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35 Examples How Sales Teams Benefit

from Microsoft Dynamics CRM

— Achieving Growth Targets —

1. Managing 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 CRM 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. Automated Lead Scoring

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

ready?

CRM 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 CRM 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 CRM 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 prioritize activities and focus budgets on the most profitable

sources.

4. User Adoption

CRM user adoption is essential if any customer relationship management initiative is to achieve its

objectives.

Dynamics CRM works with familiar Microsoft tools that many users already know including including

Outlook, Excel, Internet Explorer, OneNote and Skype to quickly facilitate early user acceptance.

Click here for 22 recommendations to create a successful CRM user adoption strategy.

5. Lead Routing

Dynamics CRM 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 CRM.

— Lead Generation —

6. Telemarketing

With its process driven interface Microsoft Dynamics CRM 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 CRM to include branching logic, mandatory fields and stage gating

that prevents leads being progressed until all steps have been completed.

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7. Web Lead Capture

Using third party solutions including Scribe, Dynamics CRM integrates with web forms to automatically

import enquiries, registrations, downloads and other online activity.

CRM 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 a complete view of every relationship from a

single interface.

9. Event Management

As a highly scalable application, Microsoft Dynamics has the flexibility to manage all the steps to plan and

follow-up your business events.

Post-event processes handled in CRM 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 CRM 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 Microsoft Dynamics CRM emarketing integrations include dotmailer and Click Dimensions.

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— 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 CRM 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 CRM 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 programs 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 in CRM to nurture prospects who aren’t yet

'sales ready’ which ensures that matching prospects are drip fed personalized emails and triggering further

actions when prospects react to your calls to action.

16. Single Interface to Manage All Interactions

Implementing a CRM solution helps sales teams prioritize 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, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 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.

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— Selling Effectively —

18. Accurate Sales Forecasting

Forecasts, pipeline charts and sales statistics create insight into projected performance. This data is available

on-demand in Dynamics CRM so sales time isn't wasted compiling reports or making decisions with suspect

data.

19. Product Management

CRM 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 Microsoft Dynamics 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 CRM 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. 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 CRM 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 CRM provides real-time visibility

that help to raise productivity, increase sales and improve operational efficiency.

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— Winning Customers —

24. Tracking Every Sales Opportunity Through Your Selling Stages

Whether you have an average sales cycle of a few weeks involving 2-3 sales steps, or a more complex series of

stages running to several months CRM tracks every sales opportunity through your defined milestones.

If you want to be sure that your sales team is consistently following your selling methodology, Microsoft

Dynamics 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.

Microsoft Dynamics 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.

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— Selling As a Team —

29. Sharing Sales Documents

CRM 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 CRM 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 CRM 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 CRM 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 CRM creates greater transparency to remove barriers between sales and marketing teams.

33. Territory Management

Territory Management enables organisations with complex sales structures to organize 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.

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About Preact Preact have been implementing CRM solutions for sales teams since 1993 and with low staff turnover

our team is one of the most experienced in the UK.

Our CRM services include requirements scoping, database customisation, project management, CRM

integration, training and user support.

We offer you the reassurance of strong customer reference sites in many industry sectors who advocate

our services.

User adoption is a prerequisite for achieving success with CRM but as highlighted in this document it’s

also a frequently encountered obstacle among sales teams. We recognise that every CRM system must

meet the needs of its users so we place user acceptance at the forefront of every project and we’ll

continually promote user engagement and training within your team.

Our Microsoft Gold Competency in CRM marks the fact that we are one of a select group of partners

who have met Microsoft’s stringent criteria to earn these highest competencies and confirms Preact's

status as one of the leading CRM partners in the UK.

Contact us to learn more about Microsoft Dynamics CRM and receive advice from our

consultants.

www.preact.co.uk

Tel: 0800 381 1000 or +44(0)1628 661810

Vandervell House, Vanwall Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire SL6 4UB

34. Assigning Sales Tasks

Assign tasks and responsibilities to sales individuals to give them responsibility for ensuring a positive

outcome.

35. Collaborate with Automatic Sales Notifications

Microsoft Dynamics CRM workflow rules trigger email alerts when important events occur prompting urgent

sales attention to avoid lost business.

This can include notifications when new opportunities are assigned, high value opportunities are created, no

recent account contact or in the event of opportunities not followed up within a defined number of days.