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

Sometimes all you need is a small change to convert an irritated customer. This was the case recently when one of our clients submitted a ticket about the "Check for Duplicates" button on the Insert Contact/Account screen.

It seems that even though they filled out fields on the form and pressed the "Check for Duplicates" button, the screen is displayed but no duplicates are found. I guess the argument could be made that this is a training issue, because all you need to do is check the fields you're interested in searching on and press the button again. Therein lies the source of the irritation. The client felt that filling out the form and pressing "Check for Duplicates" should do the trick.

A little sleuthing on our part resulted in a simple change involving two lines of code, also known as 'the ointment.'

Where and how to apply the ointment:

The change is applied to the code file ContactCheckForDuplicates.ascs.cs in the Sage SalesLogix portal. At first it would seem that all you need to do is check all the boxes and you're good to go, but alas, the form doesn't search when it is first opened anyway. This issue is easily solved by adding a line to the OnPreRender method as shown in the code snippet below.

    protected override void OnPreRender(EventArgs e)
    {
        try
        {
            if (Visible && DuplicateProvider != null)
            {
                LoadMatchFilters();
                LoadSourceEntity();
                Mode.Value = "Load";
                LoadPotentialMatches();
            }
        }
        catch (Exception exp)
        {
            throw new ApplicationException(GetLocalResourceObject("LoadErrorMSG").ToString());
        }
    }

The bolded line is a setting that is used by the next line "LoadPotentialMatches()" to perform the search.

Next we have to check all the check boxes to give it something to search on. This is done with a change to the "LoadMatchFilters()" method as shown in the snippet below.

            item.Value = propertyFilter.PropertyName;
            //item.Selected = propertyFilter.Enabled;
            item.Selected = true;
            chklstFilters.Items.Add(item);

Again, the bolded line is the change to make. Be sure to comment out the line above it. 

Now granted this is not an elegant hack, but our goal is to minimize costs and apply a little soothing ointment to a minor irritation.

SQL is often overlooked for programming capabilities. The concatenation function below saved me a lot of time in application programming to simplify presenting a 1-Many data relationship.  This function has been extremely useful for me in report writing, data presentation , etc.

 
The function takes a group of related records and returns a csv of the multiple rows
 
Example…
 
 
Account(Parent Table) ParentID     Name
1    ABC
2    DEF
 
 
Contacts(1-Many Child Table)
ParentID    ContactID    LastName
1    1    Johnson
1    2    Doe
2    3    Smith
2    4    Adams
2    4    Jones
 
Query using the function…
Select Name, ConcatContacts(ParentID) as Contacts from Account
 
Returns
Name    Contacts
ABC    Johnson, Doe
DEF    Smith, Adams, Jones
 
 
 
SQL Script to create function
 
/********Script Function Begin***********/
 
USE [CMRX_SLX626Prod_JM]
GO
 
/****** Object:  UserDefinedFunction [dbo].[ConcatContacts]    Script Date: 06/17/2011 14:48:01 ******/
SET ANSI_NULLS ON
GO
 
SET QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON
GO
 
 
 
CREATE FUNCTION [SYSDBA].[ConcatContacts](@ID CHAR(12))
RETURNS VARCHAR(8000)
AS
BEGIN
DECLARE @Output VARCHAR(8000)
SET @Output = ''
 
SELECT @Output =        CASE @Output WHEN '' THEN LastName ELSE @Output + ', ' + LastName
END
FROM CONTACTS
WHERE PARENTID = @ID ORDER BY CONTACTID
 
RETURN @Output
END
 
 
 
GO
 
 
/********Script Function End***********/

When using SalesLogix web it is often a good idea to run each portal in a separate Application Pool.  For a number of reasons we may want to find out what Application Pool is associated with each W3WP.exe process.

To find this out, simply open a command prompt via the Start Menu -> Run -> cmd.  Then type in "cd C:windowssystem32" and "cscript.exe iisapp.vbs" to see each W3WP's process ID and Application Pool ID.

I needed to create some documentation with screen shots.  All of my co-workers use SnagIt and I have used it in the past, but I was curious if I could find an alternative.  My searching found Greenshot, a free and open source screen capture tool.

The user interface isn't quite as polished as SnagIt, but it does everything I've ever used the tool for: Highlighting, Text Boxes and Arrows.

Greenshot:

SnagIt:

Greenshot appears to have recent activity.  The last blog post was December 2010 and in the forums the developer said they were working on version .9 in January 2011.

I'm currently using SnagIt version 7.2.5, the latest paid version I own which sometimes refuses to take screenshots since I upgraded to 2 monitors.  If I continue to have issues I think I will stick with Greenshot instead of paying for an upgrade.  Anyone know of any other alternatives to SnagIt or Greenshot?

Are you or one of your users experiencing short session times and getting logged off after just a few minutes of inactivity? Well the fix is just a few clicks away.

This is a per-user setting, so if more than one person is experiencing this problem, each user will have to make this change themselves.

While logged in, click the Options link in the upper-right hand corner.


On General/Search tab, locate the setting for Enable Automatic Logoff.

By default, it will be set to 30 Minutes. This time can be increased to any time you like, I'd recommend trying a setting of 90 or 120 minutes. For this setting change to take affect, you'll have to log out and back in.

When setting up a new instance of SalesLogix on a Microsoft SQL Server I generally setup two maintenance plans using the Maintenance Plan Wizard.  Note that if you are using SQL 2005, make sure you are running MS SQL Service Pack 3.  There was an issue in earlier versions of SQL 2005 that caused maintenance plans to not run on schedule.

The first plan performs a full backup of the SalesLogix database every night and deletes database backups older than two weeks.  Keeping two weeks of backups is up to the clients judgment and hard drive size.  Some clients want more backups, others want fewer backups.

The second plan is a SalesLogix Database Maintenance Plan.  In this plan I Check the Database Integrity, Rebuild the Indexes, Update the Statistics and Cleanup log files older than two months.

These are the Maintenance Plans that I have found to work.  Have any suggestions for better Maintenance Plans?  Leave a comment.

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.