Throughout the entire manufacturing marketing and sales process—from initial contact, to lead, opportunity, and quoting—all the way to order processing, a manufacturer constantly strives to optimize their processes. This makes sense; the faster and better they do their job, the more competitive they are through lower prices and more customers with increased satisfaction. There are countless moments along the sales and production pipelines with the potential to increase efficiency, and utilizing premier business solutions is perhaps the largest area of opportunity. ERP and CRM solutions such as Dynamics 365 offer features and functionalities to optimize business processes and are highly customizable to meet the needs of any manufacturer.

What is Dynamics 365?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a suite of native cloud business solutions, including the ERP system Dynamics 365 Business Central and several CRM applications—Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Marketing, and Dynamics 365 Customer Service. Their modern interface makes for ease of use, and they seamlessly integrate with each other and other Microsoft products, such as Word, Excel, SharePoint, and more. Further, Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRMs are highly customizable to work for any processes manufacturing businesses already have in place, so there’s no need to overhaul current processes to implement a CRM. Because they are hosted on the cloud, all Dynamics 365 programs are available anytime, anywhere—ideal for on-the-go salespeople—and with the protective strength of Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory, they are secure no matter where they are accessed.

Initial contact to lead

Optimal marketing means putting out material that attracts your target audience, securing leads, and then nurturing those leads by contacting them at ideal times, anticipating their needs, and providing those needs. This takes an incredible amount of time and energy on part of the marketing team. With many manufacturing firms hosting a smaller-than-ideal sales and marketing teams already, it is paramount to save as much time and energy as possible.

Dynamics 365 Marketing and Sales both provide automation of processes, such as setting appointments for prospect follow-ups and running marketing campaigns for lead segments. Automation of these time-consuming tasks frees up employee time for other business tasks that can improve lead generation, such as creating more and stronger marketing content. Further, automatic lead scoring, based on criteria the business prioritizes and customizes in the system, shows marketers and salespeople which leads are more promising, allowing employees to focus outreach on the leads that are most likely to result in sales.

Opportunity to custom quoting

Streamlined, consistent sales processes are of upmost importance to a company employing a team of salespeople. Everyone needs to understand and utilize an approved, standardized sales process. Playbooks within Dynamics 365 Sales can improve standardization and shorten the sales cycle by creating one centralized guiding process, accessible to any salesperson or sales team, regardless of where they are or when they begin to engage an opportunity.

In addition, Dynamics 365 Sales can track client conversations, past orders, contact data, and notes from fellow team members and any product price changes, discounts, or shortages that may be relevant to an opportunity. This information is available to everyone instantly as it is updated and reduces communication issues that can impact sales by allowing all employees to stay up-to-date on all client information and needs. Customer satisfaction can increase because clients feel appreciated and valued when the whole sales team knows what has been discussed in the past, avoiding frustrating gaps or repeats in the sales process. Playbooks and comprehensive documentation of client information will also help with salesperson training and dividing work between salespeople. If the main salesperson goes on vacation, the substitute salesperson can review the playbook and the client’s documentation to know exactly how to proceed. No more missed sales process steps, forgotten client needs, or lost data, and no more unnecessarily lost opportunities.

Order processing

Once an opportunity is won and a quote is accepted by the client, the next step of manufacturing is processing the order. When Dynamics 365 CRM is integrated with Dynamics 365 Business Central, the quote-to-order process can be automated, eliminating errors and the inefficiency of manually entering data into multiple locations by transferring the exact quote the customer approved from the CRM into the ERP to create the order.

In Dynamics 365, each lead and opportunity includes an estimated revenue assigned to it based on previous similar prospects. Because of this estimate revenue and the estimated sales cycle (from above), the data from open leads and opportunities can be used to produce better sales forecasting, predicting future sales and growth. Being able to anticipate when sales will go through enables an overall streamlined sales pipeline via more accurate planning, scheduling, and allocation of resources, which can resolve holdups in the manufacturing process faster, or even anticipate and eliminate them before they happen. The combined predictive power that forecast data from CRM and ERP insights on operations, inventory management, order processing, warehousing, and distribution chains creates what is known as an intelligent supply chain that is more visible, streamlined, and efficient. Overall, this makes for better resource allocation and more profitable manufacturing.