Five ways Microsoft Dynamics 365 sales and marketing can help you drive more leads and win more deals
Elevate your sales and marketing performance with Dynamics 365
What can Dynamics 365 do for sales and marketing?
Summary
Dynamics 365 revolutionises CRM by applying intelligence to all forms of data, helping your sales and marketing teams evolve from reactive business decisions to proactive insights that empower them to accelerate performance in a practical way.
This article covers the five ways your sales and marketing teams benefit from Microsoft Dynamics 365 :
- Focus activity on the pipeline deals you’re most likely to win
- Make every salesperson a star performer
- Network your way to new sales opportunities
- Target your resources with artificial intelligence
- Focus loyalty marketing to improve retention and account spending
Read on to learn in more detail the five practical applications of Dynamics 365 for sales and marketing teams.
Introduction
What would it be like if your marketing campaigns always resonated effectively with current customer needs? How about if your sales teams spent all their customer-facing time engaged with client contacts who were ready and able to purchase?
In this ideal world, everyone would have all the information they needed at exactly the right moment to make the best decisions. Activities and timings would be coordinated and sequenced to optimum effect. Marketing communications and direct contact would cut through the market noise to reach your target audience and connect with their current needs and priorities. As a result, sales teams would hit their targets and marketing campaigns would deliver strong ROI.
That’s the holy grail for sales and marketing leaders. To make it happen, you need the best tools and resources on your side. Combining sales and marketing insights and enabling collaboration are key to generate revenue and profit.Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales & Marketing is an accessible, high-value application that gives you those capabilities through its leading-edge tools and data analytics.
The theory is compelling. But what about the reality? We’re here to explain what adopting this leading solution means for you in practice. In this article, we describe in detail five everyday ways that Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps sales and marketing teams boost performance by providing a crucial, innovative blend of collaboration, insight and timing.
1. Focus activity on the pipeline deals you’re most likely to win
Sales professionals tend to be highly motivated and dynamic, constantly chasing business in order to hit their targets and demonstrate their talent. It’s frustrating when you expend all that energy on deals that aren’t likely to go anywhere or weigh in at the wrong moment with the wrong information.
In Dynamics 365 for Sales and Marketing, the latest technology powers salesforce automation tools that provide fully contextualised information that’s always up to date. AI-driven insight reveals which customers are genuinely ready to do business. It’s tailored to reflect the unique factors that influence your customers and indicators from previous deals. Intelligent analysis of these factors delivers clear information about the optimal time and approach for a productive sales engagement. It also recommends the next action to move the process along. You can even see when customers have read documents and followed links, so your next contact can follow at the perfect moment.
Sales teams can generate these insights for their accounts on demand, helping them use their time most effectively, so they can close more deals and avoid missing out on easy wins.
2. Make every salesperson a star performer
Everyone in your sales team is an individual, but some consistently deliver exceptional results. Imagine being able to replicate that throughout the team. You can’t always influence personal talent and commitment, but you can investigate the behaviours, approaches, sequences of events and actions that contribute to the most successful sales performances.
With Microsoft Dynamics 365, sales and marketing teams can analyse where and how sales reps win the key deals and clients, and identifying the factors and processes that have the best success rates with different types of prospect. From email content that gets a great response to the timing of calls or positioning of pricing deals, you can see what’s working in a range of accounts and situations.
Sharing this knowledge and best practice across your sales team, you can level up performance and help every team member choose the best approaches, tools and terms to bring in sales. As your team continually learns and innovates, Dynamics 365’s intelligent analysis means you can spot and harness their latest and best techniques as they emerge.
Tracking performance in Dynamics 365 is easy, with forecasting and powerful business intelligence bringing KPIs and results together in management reports and dashboards. That means sales managers can understand their teams’ strengths and weaknesses and focus their support on the biggest opportunities for improvement.
3. Network your way to new sales opportunities
Networking gets a bad press. That’s not surprising when it means extravagant hospitality or barely productive socialising. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Complete and accurate data about contacts and connections in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for sales and marketing gives you the power to find out who knows whom in your prospect organisations, with a simple search from your desktop or mobile. It taps into contact data from Outlook for your organisation as well as external sources like LinkedIn.
In large organisations, many individual stakeholders could be involved in the purchase decision-making process. A sales professional might have one or two direct contacts in the business, but they may need more influence and support to gain traction and progress their opportunity. That’s when knowing about the wider network of contacts between colleagues and customers can really make the difference, to reach key stakeholders.
LinkedIn integration with Dynamics 365 really opens up insight about lines of communication between colleagues and clients. You can research possible leads either in a target client or in similar organisations in the industry, using successful approaches from a previous sale to engage with other connections in the sector.
4. Target your resources with artificial intelligence
With finite sales and marketing resources, how do you know where to prioritise your efforts to support deals that are moving through the pipeline? At the moment, it may be a question of guesswork, instinct, or responding to complaints or a lack of response.
In Dynamics 365, sales and marketing, AI-infused pipeline dashboards can show you objectively which deals and salespeople need support most urgently, revealing those situations where there’s the best chance of bringing in a sale. Building on historic performance, AI-driven insights identify the next best action that’s likely to progress the sale to the next stage. These recommendations are context-sensitive and event-driven, responding to the latest customer interactions with the most appropriate next piece of information, contact or offer.
You can design dashboards tailored to a user, so a sales rep or marketer can see relevant, detailed and action-oriented information about the accounts they’re responsible for. Dynamics 365 can provide relationship health scoring, to flag when an account or contact needs attention. It can assess and prioritise opportunities to upsell or cross-sell within an account, drawing on all the data it holds about contacts, history and similar organisations.
For salespeople, that means being able to direct their individual efforts to engage directly with those customers who will most benefit and are most likely to purchase. For marketing teams, it means being able to target the most suitable campaigns and information to meet clearly defined account-level needs and opportunities. It means delivering truly relevant, timely and personalised account-based content.
5. Focus loyalty marketing to improve retention and account spending
Marketing and sales aren’t just about winning new business – they’re also about retaining customers so they become valuable advocates. A large proportion of sales revenue comes from both upselling and cross-selling to existing customers. But you need deep insight into key accounts if you want to effectively spot opportunities to communicate about the latest product or update.
Proactive customer relationship management is vital. Dynamics 365 gives you crucial joined-up customer data about products, services and transactions. From this, it can reveal valuable opportunities to segment and engage existing customers with marketing campaigns that they’ll find interesting and relevant.
With reliable historic data, you can make sure you don’t try customers’ patience with communications that don’t reflect their needs or recognise existing relationships and previous purchases. You can give your most valuable customers and accounts the VIP treatment with special offers and advantages that will reinforce and reward their ongoing trust, loyalty and advocacy.
About Microsoft Dynamics 365
Dynamics 365 is Microsoft’s next generation of intelligent, cloud-based business applications. Dynamics 365 connects your data, streamlines your processes and gives you deep organisational insight – enabling you to transform and add value.
With connected data and a single end-to-end view of your organisation and processes, you’ll uncover predictive insights – enabling better decisions and driving you forward to meet your organisational objectives.
Because Dynamics 365 is in the cloud, you get the same great user experience across any location or device. And there’s no longer a need for ‘on-premises’ hardware, maintenance, and support allowing you to focus on transforming your organisation. And best of all, upgrades are a thing of the past.
About Xpedition
With 20 years as a Microsoft Solutions Partner and more than 630 Dynamics 365 projects successfully delivered, Xpedition is one of the UK’s leading and trusted Microsoft Dynamics 365 implementation partners.
Our Microsoft certified consultants have deep experience of implementing Microsoft Dynamics 365 across a range of industries. Xpedition helps ambitious organisations reimagine their digital strategies with modern cloud technologies, creating modern marketing campaigns that deliver superior customer experiences and help sales professionals effectively engage and close more valuable leads.
To discover how Xpedition and Microsoft Dynamics 365 can elevate your sales and marketing performance, join us at our free sales and marketing event on the 10th March being held at Microsoft Paddington.
