The Townsend Report

You can increase your visibility in social media by concentrating all your efforts in a single channel, but I have been more successful with a multi-pronged approach. Each social media channel attracts a different type of user, and some may be better for your type of business than others. For instance, consumer brands often reach their audiences on Facebook, while business to business services may get more traction on LinkedIn.  Twitter is more of an acquired tastes, but it is obligatory for the press and other writers.  I rarely read my Twitter feed without picking up an interesting bit of news I would not have found otherwise. Readership of my blog increased significantly only after I became more active on social media. After several years of paltry page views of a few hundred a month, my blog traffic grew to over 10,000 pages views per month as my Twitter followers slowly grew over time. You can track the contribution made by each social channel in your blog analytics. For me,

Source: https://rcpmag.com/articles/2015/03/16/dynamics-crm-spring-15-release.aspx Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides rich reporting capabilities through built-in reports, the Advanced Find ad hoc query tool, and SQL Reporting Service (see my blog post ).  These are not your only options: you can use Power BI with Dynamics CRM 2015/2016 to provide self-service analytics on your Dynamics CRM Online data. If you know how to build pivot tables in Excel, Power BI will be familiar to you.  It allows the user to manipulate data in many ways and derive new insights.  You can try out queries to identify patterns in your data which were not obvious. You can find step-by-step instructions for Power BI and Dynamics CRM on TechNet . Sign up for Power BI for Dynamics CRM here .

If you are a government contractor and you are using Microsoft products such as Office 365, you may reach the point when you would like to automate your business development (capture management) process.  Which tool should you use? Many companies start by keeping a list of opportunities in Excel, and emailing that Excel document to sales people and managers using Office 365.  These spreadsheets often grow complex as they are enhanced to capture all the data elements that you want to track.  While it is a simple approach, it has some disadvantages: Hard to track who has most recent version People can add more columns and worksheets without coordinating with one another Difficult to generate some pipeline reports  Grows quickly and may become unwieldy, especially if past wins and losses are accumulated in the spreadsheet The next evolutionary step is to use SharePoint (included in Office 365) to store the sales spreadsheet.  This eliminates the version control problem, and est