Sonoma Partners Microsoft CRM Blog

There’s never been a better time to join Sonoma Partners!

Thanks to the great success of Microsoft CRM, our company has been growing consistently over the past few years. And right now, we have multiple job openings that' we’re trying to fill. These positions include:

• .NET Software Developer  (Chicago)
• Microsoft SQL Database Developer  (Chicago)
• Microsoft CRM Project Manager/Consultant  (Chicago, Denver)
• Microsoft CRM Sales and Business Development  (Denver)
• Business Systems Analyst (Chicago, Denver)

We already offer a great employee benefit package, but today we expanded it even further by announcing new employee benefits for 2010:  

• We’re expanding our work-from-home program to EVERY Wednesday (it used to be just every other Wednesday).  From Memorial Day to Labor Day, we still offer Summer Hours where people can adjust their work so that they can work from home on Friday (not Wednesday) and take off at 1:00pm. After Labor Day, it will be work-from-home on every Wednesday again.
  
• Everyone will get their birthday off as paid time-off in 2010! We got this idea from the Gen Y award application. We liked it so much, we decided to steal it for ourselves. :) Don’t worry if your birthday falls on a Saturday or Sunday, you can take off the preceding Friday or following Monday.

If you’re interested in any of the jobs listed above, please contact us ASAP! We’d love to speak with you. You can even apply online for these positions through our website.

As part of the Gen Y award that we recently won, they put together a quick photo tour of our Chicago office if you want to see what our place looks like.

Live from the land of desert and dates: Abu Dhabi!

That's right, readers – I've traded in the view from our Chicago office for a T-shaped island in the United Arab Emirates. Sonoma Partners has gone international!

The opportunity to work overseas was met with a great deal of curiosity and extraordinary support by my employers – Not surprising for a two-time winner of Chicago's Best and Brightest Companies to Work For award.

While here, I'll be shifting to a more strategic role in the operations at Sonoma Partners, working with our sales and marketing teams, scheduling our consultants, making sure our projects continue to hum along at our usual high quality standards, and managing our relationship with an offshore development partner.

It's been a week since I’ve arrived, and the culture shock hasn’t quite worn off. Fortunately, we created a newsfeed application that allows me to keep up on the news and coffee break chatter back in the Chicago office. Contact us for details on how we're using a few Microsoft Dynamics CRM entities and RSS technology to manage internal updates on our projects, technical accomplishments, sales and marketing activities, and even our four-league Fantasy Football extravaganza.

Watch out NOLA, here we come!

There’s been a lot of talk about Convergence and New Orleans at our office over the past week or so. First, we just sent out email invites to our customers and prospects encouraging them to attend the conference, and highlighting the benefits of attending.

Join us at Convergence 2009 New Orleans
We know that travel budgets are tight this year, so if you can only attend one conference this year we HIGHLY recommend that you choose Microsoft Convergence! This year's Convergence conference will be held in New Orleans from March 10th through 13th.

If you've never been to Convergence before, you should know this event is unique because it is designed exclusively for Microsoft Dynamics customers (CRM and ERP). With more than 10,000+ people in attendance, this is a first-class learning and networking opportunity that you shouldn't miss.

Some of the agenda highlights include:

• Monday: welcome reception at the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas
• Tuesday: keynotes from Microsoft Dynamics executives and breakout sessions
• Wednesday: Sonoma Partners' Customer Appreciation party
• Thursday: More sessions, networking and learning opportunities

With more than 28 Microsoft Dynamics CRM sessions already scheduled (and more to come), you won't find a better chance to roll up your sleeves and really learn the product inside and out.

Second, we’re in the process of securing a location for our customer appreciation party. We hope to have those details finalized soon, but please contact us if you’re interested in registering now. Microsoft employees are welcome to join of course. We had a great time in Orlando last year, and this year’s party should be a blast too.

Convergence is an absolute “must attend” event for me, but I’m also excited about New Orleans as the host city. I spent a weekend in New Orleans last February and I had a great time, there is really no other city like it. One of the most distinct memories of my last trip to the Bayou was this crazy “gold man” who would stand absolutely still (no blinking even) for 15 or 20 minutes at a time! I wonder if I will bump into him again this March?!

Of course, if you’re into culture and stuff like that you can always check out the St. Louis Cathedral at Jackson Square, but I thought the gold man was way more interesting. :)

 

Onsite at Microsoft for the Dynamics Partner Advisory Council

Sonoma Partners was recently invited to participate in the Microsoft Partner Advisory Council (PAC), and consequently I am in Redmond this week to attend the event. If you're not familiar with the PAC, here's some background on the program:

To gather and disseminate Partner feedback on strategic Microsoft products, field engagement, programs and services through meetings and ongoing dialogue between select Partners and Microsoft executives, thus driving core integration between Microsoft, our Partners and the product groups in an effort to form more cohesive, strategic relationships to deliver on One Microsoft. The PAC Program consists of approximately 24 individual PACs and over 500 members. The PAC Program meets twice annually to network and exchange information.

There are lots of different PACs such as Mobility, BI, Security and so on. Our company is participating in the Microsoft Dynamics Value Added Reseller (VAR) PAC.

The event doesn't start until tomorrow, so I was able to schedule a few meetings today. I was very lucky to participate in a "hallway meeting" with some of the developers from the Microsoft CRM product team. Since my role at Sonoma Partners is primarily sales, I tried to share some of my experiences selling Microsoft CRM and highlight the key areas where we compete with other CRM products. I also gave a quick update on where we're at in the book writing process.

Lastly, I had a quick meeting at the Microsoft Bellevue office at Lincoln Square. The building reception is on the 15th floor, and it has one of the most impressive views I've ever seen for a reception area! You can see the mountains in the distance, in addition to downtown Seattle. It's really quite impressive (even though this picture doesn't do it justice).

Here we grow again

Due to the great success of Microsoft CRM worldwide and the wonderful support of our customers, we're in the process of expanding our offices here in Chicago. We're building out approximately another 3,000 square feet to our current space to give us more room for employee offices (and one new meeting space). We need more square feet per employee than most companies because every Sonoma Partners employee gets a full 10' x 10' office to themselves. Construction started this past Monday and we're supposed to be moved in entirely by November 1st. We're planning that this expansion will cover our headcount needs for the next 12 months but that could change in a hurry if the Microsoft Titan release takes off like we hope (expect).

On a related note, we're actively hiring consultants and project managers! Click here to read the PM/Consultant job description if you're interested in learning more (even if you don't have experience with Microsoft CRM) about working at Sonoma Partners.

ExactTarget - Microsoft CRM integration webinar recording posted

We conducted our webinar titled "Advanced E-mail Marketing within Microsoft Dynamics CRM Using ExactTarget's E-mail Platform" this morning and it was a success. If you're interested in watching the recording of the event, we posted it here.

In addition, we updated the www.SonomaPartners.com website with an Events page so that customers can easily view all of our upcoming and prior webinars in one spot. For the upcoming webinars, we posted the DRAFT topics, and we'll be working the agenda and details over the next few weeks. Please let us know if there is something specific you want to see!

Reporting, Analysis and Dashboards in Microsoft CRM
More details to be announced
Thursday September 27, 2007
10:00am Central Time
Check beck for details and registration information

Empower Your Sales Team with Remote and Mobile CRM solutions
More details to be announced
Thursday October 25, 2007
10:00am Central Time
Check beck for details and registration information

At the same time, we posted the new Events page we also included a link with all of the news references to Sonoma Partners over the past few years. Check out Sonoma Partners in the news here.

Advanced e-mail marketing webinar coming up, register now!

Due to the great success of our past webinars, we've decided to continue holding one webinar each month through the end of the year! With that said, I'm very excited to announce the details behind our new upcoming webinar on August 23rd at 10:00am Central time.

Advanced E-mail Marketing within Microsoft Dynamics CRM Using ExactTarget's E-mail Platform
Don't you wish you and your salespeople could tell which prospects opened and clicked on the marketing emails sent from your Microsoft CRM system? Wouldn't it be great to see each individual's responses to your various e-mail marketing efforts directly within the context of all your other CRM data? Shouldn't you be able to access of your key e-mail marketing data directly within Microsoft CRM without having to log into different systems?

If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, join this webinar to learn how to improve your e-mail marketing and sales efforts by combining Microsoft CRM with ExactTarget's e-mail marketing add-on. As the market leader in on-demand email software solutions, ExactTarget has over 5,500 customers worldwide and best-of-class technology to help you create, deliver and manage professional e-mail marketing initiatives. With Sonoma Partners as their technology partner, ExactTarget developed integration software titled "ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM" that allows you to seamlessly access their powerful e-mail marketing tools directly within Microsoft CRM.

With "ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM", you can:
- Measure and report on email opens, clicks and bounces
- Deliver personal and relevant content
- Manage profile changes automatically
- Honor opt-out requests for CAN-SPAM compliance

This one hour webinar will give you some background on the "ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM" product, and then provide live demonstrations of the integration software working within Microsoft CRM. We'll also explain how you can engage with Sonoma Partners and ExactTarget to setup and deploy your own e-mail marketing campaigns with Microsoft CRM.

I am really excited about this event because the ExactTarget integration software with Microsoft CRM is simply amazing! The direct email feature in Microsoft CRM is nice, but it has some limitations such as:

• All emails are sent through your mail server, so you need to be very careful about sending large volumes of email.
• The template editor is somewhat limited and it is tricky (and/or) impossible to include conditional content in the email.
• Email open, click and bounce data isn't captured or reported on.

Because they're the market leader in e-mail marketing, ExactTarget has answers for all of these issues. And since our company Sonoma Partners helped ExactTarget build the integration software, we know it's technically sound! We've been using the "ExactTarget for Microsoft Dynamics CRM" integration software on our live production system for about 4 or 5 months now and it works like a charm. Here's a quick teaser screenshot that shows how users can send ExactTarget emails to all the records attached to a marketing campaign directly within the Microsoft CRM user interface.

If you're interested in attending, register now as this event will absolutely fill up! If you can't wait for the webinar and you want to talk about the ExactTarget integration for Microsoft CRM, please contact us and we'll give you all the details.

Hmmmm....cookies

When I heard that we received some cookies from a customer, my initial reaction was that their website was putting HTTP cookies on our browsers. However, when I realized that we got actual cookies I was much more excited!

We just helped them complete a fairly complex Microsoft CRM 1.2 to Microsoft CRM 3.0 upgrade, and they were kind enough to send us some treats as a little "thank you"! This was first time a customer ever sent us cookies, so it was very unexpected and appreciated.

Free book giveaway at Convergence!

I just looked at my calendar and realized that the Microsoft Convergence conference is next week! I am getting pumped up to learn about new products and ISV solutions at the show. In addition, I always love the great networking and ad-hoc meetings that take place. I attended the my first Convergence conference last year in San Diego and I had a great time.

If you're attending Convergence, here's another reason to get excited...you can get a free copy of our Working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 book if you attend the "We All Win with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0" session on Sunday March 26th! Microsoft CRM General Managers Brad Wilson and David Thacher will be presenting, so in addition to a free book you'll get to hear two great speakers as well.

Make sure you get to this session early! Conference organizers had to turn people away from the Microsoft CRM sessions at the Partner conference last July due to excessive demand. So many people wanted to hear about Microsoft CRM that it created a potential fire hazard...and that was 5 months BEFORE the new version was released. Based on the success of the great new Microsoft CRM 3.0 release and the book giveaway, I would expect more standing room only crowds.

The things we'll do for customers...

At Sonoma Partners, we pride ourselves on always going the extra mile for our customers to make sure the project gets done right. To take it even one step further, we frequently go to great lengths (pun intended) for our PROSPECTS too!

Yesterday, Jim and I flew from Chicago to a remote city in southern Colorado to meet with a large Microsoft CRM prospect. Flying to Denver is no problem, we do it frequently because we have a great customer there. However to meet with this particular prospect we had to fly to to Denver and then take a second flight on a TINY plane to get to our destination.

As you can see, this was a small plane. The inside of the plane was even tighter. Here's a shot of Jim (who's pretty tall) trying to access something in the overhead bin!

Despite a few bumps, the ride was pretty smooth and we arrived safe and sound. Even better, we had a great meeting with the prospect and we're very excited about their project. You can tell pretty quickly when you're meeting with a customer if they will be fun to work with, and this prospect definitely seemed like a great fit for us. Hopefully we'll win the gig!

In addition to a fun break from the normal travel experience, the plane ride did offer some pretty amazing views of the mountains.