Companies experience several challenges in their marketing and sales areas that could affect factors like their budget, increased competition, building trust, closing deals, and countless aspects that, if not handled properly, can directly impact the business results. Thinking about these demanding operations, Microsoft delivers Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing, two comprehensive business applications that share the same goal: to drive sales and revenue growth effortlessly.
Although each Microsoft solution is made for their specific approach, combined, they will simplify results tracking without data silos. Both Sales and Marketing help you capture, store, and use different data types in the sales flow, including the primary sales initiative, potential follow-up activity, and additional sales.
Let’s start with their differences.
This solution helps salespeople strengthen their customer relationships and sales process, make better decisions based on insights, and close deals faster. As mentioned in our previous blog about the 6 powerful capabilities of a sales management system, Dynamics 365 Sales streamlines the sales data analysis, collection, and distribution while you can easily keep track of your contacts and nurture sales from lead to order. Take a look at the business process for sales in the process flow below:
Capture customer interactions, get automatic call transcriptions, evaluate the content, and deliver intelligent insights.
Showcase the value with selected Dynamics 365 Sales Premium enhanced features, such as sales accelerator, predictive scoring, and conversation intelligence.
Get revenue forecast predictions, comprehensive views, and insights into your sales team’s pipeline.
Empower your sellers’ productivity and collaboration by working from anywhere.
Leverage predictive relationship intelligence, LinkedIn data, and engagement signals to strengthen customer relationships.
Close more deals with process automation and predictive analytics within a single workspace.
Create personalized marketing campaigns, activities, and experiences to get more customers while building business relationships with potential customers while reaching wider audiences. Dynamics 365 Marketing provides these valuable activities to enhance and increase your sales opportunities while bolstering marketing capabilities. Take a look at the business process for marketing in the process flow below:
Create engaging campaigns collaborating between departments, people, and apps.
Create real-time event-based journey orchestration while facilitating moment-based marketing for any business scenario.
Customize interactions through the customer journey harnessing the power of data and AI.
Within Sales and Marketing, the opportunities to turn potential customers into actual customers are abundant. For instance, the possibility of getting a prospective customer can happen at events, through mailing campaigns, organic or paid social media pieces, word of mouth, and so on.
Let me exemplify the flow of entity relationships with the following graphic:
The Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing collaboration will simplify how you get, store, and use several data types in the sales flow. However, your sales and marketing employees must team up and stop working in silos to help your organization understand your clients while strengthening their loyalty. The idea is to align operations across your business departments to streamline cooperation digitally. This improved client engagement leads your business to monitor the client’s journey from start to finish thoroughly while you can:
* Bewsher, D. (2016). The Secret to Account-Based Marketing Success. MarketingProfs. www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/2016/29174/the-secret-to-account-based-marketing-success
It’s worth noting that you can easily combine both solutions since they’re based on the same platform. However, Sales and Marketing are not the only apps that can be aligned; you can connect more Dynamics 365 solutions or compatible third-party apps to simplify operations. For instance, integrating Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management can also facilitate the creation of several campaigns (mailing, telemarketing, social media, etc.) to expand your customer potential. These campaigns target your contacts for leads, prospects, and customers to ease each progress and receive positive responses, leading to an effortless sales process with the potential recipients that positively interacted with each campaign.
