When consumers buy goods and services online, these days, there are usually no people involved at all in the sales transaction. From a business perspective, that means you’ll need to ensure the process from online advertising to ordering and delivery is as seamless as possible.
There’s a fantastic array of cost-effective technology designed to automate all of this. But that said, even with these huge advances in technology, the more complex sales still require systems capable of supporting people to maximise their success.
Here’s what key sales solution capabilities to look out for when sales are more complex and people need to be involved.
Despite changes in the business landscape, it’s fascinating to see how many companies still get by with Excel and Outlook when it comes to managing their sales reporting and contact management. Not only does this impact productivity, data accuracy and visibility but it gives competitors a chance to get ahead.
Why aren’t all businesses digitising?
In many cases, it’s not the software and its capabilities that restrict a business these days. It’s the ability of the business to understand the possibilities offered by technology advances and their willingness to implement such advances.
Today’s customer engagement software can give companies a real helping hand. Take Microsoft Dynamics 365 (D365) Customer Engagement, for example. The solution is a popular option for the following reasons:
Microsoft is a leader for Sales Force Automation according to Forrester, Gartner and most of the other analysts. The software can support:
LinkedIn now offers full two-way integration with the Dynamics platform. Here’s how:
Salespeople live in Outlook and use this from their phone, tablet and laptop. Microsoft has ensured the D365 Sales application looks and runs seamlessly with Outlook across all of these platforms.
Another great benefit is the Application for Outlook doesn’t require any installation (or maintenance). Once D365 is enabled for a user, that user has full seamless integration and tracking between communications with a contact in Outlook and D365.
D365 Sales comes with an AI feature that analyses the interactions your business is having with customers. For example, the Azure services analyse the emails in your exchange server. This can tell you the depth of conversations which can sometimes give you conversational routes into your client that you may not have known existed.
And it gets better! This feature requires very little work to set up as the AI intelligence is already there. You just switch it on and then use the D365 Sales functionality across your business.
Without a doubt, Microsoft’s PowerBI is the most powerful analytical reporting and dashboarding tool we’ve ever seen.
You can very easily display your sales information inside PowerBI and PowerBI dashboards and charts directly inside D365. Microsoft has created a full sales dashboard that you can use immediately. If needed, you can change this to suit whatever you need.
In our experience, salespeople often struggle to adopt an automated sales support solution such as those supplied by Microsoft, Salesforce and others.
Adoption of D365 Sales should include the adoption of the critical LinkedIn integrated functions, a fully unified Outlook to Dynamics approach, Sales Insights and PowerBI-based management reporting. Alongside the quality of a product, people will still be one of, if not the most important factors in selling successfully.
While a lot of businesses implement sales force automation (SFA) purely to deliver improvements in management reporting, D365 for Sales delivers so much more than that. It’s a platform that can dramatically improve the ability for sales to find leads, manage contacts, increase sales velocity and conversion rates.
It’s critical that the salesperson can see the value this solution can bring to them, as well as the wider value it can bring to the business. For those reasons, the solution must be easy to use and dovetailed into their daily lives.
Targets drive behaviour and we all know most salespeople focus on their ability to hit their sales targets!
With all these extra capabilities, the business will benefit from increased sales velocity and conversion, and much better reporting and accuracy of the sales pipeline.
Learn more about the capabilities of the Customer Engagement platform by downloading our factsheet below.