How a CRM System can help your sales and marketing teams

Without a CRM system in place, your customer behaviour patterns might have gone unnoticed or were more complex to identify. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys provides your business with all the features you need to execute successful marketing campaigns across multiple channels, create personalised customer journeys, gain a 360-degree view of your business, align your sales and marketing teams, generate better leads, improve marketing ROI, and more.

Key areas Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys can support:

Create personalised customer experiences

• Utilise your sales and marketing data to build a 360-degree view of your customers to understand their behaviour in more detail, make more informed marketing decisions and create personalised experiences that are tailored to your customer needs and where they are at in the journey. For example, you can send personalised emails depending on what actions they take
• Leveraging customer journey orchestration capabilities within the marketing solution enables your business to create hyper-personalised, AI-assisted, real-time journeys to engage with your customers. Additionally, you can create nurture campaigns that suit your audience, and prompt certain actions in response to particular behaviours
• Attract the right prospects by running more targeted marketing campaigns, based on your enhanced customer insights
• Utilise customisable templates, content modules and other design tools to quickly create campaign assets that can be used to connect your audience

Align your sales and marketing teams

• Thanks to this application’s ability to centralise data, your sales and marketing teams are better aligned and can work better together to give the customer what they need
• Marketing teams have a clearer understanding of the prospect’s wants and needs are can create content to support this
• Identify key customers and engage them with personalised content and nurture activities
• Leverage lead-scoring models to track and prioritise leads

Enhance productivity

• Connected data means your teams spend less time searching for information they need, which might have previously been stored in multiple disparate systems and spreadsheets. This provides employees with more time to focus on activities that make a difference, such as attracting leads, nurturing them, and closing deals
• As part of the Microsoft eco-system, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys integrates seamlessly with other applications, such as Microsoft 365 (previously Microsoft Office) and Teams. This means your teams can easily stay connected to each other and save time switching between applications

Make data-driven decisions

• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys enables your team to make more informed decisions, with prebuilt or customised dashboards displaying key metrics
• Improve the performance of your marketing campaigns using built-in A/B testing to test content
• Use Customer Voice (more on this in a later section) to better understand your customers; a tool that allows you to create surveys, track responses and gain enhanced insights

If your sales data has previously been stored across multiple spreadsheet or in siloed systems, your sales processes may have been cumbersome and reliant on individual knowledge, rather than a collaborative approach.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is a comprehensive sales application that provides salespeople with the tools they need to acquire new business, nurture relationships, close sales quickly, and make informed decisions.

On top of this, Dynamics 365 Sales also has inbuilt organisational capabilities, helping salespeople to manage their accounts and contacts more effectively, track correspondence and ensure activities are always moving them towards their goals.

Key areas Dynamics 365 Sales can support:

360-degree view of your customers

• As customer needs and wants are constantly changing, it is important you have the tools in place to stay ahead
• All information that is relevant to a customer or prospect, such as basic contact information, notes, emails, calls, communication preferences, and more, is stored in one, centralised location that can be accessed anywhere
• AI-driven insights that allow you to quickly discover emerging market and customer trends
• Gain visibility of activities across teams
• Dynamics 365 not only centralises your data saving you time switching between applications but as a cloud-based solution it updates in real-time to ensure the data that your sales teams have access to is the most up-to-date. The capabilities within the Sales application allow you to:
• Quickly identify at-risk deals, or deals that are close to closing, so you can decide on the appropriate actions
• Work seamlessly with Microsoft Teams to increase collaboration, share meetings, notes, documents and more

Sell smarter using actionable insights

• It is not just the marketing team who can benefit from AI-driven insights. These can also be useful for sales team to gain more visibility across their deals
• Boost conversion rates by leveraging lead and opportunity scoring models to quickly identify customers who are likely to convert and buy
• Tailor your customer engagements by using the suggested personalised talking points and recommended actions, using the contextual insights feature
• Work closely with marketing to understand how customers interact with your company, so you can be more proactive in your outreach, such as email communications

Build more valuable relationships

• When it comes to building valuable relationships with customers, it helps to have an authentic and personal presence across your engagements
• The LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration helps you to easily build and manage relationships by unifying relationship data with your sales processes
• Easily visualise relationships and keep a track of contacts using interactive organisational charts
• As mentioned previously, the Dynamics 365 applications seamlessly integrate with other tools in the Microsoft eco-system. You can use Microsoft 365 applications (such as Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, SharePoint and OneNote) to collaborate with other team members and share sales documentation
• Use the insights gathered in Customer Voice surveys to personalise engagements, as you have insight to your customers’ points of view

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice

Throughout this blog post, we have made reference to Dynamics 365 Customer Voice a couple of times. Customer Voice is a feedback management tool that enables you to create surveys and track responses. It is designed to provide a more complete view of relationships, enhance insights that will lead to better experiences and allow you to make more informed business decisions.

Across Sales and Marketing teams, gaining insight into what your customers are thinking around a particular topic is incredibly useful and can be used to tailor your future products, services and communications.

360-degree view of your customers

Below are a few examples of how Customer Voice can also improve your sales and marketing strategy:

• By giving your customers a platform to provide their feedback, you will gain some invaluable insights that you can use to tailor future engagements
• Survey feedback can be viewed in real-time and employees can monitor whether the survey has been opened, read and completed
• View the Satisfaction Metrics dashboard to further explore feedback, such as sentiment, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer satisfaction (CSAT)
• Within Dynamics 365 Sales, users can open up a customer record and view their Customer Voice data, such as recent activity, responses, etc
• Within Dynamics 365 Marketing, users can build surveys using Dynamics 365 Customer Voice and access them directly from Marketing components including the segment builder, the email designer, and the customer journey design

Ultimately, the better you understand your customers (both new and existing) the easier it is to build valuable relationships with them and push them through the sales funnel. With a CRM system, this is possible, as it transforms the end-to-end customer journey by unifying data, increasing visibility, providing insights, and more.

A comprehensive, cloud-based system like Microsoft Dynamics 365 can support your business across various departments, like we have discussed in the case of Sales and Marketing teams within this blog. As a result, you never need to rely on spreadsheets or siloed systems again and can use the time you used to spend searching for information, building those relationships, nurturing leads and closing sales.

Get in touch

If you would like more information about how Pragmatiq can support your business, please get in touch by emailing us at info@pragmatiq.co.uk or calling us on 01908 038110. Alternatively, fill out the contact form and a member of our team will be in touch shortly.