Microsoft’s latest customer relationship management system, Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015, as well as updates to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing services, will be made generally available later this year.
The new updates are designed to revolutionise the way sellers and marketers unite and collaborate by bringing outside-in insights to sales and marketing professionals so they can understand the impact of their campaigns. Salespeople will have the visibility to impact campaigns and targeting with unprecedented insight into marketing calendars and campaigns. The updates also enable marketers to more effectively plan and execute marketing campaigns and better track their impact, while strengthening synergies with the sales process.
“Unlike vendors that want to separate businesses by selling them countless different clouds and solutions, we have designed Microsoft Dynamics CRM to facilitate the kind of collaboration that businesses need to thrive and grow,” said Bob Stutz, corporate vice president, Microsoft Dynamics CRM. “This means that marketers and sellers can work more closely together to engage customers, bridging the chasm between marketing, sales and service to truly deliver end-to-end experiences that customers will love.”
To break down the silos between sales and marketing, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing – which will also be available in Japanese and Russian – introduces a Sales Collaboration Panel, which allows sellers to provide input into campaigns and targeting. The release also gives marketers the ability to streamline campaign creation and improve segmentation with graphical e-mail editing, A/B testing, integrated offers and approval workflows. Marketers can more effectively collaborate with the click-to-call feature in Lync and easily schedule and execute webinars as part of their marketing initiatives. Meanwhile, the new Interactive Marketing Calendar allows marketers to visualise and manage their end-to-end marketing plans.
In addition to providing salespeople with the ability to more effectively collaborate with marketing, the new release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides the ability to recommend products to up-sell and cross-sell across product families, improving their selling effectiveness. The new release enhances the Guided Sales Processes to help steer sellers toward desired outcomes and ensure the enforcement of business rules across all devices. New mobile sales capabilities across mobile platforms increase productivity with flexible RoleTailored dashboards and analytics, as well as personalised home pages.
According to Ray Wang, principal analyst, founder and chairman at Constellation Research: “Closing the gap between marketing and sales is required for a successful customer experience. Organisations need tools to track the customer interactions from marketing to sales and back, collaborate on leads and opportunities, and measure the metrics that matter to both sales and marketing.”
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