If it takes the average person 10 minutes to decide whether or not to buy a shirt (), then how long does it take the average business to pick out a CRM solution?
While most CRM solutions provide standard functionality like opportunity and campaign management, there's lots to consider when it comes down to which solution is best for your organization and your employees. There are a few things that you can zero-in on to make the process quicker and easier, such as native functionality, deployment flexibility, integration capabilities, and the user experience and efficiency it will bring to your business processes.
In many cases, these considerations reveal that is a superior choice to an alternative like Salesforce.com. Here are a few big factors to consider if you're evaluating CRM solutions:
1) Get more out of Office and other Microsoft technologies
As a Microsoft product, Dynamics gives you much more synergy with Office and other Microsoft technologies than Salesforce could ever achieve. to allow you to work right from within apps such as SharePoint, Yammer and Outlook.
In Outlook alone, you can continue to add leads and check off tasks while you deal with your emails and calendars. Compare that to Salesforce, which has only a modest plug-in for Outlook. If you already live in Office and the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem, Dynamics is the clear choice.
2) Better insights with configurable, role-based dashboards
In the age of Twitter and Slack, many workers (especially sales and marketers) now expect to be able to see the data they want, when they want it. Enterprise apps, like CRM solutions, have kept pace with sophisticated dashboards, but not all of them are created equal.
When it comes to data visualization, Dynamics has a decisive edge over Salesforce. It inherits security and data privileges, supports charts, lists and iFrame panels and taps into real-time data. Salesforce, in contrast, often needs to be manually refreshed and requires users to go to specialized pages to find their dashboards. Dynamics CRM enables users to easily create their own and share them across the organization.
3) You pick where and how to deploy it
One of the most distinctive things about Salesforce is its logo with a "no" symbol blocking out the word "software," which is meant to emphasis that the solution is SaaS (Software as a Service). Indeed, Salesforce is only available through the cloud, and this one-dimensionality can greatly limit its use cases.
With Dynamics CRM, you have options.
For example, your business may actually need the security or control that can only be achieved through an on-premises deployment. Or, you might prefer a hosted setup, under which an experienced service provider such as Turnkey maintains your CRM within a public or private cloud. With Dynamics CRM, the , or CRM Online if you prefer SaaS. You can get a CRM system that is right for your requirements and helps you achieve an optimal total cost of ownership.
4) The future
Microsoft has built the vision of streamlined business processes and integrated applications with its full ecosystem of business applications in the cloud. With the recent , the company has achieved its goal of one simplified platform to manage, integrate and run all your applications, across all your devices. Dynamics 365 introduces a common data model across Office 365, CRM, Financials and more, to enable true integration, seamless business processes and simplified IT management.
Dynamics CRM is readily built into this ecosystem, already sharing the common data foundation that will enable seamless application use. By choosing Dynamics CRM, you're positioning your organization to take advantage of the future of business applications and IT.
You can download a free eBook - - to learn how sales teams can be more efficient with integrated productivity tools.
5) More value for less cost
Salesforce is one of the most expensive CRM solutions available, even for its more basic offerings. When evaluating comparable offerings between Dynamics CRM and Salesforce (Dynamics CRM Online Professional vs. Salesforce Lightning Enterprise), Dynamics CRM offers a more robust CRM solution for about half the cost of Salesforce. In fact, Dynamics CRM now includes advanced, as a standard component at no extra cost.
Not to mention, the customization and deployment flexibility of Dynamics CRM makes it better-positioned to accommodate your future goals and changes to IT.
For an instant cost estimate of Dynamics CRM for your organization, feel free to use our
By Turnkey Technologies, Inc. - A national, award-winning Microsoft Dynamics CRM and ERP Partner based in St. Louis, Missouri.
