Today's customers want the world—and competitive organizations are quickly rising to the challenge. Businesses of all types, across all industries, are looking for ways to better and more efficiently fulfill customer demands, meet growing expectations, and create unforgettable experiences. Are you on track to hit your business goals and delight your customers?

Join us on Wednesday, September 19 for The Customer Experience Summit, streaming live online from 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM PT. 

For the month of May, our consultants achieved a perfect satisfaction rating of 10 from our clients.  With over 80% of our clients responding to our May survey, this is quite a feat.  Congrats to the Traction Team for continuing to set the service bar so very, very high!

Seems hackers are targeting Microsoft Office now for Adobe hacks since most modern browsers block known exploits.

Fortunatley for us, we use Office 365 with comes with Office 2016. And Office 2016 blocks adobe as its standard configuration.

Older versions?? Not so much... Maybe now is the time for you to make the move?

Stymied by browsers, attackers embed Flash 0-day inside MS Office document - Ars Technica https://apple.news/AEJ2oQ5LfSF2xNjaTCSsXpw

As an effective Sales Manager, it's often difficult to "cut to the chase" with your sales reps, and identify which opportunities are truly being "worked" and which are just being captured to fill out their pipeline (or simply neglected because they are longer-term opps).

As such, Dynamics 365 now has a new automated intelligence engine called Relationship Analytics.  This engine, when combined with both CRM data and email activity and "sentiment", automatically scores each Opportunity and Account with a Relationship KPI to let you know at-a-glance which opportunities are real and have a better chance to close.

It even tracks time and engagements of emails, opportunities, and more - providing you with direct insights into activity (or inactivity) across your pipeline.

Relationship Insights is one of the many new features being released in the Dynamics 365 Sprint '18 Release.  There really are too many to blog about-  Click Here if you'd like us to send you a copy of the entire set of release notes in PDF format.

New to Dynamics in 2018 is Dynamics Marketing - a new offering from Microsoft that integrates directly within Dynamics 365.  This completes directly with the likes of Constant Contact, Click-Dimensions, and Act-On to name a few.

​The new tool is much improved over previous offerings, and now offers a simple "Journey" tool to help script and automate your follow-ups for leads and prospects alike.  

​Below is a brief overview of the Journey process - please contact us if you'd like a free trial and walkthrough of the functionality.  

How many times have you seen the dreaded "yellow ribbon" in Word or Excel, asking you "Are You Sure?  Are You REALLY Sure?".

Once in the Trust Center Settings, select Trusted Locations, checkmark ALLOW TRUSTED LOCATIONS ON MY NETWORK, then click ADD NEW LOCATION:

Add the root location for your SharePoint site, and you should be all set.  The next time you'll see less yellow alerts, and get at your document that much quicker.

I can't help reflect this week on Long-term vision vs Short-term gains within the sales process.  This month, I had a contractor out to my house to begin renovations on our very-stale and very-aged living room (Hey! 1999 called and wants its carpet back!).

In the process, the project was going along ok until one day they needed to turn off some electrical circuits to replace the water heater.  In doing so, several subcontractors along with the contractor "inadvertently" turned on my Hot Tub, which did not have any water in it.  We did not discover this until it was too late - 3 days of running with no water = one blown control panel and motor.  They all looked at each other, and pointed fingers - such that it could not be determined who was truly at fault.

Now, there were 2 ways to approach the situation from the contractor's point of view.  

1. Short Term Thinking - This is going to cost me money, so how do I spread the risk, and maybe even shuffle blame, such that I am unaccountable and get to keep 100% of my margin thus far?  How do I deflect?  How do I cause fear and doubt?  
   
   
2. Long Term Thinking - This is going to cost me money, so how do I mitigate and minimize damage within this ongoing project?  Is there some third-party accountability on our part, and if we dodge it, how will we look?  Is this project worth more than the issue at hand?  What does the customer want to happen?  What can I offer in return?  Can it be more of a discussion than a right-or-wrong?

While it may seem obvious which approach to take, often it is far too simple to focus on the short term when issues arise with clients and projects.  The short term reward for the contractor here might have been about $1,000 in margin - the cost of the damages to the hot tub.  But in doing so, he burnt his credibility and integrity with the client, who fired him (yes, that was me!).  In total, for the long-term, he might have missed out on another $10,000 - $15,000 in margin because I now have a new contractor to finish the job.

I am definitely not saying that short-term thinking is more desirable every time.  There are times as a business where you simply cannot risk long-term vision due to that particular clients past engagement history (maybe they are a difficult client, or never pay on time, or  has unrealistic expectations after the sale - the list goes on and on).  But make sure you have the long-short in your mind during every situation, so you are ready to present your best case, and best possible outcome.  This contractor did not - he was shocked that I fired him.  So in the end, I lost $1,000, and he lost $15,000.  Nobody won - all because of short-term thinking.

​For more reading on the topic, see BATNA on Wikipedia -

I'm super-proud of my team!  Our results recap from 2017 shows again we are super-responsive to customer needs, and service our customers far better than the rest.  Our overall average for 2017 was 9.56​!!!

Not only have we blown past our own internal target of an 8 rating for well over 2 years straight, but we've increased our yearly average by 14 base points.  I know - doesn't sound like much.  But believe me, when you're tracking above 9.00 all year, every base point feels like a mountain!

I know my team will continue the great work, and look forward to the day when we can achieve all 10s for the entire year!

Starting in Spring '18 (and ENFORCED in Summer '18) the URLs for SalesForce Lightening are changing.  This will affect any bookmarks you have that you might have saved within Chrome, Firefox, Edge, etc.

For example:

• The current format for URLS is:
  https://<lightning.domain.com>/one/one.app/#/sObject/Account/home
  
  
• The new format looks like:
  https://<lightning.domain.com>/lightning/o/Account/home

If you need help with this change, let us know.  Otherwise, simply removing your old bookmarks and saving as "new" once the update happens should do the trick.