Marketing with Microsoft Dynamics CRM - ClickDimensions Blog

ClickDimensions Certified Professionals

We’d like to welcome all of our recently certified professionals from around the globe. Below are several recent pros who have gone through ClickDimensions Academy and administrator training, and passed our rigorous certification exam. Congratulations!

John Hawkins, Professional Advantage, Australia

John is a Solution Architect at Professional Advantage ( www.pa.com.au) in Australia. He specializes in the Microsoft Dynamics space, and has worked with Microsoft Dynamics products for over 17 years. John has extensive experience in implementing a vast array of solutions, requiring complex development and integration both within Australia and internationally.

Kimmo Koski, atBusiness Ltd., Finland

Kimmo is a Dynamics CRM and .NET developer from Finland and currently works as a software developer at atBusiness Ltd (www.atbusiness.com), which is also a partner of ClickDimensions. Kimmo has been working with Dynamics CRM for the past 3 years. “I’m always keeping my eyes open for new products or technologies that could extend the Dynamics CRM features or help to create them more efficiently. My daily work mainly consists of planning the implementations, system customization/extending, integration development and sales support.”

Ross Poulton, Professional Advantage, Australia

Ross is a CRM consultant for Professional Advantage, a leading Microsoft Gold partner in the Australian marketplace. With more than 10 years in the IT industry, his current focus is purely on CRM implementations. Starting with user workshops and solution design, Ross provides services through the implementation, training, and integrations stages for companies small and large.

Clients that Ross has worked with include large membership organizations and sporting bodies, property sales and management, education, and the healthcare industry.

Outside of work, Ross enjoys spending time with his young family in the great outdoors.

Lia Thompson, Altriva, Washington State

Lia Thompson is a CRM Consultant at Altriva Solutions, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner specializing in Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivery. Altriva, based in Bellevue, Washington, works with clients in the greater Seattle area to deliver complex, process centric, business solutions with competency designations for Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Lia earned a double concentration in Business Management and Management Information System at Western Washington University. She began her career at Altriva as a Consulting intern, and now manages full-service MSCRM implementations as a CRM Consultant.

She is excited to use her ClickDimensions certification to provide recommendations both internally, and for Altriva’s clients.

Raj Mital, Catapult ERP

Raj Mital (MBA) is a CRM Application Consultant for Catapult, a Microsoft Gold-Certified partner offering long-term support and managed services for Microsoft Dynamics NAV and CRM. She guides Catapult’s clients through each of the phases of CRM implementation projects, and provides clients with ongoing support in the form of coaching and guidance aimed at helping them get the most from their investment.

“After using Click Dimensions for our internal marketing purposes, I was consistently impressed by its capabilities, especially with regard to form-building and nurture marketing. With this certification, I have already begun translating the knowledge I hold now into benefit for our clients.”

Upgrading from CRM 4.0 to CRM 2011? Upgrade ClickDimensions too!

Even though CRM 2011 has been on the market for more than two years, there are still many organizations running the previous version, CRM 4.0. With Microsoft ending mainstream support for Microsoft CRM 4.0 this past April, many organizations who haven’t already done so are in the midst of planning their upgrades to CRM 2011. (With Microsoft’s next version, code-named Orion, just around the corner, it’s not a moment too soon!)

ClickDimensions continues to support CRM 4.0, but if you are upgrading to CRM 2011 (or migrating to CRM Online), you’ll want to make sure you have the latest guidance from ClickDimensions. We’ve prepared an upgrade document that has information and guidance that will apply to most ISV solutions, as well as specific details that are important for upgrading your ClickDimensions solution. If you are a customer or partner of ClickDimensions, you can request this guide from our technical support team by opening a support request at http://support.clickdimensions.com.

ContentMX Integrates with ClickDimensions Marketing Automation to Bring Content Rich Newsletters to Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Marketers that struggle with generating content for their email newsletters will appreciate the integration that ContentMX and ClickDimensions announced today between their two marketing platforms. This integration makes it easy for Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers to obtain original content, curate content from trusted sources, and create new content of their own. This content is then published to a ClickDimensions email newsletter.

The email newsletters generated by ContentMX and sent through ClickDimensions can be used to keep subscribers informed, engage them directly, and direct users towards relevant conversations happening on social media. "For many ClickDimensions customers, obtaining quality content is an ongoing burden", said John Gravely, CEO of ClickDimensions. "ContentMX's integration with our solution addresses these needs and provides integrated content marketing services to the Dynamics CRM community."

For ArcherPoint (a Microsoft Dynamics reseller), ContentMX provides the aggregated content they need to maintain a social conversation with their customers. "The ability to go to one place to find all the content I need for social media, our blog, and a newsletter will save us a lot of time and effort.", said Suzanne Scanlan of ArcherPoint. "Now with its integration to ClickDimensions I can send this content directly to my email list so that none of my customers will miss this great content and the conversations it generates."

"Email is often thought of as functionally and philosophically separate from other social and blog marketing efforts," said Jeffrey Mesnik, President of ContentMX. "We instead treat email as an entry point to a broader conversation. This integrated approach allows users to take high quality content and easily publish it across all platforms."

Integration between ContentMX and ClickDimensions is simple and easy, with all CRM data being collected and maintained within ClickDimensions and Dynamics CRM. A FREE 15-day trial of ContentMX is available at http://contentmx.com. For Dynamics CRM and ERP partners Microsoft is offering a special program that includes Dynamics specific content that is ready to be published to customers. For more information and to sign up, go to http://mspartner.contentmx.com.

Below is a screen shot of the ContentMX solution where a variety of content sources are aggregated. Through this interface, the marketer selects the content to be published via a ClickDimensions email newsletter….

Integration between ContentMX and ClickDimensions allows the selected content to be quickly and easily sent in a ClickDimensions email newsletter…

To end or to not end your nurture program: Two approaches to structuring nurture programs

One of the principal value propositions behind nurture programs is that they give marketers and sales people a way to automate ongoing contact with prospects and be notified when those prospects have shown some sign of activity or interest. Think of this as putting your communication with the prospect on 'auto-pilot'. To achieve this, nurture programs are generally set up as a series of emails spaced apart by days, weeks or months, with checks along the way to see if the prospect has opened or clicked the emails.

One of the main things to consider when designing your nurture programs is whether you want the flow of emails and activities to continue or to end once your prospect has shown signs of interest/activity. Below we discuss the two general ways for structuring nurture programs to achieve your desired outcome.

Option 1 – Nurture programs that continue (i.e. does not end) after the prospect shows signs of interest/activity

The screen shot below depicts a way to structure your nurture program so that it does not end when the prospect shows signs of interest/activity. With this structure, the nurture program will continue even when the prospect has clicked a link in the email. The key thing to notice is that, when the check is made to see if the prospect has clicked a link, two yes/no branches are pursued but the main flow of the nurture continues. Thus, in this type of structure, you can create a series of emails that will be sent and the owner of the lead or contact record to which the emails are being sent will be notified that the prospect has clicked but the sequence (i.e. the main program flow) will not stop.

Option 2 – Nurture programs that end when the prospect shows signs of interest/activity

Our second nurture structure is shown below. Here, we have nested the email sends inside the yes/no branches when we check to see if the prospect has clicked a link in the email. With this structure, the nurture program will end completely when the prospect has clicked a link. This is because the main flow of the nurture leads directly to and 'end node'. To see a more detailed example of this type of nurture program, refer to the blog post: Inside sales nurture marketing example using ClickDimensions Nurture Builder and Microsoft CRM Workflow

Now that you are aware of the two basic structures for creating a nurture program, you can see that there are almost endless possibilities of how to set up your programs. Happy Marketing!

eBook: How ClickDimensions uses Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Zendesk to deliver superior customer support

To provide timely and accurate technical support for this diverse user group and install base, ClickDimensions chose to implement Zendesk's cloud-based customer service software. After evaluating numerous options, Zendesk most closely met our criteria for a support desk system based on these priorities:

• Easy for customers to use
• Easy for agents to use
• Minimal maintenance
• Ability to integrate with our internal implementation of Microsoft CRM Online
• Ability to customize
• Ability to automate processes

Another important factor in our selection of Zendesk was that it was able to be immediately implemented at a time when ClickDimensions' technical support staff was one person who had numerous other duties. As ClickDimensions grew into a global enterprise with offices in Atlanta, Fargo and Tel Aviv, and customers in 45 countries, Zendesk has continued to be an excellent match to our priorities as well.

This paper provides an overview of how ClickDimensions has implemented Zendesk to provide technical support and customer service.

Click here to download

Twitter advertising adds enhanced targeting options

Here at ClickDimensions, we advertise on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Bing and Twitter along with some niche blogs and sites. It has been interesting to see these platforms develop; mainly in terms of the targeting options and analytics they provide. For example, we blogged when Facebook implemented conversion tracking and we did a post on LinkedIn's ability to target based on LinkedIn group membership.

When Twitter launched their advertising platform, we immediately saw the possibilities. The platform allowed you to do two main things:

1. Promote your account to gain more followers
2. Promote specific tweets so that more people see, and potentially retweet, them

Initially, Twitter's targeting options were not very deep. However, as of last week, Twitter added the ability to target based on twitter accounts. With this new addition, you can make sure your account or promoted tweets reach people with similar interests to the twitter accounts you choose to target. For an organization like ClickDimensions, this means we can target people who follow twitter accounts that are related to Microsoft CRM. The screen below shows the targeting options for geography and interests.

Targeting options also include device type (i.e. desktop/laptop, iOS, etc.) and user gender. With your targeting in place, you can create new tweets to promote or you can select existing tweets or have twitter automatically select your most engaging tweets. Since our goal at ClickDimensions is to achieve conversions on our web site, we have chosen to promote tweets about our premium content items listed at http://www.clickdimensions.com/content/.

We can also elect to promote our account so that we gain more followers…

With the new targeting options we believe that Twitter can be an effective source to drive additional conversions. Happy marketing!

We're hiring! Solution Success Engineer

ClickDimensions is seeking candidates for the position of Solution Success Engineer, preferably located in Atlanta, Fargo, or Greenville SC.

The objective of the Solution Success Engineer (SSE) position is to help ClickDimensions prospects, customers and partners understand how to solve business challenges with the powerful combination of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and the ClickDimensions marketing automation solution. The SSE is an expert problem-solver and creative thinker with in-depth knowledge of CRM and ClickDimensions. Engaging in pre-sales, post-sales, proof-of-concept, and architectural discussions, the SSE acts as a liaison between sales, technical support, training and customer/partner teams.

The SSE is responsible for successfully understanding and communicating the architecture and functionality of ClickDimensions, Dynamics CRM, and potentially other competing solutions and complementary components. The SSE should also be able to speak to a customer’s business and marketing processes, adding value to strategic and tactical planning and the environments in which the solutions are implemented.

As the SSE you are responsible for working directly with the Partner Account Manager (PAM) team and Marketing Success Manager (MSM) team for pre- and post-sales technical communication and preparation of the customer, post-sales client management, training, technical implementation assistance, and knowledge transfer.

As a ClickDimensions subject matter expert, you will work to understand customers’ business goals and objectives and advise about the entire solution functionality including its related technologies. You will assist and support the sales teams by delivering demonstration overviews of the solution to individual and group audiences from a technical perspective, and providing solutions for specific customer or partner scenarios using best practices for implementation and use.

You will support and educate system integrators and ClickDimensions partners. Establishing realistic and achievable strategies beyond your technical activities that exceed customer needs is one of your primary goals. Providing support and managing technical escalation paths will be additional tasks.

The Solution Success Engineer position is part of the ClickDimensions Customer Team and reports to the Chief Customer Officer. The Customer Team is responsible for achieving and maintaining customer satisfaction through onboarding, training, technical support and solution expertise.

Requirements

• 2 years’ demonstrable experience with Microsoft Dynamics CRM (deployment, customization/configuration) and related technologies
• Experience with marketing automation solutions similar to ClickDimensions
• Business requirements gathering experience
• Excellent communicator and presenter
• Analytical and troubleshooting skills
• ‘Can-do’ mentality
• Takes responsibility and knows how to balance these responsibilities
• Willingness to learn
• Ability to work in and with a multi-disciplinary team

Location

It is preferred that this position be based out of Atlanta, Georgia; Fargo, North Dakota; or Greenville, South Carolina.

Compensation

Salary DOE. Health insurance, 401k, bonus opportunities.

Contact

Interested candidates should send a resume and ClickDimensions-specific cover letter to careers@clickdimensions.com.

ClickDimensions named a finalist for Israeli Company of the Year at 12th annual Eagle Star Awards Gala

400 Northridge Rd., Suite 400, Atlanta, GA 30350

Tel: 404-843-9426 Fax: 404-843-1416 e-mail: aiccse@aiccse.org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Barry Swartz (404) 843-9426, barry@aiccse.org

American-Israel Chamber of Commerce Announces Finalists for Israeli Company of the Year

and Deal of the Year Honors at 12^th Annual Eagle Star Awards Gala

ATLANTA, April 22, 2013 – The American-Israel Chamber of Commerce, Southeast Region (AICC), announced today the finalists for the 12th annual Eagle Star Awards Gala on May 30, 2013, 6:00 – 9:00 PM at the HP Graphic Arts Experience Center, 5555 Windward Parkway Alpharetta, Georgia 30004.

Three companies, Arkal Automotive, ClickDimensions, and Delek will compete for the Israeli Company of the Year award. Three transactions, EndoChoice / Peer Medical, NCR / Retalix, and SintecMedia / Argo Systems will compete for the Deal of the Year award. Winners in each category will be selected by an expert panel of judges: Richard Kopelman Managing Partner & CEO of Habif, Arogeti and Wynne, LLP; Melanie Bialko Leeth, Vice President of Imlay Investments; and Garrett Van de Grift, CEO of Red Wizard Group.

The Eagle Star Awards Gala is AICC's community flagship event honoring the people and companies who have contributed most to the Southeast-Israel economic and business relationship.   In addition to the company and deal awards, long-time AICC President Tom Glaser will be recognized with the Chamber Founders award.  Glaser recently announced plans to retire following his 21 years of service to the organization.   The South Carolina Research Authority will be presented with the Community Partner award in recognition of its extraordinary role in the success of the South Carolina-Israel Collaboration.

 

The event's host, Hewlett-Packard (HP), is considered the second largest investor in Israeli information technology.   Israel is one of the few countries where HP has a massive presence with almost 6,000 employees, and Alpharetta, Georgia is the Americas headquarters for their products developed in Israel under the Indigo and Scitex Vision brands.  "It is altogether fitting that HP host this year's Gala, given their huge investments in Israel and the importance of the Southeast to the sales and distribution of their Israel-made products," said event chairman Barry Sobel (Deutsche Bank Alex.Brown). 

Noted author, speaker, and entrepreneur Barbara Babbit Kaufman will be the event's emcee.

 

Israeli Company of the Year Finalists:

 

• ARKAL Automotive operates a 32,000 square foot facility in  in Auburn, Alabama. This is the first US manufacturing operation for the Lower Galilee-based company where ARKAL now produces durable, life-long plastic parts by utilizing advanced thermoplastic technologies and the latest developments in high-quality materials. In the first phase of this project, ARKAL has invested approximately $7.2 million and create 25 jobs, with more growth anticipated in the future. ARKAL Automotive, a division of ARKAL Plastic Products, was founded in 1997, and since then, has developed a worldwide reputation for design excellence and utilizing state-of-the-art engineering. Auburn places ARKAL in an ideal location to serve their customers who have operations in the Southern US including some of the leading OEM's and Tier 1 suppliers.
  
• ClickDimensions, an Atlanta-Israeli software startup, is now the top-rated Microsoft-certified marketing automation solution for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The company has grown to 40 employees with most of them at its Dunwoody headquarters, 4 in sales at an office in Fargo, N.D., and 12 in development and support in Tel Aviv. More than half of ClickDimensions' clients are outside the US, mainly in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, the Netherlands and Scandinavia, and they include Volvo, the Dallas Cowboys, the Boston Red Sox, GAF Building Materials, the London School of Business and Finance, MTV Europe, and several groups within Microsoft. Their software enables sales and marketing people to share information about their individual customers' wants, needs and behaviors in order to identify the best prospects, nurture them until they buy, and then provide outstanding customer service.
  
• Delek , a Netanya, Israel-based holding company, operates its Delek US Holding Inc. headquarters from Brentwood, Tennessee as a diversified energy business with refineries, crude oil pipelines, light products, loading facilities, retail fuel, and convenience stores in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Virginia, employing over 3,000 people. Delek Group is one of the most prominent and dynamic conglomerates in Israel and abroad. In addition to their core business of fuel supply, they have diversified into energy exploration and delivery, biochemicals, media, real estate, motor vehicles and automotive imports, and financial services. Delek US is an integrated downstream energy company with operations in three primary business segments: petroleum refining (Delek Refining), marketing & supply (Delek Marketing & Supply), and convenience store retailing (MAPCO Express.).

 

Deal of the Year Finalists:

 

• EndoChoice, based in Alpharetta, Georgia, has merged with Peer Medical Ltd., a privately held Israeli company. The combined company now operates under the EndoChoice name, and is headquartered in Georgia with its R&D center in Caesaria, Israel. EndoChoice recently closed a $43 million fund-raising round led by Sequoia Capital and its existing investors to finance projected growth. Peer Medical has developed a proprietary video system and Full Spectrum Endoscope™ that greatly expands the field of view during endoscopy and colonoscopy, helping gastroenterologists detect more cancerous polyps and abnormal lesions. Launched in 2008, EndoChoice was recognized by Inc. Magazine in 2010, 2011, and 2012 as one of the fastest-growing companies in America.
  
• NCR, based in Duluth, Georgia, acquired Ra'anana, Israel-based Retalix , a global tech provider of innovative retail software and services. NCR's software, hardware, and comprehensive support services address the needs of retail, financial, travel, hospitality, and telecom & technology organizations in more than 100 countries. Retalix's integrated software and services for high complexity, fast moving consumer goods, retailers, and distributors are deployed in over 70,000 retail locations with more than 400,000 customer touch points in over 50 countries that transact billions of dollars in annual sales across its platform. The acquisition was valued at $650 million.
  
• SintecMedia, a Jerusalem-based broadcast management software provider, has acquired Atlanta-based Argo Systems, a leading provider of business solutions to the cable network and operators industry. The deal brings together SintecMedia's powerful OnAir^® scalable, all-in-one broadcast management solution for media companies and its line of related products with Argo Systems' unparalleled management solutions exclusively designed for Pay TV channels and multichannel video distributors. SintecMedia has a staff of over 300 employees with offices in New York, Denver, London and Jerusalem, and is backed by the private equity firm Riverwood Capital.

 

The event website, http://2013.eaglestargala.com , features the entire event details including information, company tables, and online ticket purchase.

 

Sponsors-to-date include Deutsche Bank Alex.Brown, The InterTech Group, The Coca-Cola Company, BDO, GlobalAtlanta, AM1690 / Newstalk1160, Atlanta Jewish Times, Smith Gambrell & Russell, Consulate General of Israel, Israel Economic Office, and Habif Arogeti & Wynne. Sponsorships are still available. For further information on sponsorships, contact Barry Swartz barry@aiccse.org, or call 404-843-9426.

 

 

About the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce

The American-Israel Chamber of Commerce is a bi-national business association with the mission of increasing economic development by fostering understanding, cooperation, and business relationships between Israel and the Southeast. Since its founding in 1992, AICC has been involved in completed transactions valued at over $1 billion, creating jobs and benefiting the economies of both Israel and the Southeast.  AICC targets a range of projects involving import, export, research & development, direct investment and joint ventures.  Key areas of focus include software, communications, cleantech, life sciences, and security.  For details, visit www.aiccse.org.

Guest Post: Send Email with Custom Entity Data via Workflow

With ClickDimensions it has long been possible to send an email and include dynamic data from another related system or custom entity. This process is described here. It relies on creating a Connection record to link the other entity record to the Email Send.

It has also long been possible to send a ClickDimensions email from a CRM workflow. This is described here, and involves using workflow to create a special record, a “Send ClickDimensions Email” record.

The challenge is when you need to do both: kick off a ClickDimensions email via workflow and include data from a custom related entity in the email. The solution as described by our guest blogger, is to create an Email Send record from the workflow, create a Connection to the Email Send from your custom entity, and (the most important ingredient) use a custom workflow assembly to associate the recipient’s Contact record to the Email Send. The rest just depends on having the placeholders for the dynamic data in the email template.

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Mark Purnell, Technical Sales Architect at Neudesic, describes how to use a custom workflow assembly to accomplish this, and has graciously provided sample code and a solution file:

When developing workflows using the ClickDimensions functionality, you may run into a situation where you need to create an Email Send record in order to initiate a ClickDimensions email instead of the ‘Send ClickDimensions Email’ record. This would happen if you need to merge custom entity attributes to your email as outlined in the ClickDimensions blog at http://blog.clickdimensions.com/2011/10/merge-any-custom-or-standard-entity-data-into-clickdimensions-emails.html

The ‘Send ClickDimensions Email’ record cannot be used to associate a contact to the Email Send record created by the workflow in this scenario. We needed a way to associate the Contact to the Email Send record (which has a N:N relationship to the Contact entity). Since creating an N:N relationship between records is not an out-of-the-box capability, this workflow assembly will allow you to create an N:N relationship between a Contact record and an Email Send record that has been created as a part of the workflow.

To Install:

Download the CustomWorkflow_1_0_0_0.zip solution file at the end of this article and install it by importing it into the solution are in the target CRM instance. Once the solution has been installed, you will see a new step type available in the Workflow Editor called “CustomWorkflow.AssociateContacttoEmailSend”. (NOTE: The solution available below is for CRM 2011 on-premise. You can download the source code and modify it according to the Microsoft CRM SDK for use in CRM Online.)

To Use:

1. You will need to first create the Email Send record in one of the first steps of your workflow.
2. Once the Email Send record is in context of the workflow, you can now create the N:N workflow step.
3. Click on the ‘Set Properties’ button to display the Custom Step Input properties page.
4. In the ‘Contact’ field, you want to identify the contact that you want the Email Send to be sent to.
5. In the ‘Email Send’ field you will want to identify the Email Send record that was created within the workflow. (Hint, this will be way down at the bottom of the “Look For:” option set underneath the ‘Local Values’ group. The value you will see is the descriptive name of the step that you entered that created the Email Send within the workflow.)
   
   
6. If you are working with a custom entity and you want any of the attributes on that entity to appear in your email, you will want to add a “Create Record” step to bind the custom entity record to the Email Send record using a Connection record. (Hint, you will want to identify both sides of the relationship in your Connection.)
7. Finally, in order to send the record off to ClickDimensions, you need to add a Change Status step and choose the workflow step that created the Email Send record to change that record to Outbox status.

NOTE: The sample below works to associate a Contact record with an Email Send from a workflow in CRM 2011 on-premise. The code can be modified for use with Leads and Accounts if they are the intended recipients in your scenario.

Download the solution for CRM 2011 on-premise here.

Sample code is here.

ClickDimensions welcomes Lindsay Bennett

ClickDimensions is pleased to welcome Lindsay Bennett in the role of Market Development Representative. Lindsay is a coastal Georgia native who graduated from Georgia Southern University in 2009 with a B.A. in Theatre and a minor in Vocal Music Performance where she was a recipient of the Kennedy Center's Regional Design Excellence Award for her 2009 Costume Design of Georgia Southern University's The Trojan Women. She has since worked as a Guest Artist Stage Manager after her graduation at Georgia Southern and worked for two years in the wardrobe department of Busch Gardens Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia. Lindsay is relatively new to the Atlanta area and is happy to have found her way to the ClickDimensions team. In her free time she enjoys spending time with her dog Indiana, hanging out with friends and enjoying local theatre.