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Recent posts by our CRM Experts
Oct 25

ZOHO CRM – Lead Conversion Mapping

By CRM, Software

Savvier Zoho CRM users who create custom fields should also know about Lead Conversion Mapping!   Wscreen-shot-2016-10-25-at-12-24-31-pmhen you create a custom field in the Lead module you have the option to create the identical field in the Accounts Contacts and/or Potential Module at the same time.  In the field creation pop-up click the down arrow next to “Also create for” to view the checkboxes and select the ones you want.  When you save the new field in the Lead module identical fields will be created in the selected modules and automatically mapped back to the Lead field.

What if you didn’t create your fields this way?  How do you map custom fields between these four modules to flow custom information from the Lead into the other three on conversion?  The answer is Lead Conversion Mapping.

  • Setup->Customization->Modules
  • Hover over Leads and click … to display the menu
  • Select Lead Conversion Mapping to view the mapping table.
  • Next to the Lead field to be mapped, you can select to target fields in each of the three modules
  • NOTE – fields must be of the same type to map!

screen-shot-2016-10-25-at-10-25-50-am

 

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 – Creating Email Templates

By Uncategorized

You can easily setup and create email templates in Salesforce, used for email blasts, simple emails, etc.  I like to use my templates for both, which can be a real time saver when you find yourself writing the same (or similar) emails many times a day.  To start click Setup and search for “Email templates”.  Click to select that area of the setup menu.

You’ll see a list of your templates:

1-1

Here’s we’re going to click “New Template”.

Choose whether you want simple text, HTML, etc.  I prefer simple text sometimes, makes the email feel a bit less boiler plate and individual when there isn’t as much marketing stuff in there.  However, depending on the needs, maybe the marketing “stuff” is what’s needed.  Select and Click Next.

Here we provide the template information including folder (if you want to organize your templates), the name/API name, description, the subject and the body.  Here I’ve copied the sample template into the body to display the merge fields used.

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Couple of key points here and what we’ll demonstrate in the webinar for this tip (see our events section) is the creation of new merge fields.  Using the top part of the form, you choose your field, then simply copy and paste in those merge fields into the body of the email.  Here we’ve got the Account.Product field displayed.

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Save it and done.

Sep 29

Salesforce.com – Running an Email Blast Using a Template

By Uncategorized

Now that we’ve got our template created, let’s make the blast happen.  For this, we need to go to our Contacts area as I always say, “we do business with accounts; we communicate with contacts”.

Once there at the bottom of the contact home page (one with the “recently viewed”) and scroll to the bottom – select “Mass Email Contacts”.

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On this first page, you can use a view that you already created, or you can create a new view for the contacts.  Here I’m using an existing view.  Once you click “GO”, it will show you all the contacts you’re going to mail to (to which you can uncheck some if you’d rather not email them).

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Now you choose your email template.  You can choose a folder and even preview them as well if you forgot what they look like.

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Click Next to get to the final screen (this is point of no return here if you click SEND).  Here you just have to decide what to do with the history of the email.  For instance, I prefer to NOT bcc myself, I do add history for each and then just put in a topic for the mass email (the body of the email will NOT store in history, only the subject and date it was sent to save on space).  You can schedule it which I always recommend as well.

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Now, keep in mind that there are some limits to how many emails you can send so check with your administrator before doing any of this, making sure you won’t use up your quota or you don’t have too many contacts to send to.  Also, there’s a simple change that has to be done or your emails will say something like “no-reply@salesforce.com on behalf of Corey Babka” which no one likes.  See this post on this setting:  https://help.salesforce.com/HTViewHelpDoc?id=emailadmin_deliverability.htm

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”.

3-1

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.

3-2

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 28

GoldMine : Using Templates for E-mail Signatures

By Uncategorized

Did you know that you can use an actual e-mail template for a signature, as opposed to using a simple text file? This allows you to use fancy fonts and insert company logos.

First, you must create an e-mail signature template.

1. Select Go To | Document Templates from the top level menu.

2. Select YOUR username from the top left-hand drop down list.

3. Within the left-hand pane, right click on “E-mail Templates”, then select “New”.

4. This will drop you into the template editor. Simply use it like a word processor and type out (inserting pictures as appropriate) your desired signature text.

5. When finished, click the little yellow disk button in the top left-hand corner to “Save”. Make sure your template is listed properly in the Document Templates list.

To set the template to be your default e-mail signature;

1. Select Tools | Options from the top level menu.

2. Select the “E-mail” tab, click on “More Options”.

3. In the lower right-hand corner, use the “Default Templates” drop downs to find and select your signature template. You can set it for “New Outgoing”, “Replies”, and “Forwarded”.

4. Ok your way back out to GoldMine.

5. To test the template, simply start writing an e-mail. The Defaults you set up should take effect immediately.

Sep 28

GoldMine : Modify your Toolbar

By Uncategorized

Did you know that you can add simple GoldMine menu items to the top-level toolbar? This is done on a per-user basis, so each user can have their own “favorite” toolbar items.

1. Click on the “little down arrow” at the right edge of the toolbar;

 toolbar
2. Select “Add or Remove Buttons”.
3. Click “Customize”.
4. Click the “Commands” tab.
5. From here you will see all the available GoldMine top level menu items. To add any item to your toolbar, simply click-drag the item from the window up onto the toolbar. If you add the wrong thing, or want to remove an item, simply click-drag it OFF of the toolbar.
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