Microsoft has made a strong push to the front of the CRM software market with Dynamics 365. The platform’s unique mix of customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) tools has a lot going for it.
To IT professionals, the value of Dynamics 365 is usually obvious. But that’s not always the case with business owners. Fortunately there’s data to back us up. Forrester Research found very healthy ROI for Dynamics 365 across several different metrics. After switching to Dynamics, organizations saw an average revenue increase of 3%, sales team productivity increases of 4%, and all the while the new efficiency gains lowered costs and increased margins by a further 2.4%.
Although those figures are compelling, customers unfamiliar with how CRM and ERP systems work still might not be convinced. For them, Dynamics may appear redundant with business tools they already have, or processes they’re used to carrying out manually.
And for other customers familiar with CRM and ERP, Dynamics 365’s advantages over its competitors may not be obvious, since many of them lie ‘under the hood.’
To help you explain its real value to your customers, here are the 5 ways switching to Dynamics 365 can improve how their businesses run.
Looking for a good reason to resell Dynamics 365 with Sherweb? Here’s a guide with 8 reasons you can’t ignore.
1) Automating the Sales Process
Marketers can plan, design, and deploy entire marketing campaigns in Dynamics 365. Then it tracks each lead as they engage with email chains, websites, and other content. Dynamics pulls together all of those fragments of unconnected marketing data to build detailed, insightful profiles on them. That lets it assign those leads an opportunity score. When that score is high enough Dynamics automatically kicks those leads over to sales personnel who can step in and help guide them to a purchasing decision.
You can show your customers how these built-in Relationship Analytics eliminate wasted sales and marketing efforts. Staff now only have to spend time dealing with serious prospects. Dead leads are eliminated before they even make it to the sales team.
2) Improving Client Retention
While Dynamics 365 does an excellent job streamlining lead generation, it also does an excellent job supporting revenue streams from existing clients. If your customers are struggling to retain their clients, show them how Dynamics connects sales, project, and service functions together into one seamless workflow.
Sales teams can initiate projects right in their Dynamics dashboard, and bring in project managers and technical staff for consultations. They can also generate project timetables and billing. And throughout the process, a knowledge base can be assembled for hand off to their customer service team.
All of these functions connect ‘under-the-hood’ to Microsoft’s analytical tools, one of the primary advantages Dynamics 365 holds over both its cloud and local CRM competitors. The Cortana Intelligence Suite makes predictive sales account analyses and provides project status updates. It learns what’s important to your customers as their projects progress, and sends those updates and reminders about action items they might otherwise miss.
3) Reducing Infrastructure Overhead
Migrating to a cloud-based CRM like Dynamics 365 lets your customers shift their IT spending to a more predictable schedule. Downtime due to patching and other upgrades is minimized using cloud-based systems. And in-house CRM server lifecycle upgrades are eliminated, letting your customers trim their CapEx budgets.
This shift alone is often enough to convince customers who were on the fence about deploying an ERP or CRM system. They can shift their infrastructure budgets away from these systems to other profit-generating initiatives. And as we saw above, the ROI on what they do spend on Dynamics 365 is considerable.
4) Enhancing Business Integration
Dynamics 365 offers a lot of individually powerful tools, but its real power lies in the way it connects all of those tools together on one platform. And—even more importantly for some customers—the way the CRM platform integrates with other Microsoft products.
That’s Dynamics’ other major ‘under-the hood’ advantage: It’s built on Microsoft’s Common Data Model, the shared data language underlying all of their business and analytical applications. If your customers are already sold on using CRM software, than this is the greatest differentiator for Dynamics 365.
Everything your customers use, from Excel, to Dynamics, to Power BI, talk seamlessly to each other. It connects what, in other IT environments, would be segregated data repositories so your customers can create reports synthesized from assets and data scattered throughout their organization.
5) Simplifying Personnel Management
Alongside sales, support, and project functions, Dynamics also boasts a robust suite of HR tools. Different legacy ERP applications often require very different backend systems. Customers running them often grumble that they’re a necessary evil. Dynamics 365 helps your customers unify all of their different ERP functions on a single platform. Hiring, onboarding, performance management, compensation, and benefits, can all be managed on a single dashboard. And accessed by employees for self-service.
Legacy ERP tools also tend to sport very complicated interfaces. Those apps toss everything anyone in the entire organization would use into one interface. So your busy customers may find the individualized dashboards that Dynamics allows them to build very appealing. Each employee has the ability to customize their dashboards in Dynamics. Keeping the essentials that they use every day, and dropping the items that don’t apply to them.
Final Thoughts on Dynamics 365
Cloud-based ERP software like Dynamics 365 lets your customers work the way they want to work. It just makes them work that way better. Dynamics offers a host of individually valuable business tools that become greater than the sum of their parts when they’re brought together in a single, integrated, ERP platform. And using Sherweb to deploy Dynamics for your customers gives you access to a team of capable and experienced SaaS experts, who help them get the most out of it.
Find the best leads easier, turn that lead into a sale faster, get them up and running smoother, and keep them happier afterwards. Dynamics 365 delivers complete, efficient, and powerful control over all of your customers’ business operations.
Contact Sherweb to learn how easy it is to migrate your customers to Dynamics 365.
