Twelve/Three Marketing

From FrontRange:

Explorer 7.0 released on October 19th, 2006 has known incompatibilities with all 6.x and 5.x versions of GoldMine.
GoldMine Corporate Edition 7.0 is not affected.The most severe known issue involves the loss of the HTML toolbar buttons from the e-mail composition window and customers report other various HTML related problems.

From Geoff at Twelve/Three:  

FrontRange has not provided an expected date for the patch. If you are on 6.6 or lower, FrontRange doesn’t seem interested in helping.

Our own experience with IE 7 is that it is not worth changing to but you won’t have much of a choice. It will be part of every future Windows patch and new computer you purchase. We characterize IE 7 and very paranoid. Microsoft is trying to detect phishing, malware and spyware and questions most of your browsing activity. We like Firefox better but you’ll need IE to work with GoldMine.

Your options, in order of preference are:

1. Upgrade to GMCE 7 or GMSE 6.7 (with new patch).
2. Prevent the IE 7 update from installing.
3. Load IE 7 and live with the loss of the html e-mail toolbar.
 

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Twelve/Three is a Quotewerks partner and we really like this software. It can work all by itself or with GoldMine, ACT or even Outlook. Quotewerks allows all of your sales people to quickly and accurately generate Sales Quotes and Proposals.

We are offering a free web demo of it Monday, Sept 25th at 2pm. Email Laurie or Geoff if you want to reserve a seat.

by Geoffrey Boulden, Twelve/Three Marketing, Inc.

“We don’t sell drills. We sell holes” - General Manager of Black & Decker plant in Greenville, NC.

Abstract

Modern CRM systems provide many functions. This paper lists the most commonly used functions. When you implement CRM at your business, try not to use everything immediately. Instead, determine the primary objectives and focus on them.

So what are your holes?

We find that people use CRM software for 15 different reasons. The terms used here are our own but we do a pretty good job of explaining them.

You and your sales will be entering a lot of important data into your Customer Relationship Management (CRM). You therefore will want a reporting system capable of summarizing and presenting this data. Every CRM system is packaged with a reporting module but you have other options and need to consider a number of factors before immediately deferring to the default report writer.

1. Users - Who needs to run reports? Are they a CRM user, CRM manager or company officer who does not use CRM? If you choose to go with the GoldMine or ACT Report writer, then you will need to install a GoldMine/ACT license on every report user’s machine, even if they don’t normally use CRM.

2. Format - Not all report writers will output in the format you want. For example, GoldMine’s built in report writer does not easily export to Excel or Word. If part of your reporting process is to aggregate seperate reports into a master Word document, you will find GoldMine (or ACT) a poor system.

3. Combining Data - Most companies have multiple business systems. You may want to create a report that displays customer telephone activity (from CRM) with annual sales information (from the accounting system). The native report writer in either of these systems will most likely not allow to report on data that is “foreign”. You will have to use a generic reporting system.

4. How many reports do you need? If you only need a few reports, have your CRM vendor create them. If you think data analysis is a big part of your CRM, then you will want to be able to generate your own reports, either on an ad hoc (quick & dirty) basis or with in house capability.

5. A unification strategy - There is no one software program that can entirely run your business. You will most likely have to buy 3-10 programs with some that are general and others more specific to your business. Having all of these programs run on a common platform will allow you use a single reporting method.

For Example, GoldMine uses its own reporting system but keeps the data in either dBase or SQL format, Quotewerks uses a Fox Pro report writer. You could learn the GoldMine and Quotewerks report writers but it would be easier to use Crystal Reports for both.

Here is a list of reporting tools we have used over the years and some comments on each.

GoldMine - has the most cryptic built in report writer known to man. We avoid teaching it clients because we like them. The report writer was written around dBase and has been known to crash a GoldMine system running on SQL. The problem has gotten better. FrontRange includes a copy of Crystal Reports Professional when you purchase the SQL version of GoldMine. They highly recommend you use that.

Our favorite reporting methods for GoldMine are (in descending order):

1. Microsoft SQL Reporting Services
2. Crystal Reports Professional
3. Stonefield Query
4. MasterMine
5. An inanimate carbon rod
6. GoldMine’s Report Writer.

ACT! - Act has a slightly better report writer than GoldMine and it is easier to learn. Because ACT 7.0 and 8.0 run on a SQL platform, SQL reporting should be a great option. Unfortunately, ACT locks your access to the SQL tables and you cannot easily open them for reading. You must buy a reader utility for $400 or an administrator utility for $1000.

Our preferred order for ACT Reporting.

1. Microsoft Reporting Services if you have a full license of SQL Server and the reader utility.
2. Crystal Reports
3. ACT Report Writer
4. Excel using the free ACT connector for Excel.

Sage CRM - Use Microsoft SQL Reporting Services if Sage is hosted by you and on a SQL back end. Sage can be hosted on Oracle but we have no knowledge of Oracle. If you are using the hosted version of Sage, sagecrm.com, then stay with Crystal.

Quotewerks - Uses a Fox Pro type of report writer and can be a little cryptic. Use SQL Reporting Services if you have the SQL version of Quotewerks. Use Crystal or the Fox Pro writer if you have the Access version.

Stonefield Query - Is a third party program that allows you to write plain English queries against a database. Stonefield publishes a version for ACT!, GoldMine, Quotewerks and Sage CRM. It is great for ad hoc reports or for casual report writers, even sales people!

MasterMine - Allows you to report data in Excel using mostly pivot tables. It takes a little training to write reports but modifying your reports is fun and easy. Because it is Excel based, charts and graphs are easy.

Crystal Reports - Is an industry standard report writer. It is very powerful and complicated. It allows you to connect to any database or ODBC connection you have and write reports. It can also be heavily programmed. Reprots can be rendered in Word, Excel, html, etc.

Crystal is like Adobe Acrobat. You need the Report Writer ($) to generate the reports and your users need a simple free reader to run them. Your users will also need a connection to the data. If they are remote, this may be an issue.

There are three version of Crystal Reports, Standard, Professional and Enterprise. In order to hit a SQL database, you’ll need Professional.

One of the problems we often encounter with Crystal is that the user does not have the Reader files or has only an older version of them. Crystal is up to version 11 and they are constantly modifying this product so staying on top of the versions is a chore.

Microsoft SQL Reporting Services (SRS) - Is a free service if you own SQL Server 2000 or 2005 (Standard or Enterprise). It publishes reports over a web site that is either public or internal. This is noce because the user only needs to have Internet Explorer to view reports. You don’t have to worry about reader software. The SRS security system uses your Windows security groups and users.

SRS reports can be exported as Excel, PDF, html or text. You can also subscribe to report. With a subscription, the report server can e-mail a report to you on a set schedule.

Writing a report in SRS can be tough and is best left to professionals. The reports use a standard XML file called a *.rdl for report data layout. With SQL Server 2000, the only way to generate a rdl file was to use Microsoft’s Visual Studio which is their programming environment.

With SQL Server 2005 it will be easier to create your own reports.

Common Types of CRM Reports

1. Sales Forecasts - By rep, territory, product.
2. Activity - Appointments or phone calls by rep, territory
3. CRM activity - Who is logging in or not.
4. Territory analysis - how many accounts does each rep have, what industries, size.
5. Relationship - Who has not been contacted in X weeks. Who did we sell to last year that we have not sold this year?
6. Mailing Labels
7. E-mail list for “spam” marketing
8. Contact List
9. Lead Reports - how many, results, by source, avg sell time
10. Who is most likely to buy this quarter? Who’s contract is coming due?

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Geoff went to Orlando the week of May 16th to attend a series of meetings about GoldMine and the future of the GoldMine product. Here is what he learned.

GoldMine Standard Edition - This is the regular dBase version of GoldMine. Current version is 6.7. There was a plan to upgrade GoldMine to 7.0 in December but it was scrapped. The 7.0 build was going to replace the dBase structure of GoldMine with a open source version of SQL called firebird.

The amount of work involved is immense. Every version of GoldMine going back to 1988 has been on the same table structure. A lot of legacy software depends on these tables and any changes could be very significant. FrontRange did re-write the SQL version of GoldMine to support SQL and Firebird and that was very hard (see below).

Anyway, the plan is to release a GoldMine version 7.0 in September and a version 8 in June, 2007. They did not go into the details of what new features you would see. We are guessing that 7 will run the new Firebird back end. No more Packing & Rebuilding! Version 8 will have a whole new screen design that is much more programmable. 

GoldMine Corporate Edition - This is the SQL version of GoldMine. Version 7 was released in November, 2005 and it had issues. FrontRange issued a patch in December that fixed 25 things and another patch in January that fixed 6 more things. They decided to drop back five yards and punt.

The next release will be in June and has over 330 fixes. They believe this one to be pretty good. We will set it up here at Twelve/Three and put it through its paces. We’ll let you know.

Also, Any new purchases of Corporate Edition will ship with Microsoft’s new SQL Server 2005 Starting in June. We like the new SQL a lot, however, we are still learning it.

In December, FrontRange will release GMCE 7.x which will have the new User Interface. That is exciting as well. Lately, we have found that ACT! and Sage CRM are more customizable and that doing certain things in GoldMine is too hard. We are looking forward to this release.

GoldMine Enterprise Edition - FrontRange is launching a new product called Enterprise (GMEE) sometime around October. It is extremely flexible and witeen in all new technology. It will not look anything like the GoldMine you run now, unless you want it to. It is also geared for very high end users and will be quite expensive.

We’ll keep you informed.

mGoldMine - FrontRange had sold a product called mGoldMine back in 2002-2003. It published GoldMine data as small web pages that could be accessed by a wireless PDA or smart phone. It worked well and Twelve/Three sold a few of them.

Unfortunately, the British company that had developed the underlying java technology went out of business and FrontRange lost its access to the technology. mGoldMine was discontinued.

At the conference, FrontRange demonstrated a new version called mGoldMine v3. It will be released in October and will support GoldMine on a Blackberry. The Palm and Pocket PC will follow.

It looked pretty nice. You can design your own screens which is new. It will require you to be on GMCE (SQL version) and will cost $295/user.  

Summary - FrontRange has invested a lot of money to modernize all of their products. Some of these moves don’t look very big from a user perspective but the changes in the background are huge and will allow you to easily integrate data with other software, the internet, your cell phones and in reporting. All of their products are getting “new plumbing” and will be written in vb.net with a SQL/firebird back-end.

This means you will not have to preform frequent Pack & Rebuilds or struggle with some of the Borland Database Engine’s idiosyncracies. Overall relaibility should greatly improve.

A trend in CRM is “Convergence” where pagers, cell phones, PDA’s and computers merge into a single device that Salespeople can use to perform their jobs. These devices are changing rapidly and this story is true, if somewhat boring.

There are three types of PDA in use today, the Palm Pilot, the Pocket PC and the Blackberry. All have an address book, a personal calendar and an e-mail client. The Pocket PC is from Microsoft and changes a lot with each version. The current version is 5.0 and is getting very similar to Outlook. The Blackberry is superior for getting E-mail but requires a special Blackberry e-mail server or service. The Palm Pilot was one of the first PDA’s and has a large installed base.

At Twelve/Three, we sell 3 different CRM programs and they take very different approaches to Smart Phone/PDA integration. With 3 CRM programs and 3 PDA Operating Systems, there is a lot to talk about.

So we’ll start in the middle. Geoff had a Treo 600 cell phone which ran the Palm OS version 5.0. This device synchronizes well with GoldMine (contacts and calendar only, no e-mail). At Twelve/Three, we also use Sage CRM which is web based. The Treo 600 had a web browser in it but Sage CRM would not recognize it and that frustrated Geoff. Not hard to do.

The Treo browser is not a small version of Internet Explorer. It is called a Blazer browser. Sage CRM is a great CRM package and is very savvy in recognizing the different browser you could use with it. Sage would then present itself so that it rendered the right colors, language and size. But not with a Blazer.

Also, Geoff got his Treo from Sprint and paid the $15/month for unlimited internet access. In Buffalo, this service was painfully slow. There are real differences in service between vendors and cities.

So using Sage CRM with Blazer browser on Sprint service in Buffalo was awful.

For a while, GoldMine sold a product called mGoldMine that served up your Goldmine over a wireless internet connection and it looked really good on the Blazer browser. Then the company that wrote the code for GoldMine went out of business and FrontRange had to discontinue mGoldMine. FrontRange has announced version 3 of mGoldMine and it will come out at the end of 2006, starting with Blackberry support.

ACT! has a really cool product for the Palm OS. It is a full version of the ACT program that runs on a Palm device. It is easy to use and has about 95% of ACT’s features in the Palm device. You can complete scheduled activities and move them to history. Geoff put ACT! for Palm on his Treo and it was very cool.

Then Treo came out with the 650. This ran a slightly newer version of the Palm OS, version 5.4. It had the same Blazer Browser so using it with Sage was still a problem. Geoff decided not to upgrade.

It should be noted that many of our clients do have Treo 650’s. Officially, GoldMine does not yet guarantee that GoldMine 6.x will work with a Treo 650. We have seen many that do but a few that did not. We recommend you purchase CompanionLink (from us! - www.companionlink.com) as the Treo 650 is supported for GoldMine by CompanionLink.

In January, 2006, Treo came out with the 700. It had the same look but Treo abandoned the Palm OS for Pocket PC! The Treo is a very popular phone and this could signal the end of the Palm OS. Geoff looked at the Treo and liked it. He almost bought it.

Then, two weeks later, Verizon announced the XV6700. It also runs the Pocket PC 5.0 but has a larger screen and a neato slide out keyboard that almost fits human fingers. Sage recognizes the browser which is a lite form of Internet Explorer. The Verizon internet service is fast. It had better be for an extra $44/month!

Neither GoldMine or ACT will synchronize with Pocket PC 5.0. as stated earlier, the changes between versions of Pocket PC are very large and it takes a while for other companies to respond.

A few things about Pocket PC. I like it but it is typical Microsoft. The device appears to leak a little memory and everyone I know who has one says it needs to be reset every week or two. This does not cause a loss of data, it’s just a pain. The Pocket PC comes with Excel, Word and Powerpoint. When you connect it to your PC, it looks like another computer on your network and you can easily moves files in/out of it. The Pocket PC is a good concept and it gets better with every release. But it has a few wrinkles.

There was enough of a backlash against Treo’s move to the Pocket PC that I have read of a new Treo 700P (P=Palm) that runs the latest Palm software. Maybe Palm is not dead.

So Geoff has 2 cell phones at the moment. The Treo 600 runs ACT for Palm and synchs well with GoldMine. It is useless for Sage CRM. Geoff’s XV6700 works well with Sage CRM via the wireless internet. It also synchs to Sage htrough Outlook. The XV6700 will not synch with either GoldMine or Act because those two haven’t caught up with Pocket PC 5.0. They will some day but don’t hold your breath. The pocket PC is a wildly moving target.

A final summary:

If you use ACT: ACT for Palm (Treo 600, Treo 650, handspring, Zeo,) is a cool thing. You can get a 30 day demo from us. If you don’t want to use ACT for Palm you can copy ACT data to your Palm device with sync. You cannot hit a ACT for Web site. We run Act for Web here and I haven’t seen a single smart phone be able to use it. Act does nothing with Blackberries.

If you use GoldMine: You can synch up to Palm version 5.0 (Treo 600). Nothing else is guaranteed but may be worth a try. GoldMine does not talk to Pocket PC 5.0. GoldMine does not talk to Blackberries but will by the end of the year. You must have GoldMine’s Corporate Edition and a bundle of cash. The product will cost $295/user.

If you use Sage CRM: Then you should get a Pocket PC and avoid the Blazer browser. Some Sage CRM work may be required. We need to change some of our own screens. Make sure the internet speed is good in your town. The cell phone guys love acronyms and I believe the service you want is called EVDO. Sage does not talk to Blackberries.

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If precautions are not taken, your CRM data could easily be copied, stolen or vandalized. As CRM consultants, we are frequently asked to make CRM systems more secure and to offer advice on the best policies.

So here are some random thoughts on CRM security.

1. There are two threats - Internal and External. Internal threats are your employees who, by necessity, require access to your CRM system. Preventing theft from internal sources is much more difficult than external threats.

2. External threats are either hackers who crash your firewall or thieves who steal a Sales person’s laptop. In either case, the hacker/thief is usually not intentionally looking for CRM data. They are simply looking for opportunistic “goodies”. Usually, you protect your CRM data from external threats using the same measures for your other programs. Use a good internet firewall with strong passwords on computers.

Keep in mind that if you have a field sales force using laptops, then you have a lot of copies of your data floating around out there. We prefer web-based CRM systems where the data stays in your server room and very little resides on your laptops. 

3. In our experience, the Internal threat is more of a problem. In 13 years or CRM work, we have seen perhaps five cases of intentional CRM data theft. We recommend you attack the problem with multiple solutions.

4. The first is to have all CRM users sign a non-disclosure, non-compete agreement. These agreements state that the database is company property and cannot be damaged, sold or given away. It may spell out penalties for doing so. You can download examples of these agreements on the internet. A stronger approach is to have your lawyer draw one up. Employment laws vary by state and some of the conditions in an agreement you find on the web may not be valid in your state.

Having a signed agreement will not prevent data theft but will greatly strengthen your case for recovering damages from a thieving ex-employee.

5. On to the technical solutions. You can severely “lock down” a CRM system in order to maintain security but this will most likely hinder the system’s usefulness. There is always a trade-off between security and the free flow of information. We prefer you make the system more open than closed. However, there are some prudent precautions.

6. Take away the data export rights from most users.

7. You may also want to limit the reports they can run. Do they really need to print out the entire database?

8. Have a policy regarding PDA’s such as Palm Pilots, Pocket PCs and Blackberries. Most CRM programs will allow a user to synch the entire contact database to a PDA. These PDA’s are not very secure and studies show that perhaps 25% of them are lost or stolen.

9. A SQL based CRM system is more secure than a dBase one. Even if you don’t allow users the ability to export, they can open a dBase file with Access or Excel.

10. All CRM programs have a common core set of features but we see a huge difference in their approach to security. Old versions of ACT (up through 6.0) were atrocious. They ran on dBase and any third rate hacker could get the data out. Recent versions of ACT are better because the database is now SQL.

GoldMine is open by default. You have to remove user rights. A very nice feature in GoldMine is that everything you do leaves a trail. For example, we had a case where a GoldMine user never performed a data export but on his last day, he ran the export wizard 18 times. GoldMine is great for forensics.

Sage’s security model is much more granular, you can turn things on/off and be very specific about. This can take quite a while to set up.

11. Web based systems are inherently more secure. If you terminate an employee, you simply disable their account to the web site. If that employee had data on a laptop or his home PC, you would need to somehow remove that data remotely. 

In summary, you can lock down many CRM features such as Outlook sync, reports, PDA sync, data export, etc but this will result in a less friendly environment. As a rule, you should trust your employees as we are all on the same team. Put a non-compete agreement in place and enforce any violations. In all likelihood, you will not suffer any data theft.

A good analogy is the security you place on your own home. If you really want to prevent break-ins, you could choose to live in a bunker one mile underground. You could put 15 deadbolts on every door in the house. Such a solution is expensive, impractical and takes a lot of the fun out of things. Take the same approach to CRM. Make the system enjoyable to use. Make everyone aware of the rules. Enforce them.

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While we’d love the traffic, there’s no need to revisit www.twelvethree.com to get the latest in news from us.  Thanks to a new technology called RSS, you can get the news from Twelve/Three streamed straight into your GoldMine!

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it allows people to subscribe to newsfeeds that automatically update whenever we post news items.  You’ll need an RSS-reading software to get these updates, though.  Fortunately, GoldMine’s got one right in it- My GoldMine!