Need sales to excel?

Need sales to excel?

Dynamics and Power Platform

Need sales to excel? Drop the spreadsheets.

1985 was a big year.

Madonna and Wham! were topping the charts with their songs: ‘Like a Virgin’ and ‘Wake me up before you go-go’. Ronald Reagan was being sworn in for a second term. And Microsoft launched Excel.

Excel transformed businesses. Accountants crunched numbers and sales managers tracked their deals. It was a game changer.

“30 years later, the world’s a different place. Excel is still a great tool – just not for sales managers.”

Here’s why:

1. No single, reliable source of data

Deal information is spread everywhere making accurate forecasting almost impossible. Collaboration on complex opportunities or tenders is frustrating. And different versions of sales proposal documents are stored in multiple places. Vital information can easily be lost, but it becomes impossible to know when or where.

2. Reporting is painful and takes too long

Sales reps should be maximising selling time. Instead, they are wasting hours trying to update shared spreadsheets and collate data from different sources. Usually just before the sales meeting. That means it’s nearly impossible to have truly actionable insights.

3. Limited visibility of sales activity

Adding info to the “comments” column in Excel doesn’t reflect the true history of sales activity related to the deal. When was the last meeting? What emails have been exchanged? Are there outstanding tasks? What makes it worse is that there are no reminders for follow-up activities in the future.

4. Information isn’t mobile

No access to important customer information while on the go. Getting access to your customer’s important information right from your mobile device is painful when it lives in a shared spreadsheet. We’ve all tried accessing shared spreadsheets from a mobile device, it isn’t fun!

5. Sharing isn’t caring

Scaling a shared spreadsheet across a team creates nothing but frustration. Online and offline versions, failed attempts to save new information and corrupt files when trying to save are par for the course with shared spreadsheets.

6. Every customer is treated the same

Not all customers are created equal. Without previous purchase history on hand, prioritising deals according to their likelihood to convert isn’t possible. That means all customers and deals are treated the same, and they shouldn’t be. Spend time on the customers or prospects that really matter.

Are you stuck on Excel? Here’s how to drop the spreadsheets in 2016:

After the Microsoft Office revolution, the next revolution was CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

CRM give you secure access to a single version of the truth. With all your important customer data in one place, reports are delivered in real-time and the insights gained are instantly actionable. All activities such as email, appointments, calls and follow-up tasks can be tracked  against a customer record. Keeping a comprehensive history in one place. This information is available on the go via any mobile device which means you have access to the info you need, when you need it.

Since it’s designed to scale from small teams up to tens of thousands of users, your whole team can work in CRM without anyone being locked out.

Best of all, customers can be profiled to ensure your people work on the most important deals first.

It’s simpler than you think. See it in action now:

At The CRM Team, we’re experts at streamlining your sales process.

Request a demo today. We’ll import a sample of your data and show you a different way of selling.

Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team

 

No Results Found

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.

Discover More Stories

Read Our Blog

The Business Case for CRM

The Business Case for CRM

Dynamics and Power Platform

The Business Case for CRM

The stats from 362 companies

Investing in CRM makes great business sense. Don’t just take our word for it: have a look at the hard numbers from 362 companies. The stats are grouped according to three key CRM benefits: sales force automation, marketing automation, and customer service automation.
Automating Your Sales Force
Automating Your Marketing Efforts
Automating your Customer Service Efforts
These results are from Nucleus Research Inc., a global provider of investigative technology research. They surveyed sales, marketing, customer service, and IT personnel from 362 companies. Company sizes ranged from 1-19 through to 10,000+, across twenty-eight different sectors.
At the time of the survey, the average time CRM systems had been in place was 14 months for cloud, and 25 months for on-premise. At this stage, 70% of the companies had already reached a full return on their investment.

The headline numbers above are average increases reported for each department. Much bigger increases are possible with full interdepartmental CRM co-ordination – something we call operational/analytical CRM.

If you do a CRM installation with us, we can get you to this operational/analytical level. It’s not something you can achieve overnight, but letting us help you makes the whole process a lot quicker. It’s something definitely worth doing. Nucleus Research estimates this unlocks a whopping four-fold increase on the benefits above.

Want the full Nucleus report? Click here

Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team 

 

No Results Found

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.

Looking for more of the latest headlines?

Discover More Stories

Microsoft Office 365 & Dynamics 365

Microsoft Office 365 & Dynamics 365

Dynamics and Power Platform

Dynamics 365 & Microsoft Office – Better Together

Every month, more than 85 million people are more productive thanks to Microsoft Office 365. Users can work from anywhere, at any time and across any device.

Add Microsoft Dynamics 365 to your Office 365 subscription and transform the way you work with customers.

Let’s take a look at how Dynamics 365 and Office 365 work together.

Office 365 and Dynamics CRM logos

Outlook & Dynamics 365

Track customer interactions – in one click

Create new Dynamics 365  records in Outlook. Never fail to track email leads again. Click one button and the email sender becomes a record in Dynamics 365. You can also bulk create records from any of your Outlook contacts.

Quick create customer tasks. Create activity lists in response to emails. Simply drag emails that need actioning into Outlook Tasks. These are automatically scheduled as tasks in Dynamics 365 and added to the customer record.

See important account info in Outlook. View account info next to the message. Dynamics 365 draws sales activities, cases and opportunity information about the account and places it next to the relevant mail.

Log your sales activities from within Outlook Calendar. With a single click from within Outlook Calendar, track meetings and customer appointments. Managers get an update on these activities without the sales rep having to log in to Dynamics 365.

 

OneNote & Dynamics 365
Sync Notes. Never lose a piece of information about a customer. Record text, photos, voice, spreadsheets and even handwritten notes. Access them directly from the customer record.

Mobile. Take notes on the move. Dynamics 365 will connect these to the customer record.

 

Word & Dynamics 365
Merge customer data into word templates. Pull customer information into quote and proposal templates at the click of a button. Word imports account information from Dynamics 365 into merge fields. E.g. Company Name, Account Contact etc. Creating sales documents has never been quicker.

 

Excel & Dynamics 365
Use Excel Online directly inside Dynamics 365. Perform analyses within Dynamics 365 and cut out the frustration of transferring data between applications. View your data in familiar Excel spreadsheets and perform functions like ‘what-if’ analyses. All analyses are saved in Dynamics 365, maintaining the sales workflow.

Connect Excel to Dynamics 365 data at the touch of a button. If you prefer seeing reporting data within excel, Dynamics 365 will link with whatever reports you produce. The data in Excel remains linked to Dynamics 365, so your reports update dynamically. And because the data is drawn from Dynamics 365, user security roles are maintained. If the excel doc contains some data above your security clearance, that part of the data will be hidden on the spreadsheet.

 

Power BI & Dynamics 365
Blend data from Dynamics 365 with other data to get smarter insights. E.g. Draw sales figures from Dynamics 365 and compare it against weather reports to see if outside temperature has an effect on sales. View this graphically to spot trends.

Create custom dashboards. Set up all your key metrics in one window. Import datasets from Dynamics 365 with a few clicks, using the pre-built content packs. It’s never been easier to see the data you need, all in one place, on any device.

 

Sharepoint & Dynamics 365
Documents added to SharePoint can be instantly accessed in Dynamics 365 against a customer record. And vice versa.

See calendars and shared docs from within Dynamics 365. Your company SharePoint accounts automatically get imported to Dynamics 365, making integration easy and seamless.

Smart collaboration on proposals. Source customer data from Dynamics 365 and those documents automatically get attached to the customer record.

 

Skype for Business & Dynamics 365
Click to Call. Call anyone from inside Dynamics 365 using Skype for Business. There is no need to invest in telephony platforms. The best part is that all calls will be logged inside the customer record.

Instant follow up. Conduct webinars or whiteboard discussions with Skype for Business and then immediately send a record of the event to participants. Dynamics 365 will track who received it, and add it to their customer record.

 

Office 365 Groups & Dynamics 365
Enhanced Group Collaboration. Office 365 Groups automatically import into Dynamics 365. So, you’ll continue to have a central access point for all shared documents and calendars. But now you’ll also see all customer and potential customer records there as well.

 

Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team

 

No Results Found

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.

Discover More Stories

Read Our Blog

The CRM Maturity Journey

The CRM Maturity Journey

Thought Leadership

The CRM Maturity Journey

Where are you currently?

Consistently great customer experience doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey. But it’s a journey you definitely want to be taking.

How do we know? Because each stage you reach on the CRM maturity journey directly impacts your revenue. We’ve helped companies like yours do this time and time again. Whatever stage they’ve started at.

See where you are now, and where could you be.

Stage 1: Scattered CRM
You can’t be sure if your customer is getting a consistent experience. There are too many variables: which area of the business the customer connects with, the person they connect with, the time of day, how busy they are etc. You are getting customer interactions across many platforms. E.g. emails, phone call, Facebook messages, tweet etc. But you are not sure they all get a similar response.

You may hear this in the office: ‘Nobody click save on the sales excel doc for the next 10 minutes. I don’t want another conflicted document’. 

Your customer contacts are in different places. Some are in your email program, some are on business cards, some are on your phone, and some never got captured. While things seem to be functioning now, if the business grows there is no way of scaling processes.

Targeted marketing happens sporadically. When you do run a campaign, somebody has to import email addresses manually. If you outsource your marketing, you aren’t getting meaningful data back. Sales may go up after spending money on a campaign, but you don’t know which elements were the impactful ones.

You know that things ought to be better, but you are not quite sure how.

Stage 2: Tactical CRM
You have strategies and systems in place to connect with customers. And they are working. Your sales teams track prospects on a sales management program. Your marketing team creates mailers with things like Mailchimp. Your inventory is on an ERP etc. But these systems are spread across the business. They don’t talk to each other.

Because of this, you are wasting many hours collecting duplicate customer information. Worse still, you aren’t sure which information, in which system, is the most up to date. You wish there was a way to have a single, accurate customer record – right across your business.

You may be hearing this in your office. ‘Everyone! If you don’t send me your customer information today, they won’t be invited to the event.’ 

You want to be able to learn from all the data you collect, but you can’t. If you do get insights, they are only at a departmental level. They are not available to the rest of the company. And because of this, you are missing out on many up-selling and cross-selling opportunities. Your customer service could also be better.

Stage 3: Operational CRM
You have one over-arching system that coordinates customer interaction across your business. Good job.

You are beginning to be confident that a customer will get a consistent experience. Marketing, sales, fulfilment and service can all see the complete record on a customer.  Not only that, you are tracking customer information across your business. Emails, calls, appointments, comments, surveys can all be seen in one place. Data from your ERP, marketing software, etc. all links up in one portal.

Every interaction is acted upon. E.g. Somebody tweets about a service issue. This gets logged by the marketing team and flagged with the service department. Because you have an over-arching system, this sort of co-ordination between departments is easy. The resultant customer experience doesn’t feel disjointed, but consistent.

You may hear this in the office: ‘Score! I just came back from the call-out and sold them a new machine!’ Because your CRM system prompts servicing engineers with upgrade opportunities, your up-sell numbers are increasing. Invoices are generated instantly. And because stock levels are accessible remotely, the customer gets realistic delivery dates.

As your system matures, you are able automate more of you processes and reporting. Staff spend more time on the things that matter and you have a better handle on what’s happening. This increased efficiency has a beneficial knock-on effect on your bottom line.

Stage 4: Analytical CRM
Because of advanced analytics and machine learning, your business processes are evolving daily. You are seeing the impact of changes in real-time. And the information is visible to everybody who needs it. Your competitors are sweating. But they can’t work out how you are accelerating away from them.

You can see the experiences a customer has in different departments. And when things go wrong, you have processes in place to intervene. When customers show certain buying patterns, promotional campaigns trigger automatically.

Accurate sales forecasting has reduced your inventory costs considerably. You are hearing things like this in your office:

‘Maximum revenue occurs when we offer these promotions, targeted at that set of customers’. 

Even though your business is large, it still feels very agile. Your processes are more efficient and your opportunities are increasing. Your bottom line is improving significantly. You wonder how businesses operate in any other way.

Interested?

Contact Us

Have More Questions?

View our FAQs

Deliver projects on time, on budget, at a profit

Deliver projects on time, on budget, at a profit

Dynamics and Power Platform

Ensuring projects deliver: On time. On budget. At a profit.

Ensure your sales team, project managers, resource managers, and project personnel coordinate for maximum profit and efficiency. Dynamics 365 for Project Service Automation works in conjunction with your current project management tools so that you can manage your entire project lifecycle: from sales, to resourcing, to delivery and billing. And because Project Service Automation is part of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite, you can easily connect it to all the other Dynamics 365 business apps. Project Service Automation has all the features you’d need to run a project from a finance and resource management:
  • Coordinated Opportunity Management – Track and manage upcoming project opportunities, so that sales teams and project managers can work together to land as many projects as possible, without overlapping resources.
  • Accurate Project Quotations – Quickly create comprehensive project quotes using standard or customized templates.
  • Automated Resource Planning – Use Azure Machine Learning to forecast demand and resource allocation. It will automatically match people with the right skills and experience to the projects that need them.
  • Team Collaboration – Combine Project Service with Office 365 and share project documents. You will be able to monitor the status on project deliverables and receive real-time updates by project members, simplifying risk management.
  • Simple Tracking of Budget and Costs – Each project worker keeps a record of hours and expenses in their mobile device, which is automatically collated by Project Service. See the whole project costs visualized in real-time.
  • Easy Reporting – See key project metrics in powerful overview dashboards, on your computer, or on-the-go. Quickly export these metrics into your project reports.
  • Hassle-Free Billing and Invoicing – See project costs in a simple overview that can quickly be converted into an invoice – either within Project Service or in conjunction with your current accounting system.
Want to see Project Service in action? Schedule a demo, and see the benefits it will give you.

Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team

No Results Found

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.

Discover More Stories

What is CRM? | Customer Relationship Management

What is CRM? | Customer Relationship Management

Dynamics and Power Platform

What is CRM?

HINT: It’s not just about software.

Many people think that CRM is software. But it’s far more than that. 

Customer Relationship Management is about blending technology and strategy to guarantee great customer experience.

Customers are at the centre of every business. Whether you are B2C, B2B, B2B2C, etc. your business success depends on the experience your customer has with you. In every business this experience is shaped at four customer touch points:

1.  Marketing

2.  Sales

3.  Delivery

4.  Service

It’s not sufficient to be good at two or three of these touch points. Your relationship with your customer is dependent on all four.

A bitter let down

A guy in our office recently ordered a cell phone from a tele-sales company. Their marketing was excellent and they had created a strong brand that he trusted. The salesman on the phone was very knowledgeable. His easy manner made buying a simple process.

But when it came to receiving his phone, he had a different experience. On opening his package, he realised the phone was completely different to the one he ordered. When he contacted the company to correct things, nobody seemed to care. It took him a long time to get the company to deliver the phone he’d actually bought. When they eventually did, he vowed never to buy from them again.

Customers are lost through experiences like this.

It doesn’t matter how good certain teams in your business are, without consistency across the four touch points, you’ll always hemorrhage customers and revenue. This is where Customer Relationship Management comes in.

CRM gives you this consistency. A good, functioning CRM system provides great customer experience – right across your business. And because customers have a good relationship with you, you’ll be able to keep hold of them. This creates up-selling and cross-selling opportunities. Selling to current customers is far easier than attracting new ones.

Great customer relationship management doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a journey. But it’s a journey every company needs to be on.

Let us help you

At The CRM Team, we are experts on this journey. Whatever stage you have reached, we can assist you to get to the next one. See which stage you are at.

Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team

No Results Found

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.

Discover More Stories

10 Reasons Why We Use Dynamics 365 on the Microsoft Cloud

10 Reasons Why We Use Dynamics 365 on the Microsoft Cloud

Dynamics 365, Dynamics and Power Platform

10 Reasons Why We Use Dynamics 365 on the Microsoft Cloud

Here’s ten reasons why we’ve chosen to go with Microsoft Dynamics 365 on the Microsoft Cloud:

 

1. Higher Security

The level of data-security that Microsoft provide is far higher than many companies can afford to provide by themselves, and it is all included in the price, taking that worry away from you.

2. Less Hassle

Upgrades, maintenance, and system administration are all managed at Microsoft. This means you won’t need to spend time or energy managing a dedicated IT department or contractors when servers go down or software updates mandate a system tweak.

3. Lower Costs

Because there is not a big hardware install, your capital expenditure is much lower. So you benefit from better cash flow and greater flexibility, which reduces your overall costs.

4. Greater Flexibility

You can add or remove users as your business requires them. So short-term projects become cost-effective, because you only pay for additional license fees for the duration of the project. And as your business grows, so does Microsoft Dynamics 365. Because it can run 100,000 users concurrently, Dynamics 365 will never cap your growth.

5. Quicker Return

Time is money, and with the on-premise set up being far more complex, you will get a much quicker return in your business if you opt for an online system. The online system can be installed in a day and your business can be running it at its max in a matter of weeks, meaning you’ll quickly see a meaningful return on your investment.

6. Assistance Wherever You Are

Wherever your company expands to you’ll find that there’ll always be a Microsoft partner proficient in Dynamics 365 nearby. This means that help or advice will never be far away. With Microsoft Dynamics 365 currently operating in 40 countries in 41 different languages, it’s truly a global product.

7. Greater Access

With the world becoming more mobile, it’s essential that everyone in your business can access information wherever they are. With Dynamics 365 you don’t even need a laptop as you can get full functionality via your tablet or even your cell phone (Android, iOS, or Windows).

8. Greater Cost Efficiency

You only pay for the users that are active on the system. In traditional deployments you purchase a number of licenses up front but with Dynamics 365, you can adjust what you pay according to the needs of your business. So the cost is mainly an operational cost, and only increases as your business does.

9. Guaranteed Uptime

Microsoft promise a 99.9% uptime or they will give you your money back. With multiple global data centres, you don’t need to worry about glitches or bugs, or even cyber attacks, as Microsoft has this covered, leaving you to focus on your core business.

10. Strict Data Protection

Because we care about your data, if you go with us, we’ll place your data in centres in Europe, where the strict European laws ensure that your data remains your own. In contrast, if you house your data yourself, you come under the data protection laws of the country that you reside in.

If you are looking for a fully connected system so you can focus on your business, view Microsoft Dynamics 365 here!

Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team

 

No Results Found

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.

Discover More Stories

Read Our Blog

What is the Minimum Viable Product?

What is the Minimum Viable Product?

Thought Leadership

What is the Minimum Viable Product?

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a commonly misunderstood term. This video is adapted from Crisp’s blog by Henrik Kniberg explaining his, now famous, MVP drawing. His drawing shows up all over the place, in articles and presentations, even in a book (Jeff Patton’s “User Story Mapping”).

 

Many state that the drawing really captures the essence of iterative and incremental development, lean startup, and MVP (minimum viable product). However, some misinterpret it, which is quite natural when you take a picture out of its original context. Some criticize it for oversimplifying things, which is true. The picture is a metaphor. That’s why we’ve made this video to put the picture in its true context. Enjoy.

Want to find out more?

Check out how our implementation process makes use of the minimal viable product.

Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team

No Results Found

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.

Discover More Stories

Read Our Blog

Delivering projects on time, on budget, at a profit.

Delivering projects on time, on budget, at a profit.

Dynamics and Power Platform

Delivering projects on time, on budget, at a profit.

Professional Service Automation.
$1.5 trillion USD! In 2012 that was what the Professional Service industry was worth in just the US alone. It’s a huge industry that’s dependant on a company’s ability to sell people’s time. Auditors, lawyers, engineers, architects, management consultants, all do this.

 

This is very manageable if you are a few consultants, but when you run complex projects, with many professionals required at different stages, most firms opt for a fully integrated Professional Services Automation System. A system like this can be the difference between firms growing and firms staying still. Small efficiency gains can result in big profits.

The global research organisation, Service Performance Insight (SPI), backs this up. Data from their 2016 report: PS Maturity Benchmark, taken from 257 organisations (minimum of 100 employees, average employee size 1,315) showed that companies with a Professional Service Automation Solution achieved 26% more profits than those that didn’t. When this was combined with a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Solution profits increased by 44% compared to those professional service organisations with neither.

We at The CRM Team love to help companies increase their profits. We sell a Professional Service Automation Solution built by Microsoft, called Project Service. It’s a complete system for project sales, resourcing, delivery and billing. We love it. See if it could help you increase your profitability by watching the two-minute overview video above.

You also might like to read our article looking at its features.

Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team

 

No Results Found

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.

Looking for more of the latest headlines?

Discover More Stories

5 reasons why Agile is better than Waterfall

5 reasons why Agile is better than Waterfall

Thought Leadership

5 reasons why Agile is better than Waterfall

Waterfall methodology used to be the way all IT deployments were done. It worked, was reliable and suited IT professionals. But then the Agile revolution happened. In a changing world, speed and the agility now matter to customers. They no longer can afford to be locked into long IT projects that, once set in motion, can’t be changed or adjusted. At The CRM Team, we joined the Agile revolution, and it’s now the only implementation method that we use. It’s better for our customers, and that means it’s better for all of us. In the realm of CRM deployments, here are 5 reasons why we believe Agile is better than Waterfall.

 

1. Less prone to error

Waterfall relies heavily on initial requirements. However, if these requirements aren’t documented precisely, or there was a misunderstanding around the detail of what the customer wanted, it makes things very difficult. Not so with Agile – requirements are checked and confirmed throughout the project.

 

2. More flexible

Once a step has been completed in Waterfall, it’s difficult to go back and make changes. In contrast, Agile builds a working version of the whole project (an MVP) so the customer can shape how it’s built. Seeing a working version early on in the project allows the customer to say ‘I like this, but I don’t like that’, and so shape the product according to their requirements. This is harder to do with Waterfall because the customer has to outline all their preferences upfront, without seeing a working version.

 

3. More predictable end product

With Waterfall, the product is mainly tested at the end of the project. If the customer’s needs weren’t captured well initially or they have changed since the start of the project, testing may come too late in the cycle to make big adjustments. The customer then has to find extra budget to get the product they now need. With Agile, testing happens regularly through the whole process, so the customer periodically checks that the product is what they envisioned. This also makes it more likely that the project will finish on time, and on budget.

 

4. More open to changes/additions

Waterfall isn’t geared to take into account a customer’s evolving needs. If business processes change during the project Waterfall isn’t set up to adapt to this. Often a client feels locked into a project that no longer meets the current business need. In contrast, Agile not only has the ability to adapt to changing needs, but it expects them and plans for them.

 

5. More customer involvement

Agile sees the customer as part of the implementation team and includes them at each part of the process. In contrast, Waterfall tends to spend a lot of time with the customer at the start, trying to document all the perceived requirements. But once this has happened, the implementation team usually take over.

Want to find out more? See our approach to CRM implementation.

Don’t miss more articles by The CRM Team

 

No Results Found

The page you requested could not be found. Try refining your search, or use the navigation above to locate the post.

Discover More Stories

Read Our Blog