By William Marchesano, Technology Advisor & Evangelist
I know this greeting is about five days late but…Happy New Year! That’s the challenge of “Wednesdays With Will”, I have to stick to my day (Wednesday) for the blog title to make sense. Regardless, I’m sure most of you participated in the common ritual of making resolutions for self-improvement now that a New Year is upon us. Instead of asking about your personal resolutions, why don’t we discuss your business resolutions for the year? This question isn’t intended to give you anxiety but to get you thinking about how you can take what you did well in 2015 and make it great in 2016. Let’s narrow the focus to 3 areas that are common among most businesses no matter the size or industry…Sales, Marketing, and Customer Services/Support.
If your business is like 99.99% of businesses today, you are looking for ways to improve at least one if not all of these aspects of your organization. As we discussed in previous posts, one of the best ways a business can address all three facets or each individual component would be to leverage a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. Is your sales team currently using one to track your interactions with customers, prospects, and opportunities? Is your marketing team using one to manage marketing campaigns (including budgets), gauge effectiveness of individual campaigns, and track social sentiment to better position your organization through messaging? And finally does your customer service or support team have the tools to effectively service your customers so that they become your advocates? These are all tasks that can be easily managed by a CRM.
It’s a New Year so that means you have a fresh start and new opportunity to set your business up for success. Seize the opportunity and have the conversation now. What you do in January will dictate your success for the rest of the year.
As always, I encourage you to reach out to me to discuss these topics in deeper detail. I hope you enjoyed and found this week’s article informative. If you’re interested in some how-to related CRM material, check out blogs by my colleague Ben Wardhere. Till next time…
About the author:
Will has over 16 years of experience in business development, team management, and project management. Will has worked at Managed Solution for over four years and is currently advising businesses on best CRM practices and implementations. Will’s focus is on process improvement and analytics specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Will is a Microsoft Certified Professional, with certifications in Presales Technical Specialist – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Sales Specialist- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Application, Sales Specialist- Office 365, Sales Specialist- SMB Infrastructure and Sales Specialist- Datacenter.
For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
How to connect Microsoft Dynamics CRM to Microsoft Dynamics Marketing
Synchronize your Microsoft Dynamics Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics CRM data with the Dynamics Marketing Connector for CRM. This deep-dive video guides you through downloading and installing the connector into Dynamics CRM Online. Initial synchronization and creating custom mappings is also covered.
For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
Microsoft acquires Adxstudio Inc., Web portal and application lifecycle management solutions provider
Organizations today are looking for new and different ways to better connect, support and engage with their customers. People increasingly rely on channels like Web portals to make sure their voice is heard – in fact this year, Forrester research uncovered that for the first time, Web self-service is now the most popular channel customers use to find help. Microsoft is committed to delivering intelligent customer engagement solutions to empower people and organizations to use these new channels to more effectively connect with their customers online.
Today we took another step toward fulfilling this commitment. I’m pleased to announce that Microsoft has reached a definitive agreement to acquire key product and technology assets of Adxstudio Inc., a provider of Web portals, online engagement solutions and application lifecycle management solutions for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. With this acquisition of our long-time partner, our customers will immediately be able to take advantage of new and exciting ways to engage with customers online.
Packed with compelling features that extend Dynamics CRM to the Web, Adxstudio Web portals are built natively on Dynamics CRM, allowing our customers to easily connect and extend their key sales and customer services business processes online. These portals work with the CRM application easily and naturally for both online and on-premises customers, who can take advantage of this offering right away. Adxstudio portals can also be used along with our Parature Service thanks to native integration with Parature’s rich knowledge management solutions.
This acquisition also delivers pre-built engagement solutions including partner relationship management for organizations who sell through partner channels; technical support solutions for high tech and software development organizations; and online citizen engagement for public sector organizations. Each of these solutions will be available for all Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers and can be used both on-premises and in the cloud.
Finally, this acquisition will empower our own customers as well as our strong partner ecosystem as it will accelerate our efforts to enable customers and independent software vendors (ISVs) to build their own CRM Web engagement solutions on Microsoft technologies. These Adxstudio capabilities enable any business process to become Web-facing.
We are dedicated to giving companies intelligent customer engagement solutions so they can deliver customer experiences that are personalized, proactive and predictive. We’re constantly looking at ways to deliver value to businesses and organizations around the world. Adding Adxstudio team members and technology components is another important step in this effort to deliver great value for our customers.
