Everything you ever wanted to know about Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM

Thinking about implementing Dynamics CRM in your business?

Deciding on a CRM vendor can be tricky; it gets even trickier when you’re sizing up Microsoft Dynamics CRM, with its recent rebrand and multitude of licensing and deployment options.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM offers growing and mid-market organizations a powerful solution to manage business relationships and transform their sales, marketing, and customer service processes.
Dynamics 365 CRM’s practical functionality allows employees to be more productive and knowledgeable, and it gives executives deeper insight into performance, opportunities, and customer relationships. The sales and marketing features streamline the way businesses communicate with customers, prospects, and team members.

Why do businesses choose Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM ?

• This is because Dynamics 365 can be used to manage any relationship – you can customise it completely to fit your business processes rather than having to adapt how you work to fit the system. This flexibility means that as your organisation grows and potentially changes, you know the system can change with you
• Its familiar and intuitive user interface ranks among the highest in user adoption.
• Its integrations with other Microsoft products offer a huge advantage.
• Its powerful built-in tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and assistant improve productivity and efficiency.

What does Dynamics 365 for Sales offer?
Dynamics 365 for Sales allows users to manage their sales processes from beginning to end, from lead generation and pipeline management, to account management and reporting. The app centralizes all an organization’s sales leads into one place, helps collect data, and automates repetitive areas of the cycle, so salespeople can focus on building relationships and nurturing opportunities.
The system can automatically score, qualify, and assign leads, and provides real-time analysis at every stage of the process to help users focus their efforts in the most profitable areas. All sales and marketing activity is logged in a single view, so salespeople get a complete picture of their organization’s relationship and previous contact with a customer, making it easier to deliver great service, and spot up- and cross-selling opportunities.
The app can also issue intelligent, automated reminders and actions to keep leads moving through the pipeline and make sure no customer falls through the cracks. Extensive, AI-infused reporting capabilities help highlight successes and opportunities, and with the in-built gamification feature, organizations can encourage productivity, user adoption, and boost employee engagement.
One of the features that marks Dynamics 365 out from other leading CRMs is its native integration with LinkedIn. Since its purchase of the networking platform in 2016, Microsoft has been working to integrate LinkedIn user data with its products, and for salespeople using Dynamics 365, having access to information on the site’s 500m users and their connections is a massive boon.
Users told Gartner that Dynamics 365’s strengths include the ability to customize its application with custom fields, custom objects, workflows and a customized user interface, and the quality of its customer engagement processes. Users also commented on how valuable Microsoft Dynamics’ integration with other products—such as Microsoft Exchange, Office 365, SharePoint, Azure Machine Learning, and Power BI— has proved.

Reporting & Insights

Dynamics 365 CRM has a powerful query feature that allows you to request data for entities like clients, contracts, activities, and more. You can also define your own dashboards in the software to bring forward the graphs, reports, and information that are most relevant to your role.
For data visualization purposes, you can easily import data from Dynamics 365 into Power BI to analyze it against other information. Even better, you can feed data from Dynamics 365 into Power BI dashboards so the information you’re most interested in is always at your fingertips. These insights provide a better understanding of how your business is performing and how you can scale.

Deployment Options
Dynamics 365 has several deployment options, including cloud, on-premise, or partner-hosted. Keep in mind that, when using cloud-hosted software, your team will be able to access the information they need anytime, from anywhere, without the hardware and IT costs that on-premise solutions require. No matter which option you choose, your monthly price will follow a software as a service (SaaS) model.

Pricing
With Dynamics 365, you get more functionality at a lower price point than competitive CRM systems. Microsoft offers three tiers of subscription packages with different levels of access and pricing. By providing these options, Microsoft ensures you can get the best deal out of your investment by only paying for what you truly need.