Customer Information from External Sources

Having the most up to date data and information about the customers is a challenge that is faced by majority of us. We might be talking to a champion for an opportunity and almost finalizing the deal, and during the last minute we find that we cant reach him/her. The reason can be that he/she has quit and moved to another role or might have moved from the company itself.

This leaves us hanging most of the times and to get the information on any changes happening in a company can be a challenge unless we have a strong network.

There are a lot of firms that provide you with these info, but they come at a price. So what if we can leverage something without additional cost.There is 'InsideView' that has a prebuilt integration with CRM On Demand, and also offer a free version with limited functionality.

The free version has a lot to offer, below are some screen shots:-

Account Screen:-

Contact Screen:-

http://www.insideview.com/resources/ORACLE/installation-instructions.html

The above link provides the steps you need to take in order to have the web applet in your CRM On Demand application.

To sum it up.. I feel that 'InsideView' has got a lot of cool features even in the free version... can be really useful for the Sales Guys and helps in getting a better user adoption...



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CRM On Demand: How to highlight records in a list ?.

Many of us use lists in Oracle CRM On Demand. It makes our life simple. Records are displayed in the list based on predefined criteria and we can scroll through the list of records and work on them as required. When we hover on the list, the rows are automatically highlighted.

What if we have more records come up on a list ? Without a visual indicator one would not know what records were previewed. It will be nice to have the row highlighted, once the record is previewed, isn't it ? I came across this interesting problem some time back and thought it would be useful to share the solution I designed.

Below is a screen shot of a sample list, if you click on individual rows, the row should be highlighted till the screen is refreshed (this is the requirement)

Below is a screen shot of  how a list would look like after couple of records were previewed and clicked.

Wondering how to do it ? :) I did have to break my head a bit to get the JavaScript working, but now that its working, one can make use of this and accomplish this requirement. Below are few simple steps that explains how to do it..

1) Create a new web applet by navigating to Admin > Application Customization > Global web applet.
Set the parameters as shown in the below screen shot.

2) Paste the below JavaScript in the Web Applet HTML text box.

<script>
ListDecorMgr.attachTREvt=function(tr){
   tr.onmouseover = null;
   tr.onmouseout = null;
   tr.onclick = ListDecorMgr.hiLiteTR;
}


ListDecorMgr.doHilite = function(tr){
   if (tr!=null && !isUndefined(tr) && (isUndefined(tr._savedBGColor) || tr._savedBGColor == null)){
   
      // Set color code here
      tr._savedBGColor = "#B3EDFF";
      tr.style.backgroundColor = "#B3EDFF";


      ListDecorMgr.hlTR.push(tr);
   }
   ListDecorMgr.clearTimer();
}


ListDecorMgr.hiLiteTR = function(evt){
var tr=this;
ListDecorMgr.doHilite(tr);
}
</script>

3) Add the new web applet to your action bar layout by navigating to My Setup > Personal Layout > Action Bar Layout.

4) Access a sample list by navigating to Accounts Tab > My Accounts List, or any of your favorite lists in the application and click on individual rows. You will see that the rows will be highlighted and will stay till the screen is refreshed :)

Note: Do test this on your staging environment ! before you put it on your live instance !

Hope you liked it ! Do share your thought and comments.

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Mass Email from CRM On Demand at no Cost

This particular article is useful for people who are sending mass emails as newsletters or equivalent, and have been using their outlook to send them. You might have all the Contacts in your CRM, present in your outlook also, but the challenge would be creating a segmented email list. You dont want to send a newsletter on Golf accessories to a contact who would be primarily be interested in fishing accessories :). You will be using your outlook itself to send the emails but what you are doing is leveraging tools that CRM On Demand provides you along with leveraging the CRM data.

You would using Mail Merge document, which is available to download for no cost at all. Below are the steps that will help you attain your mass emails.

Step 1:Design your email template in the Mail Merge Document. The ones highlighted in grey are the wildcards that would be replaced by the actual data from your CRM, depending on the specific Contact record's details.

Step 2: Choose your segmentation criteria

Step 3: Have a quick preview and choose Send Email option in step5 of the mail merge

Click "OK" and thats it, your emails will be sent :)

Note: You will have to use your own discretion on the number of emails that you would send out at one shot as you will be using your outlook to send emails :) you dont wanna jam that up... :)

Do leave your feedback/doubts :)

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Contact Details with Picture

I was just thinking that wouldn't it be good if we can actually see the contact with whom we are doing business?
Having all his info alongside his pic. Giving more of a social website feel to your CRM Application. Moreover its always great to know what the person, that we are talking to, looks like :)

Imagine we have Contacts page which looks like the below Screen shot

Sleek and gives some interesting feel to the entire CRM Application.

Now the question comes is how to attain that? Very simple. You would use Reports to do that. Yes it can be done using the Narrative in the reports. All you would need is some simple HTML code to be inserted in the Narrative section, and you can design it to your liking and your requirements.

There are a lot of possibilities that you can do, maybe you can turn the entire CRM Application which would look exactly like Facebook !

So leave your comments/ feedback/questions.



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Generate Leads from Facebook

In the Last Post we showed you how you can leverage Twitter to generate leads, in this post it will be Facebook. The concept here is that you will be doing a search on the status of the Facebook users trying to find if anyone is looking to buy a product that you might be offering.

How we do it is really simple. We will be using reports to get this done!

In the following example, the scenario is that you want to do a search for leads for Cameras which is one of your product lines.

Once you choose the Camera, a search is done on status of FB Users, where they are looking for a camera. Now all you need to do is get in touch with them and see if that could be the lead that you wanted.

Feel free to ask any questions/doubts that you would have :)



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Generate Leads from Twitter

Effective sales is possible when one has a good sales pipeline. And to have a good pipeline one needs to capture the right leads. Social network is very helpful when it comes to capturing leads. Lot of people interact on the social network and talk about buying products, or evaluating products, do product comparisons, discuss about best product price etc. Twitter being one of the prominent social networks, can be effectively used to search for potential leads.

For example if your company is selling car insurance, you may want to find out people who are interested in buying car insurance. Why not get leads from twitter ? How about having live feed going on any of the homepages, where people might be looking for something that might turn out to be one of your offering.

You can set the lead search query in the mash up and every time you login into the application you will have possible leads already listed in the Twitter mash up. Below is a screen shot of the same.

Below is how you can do it a few simple steps.

1) You will need the below twitter search widget JavaScript. All you have to do is change the query based on the kind of leads you want to search for. In the below example I have set the query to 'need car insurance'. One can set the query based on the specific need.

<script src="http://widgets.twimg.com/j/2/widget.js"></script>
<script>
new TWTR.Widget({
  version: 2,
  type: 'search',
  search: 'need car insurance', 
  interval: 6000,
  title: '',
  subject: 'Car Insurance Leads',
  width: 'auto',
  height: 300,
  theme: {
    shell: {
      background: '#ffe27a',
      color: '#000000'
    },
    tweets: {
      background: '#ebfaff',
      color: '#000000',
      links: '#2c4db0'
    }
  },
  features: {
    scrollbar: true,
    loop: false,
    live: true,
    hashtags: true,
    timestamp: true,
    avatars: true,
    toptweets: true,
    behavior: 'all'
  }
}).render().start();
</script>

2) Create a new lead web applet in CRM On Demand by navigating to Admin > Application Customization > Lead > Lead Web Applet > Select type = HTML. Paste the above JavaScript in the Web Applet HTML section. Then expose it on the lead home page.

3) To know more about how to customize the twitter search widget, refer to my previous article here below.

http://www.crmondemandtricks.com/2011/02/get-contacts-twitter-feed.html

That’s it! Now when you navigate to your lead home page you will see the possible leads listed in the Twitter lead mash up.

Once you have found a potential lead, you can create it in CRM on Demand Application and drive the sales process further.

Hope you found it useful, do feel free to share your thoughts and comments!

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Generate Quotes/Invoices using Reports

Wanted to generate a Quote/Invoice from within CRM On Demand, without having to do a custom implementation? If yes then you can actually do it leveraging reports.

Note:This trick that I am going to showcase would enable you to only create a quote in a pdf/html, and not a full blown quote management functionality. This would be useful for those business whose aim is to just generate invoices and send it over, and maybe save it as an attachment manually to keep records.

Below is what you see how it would look like. You would have a related section on your Opportunity Detail page (Bill in the below Screen shot). And all the details regarding the Contact, Product lines etc would be pulled from the Opportunity record automatically.

Now you can click on the printer friendly option and then take a print out and send it over or email it

Now how you can create this kind of a report? It can be done using the Narrative Section while creating reports.

 You put your HTML in the Narrative section to get the desired template for your invoices

Once you have created your Report for Invoice, you can create a Custom Web Applet in Opportunity which would show the quotes for the respective Opportunity.

Below is a sample final output of the report:-

This trick can be modified in variety of ways to attain your specific requirements!

Hope this helps, do leave your comments/feedback or any questions.


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