Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service is an exceptional customer service application with a wealth of features that streamline workflows and speed up responses to your valued customers. If you’re looking for a solution that facilitates positive customer relationships while boosting productivity, you’re in the right place.

What does the manufacturing industry need from their business applications? What features and functionalities are must-haves? How can a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution help common issues that manufacturers experience in the marketing, sales, and customer service stages of their business process?

All that and more are addressed in this highly informative eBook. View online and download for free!

Though it is true that every business handles its sales funnel a little differently, in broad strokes, an opportunity will be nurtured until it is either lost (if the prospect decides not to buy) or until they are ready to see a quote. Within CRM, the quote is both an extension of the Opportunity stage and a new record itself. So first we’ll talk about creating a quote from an opportunity, making a quote from scratch if you don’t have an associated opportunity, revising the quote, and then converting it into an order (if you handle orders in your CRM).

If you’re considering adding a sales-oriented CRM to your tech stack, you’re likely shopping around to find the system and subscription level that suits your business needs. Even within Dynamics 365 Sales, there are lots of different features and tiers that may require some digging through details to find your best fit.

Dynamics 365 Sales offers duplicate detection for your account and contact records. Duplicate detection works by flagging fields with identical unique values (last names, email addresses, phone numbers, company names, etc.—info that is unlikely to be common) across several records. From there, you can decide how to handle these overlaps.

Until recently, though, only account and contact records had duplicate detection. But no longer! Now you can create custom duplicate detection rules for other record types. And the first place we ran to implement these rules was for leads, which, as all sales and marketing individuals know, is perhaps the messiest entity in a CRM, due to their impermanent nature. After all, they are potential customers at the beginning of the sales funnel. Some of them work out, and lots don’t.

This is part 2 of a series exploring the tools and records that guide you along the sales process within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales CRM system. In part 1, we covered Leads and their role in the sales process and within the system. If you haven’t read that part yet, you can catch up here: Exploring the sales process in Dynamics 365 Sales: Starting with Leads.

One of Microsoft’s primary goals when updating old features or developing new ones for its fleet of business productivity apps is right there in the name: Productivity. One thing that can lead to slowdowns and hang-ups is navigating between a bunch of different pages. Even aside from the slowdowns, it just doesn’t feel as good for the user. A relatively new feature to Dynamics 365 CRM is Focused View. This feature is aimed at reducing the number of screens users have to jump between when working with different record types.

In this blog, we’ll discuss leads within Dynamics 365 Sales: how we get them there, what we do with them, and also how we move them from a lead into the next step of the sales funnel—an opportunity. In future blogs, we will discuss the sales process beyond this step.

In CRM, the command bar is the strip at the top of page that contains a bunch of different functions for the page. Recently, Microsoft has implemented an improved functionality for customizing the command bar to the Power Apps designer for CRM apps.

On its own, Microsoft Teams give great tools like messaging, calling, file sharing, and much more. Dynamics 365 Sales, on the other hand, provides a plethora of tools for sales teams to better engage leads and customers. By combining these two products, we can expand the capabilities of both. Teams can be integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales to allow for conversations to start directly from records, initiate calls to customers, or link records into Teams channels.

To stand out in an expanded marketplace, your business needs to cut through the competition and create personalized, customer-forward experiences. To find prospective customers with the right message, at the right time, and through the right avenues. Dynamics 365 CRM can elevate your sales and marketing efforts by equipping your team with the tools needed to capture each prospect’s attention at the moment that matters most. Here are ways that Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and other CRM services can keep your business agile in today’s increasingly competitive market.

Often, there are too many disconnected apps at play in the workplace, so the challenge is to ensure that any additional app you add to your tech stack is multifaceted and adds tangible value to your work process. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems provide useful tools to teams who attract leads, build rapport with opportunities, and support current clients. Here are a few of the ways that CRM apps within the Dynamics 365 suite can be more than just a CRM.

Of top priority for sales teams is the question of how they can become more efficient, more streamlined, while also improving their ability to land more leads and opportunities. Well, as part of the same Microsoft platform, Dynamics 365 Sales and Outlook present a unique ability to make that happen. Managing customer data, creating strong and informed relationships, and optimizing your daily work all become easier when you lean into the interconnectivity of these systems.

Understanding the sales funnel and knowing how to navigate each phase is key for businesses to attract, win, and keep high-quality leads and build long-term customer relationships. Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing are the cloud-based solutions that can help you meet every type of customer right where they are, with exactly what they’re looking for at any point in the sales funnel.

Manufacturers value efficiency, automation, and the ability to forecast orders, sales, inventory, and other important elements of their business. Considering these values, it’s perhaps a curious thing, or maybe not so curious, that many manufacturers use their enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for customer relationships management (CRM) activities, or else they don’t use any solution for CRM at all. Considering the myriad benefits of CRM functionality—from lead and opportunity management, contact and account management, data analysis, automated marketing campaigns, event management, branded landing pages and forms, email creation, and so much more—it’s a wonder how a business could get by on the limited customer relationship functions a typical ERP provides.

As the new year rings in, many people make resolutions—new habits, self-improvements, changes for the better. Whether or not you ascribe to New Year Resolutions, here’s a change your business can make to kick off this year and build up your bottom line: invest in CRM. A Customer Relationship Management system is a tool that, when added to your tech stack, can return massive ROI by improving your sales and marketing performance and potential. In fact, in 2014, every dollar spent on CRM returned between $5.60 and $8.71 (Nucleus Research).

Sales teams know that using the right system is crucial to their success, and Dynamics 365 Sales is a sales-focused CRM that’s a cut above the rest. Get the most out of its features and functionalities with the Sales Insights add-on. Sales Insights allows users to generate predictive lead and opportunity scores, tap into revenue forecasts, automate sales tasks, and much, much more. Unlock a new world of capabilities to not only better understand where leads and opportunities stand, but empowers sellers to better prioritize work, realize where their time and energy is best spent, and focus on the relationships that matter most.

Here are some of Sales Insights’ standout features:

Integrating Business Central with Dynamics 365 Sales unlocks a powerful range of abilities that lets you access Sales data in Business Central and the other way around as well. If you use Dynamics 365 Sales for customer engagement, you can enjoy seamless integration in the lead-to-cash process by using Business Central for backend activities such as processing orders, managing inventory, and doing your finances.

Time is a valuable resource—make the most of it by utilizing smart automation functions for day-to-day tasks. With Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can easily automate email communications to customers, but did you know that you can also delegate send as permissions so others can send emails on your behalf—automatically? Sending quick reminders to check in and follow up have never been easier.

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.

Each business is its own ecosystem, with specialized needs for the customers they serve, the distinct services they provide, and their individualized business processes. You wouldn’t buy a suit without tailoring it to fit you perfectly; the same expectation should apply to CRMs. Companies are not cookie cutter and generic, and neither are the customizable abilities possible with solutions such as Dynamics 365 Marketing or Sales.

The goal behind digital transformation is to help organizations adapt and remain resilient against competitive pressure, changing customer needs, and even global crises. Companies who are flexible, with growth-mindsets and the urge to stay relevant with ever-new technologies, are the companies who successfully shift via digital transformation.

Digital is the future, and it is also the present, so there is no better time to consider how your business can move toward full digital transformation. This blog discusses seven key ways businesses can leverage the power of Dynamics 365 business applications to drive their digital transformation.

When onboarding a new employee, the ability to quickly and efficiently provide permissions is paramount to that new employee settling in and jumping into the flow of work. Just as, if not more, important is taking access or abilities away if a position has shifted or an individual no longer works for the company to prevent over access and abuse of it.

Dynamics 365 applications have a variety of pre-built and editable security roles admin can assign to groups of employees, streamlining and enhancing security across the organization.

See first-hand how you can customize the new Dynamics 365 Unified Interface to implement unique apps for specific roles within your business processes.

In all business processes, staying organized is one of the most important keys to success. The same applies to the sales process. Dynamics 365 Sales provides a great interface to track sales from the initial lead creation all the way through the final ordering and invoicing.

Keeping details of the interactions with the lead helps to better understand their needs and focused on the sales goal. The sales process from lead nurturing to completing the order flows seamlessly and intuitively between each step.

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great tool for sales teams as it provides them access to new opportunities to find and engage with more, and usually higher quality, prospects and leads from LinkedIn. Most companies are not limited to just LinkedIn for lead generation, so LinkedIn Sales Navigator can be integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales.

Integrating the LinkedIn Sales Navigator with Dynamics 365 Sales helps to bring together LinkedIn contacts and leads with the Dynamics 365 Sales interface. In addition, it gives access to some of the other features available in the LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

In recent years, kanban boards have been rising in popularity as an effective way for teams to manage the smaller tasks within a larger project or process. They provide a great visual representation of tasks within a larger project or process.

This visualization can be a great asset to help teams get an understanding of how they are progressing through a project, or what point within a process different items have reached. Opportunity and activity entries in Dynamics 365 Sales can be viewed as kanban boards for quick editing and management options.

Customer Satisfaction surveys can have a major impact on both sales and customer service operations. Allowing customers to provide meaningful insight into their interactions with your organization can positively influence process changes and impact the bottom line.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Voice (formerly Forms Pro), organizations can create comprehensive customer satisfaction surveys and distribute them directly to contacts from Dynamics 365 apps like Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Service.

Data analytics have become increasingly important for business departments and modern cloud-based applications like Dynamics 365 continue to give users easy ways to visualize that data. Dynamics 365 Sales provides both sales managers and staff with insight dashboards right on the home screen.

When integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales, LinkedIn Sales Navigator can provide sales teams with crucial information regarding their opportunities directly in the Dynamics 365 interface. But what is LinkedIn Sales Navigator?

The LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an add-on application available through LinkedIn that gives sales teams a boost in capturing and nurturing leads. It provides features like Advanced lead and company search, lead recommendations, deals, organic marketing alerts, and more.

If your organization uses Dynamics 365 for Sales, you can track emails from clients, vendors, leads, opportunities, etc. right from Outlook and those emails will automatically sync up to the associated record in your Dynamics 365 CRM system.

Before making the move to Dynamics 365, Custom Education Solutions kept sales and marketing data in separate systems causing sales and marketing efforts to be slowed and disjointed. With Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing, the sales and marketing teams can work together to reach targeted audiences and focus on the opportunities most likely to close.

The lines between sales and marketing continue to blur. If sales and marketing teams are not on the same page or unaware of what each other are doing to further the sales funnel, valuable time and effort can be wasted. For organizations that are using Dynamics 365 Sales, the Campaigns entity provides an introductory way to create and track marketing campaign performance and activity without a dedicated marketing application.

For salespeople in the field that spend most of their time on the road, it can be difficult to find the time to make sure their CRM data is up to date. Frankly, it is difficult to use most CRM applications on the road. The latest release of Dynamics 365 Sales expands the mobile experience to help salespeople to quickly access and update customer information on the go.

Microsoft recently announced that Internet Explorer Internet Explorer 11 will no longer be supported by Microsoft 365 applications. Don’t panic – Internet Explorer users have until August 17, 2021 before the tried and true browser is officially retired, however it is important for organizations using Dynamics 365 and Office 365 to begin developing a plan to use another browser for day to day access.

An accounting team may be able to successfully enter sales orders or compile financial reports, but an outside sales team may struggle to interact with prospects remotely. For under-utilized departments like sales that are stuck at home, now is the perfect opportunity to train them on CRM processes that will improve their performance and data tracking when they have the chance to hit the field again.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is an important part of the Dynamics 365 Suite. It is used to manage leads and opportunities and facilitate more conversions for your business. There are license types that are currently offered which can be somewhat confusing to a first-time buyer who may not know all the different options available to them.

On April 5, 2019, the Dynamics 365 April release was made Generally Available to customers. Learn about upgrades made to the suite of Dynamics 365 apps, Business Central, the Microsoft Power Platform, and how they’ll all be affected. Sign up for a free 30-day trial to get started with Dynamics 365 for yourself.

Managing leads can feel like a failing juggling act. You keep in touch with most leads but fail to respond to a question one lead has about your proposal. Enhanced sales management applications like Dynamics 365 for Sales are great for keeping track of sales contacts, notes, and dates, but are limited by a user’s ability to complete manual sales tasks.

Using a CRM system to track leads and opportunities is a good way to keep up with the sales funnel. However, it is far too easy to neglect leads and opportunities when you are trying to juggle many other tasks and responsibilities. For an organization like ours that uses Dynamics 365 for Customer Engagement (formerly Dynamics CRM) for sales management and Office 365 for productivity, it makes sense to utilize every tool we can to keep up with sales. That is why I created a flow to automatically create a task in Microsoft Planner when a lead is created in Dynamics 365.

Sales professionals love to use Office programs like Outlook, Word, and Excel in their sales processes. It makes sense then that their CRM system should work well with these programs, right? With the recent release of Office 2016, the integration between Office 365 and Dynamics CRM is better than ever. Here are some of the best ways Office 365 and Dynamics CRM work together.

Business managers frequently ask me why they should choose Dynamics CRM over Salesforce. Surprisingly, even though Salesforce has a strong standing in the marketplace, I find that business managers will almost always select Dynamics CRM over Salesforce.

There are a number of reasons why Dynamics CRM is nearly always a winner: