InfoStrat's Townsend Report

Tomorrow I will be presenting on "Standards and Interoperability for CRM" at the CRM Evolution Conference in Washington, DC.  Standards are important for many technologies, but in business software standards are often sacrificed as companies compete with one another for a share of the market.

Customer relationship management (CRM) has not been known as a field which fosters cooperation among competitors such as Oracle, Salesforce, Microsoft, and others. But at the same time, standards can benefit organizations that rely on CRM for engaging with customers.  Privacy regulations such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compel compel companies to treat customer data with greater care than ever before, and privacy breaches have become routine and costly.

Acceptance of CRM standards for data make it easier to share data among applications and build data warehouses or data lakes which bring together many sources of data into one pool for discernin…

Selling to government agencies requires a different approach from most sales processes, and therefore a customer relationship management (CRM) system bust reflect the way that your company behaves as a government contractor in order to get the most from your software investment.

InfoStrat's Dynamics 365 for Government Contractors is one of our most popular solutions, and it continues to evolve in order to suit our large and small government contractor customers. 
Here are some top hints on how to get the most of our your CRM which are embodies in InfoStrat's Dynamics 365 for Government Contractors: Integrate with government contract information services. There are many subscription data services for GovCon which cater to specific industries and to target customers.  Deltek GovWin has been the leader in U.S. Federal opportunity data, and Onvia (owned by Deltek) has been the leader in state and local contracting opportunities.  Integrating with these services can save you time b…

Managing finances is at the core of InfoStrat's Grants Manager Plus software for grantors to manage the full lifecycle of a grant.  This post explains key concepts for understanding how budgets, payments and milestones are managed in the solution.

Grants Manager Plus may be configured to your business rules, so your implementation may differ from the scenarios described here.  Many of the functions and workflows are nearly universal for grant management, such as having an approval routing workflow or checking the amount requested against budgets and remaining funds.

When a grant manager creates a grant program, it will contain related budget codes, budget line items, and optional budget gates and milestones.  The budget codes are used by grantees to provide their proposed budgets, and hence to roll up totals for reporting.  Budget gates are thresholds which are tied to project (grant) progress which is measured by milestones.  In a building project, for instance, a payment may be…

My company InfoStrat has been working with Dynamics 365 for over 13 years since version 3.0 of Dynamics CRM was released.  For more than half of our customers, we have been using Dynamics for line of business solutions which are not the typical sales, customer service and marketing applications that make up customer relationship management (CRM).

Microsoft offers a subscription for these users who do not need sales, customer service or support.  This subscription is called Power Apps, and provides the same user interface, platform and development tools as are used for the CRM apps.

Power Apps offers significant savings -- the U.S. list price is $40/user/month compared to $95/user/month for each of the sales and customer service apps or $115/user/month for the Customer Engagement bundle which includes sales, customer service, project service and field service.

Another way that customers can save is through combining the subscription types so that users are only paying for the services…