Sales are complex process of getting to know your customers, understand their needs, and satisfy them. Today’s prospects are more educated than ever before and therefore you must be educated too.
Knowing all your prospect’s interactions with your brand whether it is on the website, chat, emails, etc. will give you insights to tailor and personalize your communication with your prospects.
Also with AI and predictive analytics will be and your team on top of your sales to see, which opportunities are most likely to be close, what contacts you should contact to keep the sales going, and more.
With powerful CRM Dynamics 365 Sales, you can expect to speed up your sales process and yet keep your customers and prospects happy. Create a seamless experience for your customers with your brand at any time.
Selling requires more than just pitching to your potential customers about your products or services the whole day. Your sales team needs to level up its game as did your prospects.
Today’s prospects are more educated than ever before due to the vast information accessible on the internet. 60% of the buyer journey is completed before a prospect contact a salesperson.
That means your prospects spend most of their time researching your products and services from numerous sources before they contact you. Also according to IDC, almost 70% of the buyer journey is done digitally.
Which gives a great opportunity for your business to establish yourself as a subject matter expert if you are able to lead them through the buyer journey with the online information they need to make a decision.
Therefore make your salespeople more educated and prepared. With modern solutions such as Dynamics 365 Sales, you can know more about your prospects than ever before. Understand the steps they took before and why they are searching for your products and services.
Do you want to level up your sales and bring more sales opportunities for your business? Request for a free demo or request for more information from Agile Dynamics Solutions the leader in Dynamics 365 ERP & CRM software in Malaysia.
With increasing pressure on Sales and Marketing teams to get aligned, we will discover how to overcome challenges using the latest technologies from Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing. This article answers some of the key challenges facing Sales and Marketing, how Dynamics 365 Marketing complements Dynamics 365 Sales, and how they can work together with the same set of data and connected processes, to accomplish important business outcomes.
For many years siloed processes and systems have fractured Sales and Marketing. People in these teams have struggled to optimize Sales and Marketing performance.
There are many barriers facing Sales and Marketing:
Poor quality of leads and no visibility about sales conversion
Differing understanding and definitions (i.e. what is a qualified lead?)
Inconsistent views of leads and customer activity due to non-integrated technology
Degree of control over the brand (content customization)
These barriers often limit marketing effectiveness or disrupt sales. Overcoming these and other barriers requires a commitment to shared objectives for Sales and Marketing. This usually requires the commitment of Sales and Marketing leadership, mutual understanding of customer engagement objectives, common process definition, and integrated Sales and Marketing technology – technology that bridges sales and marketing to deliver a seamless experience for the customer.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing is a marketing automation solution designed for companies that need more than basic email marketing at the front end of their sales cycle to turn prospects into business relationships.
Dynamics 365 Marketing can help growing businesses nurture more sales-ready leads, align sales and marketing, make smarter decisions, and grow with an adaptable platform. By identifying web visitors by tracking activities such as email opens, marketing page form submissions, and event registrations, Dynamics 365 Marketing engages the digital customer increasing the likelihood of successful lead capture.
It helps you to easily create and maintain pages that are friendly to search engines using templates and modules that ensure clutter-free and consistent HTML experiences. You can include page titles, descriptions, and native meta tags, or use third-party tagging systems using custom data actions to improve your SEO writing and targeting.
Dynamics 365 Marketing offers a wealth of functionality to help marketing and sales alike target the right prospects, prioritize leads, automate hand-offs, and track progress through the buying journey with shared information and connected processes. Sales and Marketing alignment focus on communication, sharing resources, and connecting teams to close more deals. Utilizing Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing applications built on the same platform can:
Help securely manage and share a single (true) source of information about contacts, leads, and customers to understand how every interaction impacts results
Use Dynamics segmentation capability to target the right prospects
Set up multiple lead scoring models to prioritize leads who are ready to buy across different customer segments
Connect and automate marketing and sales processes with journeys to nurture, hand-off, and track the progress of every lead
Seamlessly use Office 365 tools to collaborate with colleagues, leads, and customers
Further, Dynamics 365 Marketing enables important business moments such as a product launch or market expansion, the planning and execution of a major event or tradeshow, coordination of rich content-based campaigns, or customer outreach through surveys. Below are some examples.
For many companies, one of the most significant investments they will make is launching a new product or entering a new market. Nothing is more important, to a successful launch than effective planning and consistent follow-through. With Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers maintain control over product launch campaign flow with Customer Journey, email, and landing page content to ensure they are consistent with product messaging. Tracking web activity, Dynamics 365 Marketing can trigger emails to web visitors who express interest in new products or services, or who respond from a new market. Responsive emails invite prospects to landing page forms to register for product information updates or launch related events. Dynamics 365 Marketing enables marketing and sales to set up multiple lead scoring models to automatically and timely identify qualified leads. Through the business process automation, those qualified leads are passed seamlessly to sales. The ability to quickly identify qualified buyers for a new product or within a new market is nirvana for the company seeking payback for their launch efforts.
Organize Events
Many companies rely on in-person or online events to drive new leads or close deals. Dynamics 365 Marketing enables marketers to manage events, such as tradeshows or sponsored events, from start to finish. With capabilities for event planning – sessions, speakers, budgets, invitation, registration, and attendee tracking, and a fully functional event portal, Dynamics 365 Marketing takes event management to a new level. With the significant investment for personnel, sponsorship, travel, and logistics, associated with events, having a single source of information for event coordination is a lifesaver and key to measuring event ROI. Unlike most marketing automation solutions, Dynamics 365 Marketing connects the operational aspects of events, with the data aspects of invitees, registrants, and attendees creating a turnkey solution for event management.
Similarly, Dynamics 365 Marketing natively integrates with webinar provider ON24. This unique capability ensures attendee information is available for immediate post-webinar nurturing.
Manage Content-based Campaigns
Content, content, content is the new mantra for marketers. Prospects and customers want timely, relevant, and informative content about the products and services they are interested in. With Dynamics 365 Marketing, access to content-based programs (e.g. eBooks, whitepapers, videos, etc.) can be easily incorporated into Customer Journey. Using subscription centers, prospects and customers may opt-in to the content they most desire. Customer Journey efficiently moves prospects through the campaign flow, capturing important prospect information, and navigating prospects automatically to the content they desire. Today, it is no longer cost-effective to send “one-off” emails to each prospect manually. Dynamics 365 Marketing allows each prospect to pursue the journey they desire and do so in an automated fashion.
Survey Your Customers
Customizable surveys allow marketers to easily gain insights from prospects and customers about products, services, and engagement activities. With Dynamics 365 Marketing, marketers can quickly create and run surveys to gain actionable insights to improve their customer experience or create compelling offers. Completely customizable, and with links directly into the Dynamics 365 database, surveys allow Sales and Marketing alike to enrich their understanding of survey participants. With enriched contact records, Marketing and Sales can better segment their contacts to drive more personalized communications.
The benefits of Marketing and Sales alignment are many and powerful. With solid coordination Marketing and Sales can target the right prospects, prioritize leads, automate lead hand off to sales and increase customer engagement.
Coordinated Customer Engagement
Nothing is more frustrating to a prospect or customer than to receive redundant or poorly timed communications from a company. Marketing and Sales must have a mutual understanding of buyer’s journey and how those journeys may differ for different segments and/or personas. With Customer Journey, Dynamics 365 Marketing allows marketers to build highly customized nurture programs that transcend web, email, social, events, and more in a fully automated framework. With out-of-the-box Customer Journey templates, it is a breeze to quickly execute a new campaign. For Sales significant benefits accrue through the real-time visibility to prospect activities. Knowing what emails were opened and when prospects visited key landing pages is foundational to timely and relevant customer engagement.
Better Targeting and Lead Prioritization
It is no longer acceptable to do “batch and blast” marketing. Prospects and customers alike tire from being pummeled with generic, unrequested emails. The penalty for this activity is often a blanket unsubscribe and lost opportunity for the company. With new regulations afoot, companies can suffer significant financial penalties for careless marketing.
With Dynamics 365, marketers now can derive a detailed understanding of their contacts across many dimensions, both demographic and behavioral. Its only by having an integrated view of the prospect’s marketing activities (web, email, social, ads) and sales activities (events, calls, meetings) that marketers can deliver valuable insights to sales and use those insights to nurture prospects and customers with tailored and dynamic content.
Dynamics 365 Marketing’s powerful segmentation capability allows marketers to filter and target contact based on any attribute or behavior associated with that contact. Coupled with dynamic content, marketers may target ever more focused segments with personalized content. And as different segments behave in different ways, Marketing and Sales can team up to apply multiple lead scoring models to prioritize leads who are ready to buy.
More Leads and Marketing Attributed Revenue
Now more than ever, expectations are high for Marketing to deliver more and better leads. And in turn, Sales is under the gun to convert those leads to revenue. Companies may vary in how they attribute revenue from different sources, but systems and data exist now to track a lead from an anonymous web visitor all the way through to sale or revenue conversion.
Dynamics 365 Marketing uses sophisticated web tracking to identify anonymous visitors and continue to track those visitors until they become known by way of a marketing page form submission. Once known, all the anonymous activity is attached to the contact record to present a complete picture of contact engagement history.
As the contact progresses through Customer Journey, all activities are tracked and made available to Marketing and Sales alike. As the prospect becomes a lead, and the lead becomes a customer, it is now easy to see all the steps taken that ultimately lead to revenue. For Sales, this new visibility identifies which activities are “moving the meter” and creating sales qualified leads.
Conclusion:
As companies increase their investments to further improve customer engagement, the time has come for Sales and Marketing to become fully aligned. Whether these investments are new product or market launches, content-driven campaigns, in-person events or webinars, or customer surveys, Sales and Marketing need a collaborative suite to manage the customer journey. With Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing offers significant value to an organization increasing the ability to engage customers and optimize the buying process. Dynamics 365 Marketing enables marketers to nurture more sales-ready leads, align sales and marketing, make smarter decisions, and grow with an adaptable platform.
TRANSFORMING SALES MICROSOFT REMOVES OBSTACLES AND GIVES BACK TIME WITH DYNAMICS 365
Digital transformation has reached every facet of Microsoft, including our own sales experience. And it goes beyond technology—we’ve fundamentally upended our own sales culture
GIVE YOUR SALES TEAM THE WINNING EDGE: QUICK TIME TO VALUE WITH DYNAMICS 365 SALES PROFESSIONAL
Business competition is stiffer than ever, and today’s sales organizations must make every second with their customers count. This is especially true for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that have fewer resources and more limited brand awareness.
Four roles transformed with Dynamics 365 and Office 365 – Building a modern customer experience.
In today’s landscape of on-demand information and real-time consumption, buyers have come to expect personalised experiences and customised control from their brands and providers.
Mobile, intelligent and integrated business applications are now a key part of how companies provide that calibre of customer experience.
Truly personalised and proactive customer experiences stem from organisational unity – a company’s ability to securely unify cross-silo data and processes to foster the collaboration and insight necessary for powerful customerdriven experiences to exceed ever-increasing customer expectations.
When a company’s dayto-day productivity, customer relationship and resource planning tools are fully and intuitively integrated – and the data they produce can be standardised and utilised – an entire workforce can be equipped with the AI-driven insights and predictive actions that transform business outcomes.
That’s how Dynamics 365 and Office 365 work together to equip firstline and information workers – from field workers to sales reps – with a 360° view of both the business and the customer.
Discover four roles transformed with modern, intelligent business applications:
1. Field Service Technician
Built-in intelligence to proactively resolve issues before they occur.
Businesses today are expected to keep pace with customers’ expectations and technical service needs – and this means building seamless processes that proactively solve for customer issues. For firstline workers in the field who are tasked with direct customer response, leveraging real-time information and communicating up the chain can be a challenge.
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Ticket dispatch
A thermostat reading has indicated a failing heating coil, which alerts the engineering team. A single self-healing command is sent to the device, but the device does not respond.
A work order is then automatically created in Dynamics 365 Field Service, and a service alert is sent to a technician via Outlook – bypassing common pain points like outdated scheduling tools and the inability to communicate in real time.
Service history
When the technician arrives at the job site, they access customer account data, purchase and installation notes and service history using the Dynamics 365 mobile app.
Resolve issue
During the service call, the technician uses a HoloLens headset to browse their contact list and place a hands-free video call using Microsoft Teams. A team member in the home office launches a remote assist screen share session to display the wiring schematic for the HVAC system’s control panel to the technician in realtime – ensuring techs are never isolated from key organisational data.
Share information
After identifying and implementing a solution, the technician investigates the cause and details related to the failure – in this case, a faulty control panel and a defective solder wire.
The technician then seamlessly alerts the larger field team by posting an update in Teams and a photo and description of the defect to a OneNote wiki so that other technicians are aware of the issue. The account management records in Dynamics 365 are then updated for follow ups.
Keeping pace with modern customers’ technical needs requires multi-point connectivity and on-demand knowledge. By leveraging connected data, embedded artificial intelligence and machine learning, Dynamics 365 and Office 365 amplify human ingenuity and unify an organisation’s workforce to deliver real-time, insightful, data-driven solutions.
A competitive business must have the ability to efficiently traffic and meet customer requests as issues arise. That depends on customer service agents having intuitive access to the right information, resources and complete customer context that help resolve cases in real time. Modern business applications provide a holistic view of a customer’s transaction history, allowing for a faster and more personalised level of customer service. They can also house a continually updated library of product information and training resources, connecting employees to the resources necessary to navigating important customer relationships. Here’s how bringing together Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Office 365 can help a service agent resolve a customer’s platform issue.
Chatbot engagement and dispatch
Looking for assistance and troubleshooting tips on a recent business software install, a customer engages with a chatbot powered by Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent for Customer Service on a provider’s website. The Virtual Agent resolves the customer’s initial question, but then the customer requests a live agent for further assistance and is seamlessly transferred to an agent within the same chat conversation.
The customer service agent is notified of a new case within the Dynamics 365 Customer Service dashboard. Because the agent can see the full transcript of the customer’s conversation with the Virtual Agent, they quickly review the conversation details, read notes from the customer’s software installation record to pinpoint a solution and check knowledge base records for related articles, known problems and recalls. The agent hosts a quick collaborative discovery session on Teams with internal product experts to compile the most up-to-date data and solutions, and they confirm a new update is needed to resolve the issue.
Deliver solution
After the agent has found a solution and is ready to engage with the customer, they make a phone call to the customer to confirm details about both their software purchase and the issue they are experiencing. The agent quickly sends additional Knowledge Base articles, instructions and insights directly to the customer through the Outlook interface in Dynamics 365 – and sets an alert in its email engagement module for when the customer opens the email.
Follow-up and data sharing
Once the customer opens the email, the agent calls them back to confirm that the article provided a functional solution. The agent then adds notes to the customer’s record, shares helpful data across the service team and closes the case with a thank you email that includes a link to a customer survey powered by Microsoft Forms Pro.
Customer service agents often struggle to communicate up the chain or outside of their immediate team. But the combination of Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Office 365 provides agents with a connected network of resources and expertise that allows them to better serve complex customer needs – and ultimately form more trusted and longer lasting brand relationships.
Online product and service personalisation has shifted the customer-brand dynamic, meaning a frictionless, informed and boutique buying experience has become the baseline for competitive retail brands. With the right integrated tools, businesses can build a holistic view of their customer base that can empower retail sales associates to provide personalised and comprehensive customer experiences at every touchpoint. Here’s how Dynamics 365 Retail and Office 365 can work together in a retail sales associate’s day on the floor.
Serve customers on the sales floor
The sales associate greets a customer – tablet device by their side – and learns that the customer wants to buy a jacket they saw in an email promotion. The Modern Point of Sale (MPOS) app in Dynamics 365 Retail lets the sales associate securely check the customer’s account history, product information about the jacket and store inventory all from their device – thereby empowering the associate to efficiently address the customer’s questions or needs. The jacket is out of stock in the store, so the sales associate offers to fulfil the order and ship it directly to the customer’s home.
Answer questions in real time
The customer has a question about the cut of the jacket and asks how it compares to another jacket they had previously purchased from the brand. The sales associate accesses the customer’s past purchases and a product-compare tool in the MPOS app to confirm the similarity of the jacket’s measurements and shares them with the customer.
Offer personalised service
Based on items included in the customer’s purchase history and their preference for informed recommendations, the sales associate also recommends a shirt displayed in MPOS that will match the customer’s new jacket. The sales associate also checks the customer’s loyalty points and realises they’re eligible for a discount, providing the personalised experience that the customer expects.
Fulfil orders on the spot
The sales associate confirms the items in the customer’s shopping cart and completes a secure credit card transaction within MPOS, bypassing queues at the till.
Share performance data
The sales associate has created a store initiative to support regional marketing efforts. With Dynamics 365 Retail, they are able to measure and chart both marketing material engagement and sales increases for promoted products. They use Yammer to share their best practices with other stores in the region, which are used by the managerial team to inform future efforts.
Going beyond sales force automation to better understand customer needs, engage more effectively and win more deals.
The scale and speed at which customer data insights must now be identified and incorporated into B2B sales efforts requires a comprehensive suite of intelligent tools. Combining flexible productivity and sales applications can help sales representatives build relationships that extend beyond a transaction – and simplify and expedite the lead discovery portion of the sales process.
Here’s how bringing together Dynamics 365 Sales and Office 365 can help a sales representative at a SaaS company.
Efficient relationship-building
A sales representative is monitoring the progress of several key client relationships in Dynamics 365. Through AI-surfaced recommendations, they realise that they share mutual connections with a decision maker at a high-value company – allowing them to quickly identify the best path to a warm introduction.
Intelligent lead engagement
Using embedded Office 365 tools, the sales rep starts preparing a personalised outreach message in Dynamics 365. Looking for peer-to-peer feedback and further context around the lead’s company, the rep uses Microsoft Teams to seamlessly engage colleagues who have experience with the brand. Their collaborative feedback further refines the rep’s outreach strategy and aligns it to parallel selling efforts.
Engage and nurture
The representative’s tailored and timely message does the trick – the lead responds via email the next day. Dynamics 365 Sales automatically notifies the rep that they have received an email in Outlook, and with the conversation officially underway, the rep uses AI-powered suggestions from the assistant to take the next best action and move the deal forward
Foster relationships
The rep uses the AI-generated relationship health score in Dynamics 365 and acts on suggestions about when their ongoing opportunities might need a bit more attention. When the time is right, the sales rep conducts a Teams call with the primary decision makers and talks with the group about tangible next steps.
Close the sale
The sales rep customises a templated contract in Dynamics 365 through the Office 365 integration. The sales manager opens an immersive Excel experience within Dynamics 365 Sales to evaluate and approve the proposal. Once the proposal has been sent, the sales representative follows up with the buyer via email and closes the deal with a series of secure digital signatures.
Identify new targets
With a deal now in place, the rep works with their sales manager to search for the next opportunity. The manager analyses their Power BI dashboard, visible right from within Dynamics 365, to get a full picture of how the team is doing against quota goals and where its sales pipeline is most concentrated. Together, Dynamics 365 Sales and Office 365 enable key sales capabilities to simplify and enrich the entire sales process, as well as unify data across customer relationships and productivity tools to give sales teams the most informed and actionable view of next steps. By ensuring time isn’t lost on lead identification and data entry, Dynamics 365 and Office 365 help sellers easily engage and close more opportunities.
Dynamics 365 and Office 365 are changing the way companies do business.
Their integrated capabilities are already driving innovation across a variety of industries and company sizes. Combining these powerful productivity, customer relationship and resource planning tools can help your company:
Unify data across the organisation.
Dynamics 365 and Office 365 connect vast amounts of data, surfacing actionable insights through built-in artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities that amplify human ingenuity.
Improve workflows.
Dynamics 365 apps organise common business tasks under customisable tabs in its user interface, allowing teams to collaborate across functional areas more intuitively.
Foster teamwork and collaboration.
Microsoft Teams, Yammer, OneDrive and other collaboration tools provide seamless sharing of contacts and documents, facilitating collaboration across complex processes and projects while minimising costly context switching.
Transform the roles of firstline and information workers.
A 360° view of customer data, organisational knowledge bases and real-time orders and inventory allows employees in a variety of disciplines to deliver more informed and personalised customer experiences.
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![Map to your customers’ sales expectations [Infographic] 2](http://adynamics.com.my/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Map-to-your-customers’-sales-expectations-Infographic-400x1030.jpg "Map to your customers’ sales expectations [Infographic] 2")
