entire current lookup or group
  • If a group can be created using multiple conditions and joins, then this group can be used as the basis for the record deletion.
• Active record
  • Only the record that is currently being worked on will be deleted
• Currently selected records
  • This allows you to highlight a set of records in the group view and only have those highlighted records be deleted.

From experience, I have found it best to delete based on a group. This is because:

• The data in the group can easily be exported to Excel before deletion. This helps in case the list has to be passed around for review.
• The group can be shared with SalesLogix users so everyone can review it before it is deleted.
• The group lets you make sure you have the conditions right before you attempt a Delete.
• In most cases there are multiple conditions to be specified and the "group builder" comes in handy to build a more complex group based on a set of business rules.Considerations for Purging/Deleting Entity Data in SalesLogix