A Multilevel Reference

This book is appropriate for both beginners and advanced users. Because Microsoft CRM is a new product, many readers will be encountering it for the first time and having Special Edition Using Microsoft CRM handy will help ease the learning curve and speed up the process. Further down the road, as your expertise with Microsoft CRM grows and you become interested in the more advanced aspects of the product, you can use this book as a reference as new questions come up.

You can expect to learn the principles of CRM, and how to apply them to your business, as well as how Microsoft CRM specifically carries out those principles for you. You'll learn how to define your requirements and make sure your implementation meets them, and also how to identify and work with other vendors of products and services that complement the Microsoft CRM offering.

Apply CRM Principles in Your Business

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business practice that is used extensively in large corporations today. It has evolved over the last ten years or so as the de facto standard of handling customer interactions, becoming a movement in the business world.

You can learn the principles of CRM as practiced by large corporations and apply them to any business to enhance your acquisition, handling, and retention of your most profitable customers.

This book will help you learn how to utilize Microsoft CRM to do the following:

• Sell more effectively

• Make informed decisions faster

• Provide efficient and consistent service

• Help your customers serve themselves

Selling More Effectively

When you own and manage a small- or medium-sized business, you learn very quickly that for your business to grow, you have to get organized. When you can't get your arms around all your current business, it's hard to get ahead of the curve and seek out new business, much less plan and execute long-term marketing strategies.

In many ways, the first step to getting on top of your business and building an organization that can grow and sustain itself is to get the sales process organized. You need to identify and qualify new business opportunities easily, manage leads and contacts, store them, and convert information you've already collected on leads to customer information after the customer has been acquired.

As you begin to get on top of current business activities, you need to manage sales contacts, track the performance of staff and of marketing efforts. You need to be able to identify what's working and do more of that, while improving the activities that aren't working as well as you'd like.

Microsoft CRM is designed to help you do all this. It helps you identify and manage leads and opportunities, forecast expected sales activity, and ensure a shorter sales cycle. These activities can in turn lead to higher close rates on sales opportunities, while increased customer satisfaction improves customer retention.

Making Informed Decisions Faster

Getting your arms around your business means clarifying your view of your business so that you can make better decisions through better information. It also means knowing your customer, their needs and wants, and finding ways to meet those needs quickly and profitably.

It means identifying your best customers and offering them a higher level of service and better terms based on their profitability. You should also be able to identify the lower 10 or 15% of your customer base, which should be abandoned regularly to make room for new growth.

With Microsoft CRM you can forecast sales, measure business activity and performance, track service success, and identify trends and problems. Setting up these capabilities quickly and correctly will boost your business and help you take it to the next level.

Providing Efficient and Consistent Service

Improved efficiency is another way of making your business more profitable. Providing a consistent level of service, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, will help you acquire the most profitable customers and retain the ones you have.

Microsoft CRM offers a shared knowledge base so that your customers can get information about your products and services quickly and easily through your Web site. It also enables you to solve a problem for one customer, document the solution, and provide it to all customers so that they can help themselves.

Microsoft CRM provides automated routing and queuing of customer questions and issues, which makes it easy to respond quickly and efficiently while allowing customers to track the progress of any problems themselves through your customer portal.

Implement Microsoft CRM for Your Company

Microsoft CRM is provided in different versions for different types and sizes of customers. It can be purchased as a standalone solution, where you buy just the CRM product, through a Great Plains reseller. It can also be purchased as a part of a larger business solution provided through the Great Plains reseller channel, where it comes already integrated with your accounting or other systems that you use to run your business. You can choose to run Microsoft CRM yourself on your own computers, or you can purchase an option that is hosted by an application services provider (ASP), in which charges are per user-per month, and all you do is log on to a Web site to access your services.

Any of those options must be set up and configured for your particular business, and it will take a certain amount of planning and activities to get the software up and running. In this book you will learn the best ways to plan, manage, and carry out these implementation activities so that your installation is seamless, and causes the least disruption to your business, so when you're set up, your information is configured properly and everything works as planned.

Customize Your Installation of Microsoft CRM

How you install the software depends on which components your business needs the most. Some businesses are information intensive, and will make heavy use of the knowledgebase and online portal features, whereas others are more sales intensive and will need all the features of the sales force automation components.

You'll learn how to identify your requirements and plan your installation accordingly so that you've got the best set up for your particular business needs. You'll also learn to carry those requirements into the future and plan for process improvements, and the implementation of new releases with new features of CRM.

Grow Your CRM System as Your Business Grows

You might want to start with the standard edition, which provides basic features of Microsoft CRM for the first few months of your implementation. Then, if your needs justify the investment, as your business grows and your confidence with the software develops, you might want to expand how you use Microsoft CRM and purchase the professional edition, which includes the more advanced features.

Special Edition Using Microsoft CRM will help you quickly and easily implement the basic features of the software and, when you are ready, it will help you understand the advanced features as well.

Understand the CRM Marketplace

Microsoft CRM is a product being introduced into an already robust CRM marketplace. Significant resources are available in terms of vendor services and products that, depending on the size and requirements of your business, you might want to take advantage of.

This book will help you understand what's available and how to navigate your way through the marketplace. It will introduce the main competitors and alternative products and explain related aspects of CRM and how the SME can find products delivering these aspects. We will cover Microsoft's reseller partner channel, and what you need to know to find the right reseller for your business needs.

We'll also cover the three aspects that make up corporate CRM: data warehousing, reporting and analytic applications, and how you can begin to think about utilizing their basic principles in your business.

Manage Your Relationship with Service Vendors

The book discusses how to define the services you will need from vendors, how to communicate your requirements to them, and how to make sure that what your vendor delivers is consistent with those requirements.

You will learn how to establish your requirements, what your role is compared to vendors and other participants, and how to establish project ownership. We'll talk about adopting an iterative approach to requirements and how to prioritize your business needs.

We'll cover how to find and organize the resources that can help you build your CRM capabilities, introducing what's needed and where to find likely sources to draw from. We'll also examine what to look for in a vendor, where and how to collect information about vendors, and how to set up agreements and handle an ongoing relationship with a vendor based on the partnership model.

Integrate Microsoft CRM with Your Other Applications and Data

Microsoft CRM Sales and Customer Service modules work closely with Microsoft Outlook and other business applications. You'll learn how to boost your productivity by working with these modules interactively, and sharing information from one area of Microsoft CRM to another.

Microsoft CRM is also designed to exchange information easily with MS Excel and other data-handling applications. We'll cover the basics of managing your data throughout its lifecycle, understanding the Microsoft CRM customer-data model, and using import/export facilities to share data seamlessly.

Redesign Your Business to be More Customer-Centric

Making your business customer-focused is the best way to sustain business advantage in today's tough marketplace. Special Edition Using Microsoft CRM introduces the concepts of redesign for business process automation, explaining what a business process is, how to explore the many viewpoints of any business, and how to identify and adopt the viewpoint of your customer.

When you align all points of view with the customer view, you will need to reengineer your business process accordingly. You'll sort out any areas in your business currently not aligned with the customer view and work through the steps to get them aligned. At the completion of that alignment, technology can be applied to support the newly customer-centric processes.

We'll also cover how to define and clearly communicate the value you provide to customers. Microsoft CRM will help you capture the information required to demonstrate that value on an ongoing basis.

Access the CRM Community

Although there are currently few online community dedicated solely to Microsoft CRM, a robust and active user community for the general practice of CRM already exists online. You'll learn how to tap into that community to get ideas and help with your CRM questions.

We'll cover the rules of the road for participating in online communities, with tips and pointers for making friends online. We'll also take a look at what you can expect to gain from online communities, and how to translate the corporate CRM discussions to apply to your small- or mid-sized business.

We'll introduce some pre-selected sites with reviews and comments on their strengths and weaknesses to give you a convenient guide as you get started.

Find Consulting Help for Implementing Microsoft CRM

You'll learn the reasons to hire a consultant; from getting objective advice from an industry expert to the proven methods that can shorten your implementation time.

We'll cover what to look for in a consultant so that you get the help you're looking for when you need it. We'll also include tips for checking credentials, getting referrals, and evaluating the information you find.