Dynamics 365 combines the latest Microsoft CRM and ERP technology to help sales teams achieve growth targets, generate leads, increase account value, sell effectively, sell as a team and win customers. We’ve counted 33 ways Dynamics 365 can help your sales team hit the back of the net every single month.

Achieve growth targets

1. Manage sales goals

Sales teams need to know how they’re performing in comparison to their sales goals.

Are they on track? If not, how much is the shortfall?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 benchmarks performances against your key sales performance indicators to inform sales directors, managers and other sales professionals with easy to follow charts, dashboards and reports for real-time monitoring of progress towards individual and team goals.

2. Automate lead scoring

If you deal with hundreds, or even thousands, of new leads each month, how do you decide which ones are sales ready?

Dynamics 365 workflows deliver an automated solution that consistently grades and scores each lead based on your rules ensuring that sales teams receive the right leads at the right time. Any combination of data stored in Dynamics 365 can be used to score leads including: job role, location, tracked email activity, web click behaviour, product detail and purchase timeframe.

3. Understand which lead sources convert best

Dynamics 365 maintains lead intelligence enabling sales and marketing teams to identify which sources of lead create the most valuable opportunities, and which resulted in the best conversion rates.

With the benefit of this insight teams can prioritise activities and focus budgets on the most profitable sources.

4. Ensure user adoption

User adoption is essential if any customer relationship management initiative is to achieve its objectives.

Dynamics 365’s CRM and ERP capabilities works with familiar Microsoft tools that many users already know including Outlook, Excel, Internet Explorer, OneNote and Skype to quickly facilitate early user acceptance.

Click here for “22 steps for successful CRM user adoption”

5. Lead routing

Dynamics 365 captures leads from web forms and other sources and uses defined rules to route them to the correct sales team or individual.

For many organisations lead routing is a time consuming manual process. By applying routing rules leads are automatically directed to the right person for urgent attention.

Routing rules can be based on product, location, account status and any other criteria using data stored in Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Lead generation

6. Telemarketing

With its process driven interface Microsoft Dynamics 365 prompts telemarketing agents to ask to right questions that are needed to identify and qualify new sales opportunities.

By guiding agents through your unique selling steps it means that leads are consistently progressed to improve opportunity quality and ultimately increase conversion rates.

Each sales process can be mapped to Dynamics 365 to include branching logic, mandatory fields and stage gating that prevents leads being progressed until all steps have been completed.

7. Web lead capture

Using third party solutions, Dynamics 365 integrates with web forms to automatically import enquiries, registrations, downloads and other online activity.

It also uses these actions to trigger workflows that send automated email notifications and schedule follow-up activities ensuring timely communications are made and to develop increasingly efficient sales processes.

8. Importing data

Data purchased from list providers or collected from external data sources can be imported as a one-off import, or as using a recurring batched process. The result is a complete view of every relationship from a single interface.

9. Event management

As a highly scalable application, Dynamics 365 has the flexibility to manage all the steps to plan and followup your business events.

Post-event processes handled in Dynamics 365 can include attendance reporting, automating follow-up messages and converting registrations to opportunities helping sales team to maximize lead generation and assess the return from each event.

10. Social engagement

Microsoft Social Engagement integrates with the CRM system, enabling sales teams to monitor conversations around their products and market.

They can follow prospective customer needs, problems and concerns, and join the social conversation to turn a cold contact into a sales opportunity.

In addition to providing a new source of leads, the social insights gained by listening to these conversations will help to shape sales strategy, dialogues and even product development.

11. Email marketing integration

Integrated email marketing solutions enrich CRM with campaign reporting data, including which emails are opened and which links are clicked.

With real-time insight into customer behaviour sales teams are equipped with more intelligence when they make sales calls enabling them to tailor communications to known interests and anticipate new requirements.

Packaged Dynamics 365 e-marketing integrations include dotmailer and Click Dimensions.

Increasing account value

12. Account management

Connect sales teams across multiple regions to a shared customer account, including company divisions.

Sales users can access a profile for each account and follow hierarchy views in CRM that span multiple regions, contact levels and group companies to instantly see a true picture of each relationship.

Prepared with this detail, account managers are better able to understand the nature of each relationship and have productive conversations.

13. Contract renewals

By handling contract and agreement renewal processes Dynamics 365 helps sales teams increase recurring revenue streams including income from licenses, support and maintenance agreements.

14. Increased customer satisfaction

With tools to handle support issues and send automated email updates, Dynamics 365 helps to keep customers informed to drive positive experiences and contribute towards increasing account values and helping businesses to recognise and reward their most profitable customers.

15. Personalised nurture messages

Nurture campaigns keep your sales message in front of prospects who aren’t yet ready to buy – without over committing your sales resources. Campaigns can be configured to nurture prospects who aren’t yet ‘sales ready’ which ensures that matching prospects are drip fed personalised emails and triggering further actions when prospects react to your calls to action.

16. Single interface to manage all integrations

Dynamics 365 helps sales teams prioritise their actions and tasks. With full visibility you and your team know who to call first when following up customers, leads and sales opportunities.

With the benefit of a single view of each relationship and interaction the value of every account is easily understood helping managers strengthen communications and focus resources on protecting their most profitable accounts.

17. Account cross-sell & upsell

By integrating with external data sources, Dynamics 365 stores order and transactional data. As a result, sales teams can check the purchase history on each account to identify new cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and even formulate loyalty programs.

Sell effectively

18. Accurate sales forecasting

Forecasts, pipeline charts and sales statistics create insight into projected performance. This data is available on-demand in Dynamics 365 so sales time isn’t wasted compiling reports or making decisions with suspect data.

19. Product management

Dynamics 365 makes it easy to compare historic and current sales results giving product and sales managers the information they need to make changes based on market trends and the competitive activity.

By capturing why a sales opportunity was won or lost in Dynamics 365 provides insight into critical strategic strengths and weaknesses.

This may highlight changes in the win/loss ratio for a specific product line, due to new competitors, lower pricing or quality concerns.

20. Quote management

From simple quotations using standard product lists to proposals involving bundled products and services Microsoft Dynamics 365 quoting solutions help sales teams quickly produce professional quotes.

For quotes that consist of multiple line items the cost, profit, part numbers and revisions can be tracked to transform quote quality and cut administration giving sales staff more time to sell.

21. Mobile CRM

There can often be a gap in communications between field and office based sales staff due to a lack of shared information. Dynamics 365’s mobile CRM apps enable all sales staff to access their opportunities, customers, activities and other sales data wherever they go which means you can get as much done outside the office, as you do inside, by using CRM on a tablet or mobile device.

22. Email tracking

By tracking every Microsoft Outlook email sent and received Dynamics 365 gives sales professionals a complete communications history on every account, contact and opportunity record.

23. Sales dashboards

Use live sales dashboards to monitor active leads and sales opportunities to react with informed, timely decisions. Including charts, statistics, sales metrics and KPI graphics, Dynamics 365 provides real-time visibility that help to raise productivity, increase sales and improve operational efficiency.

Winning customers

24. Tracking every sales opportunity through your selling stages

Whether you have an average sales cycle of a few weeks involving two or three sales steps, or a more complex series of stages running to several months, Dynamics 365 tracks every sales opportunity through your defined milestones.

If you want to be sure that your sales team is consistently following your selling methodology, Dynamics 365 enforces your rules with gated stages that prevent opportunities from being qualified until earlier steps are fully completed.

25. Competitor tracking

Build out detailed profiles for each organisation you compete with including known accounts they work with and which active sales opportunities you are competing on.

As well as building up a detailed knowledge of your competitors including their strengths and weakness this provides great information for sales teams, who can see what opportunities specific competitors may be in the running for based on region, industry vertical or other criteria.

26. Electronic order signing

To shorten the time from quote to order CRM applications integrate with electronic document signing solutions to create an effective contracting process with faster responsiveness.

27. Pipeline management

Without a CRM system, sales teams can struggle to understand their pipeline in real-time leading to efforts being focused in the wrong areas.

Dynamics 365 generates real-time pipeline reports which are used as the basis for sales and production forecasts which in turn increase efficiency and predictable management of cash flow.

28. Qualifying leads

It’s not uncommon for a prospect to be considered highly qualified by one sales representative but seem completely unqualified to another.

CRM processes guide users through your defined sales steps with guided steps that are supported by your business rules to remove subjective verdicts and improve opportunity quality by ensuring leads are consistently qualified.

Sell as a team

29. Sharing sales documents

Dynamics 365 gives your team an effective platform to share sales materials and other documents helping them improve communication and ultimately close more sales – especially if sales teams are spread out.

For advanced document management Dynamics 365 can be integrated with libraries on SharePoint and other storage resources.

30. Managing user access

Using sophisticated security permissions, customer relationship management applications safeguards sales and customer data by restricting access to authorised users and ensuring that permissions to access sensitive data is only granted based on defined roles or individual sales user names. Further permissions can be set to prevent users exporting data or deleting records.

31. Calendar integration

Microsoft Dynamics C365 synchronises calendars with your preferred email application to manage schedules, check availability and alert office or remote sales staff about newly scheduled tasks, activities, meetings, appointments, phone calls and recurring events.

32. Bringing sales & marketing teams closer

A major disconnect between sales and marketing teams can arise in defining when a lead should be qualified.

In an alarming number of instances the leads directed to sales reps aren’t actively worked on. Often this is cause by differing views of what a qualified lead is.

For better sales effectiveness, a precise qualification process can be mapped in Microsoft Dynamics 365 to remove uncertainty and provide sales and marketing staff with clear assessment if a lead is ‘sales ready’

Through other functions including lead scoring, automated lead routing and email campaign tracking, Dynamics 365 creates greater transparency to remove barriers between sales and marketing teams.

33. Territory management

Territory Management enables organisations with complex sales structures to organise their activities based on regions, product lines or other criteria.

CRM territory management handles any customer segmentation.

Simply apply rules to automatically place customers into defined territories for measurement of territory profit levels and plan resource allocation.