For this reason, if you intend to do reports on activities that show related data to the Contact then you MUST train users to ALWAYS set the Regarding on their activities to the Contact. This includes when you are tracking Emails from Outlook. In order to get consistent reports on activities created from Outlook, everyone must set the Regarding (not just Track in CRM) or the Regarding field will not be filled out. Below is an example of the coveted Advanced Find list of phone calls with additional information about the Regarding Contact highlighted in yellow.

The problem with this policy of having users track all activities against the Contact is that it goes against CRM best practices. If you are working on an Opportunity, best practices are to track your phone calls and activities against the Opportunity. If you are working on a Case, then you want all activities to be regarding the Case. Likewise, if you are working on something built as a custom entity, such as a Project. There is no other way to associate activities with a specific Opportunity, Case, or Project without setting the Regarding field to that record.

Many people ask, “Can you set the Regarding to multiple records?” The answer is no. The regarding can only be set to one record. For example, an activity cannot be connected to Contact and an Opportunity through the Regarding field. If you could, it would make reporting on the Regarding field even harder because of the possible one-to-many relationship.

However, with the exception of Tasks, all Activity Types have another field for indicating the Contact.

• Phone Calls
  The Recipient for outgoing phone calls and Sender for incoming phone calls indicate the contact associated. This field is *special*, meaning it can contain a Lead, Contact, Account, or User.
• E-mail
  The From and To fields can indicate the contact associated with the account. Not only can these fields contain Leads, Accounts, Contacts or users, they can also contain multiples of those, as well as unresolved Email addresses (Email addresses that are not found in CRM, such as when an Email is tracked in CRM from Outlook).
• Appointments
  The Required and Optional fields on the Appointment indicate the contact associated with the Appointment. Not only can these fields contain Leads, Accounts, Facility/Equipment, Contacts or users—they can also contain multiples of those, as well as unresolved Email addresses (Email addresses that are not found in CRM, such as when an Appointment is tracked in CRM from Outlook.)
• Campaign Responses
  The Customer field (effectively the Regarding field) on the Campaign response shows the relationship to the Contact. This field is also a *special* field allowing a Lead, Account, or Contact to populate the field.

Because of these fields, you CAN set the Regarding on the Activity to the Opportunity, Case, or Project AND also have it associated with the Contact. So, it sounds like you can get your cake and eat it too!?

The problem comes when you try to report on information related to the Contact through one of these fields (Recipient, Sender, From, To, Required, Optional, or Customer). Due to the complexities behind the database relationships of these *special* fields on each of the activities, there is no way to report using Advanced Find or Report Wizard on any information related to the Contact associated with the Activity. You can query those fields as part of the Advanced Find, but you cannot show Contact fields as additional columns in your report. We are back as square one with the fact that the only direct relationship to the Contact is to set Regarding to the Contact.

At PowerObjects we have overcome this hurdle with a little bit of custom development on top of MSCRM. To each activity type, we added a new direct relationship to the Company (Account), Contact, and Lead. When one of the potential contact fields (Recipient, Sender, From, To, Required, Optional, or Customer) on an activity is updated, our plug-in cycles through the contents of the field and looks for the first valid Lead, Contact, or Account. It then fills in the Related Record fields with a direct relationship to that record.

Since these new lookups are direct relationships to the Contact, you can then Report through those relationships and display fields related to the Contact on an Advanced Find query or a Campaign Response. This solution is expected to work in 99% scenario where you are most often communicating with just one person. The solution does break down when there is an activity that is associated with many contacts. This will typically only happen with an Email to multiple people, but may also be an Appointment with multiple contacts in the Required or Optional fields. But for example, if I send an Email to two contacts at a customer through Outlook and track it in CRM, Microsoft CRM only creates one record for that Email. Therefore, the Related Record fields (shown above) will only be filled out by the plug-in with the FIRST contact in the To field.

An added bonus with this solution is that you can also do workflows using these Related Record fields. The ability to do workflows on Activities is limited by the same complex relationships on the Recipient, Sender, From, To, Required, Optional, and Customer fields discussed above. For example, you can’t have a workflow that sets the Recipient of a follow-up Phone Call based the Regarding field on an E-mail. This is because the Regarding can be a lookup to ANY entity in CRM, whereas the Recipient is a different type of lookup—it only to an Lead, Account, Contact or user. However, with the solution PowerObjects has developed you can fill out the Recipient field with Related Record lookup.

This PowerObjects solution really takes the cake AND let’s you eat it too!

His trials got me thinking about building the Dynamics CRM foundation to support successful business processes. We must start with the footings to support the structure of our customer’s organization. It is fairly easy to identify business divisions, regions, territories or other units that form the org chart of an organization. Most of our customers have already identified certain key performance indicators they want to use to monitor the health of their sales or service models.

What is more difficult is identifying, building and quantifying the measurements of key performance indicators. What is the information that will make up your KPI dashboards and reports for CRM and how will it be derived? Business intelligence has become such a buzzword over the last couple of years, but it is precisely this vital information on the details of activity that provides feedback on the health of an organization and allows you to have CRM analytics. Take the time during your CRM / XRM implementations to identify the measurements you will use to monitor the steps in your business processes. Some helpful hints include:

• Measurements to monitor Campaign initiatives or activities that result in relevant lead sources that ultimately close successfully.
• Time elapsed between Opportunity sales step processes and the activity or communications conducted during that time to help move the process forward.
• The measurement of activity in the regions or territories where your product or service sales has declined over a period of time.
• Measurements to monitor Service contracts that have not been renewed or show inactivity by the customer.
• Measurements to understand why there are Cases that have remained open past a threshold of time.

Build these types of measurements into your Dynamic CRM solution. They will help support the foundation of your organization to identify trends before you begin to slowly lurch forward.

There are certainly some standard theories and best practices for sales forecasting logic and that is generally the basis of what you find “out of the box” in today’s CRM systems. But, it should be viewed as just that, the basic starting point that you build YOUR logic on top of. In reality, you may or may not even use the base logic or functionality. What you need to do is to define how YOUR sales process works and the variables that drive that process and ultimately determine the logic you need to accurately forecast for your organization – what do you need for sales pipeline management – where will the sales process management come from?? Of course the typical challenge to this is almost a chicken or egg scenario…w/o data we can’t determine what our logic should be but w/o logic the data isn’t meaningful. To that I say…pick a place to start, make some assumptions, hazard a guess, draw straws, do whatever you need to do to begin to build the data that you need to that will help your ultimately determine your logic and adjust that logic along the way as you gain more information. A good partner like PowerObjects can help you through this process and then configure a Dynamics CRM system to match YOUR logic, whatever it is, vs. the other way around. If you look to the CRM system to determine your forecasting logic you risk inaccurate forecasts at best and maybe, having a lot of time to work on your short game at worst.

If you don’t already have a standard glossary of terms or definitions, try the “what’s a lead” exercise with your team and see if you have alignment.

Of course the terms and their definitions are different for every organization but here are a few examples of how we define for our sales team.

Lead – an organization that has contacted us or we have contacted them and they have expressed interest in but we need to further profile and qualify to determine if they should be converted to a Prospect.

Prospect – an organization with an identified need that we have qualified as a potential CRM customer. A Prospect may or may not have a current, active opportunity attached to them.

Customer – an organization that is an active customer.

Opportunity – A specific sales opportunity and associated details that has been identified with a qualified prospect or existing customer. Account Executive must be able to demonstrate that Prospect or Customer is actively engaged with us for opportunity to be considered valid.

If you can get you team on the same page here it will allow you to have a defined process around sales process management and when you get to the point of pulling sales analytics your job will be much easier!

This is really neat as we can easily query where logins are coming in for a certain user or all failed logins during x number of days. Here is a screen shot of all unique locations that I have logged into crm during the past 30 days.�
 

Going a step further we then created a second report to graphically plot where all logins for a certain server are coming from. This too, is using an out of the box map wizard that is part of Report Builder 3.0. or we can create other types of CRM reporting with this data.

Next week we’ll have a step by step blog on creating one of these map reports plotting a count of customer accounts in a crm system in a map of the USA.