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Oct 25

Zoho CRM – Use Lead Source & Deal Type to assess your marketing strategies

By CRM, Software

The Lead Source field appears standard in Lead, Account, Contact and Deal (formerly Potential) modules.  It is intended to represent your quiver of marketing strategies used to find leads.  If you use this field as its intended, in conjunction with the “Type” field in the Deal module,  you can get great feedback on how much new business is brought in by the varying marketing strategies, and make the necessary adjustments to put more time and energy into techniques that work and less on ones that don’t.

ALWAYS mark a new lead with a lead source, and make sure the Lead source field is mapped into at the very least the Deal module.

ALWAYS indicate whether a Deal Type is “New Business” or “Existing Business”.

If you do these two things – you can then pull a DEAL Summary report for all Closed Won deals within a specified timeframe, group by Lead Source, and Sum Amount.  This will show you the $ amounts won via each marketing strategy employed over the specified timeframe!

To take this one step further, you can throw Campaigns into the mix!  If your marketing is campaign driven, you can also mark each Lead/Deal with a Campaign Source – then you can pull a similar report, but instead of Lead Sources, use Campaign source instead.  This gives you ROI on all of your marketing campaigns!

Sep 29

MSCRM – Counting Child Records

By CRM

If you haven’t worked with the calculated and rollup field types in MSCRM, you’re missing out! They really help to automate calculations and provide an easy way of doing tasks that you previously had to do with JavaScript or workflows. I’m going to review a few examples of calculated and rollup fields that I have found useful for many clients.

Sometimes you may want to know how many child records a customer has. For example, how many opportunities have you had with a particular client and moreover how many were won vs. lost. Management may want to know how many open or active quotes are currently out to customers. You can quickly get this number by using a rollup field. My example will demonstrate how to get the number of won opportunities for an account.

  1. Create a new field on the account. The Data Type will be Whole Number and the Field Type will be Rollup.
  2. When you click on Edit next to the field type, the field will be created a new window will open where you can set the criteria.
  3. Under Related Entity, choose Opportunities (Account).
  4. For the filter, set it to look at only opportunities with a status of Won.
  5. Finally, for the aggregation set it to Count of Opportunity.

Here is what the rollup settings look like when finished. You could also do something similar to sum the total revenue across all won opportunities.

Rollup Count

The field will update automatically every evening when a scheduled system job runs. You can also manually update the field by clicking on the small refresh icon.

Rollup Refresh

 

 

Sep 29

MSCRM – Last Activity Date

By CRM

If you haven’t worked with the calculated or rollup field types in MSCRM, you’re missing out! They really help to automate calculations and provide an easy way of doing tasks that you previously had to do with JavaScript or workflows. I’m going to review a few examples of calculated and rollup fields that I have found useful for many clients.

If your users or sales reps are logging activities in MSCRM, chances are that management would like to know how often they’re working on a particular customer or opportunity. With a rollup field, you can get this information with ease. This example is going to determine the date of the most recent closed activity for an account. My example will look at all activities but you can limit it to specific types. I have a client that only wants to know when a rep logged a phone call and didn’t leave a message because that should mean that the rep actually spoke to the customer.

  1. Create a new field for the account. The Data Type will be Date & Time, Field Type will be rollup. Format is your preference – Date Only or Date and Time.
  2. Make sure that Behavior is NOT set to Date Only. Since the Actual End field on the activity is not date only, the rollup field can’t be either.
  3. When you click on the Edit button next to Field Type, a new window will open where you can define your rollup criteria.
  4. Under Related Entity, choose Activities (Regarding).
  5. For the Activity filter, set it to Activity Status equals Completed.
  6. Under Aggregation, use MAX of Actual End. You can choose a different date field here but I use Actual End to be consistent across all activity types.

Here is what the completed rollup settings will look like.

MSCRM Rollup

Rollup fields are automatically updated every evening with a system job that runs. Additionally, you can manually update the field by clicking on the small refresh icon.

MSCRM Rollup Refresh

 

 

Sep 29

MSCRM – Calculating Opportunity Age

By CRM

If you haven’t worked with the calculated field types in MSCRM, you’re missing out! They really help to automate calculations and provide an easy way of doing tasks that you previously had to do with JavaScript or workflows. I’m going to review a few examples of calculated fields that I have found useful for many clients.

People often want to know how old a record is. For example, you may want to know how long an opportunity has been open or how long a lead has been waiting to be contacted. An easy way to achieve this is with a calculated field. You can basically “set it and forget it.” Let’s review how to create a field to calculate the age of an opportunity. It will indicate how long an opportunity has been open.

  1. Create a new field on the opportunity. The Data Type will be Whole Number for the number of days. The Field Type will be Calculated.
  2. When you click the Edit button next to the field type, it will create the field and open a new window where you can set up your calculation.
  3. First set up a condition that checks if the status of the opportunity is Open.
  4. Add an action for the condition. It will set Age to DIFFINDAYS(createdon, NOW()). This is essentially today’s date minus the day that it was created on.
  5. Add an Else action that will calculate the age when the opportunity is not open (closed as won or lost). This will look at the actual close date minus the date that it was created. The formula is DIFFINDAYS(createdon, actualclosedate).

Here is a screenshot of what the calculation looks like when finished.

MSCRM Set Age

It’s very simple and doesn’t require any maintenance. The field updates on its own.

MSCRM Age Example

Sep 29

Salesforce.com – Using Email Templates for “One-Off” emails

By CRM, Uncategorized

Another way to use the email templates is to not “blast” the emails, but to send them one at a time.  For instance, in a contact record, I may mouse over the history area and click “Send Email”.

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This of course allows for the emails to be sent and recorded directly from Salesforce but you need a template.  You can manually write it but that would be a little tough.  So, “select a template” instead and have it filled in.

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Once the template is selected it fills in everything but provides you the opportunity to customize just a little bit more for that one email.  Maybe a comment to the person directly about last month’s phone call, an upcoming event or maybe a request for a meeting specific to their needs.  This just really helps your users not have to type the same thing every time (and helps with spelling, marketing needs, standard messaging, etc.).

Some will create a template that is more like a signature to which you can also select that each time.

Sep 27

ZOHO CRM – Get your GAME on!

By CRM, Software No Comments

With the new 2016 CRM release comes GAMESCOPE! Gamescope will motivate your employees to work harder and have fun doing it! Anyone can set up a game with one or more users in the system. Each player earns points completing certain defined things in CRM – like converting a lead, closing a deal, completing a task.

To set up the actions and points rewarded, click on the GameScope icon in the top nav bar,

screen-shot-2016-09-27-at-7-26-24-pm

then click the gear wheel.screen-shot-2016-09-27-at-7-26-42-pm

To create a game, simply click the New Game Button. Try it out!

Sep 25

ZOHO CRM – Add margins to a template

By CRM, Software

Zoho’s inventory templates look fine when viewing online, but if someone wanted to print them, they don’t have much of a margin around them.   Here’s a quick trick to add a margin to any template in Zoho:

Create the template first.  Then click the html button in the Template Editor’s Tool pallet:

You’ll be presented with all the html code that goes into making the template that you created.  Don’t be scared ;o)

Add this code at the start:

<div style=”margin:10px;”>

and this code at the very end:

</div>

You can adjust the number 10 to get the desired margin you want.  Smaller number will create thinner margin.

Sep 25

ZOHO CRM 2016 – Where are all my Custom Buttons?

By CRM, Software

Custom buttons got a little bit of a make-over in the 2016 version, and this is the case whether you have switched to the new version or not…

BEFORE, each custom button would be a visible button in the area you selected (List view, View or Edit)

NOW, they are together in a drop down list with ONLY the name of the first button showing, and you can have more than 2!

Also, for buttons placed in the list view, in the new version you must now select at least one record before the buttons become visible:

Feb 22

MSCRM – Recurring Tasks

By CRM, Software No Comments

Do you have specific tasks that you do on a regular basis and would like to automate their creation? MSCRM doesn’t have the capability to do this out-of-the-box but with a few new fields and a simple workflow, you can do it yourself.

The only field that you need to create is an option set for the recurrence frequency. I called the field “Recurrence” and the options available are None, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly. I’ll review the workflow April’s Tips & Tricks Google Hangout so make sure you join us!

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