Gill Walker presented "Breaking the Barriers of Marketing Automation in Microsoft Dynamics 365 with ClickDimensions" at the Marketing Automation Summit in Sydney.
Since Microsoft Dynamics 365 (as Microsoft CRM 1.2) was launched in Australia in 2004, marketing has always been playing catchup.
ClickDimensions solves this problem by providing full marketing automation native to Microsoft Dynamics 365.
In this presentation, Gill Walker shares how ClickDimensions is your technology of choice to break the barriers of marketing (and marketing automation) if you are an organisation of any type using Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Gill highlights the key issues in Marketing Automation and shows how ClickDimensions delivers a return on investment.
For those of you who prefer to read, the full transcript is below.
Read more: ClickDimensions Breaks Barriers Marketing Automation
Gill Walker speaks on how ClickDimensions solves the problem of Marketing Automation for organisations of all sizes, if you are using Microsoft Dynamics 365.
This keynote was given at the Marketing Automation Summit in March 2019
So, first of all, a question for you people. We are now in 2019. What do you expect in 2019 from your marketing automation tools?
Seamless integration.
So, you want seamless integration. Great. Actually seamless integration between what and what?
Everything, pretty much. Well, CRM, automation, new data, contact centres, interface-
Prospecting.
... probably tools, social.
Have you got anything to add to that, since you're from the same organisation?
I was going to say right from the customer and awareness phase, prospecting, right through retention and reducing tune.
Yes. You two at the back, from a different type of organisation. What do you want in 2019 from your marketing automation?
I still agree to the integration component, but also, maybe leveraging other tools that platforms provide us that we're not at the moment doing, or leveraging. I guess it's the inside piece. For us, what's available to provide or give us that beehive of all marketing activity that we're doing today, rather than still preventing process.
Great. You've got anything. You're both from Nexon, aren't you?
Yes.
Yeah. I just thought different brains, different opinions, maybe. That's fine.
Intuitive interface and good reporting tools. With the email automation we're using at the moment, we have quite a few accidents happening because emails are being sent to the wrong people because of wrong queries.
Oops.
So it's highly complicated at the moment. It would be nice if it would be much more straight forward to use.
Awesome.
I guess it's just leveraging other technologies. Not reusing those that are already existing. So we have a lot of technologies in AI, machine learning or NOP, and just ... Like he said, better interface to those already existing technologies and leverage those so you could reuse the same for your own marketing informations.
Excellent. Thank you.
You don't escape. 2019 - what do you need from marketing automation or what do people you know need from marketing automation?
I guess reducing the cost ... I mean, getting the metrics right to evaluate the cost and making sure it actually is getting the ROI that you're after. Because, there are options out there and one of the main concerns is how it works, the cost involved.
Great. Even in this fairly small group, we've got quite a diverse set of requirement. Back in the beginning of Microsoft CRM, as it was called then. This is what it looked like. What we had was everything but marketing. The early part of the first release of Microsoft CRM, which was now 16 years ago, there was no marketing. It was a CRM solution, and it did not have any marketing in it. Now, some of you might be thinking, that's weird. In actual fact, if you compared Microsoft CRM to the other technologies that were also calling themselves CRM solutions back in 2003, you would have found much the same results.
That Microsoft CRM and CRM, as it was back in the early 2000s, late 1990s, was all about customer management of the current customers and the people who were getting pretty close to being a customer. So, there's still a prospect right now, but they're well and truly interacting with us.
But, as I think everyone in this room will know, there is a lot of work required to convert the these suspects into customers, and we have quite a long and adius process. Microsoft CRM, as it was, really helps very little with that process. Dynamics 365, which is the current version, has certainly improved, but it hasn't got anywhere close to the top of that funnel. It is quite common, even today, to see organisations, who've got their CRM solution and they've got a marketing automation solution of some sort, and between the two there is what I call a pick valley. One of the big challenges that they face is getting the information from the marketing automation into the CRM tool or from CRM back into the marketing automation tool to kick off some further campaign.
So this slide is just going to run through what we typically call the people, right from the top of that funnel, all the way down. Obviously, as you get lower down, there is more probability of somebody buying from you. It is very common to have, with some of these layers, easily 1:10, and not uncommonly 1:100 or even 1:1000 of a ratio between one layer and the next layer down. I probably should be saying that the other way round, because obviously, we're getting fewer as we go down the funnel. But if you do the maths, you will know or you will see that you need an awful lot of people going into the top of that funnel in order to get any out of the bottom. Most CRM solutions, true CRM, as in sales, customer service and so on, solutions, don't help you with that lot at all.
Many prospects, in fact, are over half way through the timeline of this process before they reach out to a company at all. You will see various numbers banded around, but I've read a number of different articles that quote 57%, 58% through the timeline from that first realization of I've got a problem, through to thank you very much. Here's some dollars for solving that problem. So they are 58% of the way through that timeline. So if it was a 100 day sales cycle, for example, they are 58 days in before they even reach out at the most basic level to engage with an organisation. At that basic level, we're probably talking an interaction with the website, although it's not just going to be looking at a website, it is probably a little bit further on where they've gone to a landing page and they have given over some details that you can then use to follow up. But there's still quite a long way from actively engaging with you and therefore becoming a customer.
Now, marketing automation helps you up at this top end of the funnel. So, all of this pale green is where marketing automation kicks in. So there is none of that in most CRM solutions, but there is a lot of it in marketing automation tools including ClickDimensions. What we need marketing automation to do for us is to help us with brand awareness, to generate interest in our solution and push those prospects into consideration of our solution versus the competitors. Any questions so far, of what I've looked at?
Why does not automation and intel at the top? Another whole thing.
Because down here, for many organisations, it is the sales department that has kicked in. Now, there may be some automation, but typically, particularly in a B2B, it is harder to do the automation down here, because, at level, you're talking very much about the prospect and their own problems. Now, it is getting more and more blurred, I agree with you, but most organisations are happy to have more personalized and one on one interactions once people get down into that yellow, orange part of the funnel because they are much more likely to buy from you.
Usually, ones they're down here, they would have spent a reasonable amount of time on your website. They've probably downloaded some brochures. They've self selected to a degree, and it gets to the point where the organisation probably wants to talk to that person on a one on one and start having a, okay, Mr and Mrs prospect, your situation is ... This is how we could help you solve your problems. Whereas you could possibly do that up the chart.
Having said that, that's not to say that there isn't some automation down here. But in general, it's probably not what's called marketing automation. Does that make sense?
Yes.
For example, we're in banking, and we do a lot of automation, particularly the onboarding stage, and then-
Yes. That's one of my examples.
... yeah, through the 90 days, kind of automation cycle. We use it quite a lot because in banking there is a lot of data which can trigger a lot of communication and we need all that-
We have a sales department.
Yeah, we are essentially sales, but we do a lot of automation to go on the customers through the onboarding.
What you have just suggested is actually one of the case studies that I'm going to touch on later on. It's probably a little bit blurred, and certainly, you can use some of the marketing automation tools to help you with the most sales process. But, I think, official definitions do keep the marketing automation up at the top of the funnel, and it's more sort of sales automation ones we get down towards the bottom of the funnel. Then, right down at the bottom, as it says, we've got customers and clients. But that doesn't mean that we're not further marketing to them. That we're not upselling or doing further work, which yes, maybe quite likely, a marketing automation tool could help you.
You've probably recognised this. If you are using Microsoft Dynamics 365, which is one of about 400 CRM technologies, ClickDimensions is ideal as the bridge between sales and marketing automation. I say that because it is a multi-channel marketing automation platform. I will go into it offers a little bit later on. But it really does give you that full breadth and lets you communicate with people right from the top of the funnel, or from the first point where it is feasible to communicate with them.
This slide shows you what Microsoft Dynamics 365 looks like if you don't have ClickDimensions or one of the competitors, but I'm focusing on ClickDimensions. It's when you go into marketing. So, you can see what we have got is just a relatively small amount of functionality and it is functionality that does fit lower down the funnel. So, it only helps us from what is called Marketing qualified lease, which on my funnel diagram was the bottom of the greenish color, down. That's the only support that you get, even now, with the sales components of Dynamics 365. However, ones you add ClickDimensions, you get all of these extra functionality. A lot of what you are seeing there is functionality that helps you up at the top of the funnel.
So, if you look we've got details of anonymous visitors to the website. ClickDimensions helps you with people who've come to your website at the point where all you know about them is their IP address, possibly who or what referred them to your website. We've got page views, which is a little bit lower down. So, that's individual pages that people look at. So, off the whole of your website, which pages are generating interest? ClickDimensions will answer that for you, and then of course you can slice and dice it in other ways.
How does it get the data? Does it connect with Google Analytics or do you put a pixel on that page?
It's neither of those. It's actually called a tracking token. Part of the installation of ClickDimensions you generate a token and then you put that token either ... You can put it into the overall footer of the website, which then puts it onto every page, or you can be more specific. If you decide there's a lot of pages on your website that you're not interested in, but there's just a few that you are interested in, you can put the same token just into the footer of individual pages.
It's a similar idea to Google Analytics. You mentioned Google Analytics. It also puts a tracking token either into the website footer or individual page footer. But it sends information into Google, whereas the ClickDimensions token sends the information into ClickDimensions. Makes sense?
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
What else have we got here? You can see that we do have email marketing, we also have other ways of communicating via text messages and social posts. We can also analyze social cliques. So you post something out on social media, that's what social post is, but then if that post has links that can be clicked, ClickDimensions can capture the information of who clicked what, when.
There is even more. Some of this is the same as on the previous slide. Some of it is different. We've got even more information that ClickDimensions is gathering to help us work up at the top of the funnel.
Putting all of that into some sort of context. We've got the same suspects, and this is our marketing automation. Here, we've got various different ways of putting stuff out onto social media, and we've got the website. This area of the slide is focusing on how can you raise brand awareness. How can you reach out to people who, right now, you don't know anything about them? In other words, you want to raise your brand to those people to generate some engagement.
Now, we've got a fourth. So these four will probably sit either on a webpage or in a social post, and we're asking people for some information, and they are voluntarily clicking on the submit button. They are giving us that information. We can also SMS them. So, ClickDimensions includes functionality to bulk SMS, and of course, we can email them. Both the email and the SMS can be, should be personalized. ClickDimensions can merge effectively, any information that you've already got in your dynamics database and can use that in an email, in an SMS, even in a survey. The survey that ClickDimensions supports can be dynamic, in that if you already know something about a prospect, you don't need to re-ask the same question. So, you could have a survey with let's say 12 questions on it, but you don't ask all 12 questions at once.
The first time the person comes to that page, you would ask, for the sake of argument, the first three questions. The next time they return to that page, you ask another three or another set of questions. So you're building your knowledge of the prospect as they come back to the website.
Can you do that with forms as well? I know you said you can do with surveys. Let's say you're on a new page on a website, can you build a profile of a returning customer rather than putting in their details?
Yes, you can. So, the one exception is probably email address, because email address is what it's going to use to tie the various other bits of information together. But, yes you can do that with forms. In fact, in ClickDimensions the difference between a form and a survey is really very small.
So, just to summarize. If you're in the awareness-raising part of the marketing funnel, these are the things that you can do, and ClickDimensions can help with all of them. Ones you've pulled the prospect down through, so they're beyond awareness-raising, and they're into the consideration, you then start using compelling emails, surveys and SMSs. As you would expect, the emails are in full rich HTML. They support graphics, links, and a whole heap of other things that people would now expect to get within a marketing email. They also have unsubscribe functionality. So, ClickDimensions supports the ability, not only to unsubscribe from everything but if you have a range of different newsletters that you send out, you can allow your prospect to subscribe to some and not others, depending on their interests. There's a lot of stuff that you can do in and around this whole area.
All of the things that we have covered can be tied together with Campaign Automation. This is where we can set it up so it does become hands-off. Here, we have a trigger, and the particular triggers used in this example are inviting somebody to an event or adding them manually into this campaign. Other possible triggers could be being added to a particular marketing list or clicking on a link. Ones it has been triggered, we can then send them an email and that is taking them to an event here. Notice here, we've got two arrows, so these are the people who are positive. So these either reply yes or click on an appropriate link. But they do what we're deeming is the good thing. The people that do that, then get a further series of three emails, followed by three further emails running up to the event, and now we've got the actual event.
If they attended the event, they now get a followup series. If they do what we don't really want them to do, in other words, they don't click, we'll set up a campaign response, that is RSVP, and then here if they don't attend the event we have a different followup series of emails for the people that don't attend. There's a lot of other things that we can do within the Campaign Automation function, but that just gives you an idea of some of the things that you can do.
Perhaps the biggest thing that is missing as an example on this slide is the weight functionality. So you can have a particular step in the process that doesn't happen until either a certain amount of time has elapsed, or a particular day or date is reached. Any questions about what I've done so far?
How is the AB testing done?
AB testing or split testing is done usually through emails
Does it have the functionality where it does like ... So say sending 5000 emails will send a 100 test?
It does. This is called split testing
So the way you do a split test email in ClickDimensions is you create the two emails, which are very similar but with one key difference, you link that to the relevant marketing list, so you know how many people are on the marketing list. You then tell it, either the percentage or the number that you want to be in the test sample, the test group, and you tell it how long to wait. So that's another example of the timer before it sends the bulk. To use your example, we've got a marketing list or a set of marketing lists with 5000 contacts. We've got our two emails ready to go. We do 100. Typically it would be the first 100 on the marketing list. But again, you can even configure that. It will send a 100 email test, split in whatever ratio you want. So it doesn't have to be 50-50.
It then waits for a period of time so that it can measure the opens, the clicks, whatever. Based on what your success criteria were when you get to the end of that period of time, it then sends the other 4900 emails and they will all get either email A or email B, whichever got the better results after the 100. Does that answer your question as to how that works?
Yeah.
The sequence can also have a mix of emails and text messages that are all-
Yes. Yes. These, in fact, could be email or text messages or a mixture of both.
Can you only do the AB testing through the email sending functionality or through Campaign Automation? Now you just explained that was from email sends.
Yes.
So that the manual intervention, can you do it through this phase, Campaign Automation? Can you add another line and then-
I don't believe that you can do split testing through the Campaign Automation.
I haven't tested it. I'm only asking if you could do it.
Knowing what I know about how you setup Campaign Automation, I can't think how you would set it up so that the split test is done.
You could actually multiple lines going out, going to two different templates.
I can't think just looking at the symbols we've got where the actual split text would come in. Now, you could freak it a little bit by ... If we use the same numbers that we used earlier, we could do a manual send for a 100, get the results and then put the other 4900 to go straight through. But I don't believe you could do a full-on automated split test within Campaign Automation.
ClickDimensions can me and is used by a large number and a wide variety of different organisations. I'm not going to go through all of these, but I'm going to go through a few of them to give you some ideas of how different industries have used ClickDimensions.
Manufacturers use the Campaign Automation feature for ... I suppose it's variant on onboarding. But, they used emails that were triggered by somebody making a purchase of golf clubs, and that all kicked off a process that improved their customer engagement, and specifically for them, got the customers to book the preventative maintenance for their clubs. So, the ongoing maintenance that golf clubs need, was managed largely through a Campaign Automation.
Associations are possibly one of the biggest users of this technology, and they use the email and specifically the drag and drop email template editor to do membership renewals and a whole range of other things associated with boosting their membership level and membership retention.
Banking and finance, as we heard for the gentleman over here. They have used ClickDimensions for customer onboarding and upselling. Again, Campaign Automation, ones you've got to a certain point, the next step just happens, whether that's an email or an SMS or whatever.
Education institutions. These use a whole range of things, but particularly web intelligence. By being able to see which pages of the website a prospective student has visited and combining that with some of the forms where they can get download material, they can then have personalized emails or sending it out to a human being in a call centre who can have a very meaningful conversation about possible courses and a whole range of other things, because they know which webpages the student in question has visited. How long they spent on those webpages. The order that they went from one page to another. That's really really useful information, if you want to do any form of upselling, you can see where the interest lies.
So, how do you see what pages they visited before? At the moment we can only see on what page the lead form was submitted. So, what other pages ... How would I collect further information?
The way it works is based on IP address. It works retrospectively. Prior to a particular lead feeling in a form, you're right. You know very little about them, so you know that the IP address or the IP provider has visited a certain set of pages. Once they do fill in a form, you can then do reverse engineer that, that the pages that were previously visited by that IP provider. Now, that's particularly useful in the B2B environment where an IP address is often matched to an organisation. In the B2C environment, it is going to be a lot harder because a particular IP address is going to be shared by potentially a lot of people.
Different addresses are being used as well.
Sure. Yeah. I agree with you, that I think the IP address is going to become less useful, but I don't know what's replacing it yet, while people do have. This, obviously, is going to change in a hurry, a range of different devices and so on and so forth. The ability to track it back is going to get harder.
Can I ask another question?
Sure.
Is there any functionality like lead scoring in there?
There is lead scoring.
Is that coming later along-
I am going to touch on it but I'm certainly happy to tell you that ClickDimensions does include lead scoring, and it's done by you assigning a score to the relevant pages and forms and surveys on a website, plus links and opening of an email and so on and so forth. So you work out the value of each of those and then it collates and totals what a person does.
Then pops up for the sales person to follow up.
Whatever you need to happen. Achieving a particular lead score could be a trigger for a campaign, it could get passed to a sales person's queue in some way, and there's probably other things you can do with it.
Great.
Fast-moving consumer goods. So all of the stuff that we buy through the supermarket and a lot of other places are another area where this sort of technology is useful. This particular example used the web intelligence to work out geographically where the most interest in the product was, based on which pages were being viewed, where, and they then combine that with a form that was on a landing page that offered a free sample. Obviously, the free sample wasn't absolutely totally free, because you have to give your email address in order to get the sample. Ones you've handed over your email address, that can then be further marketed too.
This is all of the functionality that ClickDimensions contains. I've grouped it by the sort of areas as we work down the funnel. We've got landing pages, so specific pages that either Google AdWords or LinkedIn Ads can go to. We've got Web Forms, surveys and web intelligence. They are the functionality that is useful very much a the top of the funnel. We've also got social marketing, event management, lead scoring, as I discussed. Email, SMS communication, campaign automation and reporting. At the beginning, when I went out and asked you, people, what you needed from your marketing automation in 2019, a number of you did flag the reporting and being able to pull the information together was one of the things that were important to you.
Because ClickDimensions sits completely within Microsoft Dynamics 365, it has all of that reporting and Power BI is just there for use.
Sorry, Gill, what's work intelligence, and is that part of the service subscription level or is that-
Web intelligence is who has viewed which webpages.
So it should be part of the general ClickDimensions?
The only thing on here that is not part of ClickDimensions is social marketing. That is a higher level of subscription. Not much higher, but you can have ClickDimensions without social marketing, but everything else in there is part of ClickDimensions without the social addon. Does that answer your question?
Yeah. I just haven't seen web intelligence on my platform that's why.
I think it's a label that you don't see inside ClickDimensions itself. But what you do have is the page views, the visits and ... There's a third one-
Yes. Now, they are the functions, if you like, within ClickDimensions, that comprise web intelligence.
I'm with you.
That's why you haven't seen it.
Just a question for the text messages.
Sure.
Would the text message functionality be only one-way text message communication or would it even be possible to setup a sequence of emails, text messages that kind of say, if you answer this or answer that, it's like a bought functionality in-between as well?
I think, but I'm not absolutely sure, that a lot of that is dependent on which of the SMS providers you are using for the SMS messaging. ClickDimensions itself doesn't send SMSs, but there are four SMS providers that it works very closely with. From what I recall, there are different levels of functionality within those providers. So, depending on which on you go with, would depend on whether the retail and SMSs does work.
Just to quickly run through the benefits of ClickDimensions. Firstly, it is completely dedicated to Dynamics 365 or Dynamics CRM. So, if you're not using Microsoft Dynamics 365 / CRM as a CRM product, you can't use ClickDimensions. Part of the reason for that is it is totally native. So ClickDimensions itself doesn't really have a database. It leverages the Dynamics 365 database. All of the data that is generated via those various pink splodges that I showed you on the previous slide, gets put into the Dynamics 365 database. So, you don't have that valley that I talked about earlier with marketing automation over here, CRM over here, big hole in the middle that causes problems. There is only one database, and it is the Dynamics 365 database.
It also has a wide breadth of functionality. In fact, for all of the products that do work with Dynamics 365, ClickDimensions has got the broadest functionality. It's the only product that works with Dynamics 365 that will do social posting and can pull the information following on from social posting back into the database, and therefore, of course, enable you to put your social post clicks into the same report as an email open, as a webpage view and so on type reports.
ClickDimensions works very well for both B2B and B2C. Again that's one of the features of Dynamics 365. I think these numbers are up to date, and I think they are bigger than I've got on this slide. But I thought I won't go adding to them until I get it confirmed. But already, and the product only existed for about eight years, there are globally 4000 organisations using ClickDimensions and over 600 partners to help those organisations across the globe. It also has very very good value. When you look at the breadth of functionality and the cost, it's probably the best of the options. So, any other questions. You have been asking questions as we've gone along and that's great. But any other questions.
Just have one that how does it manage multiple communications to a customer. Can you tell or is there anything to ensure some of those, let's say three emails in a day or if that gets offered they don't get the next one for two months or something.
You can do that, and you do it by setting a window. So, within a particular email, when you're setting that email up one of the criteria that you can optionally build in is don't send if they've had another email within X days.
Can you prioritize that? Instead of it falling to two streams, you can prioritize one and say, well, if they're in both, get this one first and get that one next?
I'm going to say yes because there is so much that you can do, but I have to admit, I've never actually seen how you would do that. I really need to think through the logic and work out, where is the branch. What's the condition that we're creating to send group A down this path versus group B down that path. Because you can build in branching, and more so than on the Campaign Automation slide that I have, but there's another component, I suppose, of Campaign Automation that is quite simply a branch. When you add a branch to the Campaign Automation, you then add to that branch, effectively, the X statement. So something like if the last correspondent was more than a month ago, send them this way, else, either no correspondents or send them this way. That's the sort of logic.
I suspect, being honest, the answer is going to be sometimes because it is going to come down to the particular 'what is my text that makes me want to send group A versus group B'. But I'd be very surprised if the answer was a bold no. But equally, it's probably not a global yes either.
Marketo is now being integrated with Dynamics, I believe.
That's been an ongoing project for some time and I don't know how successful it is. What I do know is Marcato does have its own database. So yes, I'm sure, at least in theory, it is possible to share information. But we are sharing information between the Marcato database and the Dynamics 365 database. Whereas, because there is no ClickDimensions database, that is not necessary. Another point that I find interesting, when I'm doing this sort of presentation is you might have noticed that at no point, as a feature or a function of ClickDimensions did I talk about marketing lists. The reason for that is, strictly speaking, ClickDimensions doesn't have marketing lists. However, Dynamics 365 does have marketing lists and ClickDimensions leverages those marketing lists.
The beauty of that, compared to the majority, if not 100% of other marketing automations that will work with Dynamics 365 customer engagement is those same marketing lists can be used outside of ClickDimensions. So, we could build a marketing list, let's say pure customer service. That same marketing list could then be used for pure marketing or sales or anything else function. Even the relatively new dynamics for marketing does not have that functionality. I think ClickDimensions is the only marketing automation tool that uses the Dynamics 365 marketing list.
What does it cost?
ClickDimensions?
Yes.
It costs around $US650 per month. But that's organisation-wide. I have to quote it in US dollars because ... You go to our banking friends to get a conversion. But obviously, the pricing in Australian dollars varies on the exchange rate because it is priced in US dollars. Although I understand that they are putting together an Australian price list.
But you need Dynamics as well?
Oh yes.
So that's an additional cost.
It only works with Dynamics, yes.
So if you're a Dynamics user then it makes sense. If you know what I mean.
We have Microsoft Dynamics but I don't think we have 365. I think we have an older version at the moment.
We can help you.
ClickDimensions in fact will work right the way back to CRM 2011
Really?
Yes. So, this presentation, because of where we are in 2019, was talking about Dynamics 365. But ClickDimensions works on a lot of other versions of the product.
So they're all Dynamics CRM?
Yes. Microsoft CRM, without the word Dynamics. It's so old, I think you would struggle to find it now. In fact, that slide that I had on the second slide where I showed you the whole page of the first version of Microsoft CRM was incredibly hard to find. It took me a lot of googling to find.
I think it looks like the one we're using now.
Dynamics or Microsoft CRM?
No. It's about this system, it had a similar-looking screen.
If you're using it on-premise you can still access it anywhere, anyhow.
I know. But if you have a monthly rotation tool like this, you get things that are durable.
For sure.
Oh wow.
Well, that depends ... I mean, also you see there are... That if you were writing all of the content for a newsletter and putting it together in eight hours, I would argue that's pretty good. But if by putting it together you've already the content and it's a case of well, I want that bit there, and that bit there, and this image in there, and that's taking you eight hours, I'd be a little concerned.
The thing with these, it's got templates that you can drag and drop, so you can load your template.
Absolutely. It's got, and you probably know this, but it's got four different styles and editor. Starting with the drag and drop, which is very easy to use, but it has some limits, right away through to, if you're braver than me, you can go and cut your own HTML, and so on and so forth. You've got, depending on where you sit on your willingness to do that sort of technology, there are five different email editors that you can use.
Just to finish up, before I get booed off by Privin, I am ClickDimensions Certified, and I will certainly be happy to help any of you if you think that is appropriate. Even if that's not appropriate, if you would like to keep in touch with me, you'll notice I've put some stay connected forms on the tables and I've also given many people business cards. I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn, I would love to stay in touch with you. I will now hand back to Privin.
In this presentation, part of InnovestSME's "Start-Up Business Ownership certificate", on 9th December 2017, Gill Walker highlights some of the key functionality that successful CRM should deliver to any business.
This presentation shows the owners of start-ups, owner-operator, small businesses who have little experience of CRM, how a CRM solution is essential to their success - now and in the future.
The concepts coveredin this presentation include:
The presentation highlighted the five ways that you can make more profit; from each customer and from each sale, and how your CRM solution can help with all of those. We clarified the real meaning of CRM - whether you understand it to be Customer Relationship Management, Client Relationship Management, Customer Record Management or Client Record Management - which is far less about technology, and more about your processes. While in the twenty-first century, it would be difficult to have a CRM Solution that did not have technology as a key part of it, a CRM Solution is not a technology. It is the processes and how you and your team use the technology that will make it successful - or not successful.
In my broader CRM consulting, I often highlight that CRM projects do not fail because of the technology; when a CRM project fails, it will have failed because of human decisions. Typically, the decisions that lead to failure are decisions that :
If you can get these three aspects right, you are on a better path than many CRM projects.
Published by Gill Walker
There is little point in capturing all your customer / client and prospect information, and diligently entering it all into Microsoft Dynamics 365 (or Microsoft Dynamics CRM, or any other CRM), if neither you nor anyone else can get it out - and get it out in a meaningful way.
So all the data's in your CRM. Now how do you get it out? And how do you turn that data into useful information?
Gill spoke on 'Taming the Beast of CRM Data' at CRM Saturday 2017 in Sydney
Gill speaks on how you can have a successful user acceptance testing - even if other aspects of the project have been less than perfect! User Acceptance Testing - when done well - can even solve some of those earlier problems.
The most recent delivery of this was for the Agile, DevOps & Testing Global Event organised by Unicom. Gill delivered this virtually on 2nd June 2021. the focus was how can your user acceptance testing help ensure the success of a CRM / ERP or other line-of-business software project - even if other stages of the project have been completed less than perfectly?
Previously, Gill delivered a similar, although slightly longer presentation for the Software Testing Symposium in 2018.
Globally, 60% of IT projects are said to fail. 60%. Across the US, that is costing $150 billion per year. That is significantly more than the loose change you'll ever find in my purse. If we look in the CRM and the ERP space, which is where I play, that increases to somewhere between 70% and 80%. Now think about that for a moment - would you go to a surgeon who had a 70% failure rate? And yet, at the moment, that is what we, as in the CRM ERP, and slightly broader people, are delivering to our clients.
If we keep the focus on the CRM / ERP space, one of the big problems with it is that projects are deemed to have failed. The word "deemed" is very important. That comes about because after the fact, after the solution is in and live, people are saying it's failed. But one of the reasons that it has failed is because it just didn't fix all the problems in the business. They didn't actually have anything upfront that they could then compare it to, at which it may or may not have succeeded. It was just, "We've put this solution in, we've spent all this money, and life isn't wonderful. Therefore, the CRM ERP has failed."
So, why does this happen? One of the reasons that we get this horrendously high failure rate in the implementation of the sort of products that CRM and ERP are - and it's not only those two products - is that we are working with the implementation of a solution based on an existing product, as opposed to building software from scratch.
So let me ask you, 'how many of you primarily work in what I might call "traditional software development," so building software, whatever sort of software it might be, from scratch?' Okay, relatively few of you. That surprises me. 'How many of you, therefore, are working in that environment where you are taking a product; it could be a CRM technology, it could be a CMS website technology, it could be a whole range of things. And then implementing that technology, which gives us a lot of functionality straight out of the box, but we're making relatively minor changes to meet a particular client needs'. That's definitely the space that I play in. Okay, so we do have a big majority.
So that brings us to another question: 'what are the key differences between those two types of project?'
I sat and worked through this. When we're looking at development projects, they are typically larger projects than what I'm calling "implementation projects." They're also more general, because they need to meet a wide range of end clients, whereas when you are in the end client space, it's really only your own needs that need to be met.
The starting point for a complete application is fundamentally nothing, whereas the starting point for an implementation is whatever product you have purchased to start with. Or, of course, if you are a phase two or an upgrade project, you're starting from whatever existed before. And in that case, of course, you may, courtesy of your colleagues or predecessors, be inheriting a load of problems that got through. And if we look at the degree of rigour for implementation projects, it tends to be a lot lower. So they are the reasons, I believe, that we get this higher failure rate. I'm going to go on a little bit further.
One of the points is how projects are sold. When we look at how all of these applications are sold, it is very, very competitive. A business person has decided they need to implement CRM, and they go out to the market; they might do a tender, they might just invite half a dozen vendors to come and pitch to them. Those vendors obviously all want the project. They all want to win that sale. And the effect of that is, that the vendors make it out to be a lot simpler than it is, - it's a real dog eat dog world.
Why do they do that? If any one vendor didn't make it out to be simple, all the competitors would still make it out to be simple, and they would lose the project. There, automatically, we have a problem.
And of course, the purchasers, whoever they may be, they don't know what they don't know. They've turned to these vendors for advice. They don't realize how much it's a dog eat dog world; they don't realize that if the vendors were a bit more honest and pointed out all the problems, they would lose the gig, therefore they don't. So they are trusting people.
Another big problem that we have is who is leading the project. Something that I find horrendously frightening is, if we allow IT to lead the project, it tends to, rather than meeting business requirements, it's, "Here's an opportunity for me to play. If I develop this, I learn technology x, and technology x is now on my resume, so I can get another opportunity, and I'll get more pay, or I can travel," or whatever the things that float my boat. So it becomes a bit of a playground.
We hear frequently that, for all of these reasons, that IT should not lead these projects. But if we let the business lead the project, businesses typically don't have a depth of technology and understanding. We get into the, "Yes, sir," "No, sir," three bags full, where anything the business asks for is granted. I'm honestly not sure which is better. Do we want a business lead, or do we want an IT lead? The ideal world is to get somebody who can sit in the middle, who can talk in that direction to business people and understand what they want, and who can talk in this direction and understand the technology and what it delivers.
There is another big problem that we can get sucked into, and that is AGILE. Don't get me wrong: AGILE, when done properly, is absolutely awesome. But in the space that I play in, AGILE has come to mean, "We'll show you a bit of the technology, or we'll do a bit where you can have a look at it, you can have a think about it, and then you can say, 'Oh, no, that's not quite right. We need this changed, we need that changed.'" And then some changes are done, and so we go on and on and on. To me, what we have got when that happens is not AGILE development, but frAGILE development. Because it is asking for all of the problems that Andrew highlighted earlier.
So that explains a little bit of what has happened before we get to testing, and why some of these problems exist, and therefore we have got senior management saying this has failed. They would never say it's deemed to fail, but they'd say it has failed.
If we go and look a little bit further, why are they saying that this project is deemed to have failed? Probably the commonest reason is that the users just refuse to use it. The organisation has spent large amounts of money in buying the software, doing the implementation, and now the users and just saying, "No. My spreadsheet's better. I'll go back to email. It's much easier."
And the other reason is that it is just quite simply not fit for purpose. So the users are under pressure to do whatever their job requires them to do, they've got their software, and it quite simply doesn't work. And they just quite therefore don't use it. They're being asked to deliver particular results, particular metrics; the software doesn't help them, so they ignore it.
Moving now onto what the bulk of my presentation is about, i.e. user acceptance testing, which sits on the platform of what I have talked about earlier. User acceptance testing requires real users to accept that the software does what it was scoped to do. But as you will see, there are a lot of things that we need to have in place, if that is going to be something that anyone has got any hope of doing.
So, successful user acceptance testing you could think of as an iceberg. And as many of you will know, what we see of the iceberg floating on top of the water, is a very small amount of that total iceberg. Successful user acceptance testing is similar. We've got a lot of things that need to happen before, if we've got any hope of achieving successful user acceptance testing. I'm going to go through these in order.
We need to train our testers. The training I'm talking about here is quite specifically training of the testers. This is not our end-user training, or training for developers so they know the product, or anything else. This is training the testers so they know what they need to test, and so they also know the reasons that the project came into being in the first place. Surprisingly, that one is often not done.
We also need to have the rest of the family of testing to have been done before UAT. We should not be finding whole gaps in integrations that just don't work, or lumps of code that are just falling over. You might get the odd one, but that is not what should be found in user acceptance testing. Those issues all should have been found earlier.
We also should have had the data migration. Users should be testing this application on real data, or at least representative data.
We need to have had some development. This is not just, typically, an out of the box product. Something should have been built to meet those requirements that the out of the box product didn't deliver.
We should have had some design, and that design should always be making best use of the out of the box products. The organisation to get to this stage has bought a product. That product probably meets somewhere of the order of 80% of the organisational requirements, and the whole project is really only about that final 20%. And we have a responsibility when we are designing those solutions, to make sure that we are making best use of the out of the box to get the 80%, that we are not overcomplicating.
We also should have a scope; in other words, what is this project delivering? You might be thinking that's obvious. It is standard software development. And you're right. I can say, hand on heart, I have been called in to rescue projects where pretty much every combination of those points that I've just gone through, is missing. Which is really quite frightening, but we can see why we're getting to the failure rates that I talked about earlier.
So, successful UAT is sitting at the top of the iceberg, on top of a number of other things. They also are all held together by the timeline and the project manager. In theory. I have also been involved in projects where all of those are missing. So we've got this idea, we need CRM, we've bought a CRM product, we've installed it, bang, it will all just work. And then we start complaining because we don't have customers, we have clients, and the software ... But the software should have just known to change its terminology from "customer" to "client." Or that is the impression that we get.
Bringing it back to you people, what can you do if you are a test lead and you find yourself being asked to deliver successful user acceptance testing and one or more of those essential steps is missing? What do you do if the scope is missing? This is a situation where we've bought a CRM. "Well, all CRM is the same, all business is the same, so why do we need to do a scope? Implementing partner? You've been in this business for a while. You know all of this stuff. We don't need to do a scope." If you find yourself in that situation, my strong advice would be to, as far as you can, build some sort of scope. Talk to people: what were they expecting from the product that is being implemented? And once you've got that, you can then start looking at what actually has been developed, and you'll be in a position to start working out which bits are missing.
What do we do when the design is missing? Surprisingly enough, this is probably the commonest of all of the bits that are missing. So we get a scope, and then no design, planning, or documentation. It's just, "We'll hire a developer, whatever a developer happens to be, and we'll spend five minutes saying we're this sort of business, we're a financial planning company and we've bought this CRM solution. Off you go, developer, you know what to do, don't you?" To me, that is like deciding that the house is getting a little small with the bub on the way, so I met a brickie down at the pub and I've asked him to come over Monday morning. There's a few bits missing.
If you're in the situation where the design is missing, what you need to do is take the scope, and for the purposes of this, I'm assuming that only one of the components is missing. But as I said, it's relatively common for two or more of them to be missing. What you then do is, you take the scope and you look at what has been delivered, and backfill from design with a focus on those bits that have not yet been delivered. Although if there was no design, chances are there's going to be a fair bit of what the client was expecting will still be in the vapourware bucket.
Well, development. I think if the development is missing, it's probably time to go home, because you're not likely to achieve very much. Certainly not in the time frame that you've probably had foisted upon you at this point. But if you're there and you really see an opportunity to shine, what you need to do is go and get the design documentation, and then look for a small number of people with the skills in the technology itself, who can do the building for you. I would strongly counsel you to keep that team as small you possibly can, because once you get a big team, you get what I love to call Chinese whispers. So you'll have bits happening over here and bits happening over here, and the whole lot is just not hanging together.
Data migration. I've been involved in a number of projects where management have said, "Now, all that data that people have built up over the past however many months or years, it's all crap, it's duplicate data, it's this, it's that, we're not going to bother." Or maybe they accept that data migration needs to happen in the project as a whole, but not for testing: "You can just make some data up. Doesn't really matter." In that situation, I think you really do need to stand up to the powers that be, explain the importance of realistic data for the testers, and get people to rewind and give you, if not a full sample, it does need to be representative data, so that the testing can be done.
What happens if there is no other testing has been done? I think the simple answer to that is, you will have problem after problem after problem, which are really not appropriate for the users to be finding out. So when you're in that situation, you need to, and it's probably easier for people like you to handle this situation, because you're more likely to have had prior exposure to it. But you need to explain to management why all of those other testing components are important, and put in place a mini-project to make sure that those other features do happen.
The final one is the training for our testers. It is completely wrong to just assume that we can bring in a user who has been doing whatever their job is for however long, sit them down in front of a new application, and let them go. But it happens. So the fix for that one is to go right the way back to the beginning of your project, look at the scope, train your testers in the reason for the project, make sure that they understand what the solution does, and then let the testing happen.
So now, I'm going to move on to, what do we need to do within the user acceptance testing phase of the project itself. What I want to do for this is to begin with the end in mind. And the end, of course, is successful user acceptance testing. But what do you need to do to make sure that that happens?
Well, first point is give the testers scripts. Make sure that they have got detailed steps to follow. What do they put in this field? What do they, where do they move to? How do they navigate the solution? And so on and so forth. It needs to be documented in a fair amount of detail.
We also need to make sure that we are covering all of the processes, and not just the normal or the straight-through processes, but what I call exception processes. To understand this, I think, imagine you are testing an application that needs to take credit card payments. We all know that on the balance of probability, 95 or more credit card payments will just go through, and no problems. Therefore, if the cashier was to let the person go with their goods, no problem. But the bulk of our testing needs to be not that straight-through process, but it needs to be testing, what do we do when the credit card is damaged? What do we do when the credit card is stolen? What do we do when there's insufficient funds on the card? And any other issues. So it is essential when you are building those scripts, that you're thinking not just for the straight-through process, but think, what are your fraudulent credit cards, insufficient funds, damaged credit cards, and so on and so forth.
And finally, we need to make sure that all of our UAT has structure. I've been at organisations deploying various CRM solutions, where their idea of UAT is at an appropriate time, we just let all of the users into a room, give them computers. If they're lucky, they'll get testing log-ons, and say, "Off you go. Tell me which bits don't work." Of course, one of the biggest risks of that approach is the faults that will be found are not faults as such, but they're new requirements.
The user doesn't like that we've chosen pink as the background colour for the application. The user doesn't like that it takes four clicks to do this process. The user doesn't like whatever. But users not liking, are not faults. If the product was scoped to be pink and take four clicks to do that process, being pink and taking four clicks to do the process, is 100% pass. Whatever the user might think. This is not the time when we are inviting people to think up, what would you like, what do you think would be beneficial.
What user acceptance testing needs to be is, we have a scope, which we agreed with appropriate users, management, whoever it is. We have built that scope, and now your role as the user acceptance testing team is to tell us, have we delivered on this scope. Whether you like it, dislike it is irrelevant.
That, in summary, is the key things to think about if you are presented with a user acceptance testing project, where you are being measured on the UAT being successful and some, or worst-case scenario, all, of your preceding colleagues have not done a particularly good job. It is still possible for you people to be successful and to come up smelling of roses. Might not be easy, but it is possible.
Question: This is just something that, from a third-party implementation point of view, it's not all about the testing, you want a successful implementation for the customer. What would you turn around and say, we did this wrong - My job's done? You need to get to customer success.
Absolutely.
To be clear, the problem with UAT is, as you said, the business end-users engage further on, so you get to that point where the business end uses it, and they go, "Why is this one pink?" How do you address that, because just saying, "Oh, it's blue in the scope, therefore it's blue," isn't going to cut it for the user.
It will depend on who the person is and how functional it is, because although I (and you followed me) used colour as an example, in most instances, colour is not overly important. But there will be instances where we've got similar things, where the scope said A, and A has been delivered, but the user thinks that B would be better.
What I think needs to happen there is, we need to agree that A was in the scope, so for the time being, we've delivered A, so we'll get a tick on it. But then, go back to business and management and so on, and talk about B. Is there justification right now to make a change in scope, which is leading us into scope creep and deliver B? Is B sufficiently better, that that's really what we should do?
In most instances, I would say leave it as A right now, but put B forward as a change request that can be addressed later. It would be the very minor changes where I would say, "Oh, just do it." That is, of course, a risk. That whole, "Oh, I can do it for you, it's just quick, I'll make that change," where you're trying to please a user, can cause problems.
Question: I think you're right, and normally I wouldn't talk about it. In my experience, you might have 10 or 15 users, all sort of facing the same issue with how they had not been engaged early on, and they had this strange fixation with the end product. It's a big enough issue; it probably should have been shown on the iceberg, this end-user engagement with the product.
Yes. It is part of the scoping. I suppose all of those layers, we could have split out into more. The challenge is, how many users do you engage at that scoping, to not end up with, "Well, I think A," "I think B," "I think C," and then who ultimately should make the call whether A, B, or C is the better way of implementing that scope point. And if you've got that situation, if we assume that approximately equal numbers were voting A, B, and C, two thirds of them, when we get to the testing, are going to be dissatisfied.
That’s engagement from an end-user perspective, but there's also engagement from a management perspective. We decide if this is what we do, and in three months' time the users start to use the product. The end-users, they trained in the new product.
Oh, absolutely. To me, that comes after UAT. End-user training, absolutely is very important, but it comes after the user acceptance testing.
Question: How do you engage the end-users?
To me, end-user training is the how do you use the product that we are giving you to do your job? What I would do up front, and I strongly advocate, is training a wide audience within the business, in what the solution does out of the box. But that, to me, I call that business user or subject matter expert training, not end-user training. To me, end-user training does need to come after UAT, after you've got a sign-off and a stable product.
But yes, I completely agree, even before scoping. So if I were to go back to my iceberg, I would put my business training, or training in how the selected technology works, in front of or beneath my scoping. And then I would have my end-user training up in the sky above the successful UAT.
Question: How would you fit user acceptance testing into AGILE function? Separate phase or built into the sprint?
I would argue that everything that was on the iceberg exists in every sprint of agile. But there are alternatives. To me, agile is quite similar to waterfall, except it's much smaller. With waterfall, we aim to deliver this much in one go: major change. With agile, we deliver this much, this much, this much, this much. Which means that, of course, the users have had some benefit from whatever those first chunks were.
Question: I guess with the advent of agile, we're moving away from traditional planning techniques and more into automation techniques. Does that mean that our automation technicians have got to think about UAT, or should we maintain UAT as manual.
I feel, in the world that I play in, that UAT does need to stay manual with real users. But that is very specifically within UAT as I defined it. One of the challenges that I see is that people just ... and when I say people, the business, is just saying we need to do testing. Which, yes, you do need to do testing, but they're not splitting the family out into unit testing, system integration testing, stress testing, user acceptance testing, and so on. And the user acceptance testing does, by its very nature, it is users. So while the users who ultimately will be using the product are living, breathing human beings, I think the users who do the user acceptance testing also need to be living, breathing human beings, not automated.
I would say that you've got to have UAT prior to the go-live. So that depends whether a sprint is something you're going to release, or a sprint is just a chunk of functionality that you're going to get to save, regard as finished, move on to the next sprint. But if a sprint is releasable in and of itself, then there should be a chunk of UAT for the functionality within that sprint. But if you're not releasing it, you can then do UAT combined for two or three, or however many sprints. But there needs to be as many chunks, to use a highly technical word, of UAT, as we've got releases into production.
Any more questions? I will be hanging around for most of the rest of the day. More than happy to talk to people.
I'm now going to hand back to our MC
This presentation came out of an earlier blog article User Acceptance Testing (UAT) for CRM Projects – Secrets of Success
Opsis is an expert Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform and CRM strategy consulting company. Our focus is your CRM success, with Microsoft Dynamics 365 / Microsoft Power Platform or any CRM technology - not licence sales or billable hours. As Principal CRM Success Catalyst, Gill oversees all business operations, strategic planning and execution, yet she still believes in offering personal attention to each and every client, so as to understand their needs and offer tailored solutions. We are based in Sydney, with clients in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane and across Australia. Gill is the creator of SuccessRM - your blueprint for CRM success. We offer: