Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Overview

Dynamics 365 Sales enables salespeople to build strong relationships with their customers, take actions based on insights, and close sales faster. Use Dynamics 365 Sales to keep track of your accounts and contacts, nurture your sales from lead to order, and create sales collateral. It also lets you create marketing lists and campaigns, and even follow service cases associated with specific accounts or opportunities.

 

Available anywhere, on any device

Here are the flavors Dynamics 365 Sales is available in:

1. The Sales Hub app is built on the Unified Interface framework. The Unified Interface framework uses responsive web design principles to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience for any screen size, device, or orientation. The Sales Hub app is optimized to work on mobile devices as well as desktops.
2. The Sales app is designed for the legacy web client and is the full-featured, desktop-optimized web client app for sales scenarios.
3. The Sales Professional app is similar to the Sales Hub app, but the entities included in the Sales Professional app are a subset of the entities included in the Sales Enterprise.

 

Dynamics 365 Sales offers great benefits, whether you’re using a desktop, phone, or tablet.

Benefits for salespeople

1. Follow guided business processes, so you know which steps to take next to close deals faster. You can tailor these business processes for your organization’s needs.
2. Manage customers and deals wherever you are, on any device (phone, tablet, PC, or Mac).
3. Get productive faster by using familiar tools. Dynamics 365 Sales is tightly integrated with Microsoft 365 apps, which makes it easier to get going more quickly:
4. Use SharePoint to store and view documents like presentations or notes in the context of a record, such as an opportunity, so anyone working on the opportunity can view them.
5. Open sales data in Excel, make changes, and save the changes back to Dynamics 365 Sales—all without switching between applications.
6. Get actionable insights and suggestions based on how you work. For example, if you have an opportunity closing next week, the Relationship Assistant will send you a reminder to connect with your customer.
7. Find all activities (appointments, phone calls, and so on) related to a customer or opportunity in one central place, so you have the context you need to do your job.

 

Benefits for sales managers

1. Accelerate your team’s performance by using real-time analytics based on historical data and predictive information.
2. Monitor results, and provide feedback and coaching, in real time.
3. Use immersive Excel and prebuilt templates to do quick analysis without leaving Dynamics 365 Sales

 

Embedded Intelligence overview

These days, selling to customers is about building and sustaining relationships. You’ll hear this process referred to as relationship selling. Relationship selling is about finding the right people to market to and building strong relationships with those people from the beginning. Good relationship sellers prioritize their connection with their customers over all other aspects of the sale. They develop trust by adding value and spending lots of time with prospective customers before they try to close a sale. When you’re trying to decide whether to move forward with a prospect, you’ll want to consider all the different factors.

 

There are typically six steps in the relationship selling process:

1. Add value- To quickly gain credibility and establish yourself as a trusted advisor, you should add value to the prospect’s life. For example, you might reach out with helpful suggestions, send links to relevant content, or make a valuable introduction.
2. Learn about the prospect’s situation– After you have the prospect’s attention and have proven your value, dig into the prospect’s business challenges, objectives, metrics, and qualifying characteristics, and also his or her personal and professional goals. This information will help you answer two critical questions: Can your product help the prospect? Does the prospect have the authority, budget, appropriate timeline, and so on, to buy your product?
3. Provide personalized recommendations– Combine your new knowledge of the prospect with your subject matter expertise to deliver suggestions. Back up your recommendations with examples of customers who have been in similar situations.
4. Resolve objections– A necessary part of any sales process involves surfacing and solving the prospect’s blocking points. Give your prospects enough time to explain themselves, be patient, and, above all, answer them honestly. If a prospect has a genuine reason to be concerned, don’t ignore it.
5. Provide a win-win solution– Take the mentality that a win for your customers is a win for you. Together, you’re trying to find the best possible outcome. Prepare several concessions that you’re willing to make. By proactively offering compromises, you show your prospects that you’re on their side and make them more likely to offer compromises of their own.
6. Continue to provide value over time– Don’t disappear from the prospect’s life as soon as he or she signs the contract and becomes a customer. Otherwise, customers might assume that you’re interested only in their checkbook, not in their success. Look for reasons to reach out every few months or quarters.

There are multiple ways that sales professionals can build long-term relationships, but two strategies are often at the forefront:

1. Keep track of buyers and their needs. Learn what buyers are interested in by looking at the content that they share on LinkedIn and other social media channels, and also the discussions that they participate in. Get real-time alerts when they change jobs, connect with someone in your network, or are mentioned in the news.
2. Discover and evaluate business opportunities with the company, and gain unique insights into company growth, functional trends, and recent news articles.

 

Embedded Intelligence includes the following features. All these features work together to combine their individual strengths.

1. Relationship Assistant- This feature analyzes all the data at its disposal and generates a collection of action cards. Each action card includes a message that summarizes what the card is about and a set of links that can be used to take action. The Relationship Assistant sorts the action cards by priority and filters them for your current context.
2. Email Engagement– This feature helps you create more effective email messages and learn how your contacts are interacting with them. As emails are sent to, opened by, and forwarded by customers, Email Engagement tracks those activities and reports back information. It can also remind sales staff about different actions that they should take if customers do and don’t view the emails that are sent to them.
3. Auto Capture- This feature looks for messages to or from relevant email addresses and shows sales staff those messages right inside Dynamics 365. Sales staff can then choose to track any of the suggested messages. Those tracked messages become available to other team members and can be used by other Embedded Intelligence features.