Everyone knows that if you put garbage leads or info into your CRM, you’ll have garbage on the back end, too. What about if you put magic in, though? Shouldn’t you get magic out? Not necessarily. 

Here are some ways things can go off the rails during the sales process in D365, and how you can avoid them entirely.

A clearly canned RFP response

D365 Sales enables you to quickly respond to any RFP you get. Most every tool you need is embedded in the platform, and you can email a prospect, send a product PDF, and more without having to leave the system.

But, as with any other communication in life, it’s not just what you say, but how you say it. If you have a templated response in your CRM that you use for every prospect inquiry, it’ll show. Sometimes, this may not matter. Some businesses are churn-and-burn, all about volume, and a canned reply may be enough.

However, most times, it does matter. We’re living in an age when personalized service is not an “extra” but an expectation. You need to ensure most every RFP response you send is in your prospect’s tone of voice, that it captures how they themselves would detail the solution they’re RFP’ing, that it speaks to them and them alone. (Not sure how to write a killer RFP response? Check out this free whitepaper.)

Defects in the details

When a rep in your home office sends out a sales quote, are they working off the same game plan as a rep in a satellite office? The same pricing and discount structures? The same product configurations, bundles and upsells?

Let’s be honest: most sales reps won’t regularly return to Dynamics for the latest pricing and product info. Oftentimes, they’ll be working off a spreadsheet or some other doc they have stored locally — a doc which is invariably out of date.

The fix for this is easy when you add CPQ to Dynamics. A configure, price, quote solution consolidates product and pricing configuration, and makes adding that info to quotes as easy as drag and drop. So it’s 1) easy for your reps (as it’s built-in to their quote building process) and 2) it’s better for your business as it ensures reps are only presenting accurate pricing and optimal product configurations.

A magical opportunity, a “garbage-ical” quote

We let the cat out of the bag: CPQ is how you ensure you’re making the most of every RFP response. If you’re sending quotes using a combination of Word and/or/Excel and/or Outlook and/or Dynamics, you’re not doing all you can to make the most of any given sales quoting opportunity.

Yes, those tools, in tandem, will get the job done, but it will take longer and do little to improve the quality of your quotes themselves, nor of the overall sales quoting process. You could have an absolutely magical sales opportunity torpedoed by a “garbage-ical” quote.

CPQ quickly makes every sales proposal more professional in its appearance, more accurate in its content, and more easy to track (did we mention the sales quote tracking tools built in to CPQ?).

The almost-best part is that it’s perhaps one of the most affordable value-adds for Dynamics. For as little as $2 a day, you can extend Dynamics with a killer CPQ solution. The actual best part is that it ensures every magical sales opportunity you bring in on the front-end gets a magical quote on the back-end. Magic in, magic out.