If you're in marketing, you can probably skip this article.
But if you're in sales and reliant on Dynamics to help close new business, take three minutes and read further.
Dynamics CRM, as many of us know, is often positioned as a classic "Swiss Army Knife" type of tool.
- Need to manage contacts? It can do that.
- Need to access contracts and business-critical documents? It can store them.
- Need to log calls and other customer interactions? Dynamics does it.
Here's the catch to a Swiss Army Knife (and solutions we might compare to it): would you really choose a Swiss Army Knife's Phillips head screwdriver over an actual Phillips head screwdriver? Would you use its saw over an actual saw? Would you use its toothpick... ever?
In the end, we use it mostly as a knife, and as a handy sub when we can't access the tools we actually want to use.
And in the end, we use Dynamics mostly to manage relationships, not to necessarily create the emails or phone scripts that kick off that relationship (though we might store them in there after), nor do we (and nor should we) lean on Dynamics to create, send, and track the sales proposals that close that relationship.
Because there's a better tool for that, one that integrates with your Dynamics system: configure, price, quote software; a.k.a., CPQ.
Quote building in Dynamics
We're not saying you or your customers can't build a passable sales quote with what comes in a standard Dynamics deployment: you absolutely can. But you can build a better proposal with .
A CPQ solution comes with professionally designed sales proposal templates that a rep can use and re-use (i.e., optimize) time and time again. It puts the skills of a proposal designer into a rep's hands.
No more Excel spreadsheets or Word docs. Now, every quote every rep sends can look as professional as you know you, your team, and your overall business actually are.
Dynamic product and pricing configuration
In this case, "dynamic" means live, characterized by ongoing change or activity; in web dev terms, the opposite of "static."
With CPQ added to Dynamics, your entire catalog of products and pricing -- including bundles, upsells, and upgrades -- becomes dynamic. Reps just point and click to add the latest and greatest to their sales quotes.
And as it's centrally administered, product and pricing configurations can be optimized often (and in real-time), and you can create and manage discount structures unique to each sales rep. Which means every rep is only able to offer optimal products with optimal pricing to your customers.
Quote tracking in Dynamics
Go past "sent" and "signed" and track sales proposals at the most granular level with CPQ. Tracking every interaction, every reply, every edit, every phone call that turns a sent proposal into a signed one enables you to create a process you can share across your entire organization.
Dynamics has some excellent lead tracking tools, but, like every CRM system, it has essentially 30,000 foot overview quote tracking tools.
Which is not its fault! To return to our Swiss Army Knife metaphor, Dynamics does a lot of things really well, but tracking quotes in granular detail is not the sharpest tool in its shed.
Want to know how to extend the power of your Dynamics offer with CPQ? Get in touch.
