Updated · Originally published
We’ve all known that “A is only as good as the level of consistency and frequency in which your staff uses it”. Conversely, many of us often wondered why this frequency and consistency are easily adopted when it comes to Social Networking and our staff. Have you ever wondered what might happen if you could combine the allure of Social Networking user environments with applications such as SharePoint, CRM, and ERP? Microsoft has.
Imagine this scenario; a member of your sales staff “Kelly”, is on the road at a conference and bumps into a prospect from “ABC, Inc.” in line at Starbucks. From her mobile device, she snaps a picture of the prospect's business card and this image instantly turns into a prospect record in your Dynamics CRM, while the image file gets saved into a with all the appropriate metadata and file properties for indexing and later content retrieval, etc. There is nothing new here right?
Now imagine emails and notifications being sent immediately to predefined recipients by role and or individual users in your organization that need to be, or elected to be updated when a new “lead” enters CRM in this fashion. Furthermore, a “page” for the prospect similar to what you’d find on Facebook or LinkedIn also gets created automatically. A colleague back at the office recognizes the prospect from a previous engagement and comments on the thread, “Heard these guys are using XYZ and XYZ is down-sizing and dropping support”. Another colleague who received the update on his mobile device while traveling in Europe comments, “ABC, Inc. recently opened a location near our HQ”, Before Kelly and the prospect even sit down with their coffee, Kelly knows how to structure her conversation.
Because the lead is now tagged as a “Takeover opportunity” one of the related documents automatically linked on the prospect's profile page is the most up to date “Change of Partner” form. Kelly is able to schedule a follow up appointment, and email this form already populated with the prospect's information for review, signature and a new Client.
Sounds a bit far-fetched? With the new release of and the native integration to SharePoint and Microsoft’s recently acquired Yammer Social Network, the given scenario above is merely one of several scenarios Dynamics CRM users will be able to easily make reality. The added simplicity, logic and mobile capability of Dynamics CRM will resolve the epic issue we’ve all suffered up until now: “Getting your staff to use it, regularly and consistently”. for more information, and to explore further.
Founded in 2008, Yammer () offers an Enterprise Social Network used by more than 200,000 organizations globally (Including 85 percent of the Fortune 500) to foster team collaboration, empower employees, drive business agility, and socialize their intranets, all behind your company’s firewall.
By: SBS Group – & Microsoft Master VAR