5 Reasons Why Salespeople Need D365

Is your sales team empowered with a best-fit customer relationship management (CRM) system? If they’re working without one, they’re unlikely to make intelligent sales decisions and build strong, profitable relationships —and if they’re still working from an outdated legacy CRM system, it will become increasingly difficult for them to compete in the marketplace for business, and ultimately, help your company grow.

That’s why the CRM application market is one of the fastest growing business application markets today, expected to reach $81.9 billion by 2025—a nearly 600 percent increase since 2010, finds Grand View Research. As this market grows, we’re seeing Microsoft’s share in it increase, too.

Why D365?

Much of the success of Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 (D365) for Sales platform stems from its balance between advanced functionality and an adaptable, intuitive interface. The CRM system helps streamline the entire sales cycle to make prospecting, forecasting and closing deals easier than ever for sales associates, leveraging tools your team is likely already using and familiar with.

Read on as we dive into five critical areas where Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales excels compared to CRM competitors—making it an indispensable tool for your sales staff.

1. Advanced business intelligence

A salesperson can’t expect to effectively sell anything if they don’t understand a potential client’s perspective. That’s where Dynamics 365’s advanced business intelligence features shine.

Uniting all prospect and client information in a single user-friendly interface—with real-time analytics and statistics viewable from the Live Sales Dashboard—your team can gain both big-picture and granular views into client trends, histories and behaviors to make informed and educated decisions regarding how to bring in new clients, maintain and cross sell existing ones and develop marketing campaigns.

As leads progress through various selling stages, Dynamic 365 provides the sales associate with a maneuverable sales funnel giving insights across the full lifecycle—with the ability to integrate customized automations, trigger alerts, gate requirements and more to keep the lead moving efficiently within your organization’s unique processes.

2. Seamless business automation and integrations

As Dynamics 365 is a Microsoft platform, it easily integrates with other key Microsoft applications as well as partner tools to automate and connect processes for a unified experience

You and your sales staff are probably already using many of the popular integrations that are native to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, which include but are not limited to:

• Office 365: A software suite including popular applications Excel, Outlook and Word.
• Flow: A service that allows employees to create and automate workflows and tasks across multiple applications and services without help from developers.
• Forms: A tool that enables users to quickly create a form, collect responses in real-time, and view automatic charts to visualize data.
• LinkedIn: A Microsoft-owned social media platform that provides data to identify leads and help build relationships through personalized engagement.
• OneDrive: An online cloud storage service from Microsoft.
• PowerApps: A tool allowing users to build mobile and web apps leveraging their organization’s existing data.
• Power BI: Microsoft’s business analytics service providing interactive data visualization BI tools.
• SharePoint: Microsoft’s document management system.
• Teams: A collaborative app that includes business messaging, calling, video meetings and file sharing.

3. Direct LinkedIn connection

Notable among Dynamics 365’s integrations for sales associates is its direct tie-in with LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Microsoft, which acquired LinkedIn in 2006, has leveraged this asset to ensure salespeople can carry out standard LinkedIn activities—such as viewing and making connections, sending messages, adding content and posts, and interacting with users—directly through the Dynamics 365 interface.

Carrying out these actions through your CRM rather than separately through the LinkedIn app enables users to track and manage all activities and conversations in one place. This ultimately prevents overlap in your database, while enhancing its contents with additional useful sales data about people, organizations and relationships.

4. Easy on-the-go accessibility

Across nearly every industry, mobility has become a critical necessity for sales professionals who travel often, working from cars and coffee shops. Without on-the-go access to critical work information, tools and resources through mobile CRM, they’d be hard-put to do their jobs.

In fact, research shows that 65 percent of sales reps who’ve adopted mobile CRM achieve their sales quotas, while only 22 percent of those using non-mobile CRM have reached the same targets.

With Dynamic 365’s mobile interface, your sales team can access your database anywhere, anytime, from virtually any device. They can keep up with key activities such as checking dashboard analytics, entering a new lead and moving an opportunity down the sales pipeline—boosting their productivity, as well as responsiveness to ensure high levels of customer service, regardless of when and where they are working on any given day.

5. Robust resources and support

With so many features and options available to maximize your sales process, Microsoft doesn’t leave your staff to figure everything out. The Microsoft team provides users with an extensive online resource library to help them stay productive without lost down time.

Microsoft also maintains an extensive, certified partner network to provide the highest level of competencies and knowledge of the latest Microsoft Dynamics and business applications technology.

A qualified Microsoft partner can not only help you create and implement a comprehensive Dynamics 365 strategy to meet your goals for developing sales, targeting your prospects and increasing customer retention—but provide training for system administrators and end users to ensure your team feels comfortable adopting the system for day-to-day use.

Want to learn more about Microsoft Dynamic 365 for Sales or test it out with a free 30-day trial to see if it’s the right fit for your organization? Contact Microsoft-certified partner TrellisPoint at 888-719-0248 or sales@trellispoint.com.

Learn more about Microsoft D365