4 Ways to Transform Your Business with a Modern CRM Solution

In the last few years, automation has become more than a luxury for keeping up with customer expectations, it's a necessity. Our digital world simply provides too many avenues for sales and marketing teams to focus on manually. Even large firms that had seemingly perfected their processes for working with legacy CRM solutions have seen the light and upgraded to more modern, streamlined solutions. There are many benefits to doing so, not least of which is immense savings in staff time and money.

Tracking your customer information without CRM makes doing business painfully slow and inefficient. Getting the customer information you need, when you need it, might require pulling data from many different sources, which is time-consuming and error-prone. Moreover, the data is neither centralized nor updated according to a firm standard.

More than a contact management system, here are 4 fundamental, yet hugely impactful, transformations that Microsoft Dynamics CRM can bring to improve business performance.

1. Get a clean, holistic view of your business

You'll be surprised what you've been missing out on. When you track your leads and customer info in Excel, you'll see lots of data, but perhaps not the state of the business as a whole. In contrast, Dynamics CRM gives you access to real-time business intelligence and personalized dashboards, with virtually endless ways to slice and visualize your data. This means that you can see not only where your company has been, but where it's going and what you can do to reach your goals.

In addition to a clean view of your business, your sales, marketing and service processes are all consolidated into one solution and data source, so each department works with the others' data and improves their own effectiveness.

2. Acquire better-quality data

CRM provides the customizable framework for capturing and accessing your front office information (sales, marketing and service). As a result, it can include more fields to capture a greater variety of information than you initially included in your custom spreadsheets. It also creates consistency throughout your data with formatting options like character restrictions, drop down lists, and lookup fields.

Data accuracy has long been a top concern for CRM users, and accuracy suffers greatly if the application is too difficult to use. Dynamics CRM excels here (no pun intended) with its innovative user interface, familiar Microsoft look and feel, integration with Office 365, and guided business processes.

Simply put, Dynamics CRM helps your data tell a story and provide context for your front office workforce.

3. Future-proof your sales operations

The process of selling to enterprises has changed dramatically over the past decade, with the bulk of all potential leads doing extensive product research (largely on the internet) before even contacting the seller. In this environment, sellers - and the CRM tools they depend upon - have to evolve. This is already happening. For instance, Microsoft has moved to bake machine learning and artificial intelligence into the upcoming releases for Dynamics CRM, Dynamics 365 and Office 365. These innovations can provide an additional "brain" to organizations that can help improve productivity, without requiring much, if any, work on the organization's part.

But aside from keeping up with modern customer expectations, consider CRM for its value in onboarding new salespeople and formalizing your best practices. Rather than teaching every new employee the steps in selling your product/service to your industry's decision-makers, these stages can be configured and built into the processes of Dynamics CRM to provide rules, selling suggestions and next-step guidance for sales reps.

To learn how to keep up with modern customer expectations, download the eBook: Sink or Sell - Your Guide to Modern Sales Survival.

4. Integrate software that suits your organization

Dynamics CRM integrates seamlessly with Office 365, as well as most financial solutions and a complete network of add-on applications. Individual applications from various parts of the organization can be integrated with Dynamics CRM to streamline business processes from a single data source.

Have questions about Microsoft Dynamics CRM? Ask us! We're here to help build your CRM vision.

For an instant cost estimate of Dynamics CRM for your organization, try our free CRM Quick Quote Tool.

By Turnkey Technologies, Inc. - A national, award-winning Microsoft Dynamics CRM and ERP Partner based in St. Louis, Missouri.