Matt Watson

10 Tips to Improve CRM Lead Response Times in 2010

Matt Watson — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 15:04:46 GMT

Improving CRM lead response times can improve your closing ratios. Manufacturers are starting to put a huge emphasis on improving response times in 2010. Here are some tips on how to improve your internet response times.

1.    Text messages and email alerts - Immediately notify yourself when new leads are received
2.    Manually sending an email or logging a phone call attempt counts as a response. (Auto-responder emails don’t count.)
3.    Respond to leads from your smart phone if your CRM supports it
4.    Lead “buckets” - Don’t assign leads to any particular person but instead put them in a bucket and whichever sales rep gets to it first, gets it!
5.    Use a fully mobile enabled CRM system that allows you to view complete lead details, send emails and log phone calls.
6.    Unresponded lead alerts - Setup your CRM to email a manager if leads aren’t responded to within a certain timeframe.
7.    Alert prompts within your CRM – Receive popup notifications automatically when new leads arrive.
8.    Use a phone calling service that can instantly call the customer when a lead is received. Response times can be <5 minutes!
9.    Netbook – Use a netbook or laptop on to the go to respond to leads
10.    3rd party monitoring services – They can ensure all leads are being responded to on time. (Some even offer 24 hours monitoring.)

Another good idea to help keep your staff on their toes is to do mystery shopping!

Automotive CRM Software continues to get more and more sophisticated for handling internet leads and mobile CRM solutions can really assist in improving response times.

Matt Watson
CTO
VinSolutions

Citrix Netscaler vs F5 Big-IP: Load Balancers & Web Application Acceleration

Matt Watson — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 02:11:13 GMT

So we have outgrown our current load balancer solution (LVS) and we decided to step up and get a device that can help accelerate our web applications. We have dozens of web servers and our current load balancing solution simply couldn't cut it anymore.

Both BIG-IP and Netscaler and very sophisticated devices. Here are some of the features they provide:

Layer 7 traffic routing and content modification
Load balancing including via cookies
Global load balancing for multiple sites
SSL offloading
HTTP compression offloading
Server health monitoring
Application firewall
Advanced caching

I looked at Netscaler and F5 both very closely but quickly figured out that F5 seemed to be very proud of their products. Their intial prices quotes were TWICE what Netscaler was and did LESS functionality!

The best thing about the Netscaler device is it can run all of the Netscaler features on one hardware device or via their virtual appliances. F5 doesn't have virtual appliances and you can only run a couple "modules" on their hardware devices at a time. Netscaler will also let you use a bandwidth restricted version of their virtual appliace for free! It's always nice to have a dev device.

Netscaler's pricing was very simple and easy to follow via 3 pricing tiers. F5's pricing model is a nightmare as they try and part and parcel every little thing to nickel and dime you. F5's website is very confusing to understand their "product modules" vs "feature modules" and how they all relate. They need to simplify their sales materials and pricing structure.

Netscaler has a great java based user interface that seemed very easy to use and had robust reporting. F5 had a web based user interface that seemed easy to use but it wasn't as robust and lacked the advanced UI features that java can provide.

F5 is really excited about their "irules". But Netscaler seems to also have very flexible rules via a point and click policy builder that does most of the some functions. Which to me is better than learning some special F5 programming language. (BTW F5, I don't have any idea what TCL is, I'm a .NET developer... but my son likes to be tickled.)

F5 did have some neat features that Netscaler didn't have. Mainly some of the advanced functions of their Webaccelator module. Netscaler only does content caching in memory but F5 offers caching content to disk as well so it could cache more data. Netscaler also has a cool unique "push" feature that might be really useful for web based chat and other products. Something we could actually use.

F5 also bashed Netscaler a lot because not all of their stuff uses their new nCore functions yet. Which I am to understand means allowing all of their software to be fully multithreaded across all the CPU cores. But F5 also never said their own software was multithreaded... so I think they were throwing Netscaler under the bus on something they didn't even do.

F5 is supposedly the market leader. But charging the most doesn't make you market leader in my book. So in the end it was an easy decision for us to go with Netscaler. Not because they were cheaper but they defintely provided the most value for price/performance. We ended up getting better hardware from Netscaler for half what F5 originally sent us a quote for, plus we got more features! (I know it is fuzzy math, but I think that is better.)

We only looked at those two vendors very closely. We are excited about getting our new Netscalers up and running and will post an update after we have used them for a while.

Silverlight is Lighting Up March Madness and 2009

Matt Watson — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 02:58:30 GMT

Silverlight has been released for over a year now. This March it will be powering the NCAA March Madness! All of the games will be available online in streaming video.

http://mmod.ncaa.com/

For those of you who don't know what Silverlight is, it is a technology similar to Flash and Java that allows running software applications in your internet browser. The ability to do amazing things that can't be done with HTML. Silverlight is the future of web application development.

It is estimated that about 25-30% of all Internet users now has Silverlight installed on their computers. This is largely thanks to the 2008 Olympics which used Silverlight for streaming video of all the events online. This percentage still has a long ways to go to reach critical mass, but it is growing quickly. March Madness will draw millions of users and help drive the install base of Silverlight. Silverlight is now also bundled in to Windows Live and a suggested windows update to all windows users. Silverlight also powers Netflix online streaming, Blockbuster online streaming, HSN.com, CBS College Sports, and many other common sites. You can also bet it will be bundled in to the install of IE8 and Windows 7 coming up later this year. 2009 will be a huge year for Silverlight, including the release of Silverlight 3.0.

VinSolutions has been enhancing and updating our software to use Silverlight over the last year. Silverlight has helped us provide much more powerful solutions to our customers that would not be possible normally. Including new desking and ad hoc reporting systems. We are proud to be on the bleeding edge and leveraging the latest and greatest technologies to provide industry leading solutions.

Silverlight WCF Service Reference Usage Simplified

Matt Watson — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:56:07 GMT

One of the biggest problems with using a WCF service in Silverlight is resolving the service itself in the correct place at all times. When moving code from your dev machine to staging and to production you may run in to issues. Using SSL and not using SSL can also be issues. So we came up with this simple solution to a complex problem.

Credit goes to Jeff Wolfer on our team for creating this.

Here is how the solution is actually used. It uses generics:
        private SLGlobalCustomer.SLGlobalCustomerClient client = SilverlightBaseLibrary.SLLocation.GetClient<SLGlobalCustomer.SLGlobalCustomerClient>("SLCustomer.svc");

            client.SaveCustomersCompleted += new EventHandler<GlobalCustomerEdit.SLGlobalCustomer.SaveCustomersCompletedEventArgs>(client_SaveCustomersCompleted);
            client.LoadCustomersCompleted += new EventHandler<GlobalCustomerEdit.SLGlobalCustomer.LoadCustomersCompletedEventArgs>(client_LoadCustomersCompleted);
            client.LoadCustomersAsync(AutoLeadID);

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
using System.Windows.Documents;
using System.Windows.Ink;
using System.Windows.Input;
using System.Windows.Media;
using System.Windows.Media.Animation;
using System.Windows.Shapes;
using System.ServiceModel;

namespace SilverlightBaseLibrary
{
    public static class SLLocation
    {
        public static Uri SilverlightLocation
        {
            get
            {
                return System.Windows.Application.Current.Host.Source;
            }

        }

        public static Uri RootURL
        {
            get
            {
                return new Uri(SilverlightLocation, @"../");
            }
        }

        public static Uri ServiceURL
        {
            get
            {
                return new Uri(RootURL, "Services/");
            }
        }

        public static BasicHttpBinding WCFHttpBinding(long? MaxReceivedMessageSize)
        {
                BasicHttpBinding ret = new BasicHttpBinding();

                //had to wrap this in a try catch because Expression Blend would throw a fit over this at design time if
                //referencing GetClient in the constructor (not in a method basically)
                try
                {
                    if (System.Windows.Browser.HtmlPage.Document.DocumentUri.Scheme.ToLower() == "https")
                    {
                        ret.Security.Mode = BasicHttpSecurityMode.Transport;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        ret.Security.Mode = BasicHttpSecurityMode.None;
                    }
                    ret.MaxReceivedMessageSize = MaxReceivedMessageSize ?? 65536;//65536 is default
                }
                catch { }
                return ret;
        }

        private static System.ServiceModel.EndpointAddress GetEndpoint(string serviceName)
        {
            Uri uri = new Uri(SLLocation.ServiceURL + serviceName);
            return new System.ServiceModel.EndpointAddress(uri.ToString());
        }

        public static T GetClient<T>(string serviceName) where T : class
        {
            return GetClient<T>(serviceName, null);
        }

        public static T GetClient<T>(string serviceName, long? MaxReceivedMessageSize) where T : class
        {
            object[] p = new object[] { WCFHttpBinding(MaxReceivedMessageSize), GetEndpoint(serviceName) };
            return System.Activator.CreateInstance(typeof(T), p) as T;

        }
    }
}

Matt Watson
VinSolutions
Automotive CRM Software

Anti-SPAM Gateway Solution

Matt Watson — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 03:25:19 GMT

This week we switched to using Declude Interceptor as our anti-spam solution. We looked at 3rd party sites like postini and others which are actually very inexpensive at a few bucks a user per year. But because have thousands of users the costs were too high. So I found that Declude's new Interceptor product was exactly what we needed. It runs as an anti-spam inbound gateway server in our data center that filters the spam before it gets to our mail servers. It was much, much cheaper than Barracuda, Sonic and other solutions we looked at. I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for an ANTI-SPAM solution.

Defining Web 2.0 – Part 1: We're Talking Back

Matt Watson — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:34:27 GMT

“Web 2.0” is a buzzword used all over the place these days. So what does it mean? Web 2.0 actually means a lot of different things and it means different things to different people. This is the first of a multi-part series attempting to define Web 2.0. Follow my blog at http://www.drivingsales.com/blog/mwatson/ for future posts.

Part 1 - “We're Talking Back”

One definition of Web 2.0 is the ability for everyday people to change the Internet.

A few years ago the Internet was mostly created by businesses for shopping, news, travel, research, forums and other important things. The Internet was largely a “read only” collection of information where everyday people had no input.

Today, a very large percentage of the content on the Internet was created by everyday people. Wikipedia, blogs, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and dozens of other websites are all based on content created by every day people. We now have the ability to create our own web pages (ex. MySpace & blogs) and make our mark on the Internet. You could say that Web 2.0 gave us our freedom of speech online.

So how did we get here? Well... it didn't happen over night.

In 1996 web communities like Geocities became common. They allowed users to create their own websites. By the end of 1997 Geocities had 1 million users and was the 5th most popular website on the Internet. Geocities was eventually purchased by Yahoo and still lives on today as a simply way to create your own website, including a blog.

Blogs aren't really that new either. A web blog, as a concept of online commentary or online diaries started in 1993. Although the term “blog” didn't come around until 1999. However, blogging didn't become mainstream until 2004. I created my first blog in 2003... and it still exists today.

Web 2.0 can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. To me, one of the things it means is we have the ability to create the content of the Internet.

We're Talking Back.

Matt Watson
Chief Technical Officer
VinSolutions

Silverlight wish list

Matt Watson — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 19:50:46 GMT

After using Silverlight for a couple months, here is my wish list:

1. SQL Reporting Services viewer in Silverlight.
2. Ability to print from Silverlight. (See #1)
3. 3rd party components that have default styles and/or designers that make it easier to work with the components. Right now you have to figure it all out in xaml...

Matt Watson
Automotive Software

Autotmotive CRM Software in Silverlight

Matt Watson — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 19:45:56 GMT

Just an update on our experiences with Silverlight...

We have been using Silverlight since SL2 Beta 2 came out and so far it has been great to work with. We have noticed a lot of weird quirky things with Visual Studio, Blend, exception handling, and all sorts of things. But all in all it has been great to work with and our new Silverlight based software is pretty wicked. We look forward to what Silverlight 3 will look like after they have worked out all the kinks. Right now we are paying the price sometimes for being on the bleeding edge.

Automotive CRM Software

.NET 3.5 Framework

Matt Watson — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 04:46:38 GMT

Glad to say we have upgraded all of main software products to .NET 3.5. So far we have been very impressed with LINQ and WCF. We look forward to play with WWF, WPF, and Silverlight in 2008.

VS 2008 Web Development Hot-Fix Roll-Up Available

gEEk — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 04:33:08 GMT

Just want to make sure everyone saw this from Scott Gu today

One of the things we are trying to do with VS 2008 is to more frequently release public patches that roll-up bug-fixes of commonly reported problems. Today we are shipping a hot-fix roll-up that addresses several issues that we've seen reported with VS 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008 web scenarios.

Hot Fix Details

You can download this hot-fix roll-up for free here (it is a 2.6MB download). Below is a list of the issues it fixes:

HTML Source view performance

Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties.
“View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.
Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents.
Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup.
The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections.

Design view performance

Slow typing in design view with certain page markup configurations.

HTML editing

Quotes are not inserted after Class or CssClass attribute even when the option is enabled.
Visual Studio crashes when ServiceReference element points back to the current web page.

JavaScript editing

When opening a JavaScript file, colorization of the client script is sometimes delayed several seconds.
JavaScript IntelliSense does not work if an empty string property is encountered before the current line of editing.
JavaScript IntelliSense does not work when jQuery is used.

Web Site build performance

Build is very slow when Bin folder contains large number of assemblies and .refresh files with web-site projects.

Installation Notes

For more information on how to download and install the above patch, please read this blog post here. In particular, if you are using Windows Vista with UAC enabled, make sure to extract the patch to a directory other than "c:\" (otherwise you'll see an access denied error).

To verify that this hot-fix patch successfully installed, launch VS 2008 and select the Help->About menu item. Make sure that there is an entry that says ‘Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite – ENU (KB946581)’.

If you ever want to remove the patch, go to Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs and select “Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – KB946581” under Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (or Visual Web Developer Express 2008) and click “Remove".

Summary

Obviously it goes without saying that we would have liked to have shipped without any bugs. Hopefully this hot-fix enables you to quickly solve them if you are encountering them. Thank you to those who helped us identify the causes of these issues, as well as to the group of customers who have helped us verify the above fixes the last few weeks.

Note: If you do encounter issues with VS 2008 features for web development in the future, I recommend always asking for help in the VS 2008 Forum on www.asp.net. The VS Web Tools team actively monitors this forum and can provide help.

Hope this helps,

Scott

ASPNETDB.MDF - Users

gEEk — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 15:03:00 GMT

Ok so I'm trying to use the new and cool users, roles management. Works great on my computer of course. Deploying it was another matter...

The key is installing SQL Server 2005 Express on the server and having the correct file permissions on the App_Code folder for NETWORK SERVICE and ASPNET. Was painful to figure out.

This site has a lot of good info:

http://forums.asp.net/ShowPost.aspx?PageIndex=3&PostID=904462

ASP.NET 2.0

gEEk — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 11:53:00 GMT

I must say.. it pretty damn cool to create a whole little application with just 4 lines of code...

Master pages for consistent page template look and feel

Treeview menu

Breadcrumbs navigation

Sitemap

Data grid view

Details view to edit the record

All SQL connectivity to select, edit, update, delete the records.

....

...

ASP.NET 2.0 ROCKS

ASP.NET Professional 2.0 Book

gEEk — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 19:21:00 GMT

Just picked up the book at the local Borders in Kansas.

I decided to start at page one and literally go straight through it. I'm finding it very useful to pick up on the enhancements to 2.0. The little tweaks here and there.

Finding simple but amazingly cool stuff like the fact you can do:

TextBox.Focus();

Who knows if I would have ever known this without thumbing through the book.

I have been doing ASP.NET development exclusively since it came out and I'm still finding this book to be very useful as a refresher and especially for it's insights to the 2.0 changes. There are a lot of little changes...

So that said I'd recommend this book for children (developers) of all ages (experience).

Thanks to Bill Evjen and all those who worked on the book.

ASP.NET 2.0 Wizard control

gEEk — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 19:13:00 GMT

First off I want to say I love this thing.

Second off I want to say WTF were you thinking Microsoft?

If I'm editing Step 3 in the VS.NET designer and then go run my app.. it starts me on Step 3. WTF?

The designer keys off the ActiveStepIndex which is also what it keys off of at runtime. Need a second property or something so that when your editing it in the designer you don't have to remember to set it back to step 1 every single @#$)(@#)$O@# time.

This will cause migrations issues everywhere... don't say I didn't tell you so.

Active Reports for .NET 1.1 & VS2005

gEEk — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 08:34:00 GMT

After I installed VS2005 the Active Reports designer didn't work anymore. So I had to reinstall it. Now the designer works.

But now when I try to run a .NET 2.0 app that uses a referenced Active Reports 1.1 dll I get some weird stack uneven p/invoke error when trying to export to PDF. I guess they are going to make me throw down $600 or whatever to buy Active Reports for .NET 2.0.

Anyone else seen this?