The problem that you will run into is that the system account that the plug-in executes under needs to have login and data access to the SQL server and database, which is not enabled by default. In Microsoft Dynamics CRM, all plug-ins execute under the system account named “NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE”. If you take a look at any Microsoft Dynamics CRM database, you will see that a login exists for the NETWORK SERVICE account.

Your SQL server administrator will need to create a SQL server login and assign database access permissions and roles for the NETWORK SERVICE account in order for your plug-in to be able to access the SQL database. Once this is configured you can connect to the database using a trusted connection string.

Data Source=myServer;Initial Catalog=myDataBase;Integrated Security=SSPI;

An alternate approach to creating a SQL server login account is to have your plug-in establish a connection to the SQL server using a connection string which includes login information. For example:

Data Source=myServer;Initial Catalog=myDataBase;User Id=myUsername; Password=myPassword;Integrated Security=false

Note that you must use Integrated Security=false and not Integrated Security=SSPI. This method has the disadvantage of sending login information in clear text over the network, which is less secure. You are also going to have to either hardcode the login information in the plug-in or pass the information to the plug-in’s constructor at run-time. For more information on how to pass data to a plug-in at run-time, refer to the Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 SDK documentation under the topic Writing the Plug-in Constructor.

How to Execute SQL Commands from a Plug-in using Impersonation

Sometimes you may need to execute SQL stored procedures or SQL commands in the context of the user who caused a plug-in to execute instead of the Network Service system user. You can achieve this using the Execute AS command in SQL.

The NT AUTHORITY\NETWORK SERVICE login (see previous figure), or the user ID used to connect from the plug-in without using Integrated authentication, in the SQL database should be granted the sysadmin role in order for impersonation to work.

The following steps describe the process that a plug-in should implement.

1. Retrieve the domain name of the caller from Microsoft Dynamics CRM through the CrmService Web service. The systemuser entity contains domain information. You can execute a Retrieve on that entity to obtain the information.

2. Create the SQL connection to the target SQL database using the connection string specified in the secure or unsecure configuration attribute of the step. You can use integrated authentication or a hard coded SQL connection string as explained in the previous section of this blog.

3. Start the impersonation as the caller.

4. Execute any SQL commands or stored procedure that you want.

5. Revert the SQL execution context back to the Network Service system user.

The following plug-in sample code implements the previously described steps.

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Text;

using Microsoft.Crm.Sdk;

using Microsoft.Crm.SdkTypeProxy;

using System.Xml;

using System.Data.SqlClient;

using Microsoft.Crm.Sdk.Query;

public class AccessDatabase : IPlugin

{

   string m_secureConfig;

   string m_connectionString;

public string SecureConfig

   {

      get { return m_secureConfig; }

      set { m_secureConfig = value; }

   }

// Pass the connection string to the plug-in’s constructor.

   // The string is defined during plug-in registration.

   public AccessDatabase(string config, string secureConfig)

   {

      m_connectionString = config;

      m_secureConfig = secureConfig;

   }

   public void Execute(IPluginExecutionContext context)

   {

// Step 1. Get the domain name of the calling user.

      ICrmService crmService = context.CreateCrmService(false);

      systemuser callingUser = (systemuser)crmService.Retrieve(

EntityName.systemuser.ToString(), context.UserId,

new ColumnSet(new string[] { "domainname" }));

      // Step 2. Connect using a SQL connection string specified in the

      // configuration of step

using (SqlConnection conn =

new SqlConnection(m_connectionString))

      {

      conn.Open();

SqlCommand comm = conn.CreateCommand();

// Step3. Start SQL impersonation.

      comm.CommandText = @"Execute as Login='" +

         callingUser.domainname +"'; ";

      // Step 4. Run the SQL commands that need to be executed.

      comm.CommandText += "SELECT SUSER_NAME(); ";

// Step 5. Revert the context back to Network Service

      comm.CommandText += "revert;";

      comm.CommandType = System.Data.CommandType.Text;

// For demonstration purposes, display the username displayed

      // from the SELECT statement.

throw new InvalidPluginExecutionException(

         comm.ExecuteScalar().ToString());

      }

   }

}

For more information on the EXECUTE AS command, refer to http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms181362.aspx.

Cheers,

Ajith Gande and Peter Hecke

Hihi! Wenn man schon den Newsletter testet, sollte man einen Text verwenden für den man sich nicht schämen muss, denn es kann IMMER was schief gehen - auch ich hab schon Newsletter versehentlich rausgejagt. Lustigerweise kam die Entschuldigungsmail sogar schon vor der Malaise, insofern war ich da gleich doppelt gespannt - ich hätt's sonst vielleicht übersehen:

Sehr geehrte Nutzer von scholarz.net,

seit heute haben wir unser neues Newslettersystem am Start.

In der letzten Woche haben wir noch ein wenig getestet, aber die
Tests waren wohl nicht intensiv genug.

Nach dem einspielen der Empfängeradressen wurde doch prompt eine
Test-Email, die an die Mitarbeiter von scholarz.net gedacht war an
einige von Ihnen versandt.

Das bitten wir vielmals zu entschuldigen. Das ganze war ein
Insiderscherz und auf uns selbst gemünzt, für die Mitarbeiter daher
lustig. Wir hoffen Sie können auch darüber schmunzeln.

Wir werden das System in Zukunft mit größerer Sorgfalt bedienen.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen,

Ihr scholarz.net-Team

Im August erscheint übrigens ein Artikel zum Thema Web 2.0 und Wissenschaft in "IM - Information Management & Consulting" in Heft 3/2008, "IT Risk Management / Service Engineering", verfasst Francois Bry und mir - da geht es dann auch kurz um Scholarz.net

Many companies feel they need to spend thousands on their site for results.  Instead of choosing a web designer from their approach, marketing insight and optimization skills they go with one that looks nice or has flashy graphics.  These can be good, but only when combined with the first.  I build small, basic websites for my clients who want a brochure or small storefront but I tell them up front that I will not do all the swirling graphics and glowing buttons that Flash provides.  Not that I can't, but since search engines cannot read text embedded in a graphic I find it unnecessary. 

Do you need a big, expensive site?  That depends on the goal you have for your website.  If you are using it as a brochure or lead generating site - probably not.  A simple site with a few well-thought pages with consistent brand elements, a memorable domain and consistent optimization work will serve you well.  You may want to consider more if you want to sell a lot of products directly to your clients from your site, want customers or employees to have login access to certain information or you want to use CRM (customer relationship management) software.  These integrations are best left to professionals that can write clean code and manage the site.  Still, it's the extremely rare web designer/developer that can advise you on marketing strategy and tie it all into your optimization strategy and traditional offline marketing campaigns. 

When it comes to website design, development, marketing and optimization it might serve you better to pay a little more by hiring a few collaborative professionals rather than one who claims to do it all.  Even I can only help clients along so far.  But if I had a dollar for every web professional claiming they can do it all...well, you know the rest.  If you can find two professionals that work well together you will get twice the brain power and twice the advice.

We (America) need to jump on this paradigm shift to reduce costs in this post Sarbanes Oxley and difficult economic environment if we want to gain competitive advantage for ourselves and for our country. No longer is running enterprise CRM or ERP a competitive advantage - its table stakes.

What does this mean for IT departments? What does this mean for your data security? And most importantly - what does the impact of distributed computing have on marketers? Check out what Nick has to say about all this …

[audio http://media.podcastingmanager.com/72206-80605/Media/Nicholas%20Carr%20final.mp3](The Big Switch - podcast with Nicholas Carr)

About Nick

A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr writes and speaks on technology, business, and culture. His 2004 book Does IT Matter?. published by Harvard Business School Press, set off a worldwide debate about the role of computers in business. His widely acclaimed new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, examines the rise of "cloud computing" and its implications for business, media and society.

Carr writes regularly for the Financial Times, Strategy & Business and The Guardian. His articles have also appeared in the New York Times, Wired, Business 2.0, The Banker, and Advertising Age as well as on his blog Rough Type. He is a member of the Encyclopedia Britannica's editorial board of advisors.

In 2005, Optimize magazine named Carr one of the leading thinkers on information technology, and in 2007 eWeek named him one of the 100 most influential people in IT. Earlier in his career, he was a principal at Mercer Management Consulting.

Carr has been a speaker at MIT, Harvard, Wharton, the Kennedy School of Government, NASA, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas as well as at many industry, corporate, and professional events throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. He holds a B.A. from Dartmouth College and an M.A., in English literature, from Harvard University.

In last semester's Accounting 321 paper "Strategic Management Accounting" the syllabus covered Activity Based Costing (ABC) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in relation to Customer Profitability Analysis, but something relating to all of these which I found quite interesting is the Whale Curve of customer profitability.

If your organisation implements ABC and CRM, not only will you be able to allocate your costs to your cost drivers, but also to each of your individual customers.  Kaplan and Narayanan (2001) bring the 20/80 rule to a new level, where they suggest that by performing a whale curve analysis, you may find the most profitable 20% of your customers bring in between 150% and 300% of your total profits.

Surely that can't be, because your profits can never be more than your profits!  They continue that the middle 70% of customers are generally break-even, while you will lose money on the last 10% - the losses on these last customers bring profits back to the 100% level.  You can see this pattern on the graph below.

What now?  Well, if your CRM software can tell you which customers you are making the most money on, you can focus your efforts to retain them as customers.  You can also focus your efforts on the profit-losing customers, to find out why they are losing money.  Are they on the wrong products?  Do they pay late?  Are you charging them too little?  Knowing what makes them unprofitable allow you to make decisions to manage these unprofitable customers to profitability - and if this can't be done, perhaps you need to consider dropping them as customers.

But bare in mind that CRM isn't a one-stop-shop to making your customers profitable.  CRM is a tool in the Management Accountant's toolset, which works alongside ABC, ABM, Activity Based Pricing, and a few other concepts, to help your organisation gain competitive advantage.

Anyone keen to update Wikipedia?

—

1. Kaplan, R.S., and V.G. Narayanan, 2001. "Measuring and managing customer profitability", Journal of Cost Management, September/October: 5-15

To categorize the reports by language, use the report.languagecode property. You can set the property to a specific locale ID (for example, 1033 for US English) to make the report visible to the users of that language. For example, the English out-of-the-box Account Summary report appears in the Reports grid in the English user interface, but not in the Spanish or German user interfaces in the same organization.

You can also set the report.languagecode property to -1 (minus one) to make the report visible to all users in the base language user interface (this user interface is installed during the original Microsoft Dynamics CRM server installation) and in the user interfaces in other languages. For more information about locale ID, see "List of Locale ID (LCID) Values as Assigned by Microsoft", at http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/lcid-all.mspx.

You can use the report language information in combination with information that is contained in the report entity, report category, and report visibility entities to determine the areas and categories in the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web application where the report is shown in different user interfaces languages.

Note   The Language element inside the report definition language (RDL) file does not determine where the report is shown inside the Microsoft Dynamics CRM Web application. It contains an expression that evaluates to a language code as defined in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) RFC1766 specification. The language code is used mainly for formatting numbers, dates, and times for a specified language. For more information about the Language element, see "Language Element (Report) (RDL)" at http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms153956.aspx.

For more information, see Report Writers Guide.

Thanks,

Inna Agranov

Opportunity Import and Cleanse

Get every sales opportunity imported into CRM. Get the latest spreadsheet from every sales guy, import. Often, the sales manager runs a Friday or Monday pipeline call enfused with nuggets from each sales person about pertinent sales opportunities. This stands as a standard tracking tool for most sales managers. Now the sales manager can take this spreadsheet and track, for real.

Get the guys to get the sales dates right, the product groups accurate, the sales stage correct. ( See sales stage entries in this blog).  The pipeline slims out doing this. The fringe sales opportunities die off. All the smoke and mirror talk, the bs about this prospect and this contact and this large oppty now are recorded. The sales team is held accountable. So is the sales manager.

Requalify every sales oppty in CRM. Go back to basics, make sure the sales guys know what is a qualified oppty and requalify each one. This requalify is done on the phone or email using best practices sales ready messaging. Get the team focused on hard core sales qualifying. Get the Vampire optys out. Vampire optys suck time and will kill the sales chaser.

Steps: Load every current sales oppty, requalify each oppty.

The sales management should take the lead in setting good, simple sales stages. Each sales stage should have one or two characteristics defining it.

First Get Ships all Navigating to the Same Goal

Customer data, in most small and medium businesses, is stored in several internal systems and resides on the sales team laptops. This is like an ocean of customer data with ships navigating to different headings. I used to believe the first step to getting CRM or an online sales tool deployed into a new customer site targetted current opportunities. Getting all the current sales pipeline re-qualified is a sobering experience and important. Sobering due to the drop out of sales opportunities, not really qualified, important by building a current snapshot of pipeline health. I now believe that accurate customer data is as important as accurate pipeline data Getting the customer data ships all headed in your business direction is not hard. This task takes a good CRM or sales tool and is driven by hard work.

First, set up a CRM tool. Get your Account and contact profiles set up with descriptive fields. The base fields will be there already, just add your business centric fields.  Add your industry groupings your zones or territories if applicable. Then ask the owner of customer data to cleanse best they can and send to you. If each member of the team which owns a customer database does this, the task is not onerous. It may take awhile but it will get done.

Now get the spreadsheets together and take the second run at cleansing. Remove duplicates, remove bad addresses. Now import into your CRM. Now that data is visible and organized in your CRM database the third wave of cleansing is done. I recommend the sales team, now told about the importance of clean data, can clean and edit all current or active customers first. Get the top 20% of active contacts ship shape with good addresses, phones and the correct, standard company name.

Duplicate customer names are the biggest headache. Companies may have 35 different IBMs like, IBM, IBM Inc, I.B.M. A good CRM contact tool will reassign contacts to the correct, standard company name and the bad data can now be deleted.

But, after you’ve delivered that first bit of information to your prospect, do you send him any further information?

If you are like most Internet marketers, you don’t.

When you don’t follow that initial message with additional information later on, you let a valuable prospect slip from your grasp! This is a potential customer who may have been very interested in your products, but who lost your contact information, or was too busy to make a purchase when your first message reached him.

Often, a prospect will purposely put off making a purchase, to see if you find him important enough to follow up with later. When he doesn’t receive a follow up message from you, he will take his business elsewhere.
Are you losing profits due to inconsistent and ineffective follow up?
Following up with leads is more than just a process - it’s an art. In order to be effective, you need to design a follow up system, and stick to it, EVERY DAY! If you don’t follow up with your prospects consistently, INDIVIDUALLY, and in a timely fashion, then you might as well forget the whole follow up process.

Consistent follow up gets results!
When I first started marketing and following up with prospects, I used a follow up method that I now call the “List Technique.” I had a large database containing the names and e-mail addresses of people who had specifically requested information about my products and services. These prospects had already received my first letter by the time they requested more information, so I used...

To read the full article visit:
WWW.BAMBIZ.BIZ - The #1 Open Content Business Platform for Entrepreneurs.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) é uma expressão em inglês que pode ser traduzida para a língua portuguesa como Gestão de Relacionamento com o Cliente (Gestão de Relação com o Cliente, em Portugal). Foi criada para definir toda uma classe de ferramentas que automatizam as funções de contato com o cliente, essas ferramentas compreendem sistemas informatizados e fundamentalmente uma mudança de atitude corporativa, que objetiva ajudar as companhias a criar e manter um bom relacionamento com seus clientes armazenando e inter-relacionando de forma inteligente, informações sobre suas atividades e interações com a empresa.

O Customer Relationship Management é um sistema integrado de gestão com foco no cliente, constituído por um conjunto de procedimentos/processos organizados e integrados num modelo de gestão de negócios, do inglês “Customer Relationship Management“. O software que auxilia e apoia esta gestão é normalmente denominado sistema de CRM.

O seu objectivo principal é auxiliar as organizações a angariar e fidelizar clientes ou prospectos, fidelizar clientes atuais procurando atingir a sua satisfação total, por meio do melhor entendimento das suas necessidades e expectativas e formação de uma visão global dos ambientes de marketing.

O CRM abrange, na generalidade, três grandes áreas:

• Automatização da gestão de marketing;
• Automatização da gestão comercial, dos canais e da força de vendas;
• Gestão dos serviços ao cliente.

Os processos e sistemas de gestão de relacionamento com o cliente permitem que se tenha controle e conhecimento das informações sobre os clientes de maneira integrada, principalmente por meio do acompanhamento e registro de todas as interacções com o cliente, que podem ser consultadas e comunicadas a diversas partes da empresa que necessitem desta informação para guiar as tomadas de decisões.

Uma das atividades da Gestão do Relacionamento com o cliente implica registar os contatos por si realizados, de forma centralizada. Os registros não dependem do canal de comunicação que o cliente utilizou (voz, fax, e-mail, chat, SMS, MMS etc) e servem para que se tenham informações úteis e catalogáveis sobre os clientes. Qualquer informação relevante para as tomadas de decisões podem ser registradas, analisadas periodicamente, de forma a produzir relatórios de gestão.

• CRM Operacional: visa à criação de canais de relacionamento com o cliente.
• CRM Analítico: visa a obter uma visão consistente do cliente, usando os dados recolhidos pelo CRM operacional para obter conhecimento que permita optimizar e gerar negócios.
• CRM Colaborativo: foca na obtenção do valor do cliente por meio de colaboração inteligente, baseada em conhecimento.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Customer relationship management
Origem: Livro Miguel Abuhab - Um Homem que não pára! pag.119
Software que possibilitam um maior e melhor conhecimento do perfil e das peculiaridades de cada cliente, tornando viável uma maior satisfação das demandas no timing adequado.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Customer relationship management
Origem: Pauo Lucena
A melhor maneira para entendermos o que significa Gestão de Relacionamento com o Cliente é voltarmos aos tempos onde as relações entre as empresas e os consumidores eram feitas de forma mais individualizada. O vendedor porta-a-porta sabia exatamente quais eram as necessidades e desejos dos seus clientes e a própria empresa estruturava sua política comercial de acordo com o perfil de seu público.
Quem tem menos de 20 anos talvez nunca tenha visto a frase “Não vendemos fiado” dentro de um estabelecimento comercial.
As empresas cresceram, as tecnologias evoluíram, e de alguma forma as organizações tiveram que padronizar seus processos para aumentar a escala de atendimento. Conseqüentemente este novo cenário fez com que as companhias perdessem o contato mais próximo com os clientes e das suas reais necessidades.
CRM vem com o desafio de reaproximar as duas pontas permitindo novamente que as organizações consigam classificar seus clientes e os mesmos percebam que esta diferenciação esta trazendo um melhor atendimento.

Outra maneira de entender o conceito é nos colocarmos na posição de consumidor, ou seja, independente do tamanho do negócio o relacionamento entre as empresas não acontece através de CNPJs e sim de CPFs. São pessoas se relacionando com pessoas e entender suas expectativas e manter os históricos de relacionamentos são insumos para estruturação das estratégias de negócio. Ex. Desenvolvimento de novos produtos ou canais de atendimento.
No dia-a-dia medimos a qualidade dos produtos e serviços que consumimos pela capacidade das empresas de atenderem os nossos desejos e expectativas. Seja pela temperatura, sabor ou até mesmo atendimento do garçom do estabelecimento que estamos tomando uma cerveja, seja durante o contato com a loja ou fabricante buscando a solução de um problema de um produto que você tenha adquirido.
Resumindo, tanto o consumidor final ou mesmo o comprador profissional, esperam que as empresas os surpreendam. Para isso as organizações precisam estar voltadas efetivamente para trabalharem de forma estratégica com todos os dados que possuem do cliente transformando este conhecimento em relacionamentos mais duradouros e com melhores $resultados$.

Dentro da minha vivência de implantação de softwares de CRM, um dos pontos que sempre gera polêmica no projeto é o momento que de definir as características e parâmetros do potencial dos clientes.

Algumas empresas partem para curva ABC tradicional, definindo faixas de potencial de acordo com o faturamento. Outros apimentam esta visão somando dados financeiros como inadimplência. Em outros momentos, são analisadas também informações quantitativas como número de filiais, vendedores e qualquer outra característica que possa ser mensurada e que de alguma forma possa ajudar no dimensionamento de tamanha do cliente.

Mas vamos analisar uma mesma situação com duas visões diferentes.
Uma empresa vende instalações de ar-condicionado e o seu maior cliente, nos últimos 12 meses, foi uma empresa que acabou de construir uma nova unidade. O cliente pagou em dia todas as faturas e elogiou muito o serviço executado.
Vamos incluir também nesta história a informação que o cliente não prevê ampliações de suas instalações ou muito menos manutenções no local nos próximos 12 meses.
Em uma escala de zero a cem, onde o maior valor seria o potencial máximo, qual seria o potencial deste cliente? Se analisarmos a visão da curva ABC tradicional o valor seria cem, em razão do seu histórico de compra. Agora se analisarmos o potencial futuro de compra o valor seria zero.

Mas se encaminhássemos a visão dentro do contexto que um dos melhores vendedores da empresa é o cliente satisfeito e por esta razão a aaálise de potencial do nosso negócio não seria feita somente por venda e sim pelo quanto o cliente pode ajudar em novas vendas, o cliente da nossa história teria cem em seu score de potencial.

Então o que fazer para definir o potencial do meu cliente?
Vamos recorrer ao dicionário para verificar se conseguimos encontrar a melhor maneira de aplicar o conceito dentro da visão de negócio. Pincelando uma das definições para  a palavra Potencial dentro do dicionário Michaelis temos; “1 Força total dos meios disponíveis para certo fim”.
É isso. Qual força estratégica que cada cliente tem? Qual o objetivo fim que queremos ter com cada um dos meus clientes? Ao respondermos estas perguntas utilizando como premissa os objetivos de vender mais, fidelizar clientes e buscar parceiras e novas referências para o nosso negócio, você terá com certeza condições de estruturar quais atributos serão utilizados pela sua empresa para definir o potencial de cliente.Sugiro que esta visão seja segmentada conforme o ciclo de vida do cliente. Desta forma é possível separar e ranquear os clientes e conseqüentemente definir estratégias de relacionamento para cada um deles.
Ex.

No exemplo acima, você tem um cliente classificado como A em razão do faturamento, porém ainda sem um valor efetivamente estratégico (1). Outro cliente classificado também como A e com alto potencial estratégico. E outro cliente classificado com “Vip”(3), que recebe esta classificação por ter alto volume de compra, alto potencial estratégico e em razão de atitudes positivas no relacionamento com sua empresa, virou um parceiro e indicador de negócio.
É interessante também analisar os clientes novos (4). Se ele receber uma boa qualificação é possível tentar identificar qual será a classificação futuro deste cliente, ou no contexto de compra, ou mesmo por valor estratégico.
Fica uma sugestão de “lição de casa”. Separe um grupo de clientes e discuta com suas áreas de vendas e marketing, quais características quantitativas e qualitativas seus clientes possuem e o quanto eles interferem no seu negócio.
Quem sabe, durante este brainstorming você não se surpreende de forma positiva, ao identificar padrões de compra e clientes que podem ser utilizados para potencializar ainda mais seus resultados e aperfeiçoar as suas estratégias.

Via Blog Datasul

Se relacione apenas com quem lhe deu permissão para isso
E-mail marketing não pode ser confundido com Spam.
O Spam é um email não autorizado enviado por uma pessoa que você não conhece.
A primeira grande fonte de obtenção de e-mails autorizados para realizar suas campanhas é seu próprio site. E é muito importante utilizar a técnica do confirmed opt-in para ter certeza de que a pessoa que está autorizando é ela mesma. Mas qual a diferença entre o opt-in e o confirmed opt-in? A tabela abaixo explica a diferença entre as duas.

Envie emails individuais
É extremamente desagradável ser apenas mais um. Todos querem ser tratados com individualidade.
Não faça campanhas colocando as pessoas com cópia oculta, pois claramente cada pessoa perceberá que se trata de uma campanha de massa onde ela é apenas mais uma.
É importante que cada um receba um e-mail individual, constando seu próprio nome como destinatário do e-mail.

Cuidado com a mensagem
O primeiro aspecto importante da mensagem é a frase colocada como assunto. Se ela não chamar a atenção da pessoa, muitas vezes, ela nem chega a abrir o e-mail. Muitos mecanismos anti-spam chegam inclusive a bloquear e-mails com assunto como “promoção”, “compre” ou outras frases muito comerciais.
Procure criar um assunto que desperte a atenção do público interessado no que você quer comunicar no e-mail marketing.
Um exemplo: você é uma grande loja virtual, mas quer fazer uma campanha de uma promoção de notebook, então comece o assunto do seu e-mail marketing com essa palavra. Você pode pensar: mas aí quem não quiser notebook vai deletar e nem vai abrir o e-mail. E qual o problema? Seu anúncio não é de notebook? É melhor que 20% do seu público abra o email, e destes 50% clique em sua promoção, do que 50% das pessoas abrirem, e somente 1% clicar na promoção.
O ideal, na mensagem, é ter um profissional de arte ou de criação envolvido. Mas sabemos que muitas pequenas empresas não têm essa verba e preferem fazer o envio com recursos próprios. Não há problemas. A mensagem deve ser clara e sucinta. Cuidados visuais também são imprescindíveis. Tamanho, estilo da fonte e cores devem ter harmonia e estar de acordo com o padrão de sua empresa. Imagens que sejam leves e que efetivamente transmitam o conteúdo desejado também são importantes.

Considerações Finais
Esperamos que este artigo tenha sido útil para esclarecer alguns pontos muito simples, mas que nem sempre são observados.
Não tivemos a pretensão de esgotar o assunto, mas apenas oferecer algumas dicas importantes, pois recebemos diariamente dezenas de e-mails extremamente mal redigidos e sem a mínima preocupação com a imagem que a empresa está transmitindo.

Copy-paste de Rolling Stone (Maximiliano Poter):

Hace un tiempito hablamos sobre las transformaciones en la publicidad y la distribución dentro del mercado discográfico (¿debemos seguir llamándolo así?), pero unos días atrás la revista norteamericana Billboard hizo un relevamiento sobre el tema y puso en su portada a Topspin, una empresa que parece que se las trae. ¿Por qué? Principalmente, porque está formada por un verdadero "Dream ITeam" del negocio tecno-musical: Peter Gotcher (ex Digidesign, creadores del ProTools) y Shamal Ranasinghe (ex Real Networks y Musicmatch) como fundadores; e Ian Rogers como CEO, un tipo con ideas y opiniones muy interesantes sobre el actual estado del negocio discográfico quien, hasta hace solo unos meses, fue vicepresidente del sector Video and Media Applications en Yahoo! (y otro de los tantos cerebros que se están fugando del buscador, que vive momentos de incertidumbre).

Según explica Rogers en el blog de Topspin, la compañía "está fundada sobre el principio de que, mientras los costos de producción y distribución en la industria musical están cayendo, la ilimitada variedad de elección que tienen los clientes solo incrementa la importancia de un marketing efectivo. Marketing significa conectar y cultivar la relación con los fans existentes y descubrir nuevos, y Topspin está construyendo herramientas de software que hacen más eficiente el mercado del artista".  Así se presenta la firma: no como una discográfica ni una agencia de marketing, sino como una compañía de soft. ¿Y qué ofrece?

Por lo pronto, una plataforma tecnológica (o una suerte de "suite de aplicaciones"), que permite administrar el contenido y la relación con el cliente para que los artistas puedan distribuir y comercializar su música directamente. Acá se incluye:
a) Un sistema de gestión de canciones, fotos, videos y otros productos de los músicos.
b) Otro de "gestión de fans", que reúne y organiza datos como e-mail, ubicación, edad, fecha de nacimiento e historial de ventas, así como información sobre cuántas veces un fanático busca música en sitios que usan Topspin, si comparte temas con otros amigos y qué otras bandas escucha.
c) Una herramienta de creación de productos que permite a los artistas desarrollar ofertas especiales de su contenido, como suscripciones, paquetes de tickets / tracks u otras metodologías para comercializar su catálogo.

A diferencia de MySpace o ReverbNation, Topspin no es una red social ni un sitio de promoción de bandas, sino que ofrece un conjunto de soluciones informáticas que se montan sobre el website de cualquier artista para que este "autogestione su oferta".  David Byrne, Dandy Warhols y Jubilee (banda formada por el bajista de Queens of Stone Age con el ex violero de NIN) están usando Topspin para ofrecerles a sus fans suscripciones, canciones, contenido exclusivo y otra clase de promociones digitales.  En la disquería online de "la larga cola", la diferencia la hace la publicidad, para la cual es fundamental la tecnología, no un sello.

"I had high hopes for that Tuna Salad", said the IT director, "It didn't really deliver".

I was thinking about his IT problems, but in the middle of lunch with him, I thought I would respond by conjoining the two issues:

I said, "It's full of heavy metals, they have signs at Whole Foods that you shouldn't eat too much, and certainly not if pregnant".

He was not thinking about his IT problems at that precise moment, and why should he? Lunchtime was his one daytime hour away from the nightmare that had been plaguing him for months; unless I could convince him to take drastic action, the issue would continue to fester until the budget was spent, he was fired, or a decision to undertake a complete roll-back to the formerly reliable processes was made. They had certainly left  the realm of the familiar and functional for a stinking pile of ERP.

He continued: "Well, everyone here gets the Tuna Salad, and I'm not pregnant!"

I answered with a piquant anecdote that would steer the question back to where we could discuss his real problem: Big, heavy enterprise software, ill matched to the strategic mission, integrated, installed, and manhandled by a VAR's enterprise sales team of butchers. These stooges didn't know him or his industry from Adam.

This was indeed a phantasmagoria of errors with the proportions of a tragicomedy - nay, a comedia of epic dimensions that would be humorous if not for the high stakes.

Surely, like the Tuna Salad at this overpriced Luncheonette,  it was a recipe for disaster.

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Everyone gets the Tuna Salad. Everyone in our business uses SAP or some other honking server-based 'bloat anchor'. For some, it's great, it works, they can lavish resources and support on it - the features and alignment of these systems can be put to good use. In many cases, like the one at hand, however, they are too much, or just plain wrong for the task at hand. Oftentimes, it's not the application itself which is to blame, but the process for integrating and deploying it that causes havoc and destruction - particularly in the mid-tier companies in which I ply my trade. These organizations are too big for desktop or generic solutions, and too small, broadly speaking, for most of the ERP and CRM being shoved down their throat.

That's that lunchtime segue. My counterpart is not concerned about the heavy metal (bloated solutions enterprise-ware), and he's in pregnancy semi-denial (he suspected that he was on the path to delivering a bastard child). Well, he had enough sense to have me in to bid on the re-engineering.

It's complicated, though -

This fine example of a 30 year old, family owned and run business of 300+ employees had made it to this stage, and profitably, without the burden of ERP. One of the brothers who inherited the executive mantle was gung-ho to innovate...and good for him, Jack!

They had an organically grown process-based business that their dad and uncles built brick by brick. Their IT was lovingly transitioned from a paper forms method to AS400, then to a custom Oracle system with Power builder, and then some faltering, tentative steps to mobilize the processes, adding partners to the extranet over time. They had many successes and minor setbacks over a 10 year period mirroring the IT boom of the 90's.

It all started falling apart when a slick SAP VAR told the go-getter brother what kind of "efficiencies" he could gain by instituting automation for certain processes (that were not broken), such as their rapid replenishment system. And you know, he may have been technically right, in theory, but the way it was rolled out was wrong, so wrong. It kills me to see the waste and angst that occurred. What I uncovered in my analysis was ghastly.

The business had good, efficient, in-place processes that were refined over years of real-word use. One could say with confidence that they were the experts in their business of brokering specialty PCB  manufacturing components.  With a system of carefully maintained files, an aging yet stable Oracle database, and an integrated fax and imaging server, (not to mention a cadre of smart staffers), they had their shizzle down proper.

Now in comes SAP, whoo-hoo, and with a VAR completes a one week (!), once-over-lightly, pre-sale process study that concludes....wait for it now....that the processes must be changed to thus and so, and SAP SCN is the way to do it.

Can't do it your way anymore, only this wholesale re-engineering with THIS  package, this support, this training, and these database upgrades (by the way, you will need this hardware list), is the way to enter this new and efficient era. Baby brother, the go-getter, was sold!  With this complex burdening of the IT infrastructure, he had the means to unconsciously usurp his older brother while maintaining an appearance of propriety. It all seems to be good for the business, no? No. He probably believed it, too.

Many elementary rules were broken, once the trigger was pulled. They signed agreements, did no competitive RFPs, and neither held nor researched vendor cook-offs and comparisons. But most of all, they turned over their process studies to a vendor with skin in the game. This is a no-no.

Rule Number One: Never examine work processes in light of a software project. Corollary: make all examinations of process purely IT systems neutral. NEVER let a vendor run your process studies.

This company had every reason to examine process and systems upgrades, with possible concomitant IT systems augmentations. They had numerous human-centered processes in their daily grind that were bound by the expertise of a sole person who owned the processes - a scenario ripe for automation. Such solutions not only multiply an incumbent expert's productivity, but also empower other employees to  cover the expert's mission in their absence. That's what system re-engineering is all about.

Not the wholesale destruction of processes cultured over a thirty year life-cycle, no sir.

Changes to mature processes must fit the ultimate strategy and purposes of the business, not the IT vendor.

This misalignment is common, and has led to some un-G-dly statistic that a large percentage of SAP client licenses go un-deployed after the sale is closed and the project is found to be irredeemably broken. It figures that these un-implemented SAP seats are most often found in mid-tier companies.

These mid-tier stalwarts are the vulnerable ones - too big to do nothing, too small to afford the massive resources to de-funk badly screwed up ERP projects that are in their second phase of non-performance by anyone's yardstick.

In the next Installment, I will tell you what I discovered, and what my recommendations were. That's where I left it; I billed them for the analysis, and left a quote for the follow-on work. I think I heard the screaming start to rise in their throats (with the exception of the poor IT director, the guy who had been saddled with a thing he never recommended) as I exited the building.

One thing before I go: If you are mid-project, and you are fighting over when to pull the plug on the old stable systems, and the new one isn't working quite right, and the meetings have like 20-30 stakeholders in the room with vendors with MS Project CPM's and power points and memos to move onto the next 125k phase....

You've got a problem.

http://www.connectingforhealth.nhs.uk/newsroom/worldview/protti11/

...download here: sap_best_practice_for_crm

5 Customer Data Integration Problems

Jill Dyche and Evan Levy, gurus in this field, have boiled the challenges down to five primary categories:

1. Completeness – You don’t have all the data you need to make sound business or organizational decisions
2. Latency – It takes too long to make the data valuable…by the time you can use it, too much is obsolete or outdated (slowed by operational systems or extraction methods)
3. Accuracy – What percentage of your data is inaccurate…your Achilles’ heel
4. Management – Data integration, governance, stewardship, operations and distribution all combine to make-or-break data-value and
5. Ownership – The more disparate data-source owners, the more silos of data, the more difficult it will be to solve the problems.

Our consultants have written a new Journal addressing the top 5 customer data integration issues. Get yours here: Customer Data Integration Journal

Customer information changes constantly, or can be entered in error, or fraudulently. And, for most medium to large business or organizations, the data is stored in several different places, different departments, different locations,in different formats, etc.

This stuff is extremely complex and ultra-dynamic due to the many changes individuals go through in the course of their lives. Multiply all these fields by the millions of records a business or organization has in its data sources, then consider how quickly and how often this information changes.

The Amount of Inaccurate Customer Data is Staggering

The results are staggering. The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI)says, “The problem with data is that its quality quickly degenerates over time. Experts say 2% of records in a customer file become obsolete in one month because customers die, divorce, marry and move.”

To put this statistic into perspective, assume that a company or charity has 500,000 customers, donors or prospects in its databases. If 2% of these records become obsolete in one month, that is 10,000 records per month or 120,000 records every year. So, in two years, about half of all the records are obsolete, if left unchecked.

A este curso asistieron cerca de 30 ejecutivos provenientes de diversos sectores, desde el de seguros y finanzas hasta el de entretenimiento y la academia.

Creo que se aprendieron lecciones muy valiosas, además de que hubo una participación muy activa por parte de los asistentes. Las presentaciones por parte de Jesús y de José fueron extraordinarias, y sin duda estaremos pendientes de las siguientes fechas en las que se impartirá el curso en otras ciudades alrededor de Latinoamérica.

He aquí una foto de los participantes: