Microsoft is trumpeting their latest success with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online through Smead, a privately held company that recently cut its annual subscription costs by switching from Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The switch has also improved user adoption rates, employee collaboration, and quality of business intelligence. Naturally, the management at Smead has a bit of a spring in their step.
“Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is the best CRM solution in the cloud for us. In addition to offering a seamless experience across our systems, features such as customizable dashboards give our managers insight into accounts, sales and opportunities, which helps them make more-informed decisions,” Smead Systems Development Manager Daniel Hart said.
Smead was already using Microsoft products like Microsoft Office, Outlook, and SharePoint. This helped the integration of Dynamics CRM, as it is developed with special hooks into existing Microsoft products – most notably Microsoft Outlook. Some of those features include an integrated CRM ribbon (the new menu style in Windows 7 and newer versions of Office), role-tailored design, and user experience personalization. According to Hart, this made the transition extremely smooth.
“We worked directly with Microsoft and really appreciated the level of service it provided during the migration, in addition to the world-class training,” Hart said.
Understandably, Microsoft is eager to trumpet Smead’s success, implying that you should follow their lead.
“Customers like Smead are switching from Salesforce.com to Microsoft Dynamics CRM to increase productivity, collaboration and user adoption while reducing costs. We are committed to offering a familiar and flexible cloud solution that fits our customers' needs.” said Microsoft Dynamics CRM Product Management Group General Manager Brad Wilson.
Cutting costs is great, but you may not be completely sold on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online. The truth of the matter is that cloud solutions are not for early adopters anymore. As companies begin to migrate to low-cost systems like Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, this will create a gap in both economics and business intelligence, and that gap will continue to widen. Think of it this way: you may not want to deal with the unknowns in migrating to a new system, but your competitors might, leaving you on the wrong side of that gap.
Harvesting business intelligence isn’t the end of the line, either. There is a direct and looming economy based on business intelligence, and as products like Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Dynamics CRM make it easier to collect, collate, and analyze business information, its potential as a new revenue source will be clear. In sports terms – you don’t catch a ball by running to where it is, you run to where it’s going to land.
Companies like Smead are poised to catch that ball, and it’s going to land very soon. While cutting immediate costs is a nice-to-have, the true potential of the coming transition is something companies can’t do without.
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by CRM Software Blog Editors
