MaxTips

Maximizer User Tips and Tricks

This tip relates to the autofill function in Google Chrome and other browsers.

After you log in to Maximizer CRM for the first time, you should then change your password

In addition to the Advanced Search in Maximizer CRM, you are also able to catalogue the Search and save it with an icon in order to keep reusing the same search again in future.

Maximizer CRM 2019 includes a new Leads Module and these leads are basically your prospects.

Global Edit is a powerful administrator feature in Maximizer CRM which (among other things) helps you manage, clean and maintain data so that you can rely on the power of the information you hold. The Global Edit in Maximizer CRM 2019 now supports changing the process and stage in Opportunities as well as changing the territory in the Address Book.

The right mobile strategy is crucial if your remote workers or field staff are to keep their finger on the pulse of their pipeline and customer relationships while away from the office. In the first of a series of new role-specific apps within Maximizer, Mobile CRM is set to transform the productivity and performance of mobile users so they can excel at their jobs wherever and whenever convenient.

By enabling the auditing feature for your Address Book, you can retain a record of changes made to your entries, manage the audit logs, and view the system audit report. Auditing Maximizer gives you the ability to log a history of changes made to entries in your Address Book.

You have to enable and configure Auditing preferences for the Address Book module to allow users to view audit logs and this can be done in the administrator console. When Auditing is enabled, a history of the changes made to the basic fields, user-defined fields, notes, and documents of your entries will automatically be saved to the audit log.

Tracking code allows you to gather valuable information on how your links are being used and how effective they are. With all of the effort and care that is put into crafting content for off-site placement, doesn’t it make sense to track whether it ever generated visits, leads or sales?

Luckily, there’s an existing feature in Maximizer CRM that campaign builders can utilise to track any incoming traffic from sent emails. All new emails and/or campaigns you send will have tracking tags appended to links for the domains you want to track.

Use these steps to turn add tracking codes to campaign links:

Alerts proactively notify you when important conditions are found in your monitoring data. They can also allow you to identify and address issues before your system’s users notice them.

With mobile usage being such a huge part of everyone’s daily life and processes these days it’s typically not sufficient enough to solely utilise a desktop CRM tool for your business. It’s also important that your business can access and update your CRM system using mobile while on-the-go.

If used strategically, automated alerts can help save time, catch errors and highlight optimisation opportunities.

Google Calendar is a free online tool from Google that helps you manage your appointments, meetings and events by easily adding new events to your calendar online. You can create several calendars for your businesses or for your family and free time.

Maximizer CRM now allows you to connect to your ordinary Google Account and syncs your personalised Maximizer CRM calendar with your Google Calendar online.

Maximizer’s built-in email functionality makes it easy to keep in touch with your contacts. It can also help you to manage your important customer and client relationships by maintaining a history of all of your email communications with your contacts.

When sending an email in Outlook to a contact in Maximizer, you can also choose to save information about the email to the entry. This can be especially useful when there are multiple Maximizer users in your organisation, allowing other users to see your entire communication history with each contact.

Maximizer CRM users should be familiar with user-defined fields (UDFs). UDFs allow for users to create a customised view of their company’s data; specifically tailored to their business needs. UDFs can be configured to describe Companies, Contacts, Opportunities or Customer Service cases. These customisable UDFs help build your unique insight and processes into your CRM system.

A sales team without an effective prospecting process could lead to the overall reduction of the team’s sales effectiveness. A major factor that contributes to a prospect becoming a successful lead is the time-frame in which a customer has been exposed to your brand’s offerings.

Maximizer CRM is a great way to be more efficient in the workplace. With the inevitable predicaments we may find ourselves in from time to time due to human error, one often has to do more cleaning up than usual.

Maximizer CRM makes removing duplicates a breeze with the added functionality of combining duplicate entries in one contact.

The Microsoft Outlook synchronization allows select Appointments, Tasks and Address Book entries in the Maximizer CRM Live version to be mirrored in Outlook with settings configured on a per-user basis.

You can set up Outlook synchronization using the Integration for Maximizer CRM Live wizard that runs when you first open Outlook and after installing the Outlook Integration, as follows:

Sometimes text copied from Microsoft Word documents may not paste directly into the Maximizer email window and you may need to choose to “clean up” the text first when this option is presented at the time of pasting it in.

Democracy rules. Accountability is in. Lack of responsibility is out.

To ensure your CRM delivers value to ’the people’, aka your customers, prospects, sales team and management team, you need to have a Maximizer leadership team in place. A team that will drive and deliver on your investment in the system.

Firstly you’ll need to elect your ‘Maximizer President’. The President is the person who ultimately benefits from big picture insights in the form of valuable reports and analytics generated. It might be the person who signs the cheque. It’s definitely the person who ultimately takes responsibility for implementation. The President usually doubles up as the business owner or the sales director/manager. He or she might not use Maximizer daily but gets regular reports and feedback from the Ministerial team.

All reputable CRM systems have security access levels which restrict users in one way or another. This is simply good business practice, not just for protecting confidentiality of information but also for ensuring that your database is well-maintained. Allowing all users to edit, add, delete or change the setup of data fields, drop down options and templates creates chaos.

Here’s an idea: If you’re not using Maximizer’s Customer Service module to manage customer issues, then set it up to manage all of your work-in-progress or back orders. We’ve helped many customers customise the module to do just this.

We’ve found that many companies don’t track their back orders very well. Most often, orders are summarised onto an excel spreadsheet or whiteboard that has to be re-written time and time again.  Using the Customer Service module will seriously improve internal order management.

Maximizer offers you the option of ‘personalising’ your CRM experience. From adding an avatar of yourself, to choosing who to share your calendar with, to deciding exactly what records or views you would like to see when you open your Maximizer screen at the beginning of your workday.  It’s your choice. Personalising Maximizer results in eliminating all of those unnecessary clicks.

If multiple users are allowed to add, edit or delete your customer records, not having standard input rules will create problems when it comes to exporting your database or using it for reports or sales and marketing promotions. For example if the postcode is not entered in the same field, this means that you can’t just print out address labels or personalised letters at the click of a button. Someone then has to sit and double-check all of the records one-by-one, which just delays the whole promotion and causes irritation.

Make sure everyone complies with your input rules. Hold people accountable for their actions and give someone the responsibility of overseeing the correct input of data.

To add an announcement to the list in the My Work Day Window, insert the announcement as a Note, HTML or Text document in the Company Announcements folder in the Company Library. You will need to refresh the window for the announcement to be visible in the list (on the View tab, select Refresh from the Window group).
• Select the My Work Day icon to open the My Work Day window.
• Select a Company Announcement from the drop-down list to display it in the page.

Maximizer’s Hotlist is a powerful tool that allows you to keep on top of events that you could otherwise easily forget. You can use the Hotlist to schedule reminders of important events like the expiry dates of leases and licences for cars etc., anniversaries such as birthdays and weddings, important school events for your kids, and in business call backs to customers that you said you would call at a future date, reviews of the performance of investments or staff, or simply To Do tasks that you can’t get to right now but are important and need completing at some time. Having your finger on the pulse of your business and personal life gets you back in control of your future rather than leaving it to good fortune or chance.

When using Hotlists, however, you will also need to identify just how many reminders you are prepared to receive because simply putting every reminder into the Hotlist will generate such an overload of reminders that you will likely end up ignoring most of them and losing out on the important ones. Maximizer’s Hotlist also allows you to reschedule a reminder for a future date, but as with all things in life, if you don’t discipline yourself to tackle the tasks that are less enjoyable they will carry on being deferred until you become desensitised to their importance.

MS Outlook has a limit on how much data can be exported into a Windows comma delimited file. Outlook has many more fields than you need in Maximizer, so delete all the blank ones in Excel first and then do a File | Save As to make sure that it keeps the *.csv format. Excel will display a dialog box warning about format loss but you can safely ignore this. You can then import the edited file into Maximizer and match the fields with each other.

NB! Import companies and individuals into Maximizer first and ignore contacts by placing the Skip field tag by First Name, Last Name etc. Then Import the contacts into Maximizer as a second import into the same database so that the contacts are matched to the companies.

Opportunity Manager is where you work to follow through with a prospect and turn the opportunity into a sale. When you have a prospective customer entered into Maximizer, you drag the contact name up to Opportunity Manager to start the process. The Opportunity window opens and you now make some decisions:

What is your objective? Is it a new system or product sale; is it a further sale into the customer; is it an upgrade? State your intention clearly here.
What products or services are you selling into the customer? There should be a drop down list here to choose from and you can add new fields.
What Category does the sale fall into? Again there are choices.
Description – what is special about this sale? Flesh it out.
Fill in the stage the opportunity is at – probably “Starting” and your Confidence Rating.
Fill in all the Opportunity details that you can complete at this time and any other information needed to complete this window
Click the User Defined Fields tab and complete the information required by your company there.
Click Sales Plans and note that you are not using a strategy, so choose Show Activities.
Click on the More button, and start your activities around this opportunity.
Work the opportunity until it is closed!
Click on the Competitors and Partners tab. Find the competitors you know you have and put them in with comments. If you have a partner in the deal, find them as well.
The last tab is the Status tab. Here you will able to put in information on how you won the deal. This knowledge enables you to do more deals more easily!

Maximizer’s Campaign Manager uses two types of documents – HTML and Maximizer’s own format. HTML documents mean that you can use pictures and text formatting, whereas Maximizer’s own text format is very plain. What are the advantages?

With Maximizer’s own text format, you can use merge fields, whereas HTML does not allow this unless you have a good HTML programmer to assist you. However, if you want really good formatting, remembering that the email will contain the addressee’s name in the To: section, HTML is the way to go.

We recommend using FrontPage or a similar html editor to produce your document. Pictures, contained in it, require that you put them on your website with links to them in the document. The resultant communication comes onto the recipient’s screen beautifully if they are allowed to access graphics, otherwise they receive the text with links to your website. This means that more people receive your quality communication! Where the Maximizer document format seems to work best is with product introductions. Plain text makes for easy reading and the merge facility makes it more personal.

Bulk e-mails sent out in a Maximizer Campaign can be personalised so that each recipient’s name appears in either the subject line or text body of the e-mail message that they receive. Other Maximizer fields specific to a particular client can also automatically be inserted in the subject or text of the e-mails. Select File | Libraries | Automated Campaign Templates. If you are adding a new campaign, click the Add button and enter a name and description for the template. Leave the Start with a new blank template option selected unless you would like to start with a copy of the selected template, in which case you choose the Duplicate this existing template option. Click OK to close the Add Automated Campaign Template dialog box and then click Next in the Automated Campaign Templates wizard screen. In the Activities wizard page, click the Add button. Select the type of activity—Email, Fax, or Print. To modify an activity, select it and click the Properties button. Enter the details of the campaign activity in the Add [Email, Fax, or Print] Activity dialog box: Enter the name and description. For e-mail activities, enter an E-mail subject at which time you can click on the ellipsis button to insert a standard merge field into the subject line of the e-mail. For example, Dear {First_Name?} will insert the recipient’s first name in the subject line preceded by “Dear”.

You come back to the office and you click the completed box in your hot list tasks. Now what – well you will be prompted to make a note to follow up, which you dutifully do. However, you haven’t put in the meeting result. Click on the contact name and drag it to the Notes Window, this will open a note, into which you can type your meeting notes. This completes your documentation on the meeting and you still have the follow up task already set.
By using this method, you are keeping clear on your customer’s requirements and ensuring that you also complete the tasks that are needed to move the sale forward. In Maximizer, your Hot List is your workflow, in fact it is your business bible, tracking everything that you have undertaken to do for a customer.

By using Search > All fields, you can create and catalogue for future use any number of searches that give you the reports that you require. The “Catalogue” feature in Search is the one which makes Maximizer simple and easy to use. To really harness this power, create the views that give you the search results laid out on the screen as you want them, then you just print the column report.

Sales people are always under pressure to ‘get out there and sell’ so the easier it is to do admin tasks, the better. Having say 15 versions of the same document listed on 8 computers in 22 folders is simply a waste of time. If you have a CRM system – or even if you don’t, your sales team should have access to ONE common template folder where all the commonly used documents are kept. It then also just needs someone to take personal responsibility for keeping the folder up to date.

Why also keep on reinventing the wheel every time you need to prepare a detailed quote or provide answers to technical questions from customers? You might think that it only takes a few minutes but it’s quite easy to waste half an hour re-typing something or trying to find the right size logo that you should have had at your fingertips.

Invest a few hours to get your template system working properly for everyone on your team. And keep your templates current – get rid of the unnecessary dozens of extra ‘versions of the truth’ and present one professional image to your client base.

Maximizer User Tips and Tricks