Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way

‘Right-Click’ For the Win

Margarita Orlov — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:44:00 GMT

Web Access for Maximizer CRM 12

By Will Leung

I can honestly say that after nearly 5 years here at Maximizer CRM Software that I have never been more excited about a new release - our latest version, Maximizer CRM 12. Not to take anything away from its predecessors, but the attention to detail in addressing major pain points the product has had will not only engage those who are new to Maximizer but excite those who have been using Maximizer for years.

I admit that before the existence of Maximizer CRM 12 I have been more comfortable using the Maximizer Windows client. That all changed when I saw the performance improvements, the updated visually aesthetically pleasing User Interface of Maximizer Web Access and especially the availability of the Context Menu via ‘right-click’ in the Address Book Window.

As you can see the many options that are available in the Context Menu for the Address Book Window in the Maximizer Windows client have made their way into Maximizer Web Access. This is a great step that has been taken by Maximizer towards an ideal goal, which is creating a product that is indifferent of what it is being run on, a Window client or Web Browser.

So start using Web Access for all of your CRM needs, including Business Reporting, Sales Management and Marketing Management!

Adding a "Twitter" button to Maximizer

Margarita Orlov — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 19:15:00 GMT

Tweet-Creep from your CRM

By Will Leung

Twitter is imagery for the new age. Twitter is to social media as Haiku is to poetry.

Good Tweets, like haiku, invoke imagery in the reader's minds and provoke thought. In the case of tweets, you can also follow them up by replies, re-tweets, or if you are truly impressed by the author, a follow. Good tweets are clear, concise, and most importantly short. And if they are not clear, concise, and short? Click on the bit.ly link for more.

Maximizer has the capability of opening somebody's twitter page at the click of a button, so you can catch a glimpse of their soul, 140 characters at a time. So the following involves 2 user-defined fields, and a Custom Action button.

1. Create the twitter name user-defined field

This is where you put their twitter name. For example, Maximizer's twitter name is MaximizerCRM. This field should be an alphanumeric user-defined field.

2. Create a formula field that combines that with twitter.com

Create an alphanumeric formula user-defined field with the following syntax: "http://www.twitter.com/" + [Twitter Name]

What this will do is it will append the contents of the "Twitter Name" user-defined field to http://www.twitter.com/.

Some users may be confused with 2 twitter fields, so to make it a little bit more clear, just hide it or throw it into a "Do Not Use" folder.

We'll call this user-defined field "Twitter URL"

3. Create a custom action button that will launch this field

On the Setup tab, select the Custom Actions option in the Workspace group.

Create a custom action group (the group that will contain the button) by clicking Add, or select an existing group and click Properties to add an additional button.

Next, click Add to add a button. Select the "Start a user-defined field for an Address Book entry" option. Then select the "Twitter URL" field from the user-defined field drop down. You can also change the tooltip if you want. After you select the button icon, then click finish.

You now have a button in a group in the Custom Actions tab. You can also add this button to the Quick Access toolbar.

Secondary Sorting: How iTunes changed the way I use Maximizer.

Will Leung — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 07:27:00 GMT

By Will Leung

Isn't it funny how you learn simple little tricks even after using a piece of software for a very long time? Here's something I discovered a few weeks back.

Let's begin with a little story. If anybody has attended any of my training sessions, I always brag about how much I use programs like Excel, Microsoft Word, and Outlook. However, following handy trick I discovered using (of all things), iTunes.

I recently purchased a couple of Katy Perry albums from iTunes. What I wanted to do was sort them by Album Title, then sort them again by track number. That way, I could listen to all the tracks in order and become "One of the Boys" first, then have a "Teenage Dream". After hours of fiddling around with my iTunes settings, I realized that I could achieve this by organizing my columns in such a way that the name of the album came to the left of the track number. Every time I sorted by the Album name, it would group all of the songs from the same album together. Then, low and behold, because the track column is to the right of the album name, it would be the next to sort. It's funny how something so simple has eluded me for years.

Now while the events of this story are slightly fictional (it was my wife who purchased the albums, not me... I swear...), the same left-to-right sorting principles apply to Maximizer.

What I did in Maximizer before was I did my search, sorted by the column I wanted first, then narrowed the list by selecting all the appropriate address book entries and selecting the Make List Current option from the Edit tab, then doing secondary sorts on other columns.

Now, if you wanted to do a secondary sort, sorting your information in a way such that you first sort by (for example) Country, then State, then City, all it takes is a bit of organization. They all don't have to be at the very left, but just make sure than they are grouped together, in the order that you would like to sort the columns, left to right. Once you have a column setup with the columns in the order that you want to sort them, click on the heading of the first column and the sort will sort, starting from the column you clicked, followed by the one to the right, then the next one, and so on and so forth.

See how in the below pictures I sort by Country when the columns are not in order?

Then see how I sort by countries when the columns are in order?

The moral of this story is it's funny how you learn simple little tricks even after using a piece of software for a very long time.

Conditions in Formula User-Defined Fields

Will Leung — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:19:00 GMT

Formula user-defined fields are awesome. You may remember this from such blog posts as "Life in Technicolor: Row Coloring for Non-Table User-Defined Fields".

One really powerful aspect of formula user-defined fields is the ability to use conditional statements. Imagine two user-defined fields, one called color of Sky, one called Time-of-Day. Every time you select a color of sky, the time of day user-defined field will change. For example, if Sky = Blue, then Time-of-Day = Day. If Sky = Black, Time-of-Day = Night.

Yes, it's an overly simplistic example, but the premise behind the field is an if/then condition.

From the manual, here is what the definition of a conditional statement:

You can create conditional expressions in your formula user-defined fields. Conditional expressions use the If expression to evaluate comparison statements and return values based on the results of the statements.
Conditional expressions use the following syntax:

If (Comparison Statement, True Value, False Value)

• Comparison Statement – Uses comparison operators to compare two values. It can be combined with logical operators (and, or, and not), as well as additional conditional expressions
• True Value – The value of the expression when the comparison statement is true. It can also be combined with other expressions.
• False Value – The value of the expression when the comparison statement is false. You can include other conditional statements to supply different answers for different values.

An example of this is the following. Imagine this is the formula definition for the time-of-day user-defined field.

If ([sky] = "Black", "Night", "Day")

If the Sky user-defined field is "Black, then the time-of-day user-defined field will report "Night", otherwise, it will report "Day".

The true usefulness of the conditional statement is the ability to "chain" the statements together. In the "true value" or "false value" part of the statement, you can replace it with another conditional statement.

For example, if we have a 3rd value, when Sky = Red, then we want Time-of-Day to display "Evening". Let's map it out (one thing I learned from university, but don't put into practice nearly enough).

Sky   Time-of-Day
Black Night
Red   Evening
Blue   Day

So all we need to do is take the above example, replace the False value with another conditional statement as seen here:
If ([sky] = "Black", "Night", If ([sky] = "Red", "Evening", "Day"))

So it's just a matter of fiddling with the order and the placement of the conditional statements to get the desired effect.

Column Setups + Catalog Searches = Simple Reporting Magic

Will Leung — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:21:00 GMT

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.

Life in Technicolor: Row Coloring for Non-Table User-Defined Fields.

Will Leung — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:43:00 GMT

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:

In the user-defined field setup screen, click Add to create a new user-defined field.
Name the field "Opportunity Size".
In the Type drop down, select Formula, then select Alphanumeric.
In the Return type drop down, select Alphanumeric.
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.
Click OK to complete the formula.
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:

Name the coloring rule "Color by Size".
In the Match entries using this field area, select the Opportunity Size field we created.
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!
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.

Holiday Work Delegation

Will Leung — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:48:00 GMT

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:

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).
Select the user you want to assign the tasks to, and select preferences.
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:

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

Happy Holidays!

Note Filters: Make Notes Linger in the Darkness...

Will Leung — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:19:00 GMT

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!

Leads Vs. Non-Leads

Will Leung — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 19:18:00 GMT

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.

There are advantages to organizing your companies as leads and non-leads.

You can search your leads only. Having a narrow search will allow you to streamline the results and avoid clutter. When you open up most search dialogs, you will see a "Leads options" area.
- The Entries that are not leads option will search all entries where Sales Lead = No.
- The All entries option will search all entries, regardless of the value of the Sales Lead field.
- The Leads option will search all entries where Sales Lead = Yes.
- The My leads only option will only search records where the Sales Lead = yes, and the Account Manager = you (or the person who is currently logged into Maximizer).
Leads have a different set of Key fields. Because you need to know different information about leads as opposed to regular entries, it is always good to have a different set of key fields for easy access to the important fields. You can create Lead specific key fields for Company leads, Contact leads, and Individual leads.
You can sort your address book by lead/non-lead. A clever way of doing this is by adding an extra column to your column view and adding the "Entry Type Icon" field to it. If you sort by this column, it will group together all your leads/non-leads.

Automatically Creating Hotlist Tasks When Entering User-defined field information.

Will Leung — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 19:39:00 GMT

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.

Go to File > Set Up User-Defined fields.
Click Add Field
Select Date from the type drop down list.
Select Include in Hotlist option. If you want the date repeated annually, then select the Annually recurring event option.
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.

Choosing when you work... in your Calendar.

Will Leung — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 18:26:00 GMT

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.

Great Save! Recalling and Saving Searches

Will Leung — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:03:00 GMT

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!

Drawing an Organizational Chart

Will Leung — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:00:00 GMT

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:

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

The Organizational chart is derived from the hierarchy that is created by populating the Reports To field in the basic information window of a contact. So let's ABC Wine Shop Inc. has 3 employees, James Dolton, Ed Johnson, and Martha Torres. If both Ed and Martha report to James, then the organizational chart looks like this:

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

Excel to Maximizer: Two-tiered Importing

Will Leung — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 17:12:00 GMT

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:

Last Name

First Name

Company

Phone Number

Address

Birthday

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.

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.
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.

Now, in Maximizer...

Go to file > import > Address Book Entries
Select the CSV file saved from step 2 above. In the "Type of import" section, select the Companies/Individuals option. This will import all the company names and no contacts. That's the "second tier". We'll talk about that soon.
When you get to the "Select Fields for Import" screen, match up the Order of import fields with the Fields from file fields for company fields only, and skip the rest. So in our example, we will match up the Company and Address field with the matching fields in Maximizer. See the picture below:
Click Import to import the first layer (or tier).
After the first tier has imported, go to file > import > Address Book Entries.
Select the same CSV file. In the "Type of import" section, select the Contacts option. This will import the contacts.
When you get to the "Select Fields for Import" screen, match up the Order of import fields with the Fields from file fields for contact fields only, and skip the rest. BUT make sure to also include the company field. It is critical that you do, or else the import will not work. So in our example, we will match up the Last Name, First Name, Company, Phone Number, and Birthday field with the matching fields in Maximizer. See the picture below:
Click Import to complete the second tier of the import.

The import is now done. It's now time to go through your Address Book to verify everything is ok. Any company where you put a period or some sort of filler information in the CSV file will need to be dealt with appropriately.

Thanks, Microsoft, for making such an excellent program. Keep up the good work.

Best Regards,

Will "Excel's BFF" Leung

Semimonthly appointments

Will Leung — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:55:00 GMT

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.

Here is a short video on how to create a semimonthly appointment:

(Please visit the site to view this media)