Wednesdays With Will: Empowering Your Sales Team With Microsoft Dynamics CRM
By William Marchesano, Technology Advisor & Evangelist
As a Business Owner, VP of Sales, or Sales Manager you are heavily invested in the level of success your sales team can reach and rightfully so. If they are unable to close enough business in a set period of time it may lead to the downsizing of your overall staff. If they are greatly exceeding company goals, this can lead to challenges for your operations teams to meet the expectations of your clients. It may also lead to a secondary adverse effect on your customer service team in keeping current customers happy. It seems to be a delicate balancing act in this ecosystem you call your business.
Last time we discussed a smarter way to market, “smarketing’, by using Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The methods highlighted in last week’s post were suggestions for improving lead generation. Leads generated by your marketing team will become new opportunities for your sales team. Once you have entered these opportunities into Dynamics CRM, you can now properly usher them through your company’s defined sales process, increasing your probability for a win. If the opportunity is lost, you now have the ability to analyze why it was lost as to make corrections for other future opportunities. If you are looking for a way to increase the value of an opportunity, Dynamics CRM makes it simple to set up upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Possibly the most important aspect of opportunity tracking is forecasting. Proper forecasting plays a huge role in scheduling and allocating the proper resources on the operations side of the house. From a management prospective, it may be used to dictate whether to hire more people and if so for which role or roles.
Something that may seem so basic but is often overlooked is the handoff from marketing to sales. The reason the lead, from marketing, became an opportunity, for sales, is because they followed a certain path or journey that qualified them. Understanding how and why they arrived is imperative to understanding how your business can solve their challenge and gauging the timing for a decision to be made. When you leverage a tool such as Dynamics CRM, you are able to align your sales and marketing departments, in turn making each much more effective.
From a sales aspect, contact management has been the most fundamental use of a CRM system over the past 20-30 years. It gives you a searchable, centralized location to keep information about an organization, contact information for its people, as well as a place to log notes from phone calls, emails, appointments, and other interactions. Most systems will also provide you a follow-up component that alerts you of when to reach out to a particular contact. These functions are highly valuable when prospecting and/or managing multiple accounts. With Dynamics CRM you can add more meaning to the way you follow up with prospects and clients through social selling. The Microsoft Insights and Social Engagements components of Dynamics CRM gives sellers this ability in two different ways. Microsoft Insights pulls information about an organization (size, annual revenue, industry, etc.), its people (phone number, email address, role, etc.), and recent news (mergers, acquisitions, expansions, etc.) from multiple social media platforms. By leveraging Social Engagements, you can captures information about what is trending on social media. This is helpful for learning about a change occurring in your prospect or client’s business without them having to tell you.
Most sales professionals are always on the go so most of what we have discussed would not be as useful unless it was easily accessible “out in the wild”. Dynamics CRM can be used on a variety of mobile devices such as tablets and cell phones. This allows you to access information already entered into the system as well as the ability to input additional information. I’m really excited about the next iteration, Microsoft Dynamics 2016, which will take advantage of Cortana’s search by voice capabilities.
We covered quite a bit today regarding the capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM sales automation and there is still so much more such as the ability to instantly generate proposals through the system and save documents pertaining to accounts. I can go on forever about how you can empower your sales team with this platform but I digress. As always, I encourage you to reach out to me to discuss these topics in deeper detail. I hope you enjoyed and found this week’s article informative. If you’re interested in some how-to related CRM material, check out blogs by my colleague Ben Ward here. Till next time…
About the author:
Will has over 16 years of experience in business development, team management, and project management. Will has worked at Managed Solution for over four years and is currently advising businesses on best CRM practices and implementations. Will’s focus is on process improvement and analytics specializing in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Will is a Microsoft Certified Professional, with certifications in Presales Technical Specialist – Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Sales Specialist- Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 Application, Sales Specialist- Office 365, Sales Specialist- SMB Infrastructure and Sales Specialist- Datacenter.
For information on deploying Microsoft Dynamics CRM in your organization, please call us at 800-257-0691.
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Nonprofit moves to Office 365 and SharePoint Online to improve income generation
As written by Fiona Knower, Office Manager, British Ballet Organization as written on https://blogs.office.com
The British Ballet Organization (BBO) trains students and teachers in the globally respected BBO syllabi. As a nonprofit organization, we organize courses and events locally, nationally, and internationally to enrich lives through the medium of dance. Working on these events was a challenge because we had limited collaboration tools. We had a shared file server running on an old PC in the office, and I worried about losing teacher, student, and event management information if a backup failed. When we worked on documents, versioning was always a nightmare, so we ended up sending drafts to one another by email. It wasn’t very efficient.
Then we heard about Microsoft Office 365. I saw how we could use SharePoint Online and team sites as a security-enhanced, easily accessible collaboration platform. We deployed Office 365 and now we can coauthor documents simultaneously, track versions accurately, and store our data with robust security in the cloud. Because we can access our work from any PC, laptop, or mobile phone- wherever we have an Internet connection-we are no longer restricted to meetings in the office to get things done. With Office 365, we can work more productively on more events and reinvest more money into the organization!”
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
Cortana is Microsoft’s answer to Apple’s Siri and Android’s Google Now, both great virtual assistants in their own right, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes that soon assistants like these will replace our web browsers in the future.
At the O’Reilly Next: Economy summit, Nadella spoke on the possibility of users browsing the web through a voice assistant.
“To me, AI is going to happen,” says Nadella during his keynote. “It’s technology that’s inevitable.”
The idea isn’t for the browser to disappear completely, only the way that we interact with it. Instead of using a keyboard and mouse to navigate a webpage, our voice assistants will search the web for us and present that information in a natural way.
Nadella says that it will be perfectly normal to see people walking down the street, talking to their personal assistants.
“‘Hey Cortana’ is in my vocabulary. Having that become more pervasive is my pursuit,” Nadella told the summit.
With Cortana on various Windows devices, and now in beta on iOS and Android, this definitely seems possible.
What do our readers think, can you imagine a future where your only access to the world wide web is your voice assistant, let us know in the comments. Check out the video below to see what Cortana is capable of:
Read customer success stories to learn how Managed Solution helps businesses implement technology productivity solutions.
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Microsoft Skype announced the share button, which makes sharing to Skype even easier. When you find something to share on the web, click the Skype share button. A window will come up on the page and all you need to do is sign in, pick one or more Skype friends you would like to share with, and click Send. You’ll also have the option to add a message to be sent along with the link to start the conversation.
For our developer friends with blogs and websites, you can also easily add the Skype share button to your site. Simply head over to skype.com to learn more and generate a code snippet today. There are multiple button layouts available and the sharing experience works great for both desktop and mobile sites. So get started and add the button to your site today!
Skype team has partnered with MSN.com to kick off and launch the share button worldwide. In India, they have partnered with sify.com. You can try the new experience in these sites.
The tech world is still pretty much dominated by men and only a few women are currently drawn to it. Now, a new technology aims to change that and make even more women get into tech. It also takes nail art to the next level. NPR featured the genius behind the company called Preemadonna, the creator of Nailbot.
This technology's goal is to attract girls in an industry dominated by men. The company is based in San Francisco and they are mainly about products that cater more to women and young girls.
Their current product that seems promising is the Nailbot. This allows printing any nail art directly on the nails of their customers through the help of a smartphone.
The CEO and Co-founder of the company, Pree Walia sat in for an interview with NPR and revealed a lot about their business and new technology. According to the publication, they treated this innovation as if a gateway drug for girls to enter the world of technology. The company also aims to make girls free from expressing themselves through nail art and have fun while they're at it. Walia explained, "It is a beauty tool, but for young girls it's a learning tool."
The price of this device is around $199 and it would definitely spark up the interest of both girls and boys, as they would be curious about the technology behind its entire operation. The company is pitching their product not just as a beauty tool, but it also does work as part of the arts and crafts tool.
This product would also come in handy for those who treat nail art as their business. Now, nail artists won't have to manually create designs onto their client's fingernails. A 3D printer can now do it for them.
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Join us on December 10th to listen to success stories from women professionals who are leaders in technology and are passionate about changing the ratio of women in tech. Bring your daughter or family so together we can share our knowledge and resources and help young women understand and expand their potential as future leaders in technology – from the classroom to the boardroom. Learn more.
The Microsoft Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) is a hands-on introduction to Microsoft’s suite of productivity tools. A true-to-life user experience, CIE takes you through everyday business situations, such as working remotely, analyzing sales data and collaborating with coworkers, and lets you see how Microsoft products make it all easy, convenient and secure.
This workshop will have you experience firsthand how you could utilize productivity tools to solve your biggest business challenges in a real-world setting.
