Top 10 Reasons for Using a Client Relationship Manangement (CRM) System

If your company is not using a Client Relationship Management (CRM) software or a CRM system, then you are probably missing a good opportunity to increase revenues and reduce costs.

There are numerous benefits to properly implementing CRM software and I have gone through several web site and compiled information into a top 10 list.

Top 10 Reasons Your Company Should Use CRM Software:

1. Revenue increases of up to 41% per sales representative - That's $410,000 additional on every $1M in quota.
2. Decrease sales cycles by over 24% - If you average sale takes 4 months, this is like adding 1 additional sale per year.
3. Lead conversion rate improvements by over 300%
4. Increase customer retention improvements by 27% - This can have a significant impact on adding to the bottom line - less costly to maintain a current client then to get a new one.
5. Decrease sales and marketing costs by 23% - Huge impact on the overall performance of a company.
6. Improve profit margins by over 2% - This also has a significant impact on the overall performance of a company.
7. Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits by 25% to 95%
8. 65% of a businesses revenue is generated by loyal repeat clients - Understand what clients are your best clients and get to know them and their spending habits - Upsell them!!!
9. 80% of sales leads are lost, ignored or discarded - Just because someone didn't buy in the past doesn't mean that they are not interested today - Follow up.
10. 73% of organizations have no process to requalifying or revisting business leads - Gain business that you didn't have before.

An interesting piece of information that IDC reported is that ROI from CRM is between 16% and 1000% and that half of all companies surveyed see between 50% and 500% on ROI.

The whole concept behind these figures is that you adhere to a process to manage sales and by managing this process, the benefits will follow. Key to making a CRM system work is to understand what you want to accomplish and implement CRM to meet your goals. Over 50% of all CRM implementations are deemed to be a failure due to the fact that there was not a proper implementation to meet the objectives that were desired. So just implementing CRM alone is not the answer. Determining what you want to accomplish and mapping it out is where you want to start.

If you would like to understand how Avanade can help you leverage the power of CRM for your organization, please feel free to contact Chris Hamilton in Calgary at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com .

Avanade offers a hosted model in addition to a client server model.

Windows 7 Upgrades Creates Up to 15% Reduction in TCO - Putting Money Back In Your Pockets

If you work for a company contemplating upgrading your desktops from older versions of Windows to Windows 7, there is a way to offset the cost associated with the upgrade and pay for the upgrade out of operational savings. These savings could add up to over $700/year per desktop image.

Avanade Inc. has a method that will assist companies with paying for their Windows 7 deployment through cost savings. The cost savings are derived from creating a Definitive Software Library (DSL) and truing up software licensing.

Avanade Inc.'s process is called ACA Accelerate and it allows organizations to understand what software their company currently owns, how many users and what versions the company is running. This creates a current state software list and Avanade uses this information to model a future state which will typically drive approximately a $400 per desktop in software savings.

A typical desktop environment cost $5000/year to maintain according to Gartner. Software typically costs about 25% or $1,250 of the desktop expenses. Through a rationalization process, a company can usually reduce redundant or unused software between 25% to 33% of the overall software costs, which would produce savings between $312 per desktop and $412 per desktop.

In addition to these savings, Microsoft has come up with a total cost of ownership reduction figure of approximately $155 by using Windows 7. If you were to add Application Virtualization into the equation, then there is approximately another $155 cost savings. By adding these TCO reductions with the savings from using ACA Accelerate to create a Definitive Software Library, this can provide over $700 per desktop in savings. At most, your desktop migration to Windows 7 shouldn't cost more than $350/desktop and that would be at the high end with a lot of hand holding and white gloves involved.

Example of a TCO Reduction For a 5,000 Desktop Company :

As an example, if your company were to have 5000 desktop images, your approximate yearly cost to manage that environment would be $25,000,000 ($5,000 per desktop time 5000 desktops). By utilizing Avanade's ACA Accerate service to derive $400/desktop in savings while creating a Definitive Software Library, your savings would be $2,000,000 in the first year and then adding the savings, $310 per desktop, that can be had by efficiency gains from upgrading to Windows 7, that would add another $1,550,000 in savings yearly savings.

So for this company, if they didn't upgrade to Windows 7 from their current Windows Platform, they would spend $25M/year on their desktop environment. By using ACA Accelerate to rationalize applications and then upgrading to Windows 7, the annual desktop costs would be $23M with savings of $2M and by utilizing Application Virtualization, the total costs of the desktop environment would be $21.45M which would drive savings of $3.55M or over 14%. Over a 5 year period, this would provide over $17M in savings for your organization.

	Cumulative Costs	With Windows 7 Savings and ACA Accelerat Savings	Cumulative Savings	Percent Annual Savings
Year1	$25,000,000	$21,450,000	$3,550,000	14%
Year2	$50,000,000	$42,900,000	$7,100,000	14%
Year3	$75,000,000	$64,350,000	$10,650,000	14%
Year4	$100,000,000	$85,800,000	$14,200,000	14%
Year5	$125,000,000	$107,250,000	$17,750,000	14%
Total Savings:		$17,750,000

This chart shows the cumulative costs associated with not going to Windows 7 in Blue.

The Red in the chart show the cumulative effects of using savings from ACA Accelerate and the potential savings from Windows 7.

If you are contemplating a Windows 7 Upgrade, you owe it to your company to contact Avanade to see how you can reduce your overall cost and either pay for all or a large portion of you upgrade. Avanade Inc. will provide and initial assessment free of charge for Calgary based businesses if you contact us at 403-476-1473.

If you would like to understand how ACA Accelerate can help you can reduce your Windows 7 implementation in Western Canada or for that matter, anywhere in the world, please contact Chris Hamilton at Avanade in Calgary at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

Dynamics CRM - Simple Statistics That Can Help Increase Sales

Increasing Sales and retaining clients are typically top priorities for sales departments of most companies. If you are fortunate enough to use a Client Relationship Management (CRM) system, then you may already experience the added sales and client retention benefits that a CRM system can bring to your organization.

If you are looking at implementing a CRM, you should look at the efficiencies that can be gained. Some of the major benefits that CRM can bring to your organization include:

• Revenue increases of up to 41% per sales person
• Decreased sales cycles of over 24%
• Lead conversion rate improvements of over 300%
• Customer Retention improvements of 27%
• Decreased sales and marketing costs of 23%
• Improved profit margins of over 2%

These figures typically are achieved only if you implement a CRM system properly and wrap and embrace the process change that comes with it.

ROI Example:

In order to show how a proper CRM implementation will help a company, I will use and example of a company with $100M/year in revenue with 10% Gross Margins or $10M in profit, and 15% of total revenues are cost of sales or $15M. We will assume a company this size will have 20 seats of CRM and using a potential cost of $3,000 for a first year cost, which includes installation and software (assuming a Dynamics CRM implementation). The first year costs for CRM is $60,000.

Using this example above and looking at the parameters of Decrease in Sales Costs and Increases in Gross Margins, then the following results could be expected:

1. Decreased Sales and Marketing Costs:

With a 23% reduction in sales and marketing costs applied against a 15% cost of sales on total revenue of $100M would be equal to $3.45M in cost reduction.

2. Improved Margins:

With an average of 2% increase in margins, this would mean on the example, 2% on $100M would be $2M. Another way to look at the gross margin increases would be to understand how many additional sales you would need to achieve this figure. In this case, it would be equal to selling an additional $20M in revenue (10% GM percentage on $20M is $2M in GM).

These two parameters added together would potentially be worth $5.45M in value.

One factor that isn't included in these figures would be the client retention number, which could be 27% (on average) of a potential client lose. Unfortunately I cannot find any figures to give exact numbers on client lose per year, but if you use 10% and you can maintain 27% of that number then this would be worth $2.7M in this example.

Although this is a fictitious example, it is there to show the power of a positive ROI on a CRM implementation. An investment of $60,000 is has a return of 9,083%.

As can be seen by this example, embracing a methodology and utilizing a CRM system properly will more than pay off and have a significant ROI.

If you would like to learn more on how CRM can help your organization increase sales, boost profits and margins and retain clients, please contact Chris Hamilton at Avanade Inc. at chris.hamilton@avanade.com or by phone at 403-476-1473.

4 readily available processes that reduce your IT Project spend by up to 50% or greater

Are you aware that there are four readily available and often overlooked processes that IT organizations can follow that can potentially reduce an IT spend by up to 50% or greater.

These processes are available in a discussion document that I have put together for review.

Each of the processes individually will provide at least a 5% cost savings, but any of these in conjunction with each other gain synergies.


The processes are as follows:

Process One: Underutilized government program that can add up to 30% savings on IT projects.

Process Two: Rarely accessed procurement service that can reduce hardware and software spend by up to 20%.

Process Three: A community effect that reduce the cost of projects at least 10% and potentially allow for the savings to self fund the entire project.

Process Four: Access to cost cutting measures on labor that can save up to 70% on labor costs.

If you would like to understand how these processes can be accessed and how you can reduce your overall IT project spend, please contact Chris Hamilton at Avanade in Calgary at 403-476-1473 or via email at chris.hamilton@avanade.com.

How to save up to 35% on your IT projects

IT projects for corporations are typically expensive undertakings often costing multi-millions of dollars.

There is a way to potentially reduce the overall costs of your IT projects done in Canada by up to 35% through the Scientific Research and Experimental Development program run by the Canadian Revenue Agency.

The basics of the program are as follow:

Who qualifies?

“Generally, a Canadian-controlled private corporation (CCPC) can earn an investment tax credit (ITC) of 35% up to the first $2 million of qualified expenditures for SR&ED carried out in Canada, and 20% on any excess amount. Other Canadian corporations, proprietorships, partnerships, and trusts can earn an ITC of 20% of qualified expenditures for SR&ED carried out in Canada”. CRA

What kind of Project qualifies?

Work that qualifies for SR&ED tax credits includes (from the CRA SRED website):
experimental development to achieve technological advancement to create new materials, devices, products, or processes, or improve existing ones;

applied research to advance scientific knowledge with a specific practical application in view;

basic research to advance scientific knowledge without a specific practical application in view; and

support work in engineering, design, operations research, mathematical analysis, computer programming, data collection, testing, or psychological research, but only if the work is commensurate with, and directly supports, the eligible experimental development, or applied or basic research.


IT Project Example:

The following example compares both a private company and a public company with a $5M IT project that has $3M in qualified expenditures for SRED Credits.

Private Company

IT Project is $5M
Qualified Expenditures: $3M
SRED Credits: $900K (35% of the first $2M and 20% of the next $1M)
Potential Project Cost with SRED credits: $4.1M
Savings: $900K
Percent Savings: 18%

Public Company:

IT Project is $5M
Qualified Expenditures: $3M
SRED Credits: $$600K (20% of $3M)
Potential Project Cost with SRED credits: $4.4M
Savings: $600K
Percent Savings: 12%

As can be seen, SRED credits have a tremendous impact on the overall costs of IT projects. Basically, in this day and age, if you are not exploring ways to reduce your overall project costs, you are doing your company a disservice.

Rules change all the time and you should consult the Canadian Revenue Agency’s website to see what they are:

http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/txcrdt/sred-rsde/bts-eng.html

Avanade in Calgary can assist you in any of your IT projects and help you offset the costs by assisting you with navigating the SRED program.

If you would like to find out more on how to potentially reduce your IT projects, please feel free to contact Chris Hamilton at chris.hamilton@avanade.com or at 403-476-1473.

VB6 Migration - Moving Mission Critial Application off VB6

There are numerous companies that are still unaware that they may have VB6 applications that are running mission critical processes. A major concern is that VB6 is no longer supported and could put your company in jeopardy, especially if you are running applications that roll up into financials.

With proactive IT investments delayed due to economic challenges,organizations like yours are beginning to outgrow their legacy Microsoft Visual Basic applications and must increasingly dedicate resources to keep these systems running. By migrating Visual Basic 6.0 and earlier applications to the .NET platform, your company can achieve a highly scalable, extremely reliable foundation for mission-critical applications and realize substantial maintenance-related savings.

Gain competitive advantage by updating your applications:

In order to be successful, your Visual Basic applications must evolve with your organization’s ever-changing business needs.

- Do you have a clear picture of the benefits and costs of migrating your applications to .NET and how to remain competitive during migration?
- Do your current Visual Basic applications meet minimum performance, stability,and enterprise-scalability requirements?
- Are you concerned about security vulnerabilities in your older applications?G Can your legacy applications meet current business standards and easily adapt to new industry regulations and legislation?
- Do you have a Visual Basic application performing critical business activity that needs new functionality and are struggling with the best approach for implementing that functionality?

Migrate to Microsoft .NET and maximize your IT investments Migration to the .NET:

Framework is essential for applications that will continue to be important to your organization. Aligning your future IT strategies with .NET through languages such as Visual Basic .NET and C# will enable you to take full advantage of your existing investments in Microsoft technologies. The .NET Frame work presents an outstanding opportunity to increase developer productivity and stability for your organization’s most critical applications.

- Improve the scalability, performance, stability, and security of your Visual Basic applications.G Shorten development time and reduce risk by utilizing existing code and taking advantage of tools to automate code conversion.
- Leverage your investments in supporting infrastructure areas of the Microsoft environment, including IDE and developer tools licensing, build and test environments, and technical resources
- Gain competitive advantage by creating new, lower-cost applications and modifying your existing applications to allow for future growth and agility, while remaining competitive during migration.
- Take full advantage of open standards and new technologies such as XML, Web services, and smart clients, while moving toward Service-Oriented Architecture.
- Reduce your long-term maintenance-related expenses and build on existing support and vendor relationships.

A proven migration methodology:

When it comes to the Microsoft enterprise platform, Avanade has the deep product knowledge and real-world experience that customers demand. Avanade offers a proven migration methodology, including a full Application Migration Assessment, to ensure that organizations get the most value from their Visual Basic-based applications.

- Avanade Application Development Workshop In a two- to five-day workshop, Avanade reviews your organization’s development capabilities and challenges to identify and prioritize the applications most in need of improvement and offer recommendations to take advantage of new technologies. A gap analysis of your organization’s capabilities is incorporated into an action plan that supports your priority application migration opportunities and closes any capability gaps.
- Avanade Application Analysis In a formal one- to three-week process, Avanade examines your existing applications to determine how your organization can benefit from migration to .NET technologies, including reviews of infrastructure platform, technical architecture, application architecture, and application functionality.
- Avanade Application Proof of Concept As the final step in the assessment process, Avanade can build a prototype application to demonstrate the migration process and benefits.

Based on the results of the assessment and proof of concept, Avanade will provide a complete migration plan, including an estimated timeline,detailed project plan, and complete set of deliverables to jump start the creation of your next-generation business applications.

Reduce costs through strategic global delivery:

As a true global services company, Avanade has a worldwide presence and proven delivery record. Our global network of delivery centers in over 30 locations, including India, offers customers the benefit of multi site delivery. Offshore resources, highly trained in Avanade assets,architectures, best practices, and our comprehensive delivery methodology,provide accelerated development of solutions. Our strategic global delivery approach to application migrations allows companies to take advantage of the right combination of onshore, nearshore, and offshore options, resulting in increased productivity and cost-effective solutions development.

If you would like to find out more about our Dashboard offering or any other solutions that we provide, please feel free to contact Chris Hamilton at chris.hamilton@avanade.com or at 403-476-1473.

Dashboards for The Oil and Gas Industry

Recently Avanade in Calgary has been working on a quick dashboarding solution that is geared towards the oil and gas industry.

One of the issues that a lot of oil and gas or E&P companies face are the disparate systems that contains data that is relevant to providing meaningful information that should be correlated and used to getting your job done.

A couple of our local Architects have created a quick dsahboarding solution that is specific for E&P's to provide quick visibility into key performance indicators (KPI's) that they measure, such as production growth, capex spend to budget, output per dollar spent on a project or project type, among others.

This solution is utilizing SharePoint, XL Services and Silverlight and can typically be implemented in days as opposed to weeks or months for other dashboarding solutions. Most organizations already own this infrastructure, so deployment is usually quick and inexpensive.

One of the primary uses for this solution is in small divisions or departments of E&P's. For example, a regional division of an oil company may require a dashboard that show their daily production digits. They can benchmark if their numbers against what is required and if a problem occurs where production is lower, then they can drill down to spot the problem.

This solution can be extended to many different areas in an oil and gas company and any information that is contained in a system can be displayed on it's own or correlated with other information.

If you would like to find out more about our Dashboard offering or any other solutions that we provide, please feel free to contact Chris Hamilton at chris.hamilton@avanade.com or at 403-476-1473.