This week, three Directors from Prosperity 24.7 made a bold investment, take a week out of their busy schedule to ‘sharpen the saw’ at eXtremeCRM 2015 in Madrid, learn about the latest iteration of Dynamics CRM whilst validating that the organisations strategic investment in being the leading Dynamics CRM practice in the Channel Islands is correct not only for our future but also for our client’s prosperity. We were not disappointed…
So what were we looking to achieve from our week away from the office?
- For Chris Clark, Prosperity 24.7’s CEO this trip was about strategic alignment, to further validate our approach to export high volume software globally, facilitated both by his participation and presentations in the ‘Executive Track’ as well as his support within the ‘Innovation & App Challenge’.
- For Simon Jackson, Prosperity 24.7’s Technical Director for Business Solutions, this trip was to enhance his relationships with the ISV community by participating in the ‘Innovation & App Challenge to engage with potential International Channel Partners / implementation partners and to understand the capability of others in the Industry.
- For Geraldine Evans, Prosperity 24.7’s CLO, this trip was about validating our investment in ‘ClickDimension’ and to become fully conversant with the latest Microsoft Social Engagement (MSE) and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing (MDM) enhancements to Dynamics CRM 2015, as well as all the great functional enhancements available in the Spring Release which will be available shortly.
The first thing however that blew us away was this:
Our team won the Innovation & App Challenge!
This annual competition, sponsored by ADXstudio and eXtremeCRM, presented by Hayley Bass and Julie Yack saw the winning presentation solve a very real problem and succeed in an audience of 450 CRM Partners with competing teams from all over EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Asia). If you would like to see the video, it is now available on Vimeo, but in essence we built a rich, mobile agnostic platform integrated with Dynamics CRM 2015 in a day, which has the potential to be used in 2.5m transactions per annum.
So, besides winning the main event at eXtremeCRM 2015, what else did the team achieve, which they are willing to share…?
Chris advises “you are always concerned about making such a significant commitment primarily in time but also in investment to take the majority of our Executive away from the office, validating the real challenge of ensuring your strategy for the next three years, especially if endeavouring to realise strategic opportunities to export our IP, is correctly aligned. All I am going to say is that I was not disappointed from the session I ran with the Executive Community nor am I disappointed in any way with the excellent access I had to Microsoft’s Executive team from Dynamics CRM. If you want a synopsis of what I learned about products? ‘Masterpieces, paint or brushes’ is all I will say, although I will add that winning the Innovation & App Challenge did not harm our aspirations or our exposure as a great partner to Microsoft!”
Simon and Geraldine are both going to post their key learning objectives in separate posts shortly about eXtremeCRM 2015. Sufficed to say, they both gleaned far more than they were expecting and are fully armed and charged up about the excellent Spring release of CRM 2015, information of which, we will be sharing at an upcoming event at Digital Jersey as part of Learning at Work week in May.