Review the sales lifecycle
The goal of any sales organization is to identify prospects and turn them into revenue. For example, how do you take someone you met at an event and turn them into a customer? This process is referred to as a sales lifecycle.
A typical sales lifecycle might resemble the following image:
To assist sales lifecycle management, many organizations use processes that guide sellers throughout the entire sales lifecycle. A sales process ensures that everyone is following the appropriate procedures.
The image below an example what a sales lifecycle might look like from beginning to end:
As you can see in the image, different sales record types correspond to different stages in the sales process.
- Qualify: A potential lead is identified and qualified.
- Develop: An opportunity is created. Other details such as the products and services they are interested in, estimated revenue, and timelines are added to the opportunity.
- Propose: A quote is added to the opportunity and formally presented to the customer.
- Close: The customer agrees to the quote and an order is generated.
- Fulfill: After the order is fulfilled, an invoice is generated to bill the customer.
Dynamics 365 Sales assists organizations with managing their sales lifecycle. In most organizations, this lifecycle begins with leads. Let’s examine how Dynamics 365 Sales helps sellers create, manage and qualify sales leads.
Dynamics 365 Sales provides a wide and powerful array of tools to help you take control of the entire sales process by automating common tasks, delivering insights, and providing personalized recommendations based on how you work. You can easily identify which customers or sales leads to focus on and take the most appropriate actions based on your organization’s sales methodology. Dynamics 365 Sales provides many multiple features out-of-the-box that support sales functions for organizations of all sizes and is designed in such a way that it can be easily configured to support an organization’s specific or changing needs.
Dynamics 365 Sales delivers many of the out-of-the-box features to support sales functions, such as lead qualification and sales opportunity management to build and manage your pipeline. These tools can be easily configured to support your sales organization’s unique or changing needs. This ensures that your organization can use modern selling tools and technology with your proven sales practices.
As you identify sales opportunities and qualify leads, Dynamics 365 Sales provides multiple tools that can be used to help with the lead qualification process.
- Artificial intelligence tools: Tools, such as the business card scanner, allow you to quickly capture important information and input it into Dynamics 365 Sales or Power Apps while in the field. This helps you quickly identify if there is a past relationship with this customer and determine what the next course of action should be.
- Tailorable business process flows: Guides sellers through each stage of your organization’s sales lifecycle process. Not only does this help to onboard new sellers, but it ensures that all your sellers know exactly what is required during each stage in the process and are equipped with the necessary data and tools to execute it.
- Assistant: Surfaces important information in the context of what you are doing now, such as providing reminders of upcoming activities related to a sales lead or notifying you when customers are doing something that could impact a potential deal.
- Timeline: Surfaces any related communication directly on the records form. This allows you to easily see all relevant communication from a single point. In addition, you can quickly generate communication such as phone calls, emails, and appointments, as well as interact with team members directly from the prospects record.
In addition to lead and opportunity management capabilities, Dynamics 365 Sales makes it easy to generate and deliver quotes to customers, as well as turn those quotes into sales orders and invoices. Dynamics 365 Sales can act as a standalone sales order processing solution, or it can be integrated with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications, such as Dynamics 365 ERP applications.
Dynamics 365 Sales makes winning deals easier by providing multiple sales delivery and collaboration tools such as:
- Embedded Office 365 Tools: With embedded tools like Microsoft Excel and Word, you can use tools that you use every day to help build details, analyze deal details, and communicate with customers.
- Microsoft Teams Integration: Engage Subject Matter Experts (SME) and collaborate with colleagues across business functions and geographies. You can access Dynamics 365 data, such as records and views directly from within a Team workspace, providing access to all of Microsoft Teams collaboration abilities.
- Product Catalog: With a dedicated product catalog that can function stand alone or be integrated with ERP applications, such as Dynamics 365 ERP applications, you can quickly build sales quotes by adding products directly from the product catalog. Automated pricing options can update pricing details automatically.
- Customized Pricing and Discounting: With multiple price lists, you can attach the most appropriate pricing based on who the customer is, current promotions, or specific sales scenario.
- Product Families: Product families extend the product catalog functionality even more by providing a central area to define common properties such, as sizing and coloring options, for all products in a family. Products can be linked together to provide greater support in common sales scenarios such as cross selling, product substitution, or upselling.
- Power Platform: Execute business processes and speed up daily activities such as approval processes across line of business applications with automation powered by Microsoft Power Automate. This provides you with a richer overall experience and simplified execution of business tasks, by embedding automation of these items directly into Dynamics 365 forms.
- SharePoint & OneDrive Integration: Use the document storage and versioning capabilities of SharePoint and OneDrive for business to help with document collaboration. This lets you easily see who is working on documents, and what changes are being made. It also provides you deeper insights to see what documents customers are accessing when you use them to store shared attachments.
- Quote Management: Easily generate quotes directly from details stored in a sales opportunity. You can manage the entire sales negotiation process with easy quote revisions and quote delivery using familiar formats, such as Microsoft Word documents or PDFs.
- Sales Orders: Sales orders can be created directly from Quotes when deals move forward. With Sales automation, related supply chain items can be opened or closed as the attached quote record is also closed.
- Invoices: Invoices can be created from fulfilled sales orders, and the status of the invoice is tracked as the invoice is paid by the customer.
Why choose Dynamics 365 Sales?
- Scalability: Dynamics 365 Sales is a scalable solution that can grow with your business. Whether you are a small business or a large enterprise, Dynamics 365 Sales can be customized to meet your specific needs.
- Integration: Dynamics 365 Sales integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Power BI, and SharePoint. This provides your team with a complete suite of tools for collaboration and productivity.
- Cloud-based: Dynamics 365 Sales is a cloud-based solution, which means that your team can access customer information, manage leads, and close deals from anywhere.
- Security: Dynamics 365 Sales provides enterprise-grade security, ensuring that your customer data is protected at all times.
- Customization: Dynamics 365 Sales is highly customizable, allowing you to tailor the platform to meet your specific business needs.
In conclusion, Dynamics 365 Sales is a powerful CRM software that provides businesses with the tools they need to increase sales productivity, streamline sales processes, and improve customer engagement. With its robust features, benefits, and customization options, Dynamics 365 Sales can help your business grow and succeed. Contact us today to learn more about how Dynamics 365 Sales can benefit your business.
Watch this demonstration video of the Dynamics 365 Sales business scenario.
Whether you’re a small business looking to grow or a large enterprise seeking to streamline your sales processes, Dynamics 365 Sales has everything you need to succeed. With its advanced features, benefits, and customization options, Dynamics 365 Sales is the ultimate CRM solution for businesses of all sizes.
Don’t let outdated sales processes hold your business back. Contact us today to learn more about how Dynamics 365 Sales can benefit your business and help you achieve your sales goals.