In life, there are certain things that simply belong together. Things like how peanut butter and jam belong together in sandwiches. Or how ketchup belongs on hotdogs. Or how the Sedin twins belong on the same line for my beloved Canucks. 

In Maximizer CRM 11, there is a new ability to attach column setups to catalog searches. This is really useful functionality, not only because it formats the results of a search in the way that you want it, but it also sets you up to export to excel, which is my favorite kind of report.

So what I would usually recommend people do is take one of their excel spreadsheets that they need to take on the road or into meetings. Admit it; you have THAT Excel spreadsheet that has all your information on it. Everybody has one of these sheets.

With that Excel spreadsheet, backwards engineer it into a column setup in Maximizer, where you can. This can include things like revenue numbers for opportunities, or phone numbers and addresses for Address Book entries. You can also include any user-defined field that you need like size of company, revenue per employee, etc. The end goal is to have your column setup to look like your excel spreadsheet.

Then, you need to create your search by going to the All Fields option, in the Search By group on the Search tab. Configure your search will pull all pertinent records, whether that be all entries in your territory, all entries by state, all of your accounts, or any combination of any basic or user-defined field information. Constructing a solid search is key.

Once you've constructed a good search, hit the Catalog button, and click Add to create a catalog search. Give it a name and set its access permissions. If you want the search to ask you for values each time you access it, select the "Prompt for values when search is retrieved" option. This is useful for things like date ranges, or if you want to make the catalog flexible for other people to use. Before you hit OK, choose the column setup you created earlier from the drop down.

So the next time you use the catalog search, it not only will pull up the results of the search, but it will also format the results in the column setup that you created earlier. After you've populated the screen, click the Export to Excel option and you get yourself a simple report, formatted with the fields that you want.

You can do this in previous versions, but you will just need to search and then change column views or vice versa. In Maximizer CRM 11, however, the two functions have been fused together. Like a Liger.

Row coloring is one is my second most favorite feature in Maximizer CRM 11. One thing that you cannot do, however, is set a row coloring based on ranges. If I wanted to color all the opportunities that have a projected revenue of something greater than $100,000 dollars for example, there currently is no way to configure this.

This leads me to my second most favorite feature in Maximizer CRM 11, the formula user-defined field. Formula user-defined fields allow you to take the value of one or more field, manipulate them, and display them in another user defined field. For example, if you wanted to create a "Revenue after tax" field that will subtract sales tax from the revenue, you can now do this by programming the formula field to calculate the tax and subtract this from the revenue.

So for coloring rules, the trick would be to configure an alphanumeric formula user-defined field that will take ranges of revenue and output a label for that range. In my next example, I'm going to create a formula field called "Opportunity Size" and have 3 opportunity sizes: small, big, and huge.

So here is how we would configure the formula field:

1. In the user-defined field setup screen, click Add to create a new user-defined field.
2. Name the field "Opportunity Size".
3. In the Type drop down, select Formula, then select Alphanumeric.
4. In the Return type drop down, select Alphanumeric.
5. In the Formula field, click the ellipses.
   
   Here is where the fun begins... But to make life easier, copy and paste the following couple of lines into the formula field.
   if ([Revenue] < 50000, "Small",
   if ([Revenue] < 100000, "Big","Huge"))
   
   The manual has lots of examples and the below snippet of code doesn't have anything that is not in the manual.
6. Click OK to complete the formula.
7. You may want to set the user-defined field to hidden, if you don't want to see it all the time in the list of user-defined fields. Otherwise, click Ok to complete creating the User-defined field.

Once you've created the user-defined field, look at the user-defined field for all your opportunities.  The opportunities all are classified as Small, Big, or Huge. You can put this formula user-defined field in your column setup just like any other user-defined field.

To create a coloring rule:

1. Name the coloring rule "Color by Size".
2. In the Match entries using this field area, select the Opportunity Size field we created.
3. Add criteria for the Small, Big, and Huge. Now be aware that these are free-form text typing, but the beautiful thing about the formula fields is that since there is no user who is entering the data, and the field will always be Small, Big, or Huge. So make sure you type in Small, Big, or Huge correctly!
4. Once you've entered a value, change the text color and/or background color.

Once you're done, click OK and apply the Coloring rule to view your opportunities in Technicolor.

It's the holiday season again. A time of wonder. A time of joy. A time where you can offload your workload to the poor interns/articling students/contract workers/anybody else not fortunate enough to have the holidays off. A good way of assigning work to these poor souls is by creating hotlist tasks and assigning the tasks to them.

In order to assign other users tasks, you must first be able to access their hotlists. Here is how you would do this:

1. In Administrator, go to File > Users. (You can also do this in Maximizer by going to File > Users, just make sure you have the right to modify User/Group setup).
2. Select the user you want to assign the tasks to, and select preferences.
3. Under the Access to Hotlist section, make sure that you, or a group you belong to, has full access to the user's Hotlist.

The Calendar/Hotlist tab is also the place where you would set access rights to their calendar too, so you can see whether or not they actually do have time to do your work before whatever plans they have at night. Nobody likes to stay in the office really late around Christmas. You don't want to be Major Buzzkill, because nobody likes Major Buzzkill.

So after you've enabled yourself to assign hotlist tasks to the user(s), when creating a hotlist task, their names will appear in the "Assigned To" drop down list. Names appearing in this list are users who have set full access to their hotlist to you or a group that you belong to. After completing entering their task, click OK and the Hotlist task will appear in their hotlist.

So after you've assigned all your work to other people, go home and enjoy the holidays. Here are some simple steps to have a good holiday:

1. Chill out, be happy. Forgive and forget!
   
2. Give generously, there are many people in need, especially this year.
   
3. Give your Mom a big hug the next time you see her.

Happy Holidays!

Welcome to this Halloween edition of "Where There's a Will, There's a Way" (queue the cheesy Halloween music).

Having a ton of notes on clients can be a good thing. But sometimes, finding specific notes can be a nightmare. There is a way, however, where you can make some notes vanish when hunting for a specific note and re-appear when you want to view all notes. Filters can be used to specify the type of note that gets displayed in the notes following. You can switch between filters, just like how you can switch between column setups. 

Effectively using filters is frighteningly easy. It all starts by classifying your notes. When creating your notes, you can set the category of the note.  There are some system defaults, like email, phone calls, mail-outs, and these automatically get assigned to the notes when you perform these actions. When you create manual notes, however, you can assign it a custom category.

You can configure manual note types in Administrator by going to File > Preferences and selecting the System Fields tab. Select the Address Book Notes category and click the Add button to add values to the list. As you can see, there are many other categories you can select and add values to, but we'll keep this discussion focused on note types.

So after you create the note, set the category to whatever you want. Notice that the values that appear in the notes drop down are the ones that we configured in the System field tab? Scary!

So to filter the notes in the notes following window, select the Filter drop-down list and select Custom. Then, in the Type of note area, leave manual selected, choose the type of note you want to display, and de-select any other note types you don't want visible.

Click OK and only notes of the types that you selected in the manual filter will appear in the Notes following window.

Have a happy Halloween!

I guess you can say that all your customers are important. But sometimes, you need to make a distinction between those customers who take priority over others. Certain circumstances necessitate that you choose specific customers, and treat them differently. In the business world, these customers could be your leads. The potential customers that you probably want to pay greater attention to because they become your customer base.  The customers that you already have, however, are still important, so you can't forget about them either!

Maximizer allows you to classify your companies, contact, or individuals as leads or non-leads. There is a couple of fields that are important when thinking about leads.  All of these fields can be found on the Company/Contact/Individual Details section of the Basic Information dialog.

• Sales Lead - if this field is set to Yes, the entry will become a lead.
• Account Manager - set the Account Manager to the user who the lead belongs to. So if you are doing a search and you narrow your query by searching "My Leads" only, then the search will only bring up Leads that have you assigned to as the Account Manager. More on searching for leads in a little bit later on.
  
   

I am terrible at remembering dates. Sometimes I get so busy that I almost don't remember my own birthday. I guess that's what my better half is for. But still, I'd like to remember her birthday from time to time.

So what if you had a really important piece of customer information that you had to remember every year, like a contract renewal date, CEO's birthday, or end of fiscal year? Now, it's easy to create a reoccurring appointment in your calendar, but that can get tedious when you are doing some data entry or are updating a few companies at the same time. There is, however, an easy way to create hotlist tasks based on dates entered in a user-defined field.

1. Go to File > Set Up User-Defined fields.
2. Click Add Field
3. Select Date from the type drop down list.
4. Select Include in Hotlist option. If you want the date repeated annually, then select the Annually recurring event option.
5. Set Full Access/Read Access to the users or security groups that you want the hotlist created for. In the below example/screen shot, hotlist tasks will be created for Billy Holly and MASTER.

So in the future, when any date is entered into the UDF, a hotlist task will be created for all users specified in Full/Read access. 

Be careful with this tip. If you create a date UDF that everybody can see, then every time you fill in that UDF, everybody will get a hotlist task reminder. That may or may not be what you want.

In Maximizer, you can customize your calendar to fit your work schedule. If you are one of the lucky ones to only have to work a few times during the week, or a few hours during the day, this can make your calendar a little bit more aesthetically pleasing. 

Two of the most useful functions are the working day and working hour options in the preferences menu.

Working day

Select which days you work. Any day left unselected will be red in the weekly and monthly views, so you can quickly identify which days you are in and which days you are not.

You can also choose to not show non-work days in the weekly view by selecting the "Show non-work days in the weekly view" option in the Options area. That way, you can look at a weekly view of your work related activities while not being distracted with your weekly golfing sessions on your midweek day off.

Working hours

Set your working hours here. The range specified in the from and to drop down lists will be a different colour than the hours that are outside the range. Also, any appointments created outside of the range will appear at the top or bottom of the daily view saying you have x number of appointments before/after your start/end time.

Sometimes, it takes a stroke of genius to create the perfect all fields search. After many hours of carefully planning which fields to include and which values to select, you run the search and get the perfect result set.

And sometimes it’s just a big fluke. You are shooting from the hip and just happen to stumble upon the right combination of fields and values to get the results you are looking for. You probably want to save that search, so you don’t have to go shooting in the dark again the next time you want to run the same search.

So after you are satisfied with your all fields search, go back to Search > All Fields. Then, select Last Search. This will bring up the last search that you made. Then, click Catalog, then Add.  Fill in the Name of the search and a description. You may also want to include, or not, in the description, the fact that no planning was involved and you pretty much just guessed your way to the end result.  Click OK to save the search.

You just made a great save!

Time is always at a premium, at and outside of work. Let's be honest here, nobody likes to waste time, unless it's "wasting time" relaxing. At work, the more time you waste, the more money you could be losing. Unless you are New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez, who makes roughly $100,000 for every 6 pitches he sees. [Wall Street Journal] Waste away, Alex, you are doing good for yourself.

A good way of not wasting your time is talking to the right people. Establishing a pecking order is always important. When making a sale, it's always good to figure out who's the boss or who's writing the cheques.

A quick way of figuring out who is the king of the hill is drawing an organizational chart. Here is how you do it:

1. Highlight the company in the Address Book window.
2. Go to View > Organizational chart

If Martha reports to James and Ed reports to Martha, the organizational chart will look like this:

From: William Leung 

Sent: Friday, August 14, 2009 4:31 PM
To: Microsoft
Subject: Excel Awesomeness

Dear Microsoft,

By now, you must think I hate Excel. I've already written a couple of blogs about Excel and/or people's strange fixation with using Excel for everything. I work for a CRM company. So you can imagine the frustration I used to feel when I see people storing all their contact information in an Excel sheet and trying to use it as a pseudo CRM.

But really, thank you for making such an awesome product. It is great for doing spreadsheet stuff. 

Come to think about it, if all you are storing is like, phone numbers, and names, I guess Excel could be okay.

But what if you want to get your Excel contact lists into Maximizer?

For example, let's say you had a spreadsheet with the following fields:

Importing this sheet into Maximizer is easy. There are a few things you need to do first to your spreadsheet to get it ready for importing.

1. Make sure all rows have a last name or company filled in.  You can do a search in Excel for all blank cells in a column and replace it with information of a period.  That way, when importing, Maximizer will not ask you a hundred times for a hundred missing last names.
2. Save the Excel sheet in CSV format. Do this by going to file > save as. Then, in the "Save as type" drop down, select CSV. You may get a couple popups saying something about losing formatting. Just hit OK and make sure the CSV gets saved. After it's saved, open it up again just to make sure it's ok. After that, CLOSE excel.

Best Regards,

There is a way to create a semimonthly appointment in your Maximizer Calendar. Just to be clear, an example of a semimonthly occurence is like my favourite times of the month: pay day. It is like being paid on the 15th and 30th of the month and not every other Friday, which is bi-weekly.

Because there is no semimonthly option when creating a reccuring appointment, you have to be a little bit clever about it. The process isn’t perfect, though. For example if you create semimonthly appointments to happen on the 15th and 30th of every month, the 15th and/or 30th may land on weekends.  You will just have to play these instances by ear. If you do want to see these options included in the software, email suggestions@maximizer.com, or go to the suggestions section of the forums and post something there.

Sometimes, it's important to know how much effort you're putting into a relationship. Any relationship. Whether it be with your friends or a lead, it's always good to know how much time and effort you put in. A good indication of how much time you are spending with a client is looking at the number of activities you have with a specific client. Obviously it could be a bad thing that you see a customer a lot. They could be having a lot of problems. But it could also be a good thing. Maybe the customer keeps asking questions about different products and you are happy to answer them in hopes of making a big sale.

The hotlist task window is a great place to see both appointments and tasks at the same time. Configure a column view for the hotlist like I mentioned in a previous blog and you can sort your appointments and tasks by company name.

Another way of seeing both appointments and tasks for a specific company is by right clicking on the Address Book entry and selecting "Activities for [name of Address Book entry]"

This opens up the Activities for... dialog. It is like a mini Hotlist window.  It shows all activities for the Address Book entry. From here, you can create Hotlist tasks or appointments. You can also filter the results to see only certain user's appointment/tasks for the entry.

Maintaining a tidy database is one of the keys to efficiency. It's just like keeping a tidy house. It's all about getting rid of what's no longer useful and organizing the stuff that you do have for easy access.

It's the same way with user-defined fields. Yes, they are very useful in helping to store useful data, but the more you have, the harder it is to find things. A lot of this comes from proper planning when initially creating the database. Mapping out your business processes first and planning your database around your business process is always a smart thing to do. But I'll let Byron tell you more about this in his blog.

One way to help alleviate the pain of wading through a sea of user-defined fields is to create a key fields list. Key fields are important user-defined fields. They are displayed on the basic information dialog box in the bottom left hand corner. Adding or modifying a value to a key field is the same as browsing to the user-defined field and adding or modifying a value. It just takes less searching and fewer clicks.

To create a key fields list:

1. Go to Administrator.
2. Go to file > preferences. Go to the key fields tab. 
3. To edit one of the displayed key fields, select the key field and select Modify. To create a new key field list, click Add.

If you edit or add a new key field, you will get to the key fields dialog.

Pretty standard stuff. Insert a name and description. Requested by is optional. Set the owner to something other than public if you don't want everybody to be able to use the list.

Here comes the tricky part: entry types.

There are 9 different entry types:

• Comany - Lead 
• Company - Non-Lead
• Individual - Lead
• Individual - Non-Lead
• Contact - Lead
• Contact - Non-Lead
• Opportunity
• Campaign
• Customer Service

The list will only display the key fields corresponding to the type of entry that is currently open. For example, you can have a list called "Will's Key Fields" and have fields for customer service and non-lead contacts. So every time I open a customer service case, and select "Will's Key Fields" as the Key Fields list, only the customer service key fields will appear. Conversely, if I'm editing a non-lead contact, only the non-lead contact key fields will appear.

So select the entry type and add fields by selecting the field on the left and clicking add.

When you are finished, click OK.

The key field list should appear in the key field drop down in any entry type that you have specified fields for. So in my above example, "Will's Key Fields" will only appear in the customer service case and non-lead contact dialog boxes.

Sometimes it is necessary to broadcast a message to the entire company. It is always good to report things like a profitable quarter, a new product launch, or the company dragonboat team doing very well at the local regatta.

Email is a good way of doing it, but if you are like me, you get a lot of emails that are not relevant to you. Also, once you read it, it usually gets filed away in the Deleted folder for "safe keeping".

The Company Announcements section of the My Work Day window is a good way to broadcast important messages. It is also a useful place to find past important messages.

So here's a short clip on how to create a Company Announcement from an HTML file.

I have this fancy mouse at work and sometimes I feel as if it wasn't a good investment. It is a wireless mouse with a whole slew of different buttons, but after the first few weeks, I found out that I really don't use it that much. Why? It's because I'm a keyboard shortcut fanatic. I would say that 50%-75% of the time, I'm navigating around Windows with my keyboard. I use my mouse to select things I can't get to with my keyboard, or to select text that will take me more than around 20 keystrokes to get to.

Now I'm sure most of us procrastinators know the common windows shortcut keys. Windows Key+D will minimize all windows and show your desktop. Alt+f4 will close your current open window. Alt-Tab will switch to the next window.

Here are some of the shortcuts that I use the most in Maximizer. This list is by no means exhaustive, they are just the ones I use the most. If you have any other shortcuts, by all means, post it to the comments section. Some of the shortcuts are also dependant on which module you are in.

Alt+f, f - Preferences
Alt+f, d - Administrator
Alt+f, p, o - Note report

Alt+e, m - Make list current

Alt+v, f - favourites lists
Alt+v, u - column setups

Alt+s, f - All fields search
Alt+s, b - All phone number search
Alt+s, e - Retrieve contacts
Alt+s, t - Retrieve opportunities

Alt+a, m - Schedule a meeting
Alt+a, n - Write a note

Ctrl+0 - Opportunity window
Ctrl+1 - Address Book Window
Ctrl+h - Customer service window
Ctrl+6 - Hotlist task window
Ctrl+7 - Calendar window

You can also create your own buttons and macros. See the user's manual for more information. All of the menu options have pneumonics. Hit the alt key to see the pneumonic for the menu.  When you drill down into the menu, the pneumonics will be displayed for the function.

And as an added bonus, here are some of my favourite windows shortcuts:

Windows Key + r - Run command. The run command is THE most common thing I use day to day.  After pulling up the run command, you can launch some of the most common applications. Here are some examples:

maxwin - Maximizer
winword - Microsoft word
excel - Microsoft Excel
outlook - Microsoft Outlook
Notepad - notepad
pbrush - paint brush
iexplore - internet explorer

And some windows functions:

control - control panel
control admintools - Administrative tools
services.msc - Windows services
appwiz.cpl - Add/Remove programs

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