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!

 

Why On-premise CRM Deployments Need Cloud Computing

Many on-premise CRM vendors like Sage Saleslogix are now offering a cloud option.   Companies who want an in-house solution usually ignore these options. Here are a couple of reasons why you should consider a cloud offering.

Testing -- to effectively manage your CRM system you need a test system, if not a test and development system.  These systems require software licenses for operating systems, data bases, and system utilities.  They require back, management time and IT support time.  Cloud computing provides a lower cost alternative to managing your CRM test / development system because you rent the cloud environment only when you need it.    Places like Amazon charge a few dollars per hour for these systems.  Companies can have a managed test environment which they only need to turn on when they are testing and have accessibility from anywhere.  The cloud can do all this while keeping costs down. 

Disaster Recovery --  Cloud computing provides an option for company who are looking for a disaster planning.  A company can set up and maintain a complete environment for about $250 and maintain it for a monthly fee of about $50.  Back up services can push a copy of your CRM data to Amazon for a few dollars a month or when disaster strikes you can migrate up a back-up copy of you data base.  Assuming you make back-ups.  Cloud-computing is a virtual environment,  so you can ramp you the processor, memory and disk space on the fly to meet the needs of your production environment.

So on-premise user before dismissing cloud computing you might want to reconsider how you are doing Disaster Recovery and development / testing and see if these provide money saving alternatives.

After this Wednesday, March 31, 2010, SugarCRM will no longer provide customer support, maintenance patches or bug fixes for Sugar 5.1.0.

Check the End of Version plan to learn about the upcoming End of Version dates.

This update contains a few bug fixes and a slew of improvements to the email functionality.  "The Emails module has been redesigned to improve usability and performance. New features have been added and existing features have been enhanced or removed."

The following features have been added or enhanced:

•  A new Quick Compose form provides the ability to quickly compose emails from other records, such as accounts, without leaving a List View or a Detail View. You can access this form outside of the email client by clicking on any email address or by clicking the "Compose Email" button in the Activities sub-panel of a record's detail view.
• The Address Book has been redesigned to make selecting recipients for emails easier. You can easily identify and select email recipients from related records.
• The Search form for finding imported emails has been expanded, and now includes the following fields: Subject, From, To, Date From, Date Until, Relate To, Assigned To, Attachment.
• The Settings window in the email client has been redesigned for ease of use.
• The Mail Account tab in the Settings window has been redesigned and simplified for ease of use.
• The Folders tab has been removed and a Folder management section has been added to the General tab.
• Inbound Email setup has been redesigned to make it easier for administrators to create group mail accounts.
• Administrators can configure outgoing mail accounts for users.
• A "Send Test Email" button has been added to test outgoing email settings.
• Error messaging has been improved for invalid and incomplete mail account settings.
• The user interface has been enhanced so that viewing, importing and sending emails can be done within the email client, without accessing additional views in the Emails module shortcuts menu.
• Users can assign the email record to another user during and after import.

You can read the full release notes on the SugarCRM website here.

Knowledgesync is an Alerts and Workflow solution for numerous business applications. A few of the more basic uses are:

• Business activity monitoring for events customers want to know about.
• Business Process automation. Automatically deliver confirmations, quotes, thank you emails, etc.
• Alerts for warnings regarding issues with clients.

How can these items be accomplished? Here is a short list of some basic capabilities:

• Triggered emails based on events in a database or email inbox.
• Web dashboards using html with graphs, etc.
• Deliver crystal reports via email as a pdf on a schedule.
• Trigger crystal reports sent as a pdf to a group of people.
• Inbound email marketing
• Triggered updates integrating several databases or applications.

Off the top of my head, I can see several very good uses for this application within Technology Advisors for the Customer Advocate position.
Such as:

• Automatically send pdf ticket reports to customers.
• Send alerts to the Customer Advocate and Support about issues that need to be followed up for a customer.
  • Tickets, Contract Status, etc.
• Alert emails to Customers and the Customer Advocate
  • Tickets opened & closed.
• Alerts to the Customer Advocate
  • Ticket without an updated for 7(3?) days.
  • Customers the Customer Advocate has not contacted in the last 30 days.

These basic functions would not take long to setup, but could save our users several hours a week in effort. Not to mention avoiding headaches from issues that might slip through the cracks otherwise.

Best of all, SalesLogix users can download a free 30 day trial at http://www.sageknowledgesync.com. For best results, I would advise our customers to work with Technology Advisors to make sure the trial is beneficial and used to its fullest potential.

Entrepreneur.com has an article up on 5 Simple Ways to Show Customers You Care:

1. Share Your Knowledge
2. Ask, Listen, Respond, Adapt
3. Reward Customers
4. Hold a Customer Appreciation Event
5. Do Good

It's a great article and I recommend you check out. Here is my take on how you can apply these points to your own business.

1. Sharing Your Knowledge.  Social CRM is here.  As has always been the case, with it you can manage your e-mail newsletters.  You can now also manage your incoming and outgoing Social CRM communications with applications such as Twitter or Facebook.

2. Ask, Listen, Respond, Adapt.  Without a CRM application, how will you be able to keep track of all of your correspondence with your customers.  Newer CRM packages have the ability to integrate with all forms of communications.  Fax, Email, Snail Mail, Twitter, Facebook, Linked In, etc.

3. Reward Customers.  With the proper CRM application you can track Campaigns where you use Coupons, Gifts, Events, Targeted Mailers, Phone Calls, Social Media, etc.

4. Hold a Customer Appreciation Event.  Customer Appreciate Events or User Groups are a great way to keep your name in a customers mind.  With CRM you are able to invite your customers or potential customers to the events, track registrations and report on attendance and survey results.

5. Do Good.  Doing good is a great thing, but how will your customers know about it if you aren't able to track and effectively communicate your "good."

Using newer CRM products goes far beyond just a giant electronic Rolodex of names and phone numbers.  With a properly setup CRM application and trained user base, you should be able to manage your complete customer experience from prospect to repeat business.  And then some.

Crmbuyer.com has a story up on CRM for the small business, specifically on when to invest.  There is some good information in there.

When to Buy

When small businesses start out, they are usually focused on building a list of prospects and customers, noted Garns. The value of a business is usually in the size and quality of that list.

Read the full story here.

Microsoft has released Update Rollup 8. This is a tested, cumulative set of updates for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0. It includes performance enhancements that are packaged together for easy deployment.

 More information is available at the Microsoft website here.

We are pleased to announce Jason Nassi, Sr. Director, Product Management at SugarCRM will be joining us for the CRM Acceleration event on Thursday. Jason will present the SugarCRM 2010 and Beyond Roadmap and be onhand to answer questions.

Register Now for CRM Acceleration!

Thursday, December 10
9:00 am - 12:00 pm
Park Ridge Country Club
636 N. Prospect
Park Ridge, IL 60068

Join Technology Advisors as we demonstrate what it takes to ensure success at our CRM Acceleration event. 

End user adoption is one of the key elements in gaining the most value out of your CRM investment. By following a few best practices, companies will quickly see the benefits of that investment.

Learn how to:

• Utilize the proper techniques to achieve a successful implementation and the greatest end user adoption
• Integrate CRM with other business systems
• Move data in and out of your CRM system

This interactive event will provide you with a solid strategy to achieve a successful CRM implementation and increase user adoption early on in your implementation process to see results right away.

Don't miss this chance to accelerate your company's growth with the value of Sugar.