Businesses of every size – SMBs to enterprises – use a CRM solution to accelerate and automate interactions with clients and prospects. Among the most popular of these is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. A feature-rich solution, it’s a powerful system that keeps sales teams organized, makes customer information accurate and easily accessible, and helps drive revenue.
That’s not to say it does everything. Improvements can be made in sales process efficiency and the ability to deliver accurate quotes quickly, thereby reducing the sales cycle length.
Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) software steps in here to fill the gap. Integrating with Dynamics 365 Sales can make your sales team more efficient and effective, selling more in less time.
CPQ is the perfect complement for CRM. Let’s find out why that is so.
3 Benefits Gained When Integrating CPQ with Dynamics 365 CRM
By integrating a CPQ solution with your CRM, you help your sales team to reach new levels of productivity and customer responsiveness. Here are three benefits:
1. Seamless Proposals, Quotes, and Contracts
Dynamics 365 Sales provides a centralized place to manage customer information, assess leads, and ensure opportunities aren’t missed. However, in many businesses, other parts of the sales cycle, such as quoting, price optimization, content management, and sales playbooks, are handled by other standalone applications.
For example, Microsoft Word and Excel documents are a common medium of information exchange, even internally, bringing headaches such as multiple document versions and the possibility that inaccurate data flows back to the CRM. By contrast, a modern CPQ solution is integrated into Dynamics 365 Sales, eliminating those challenges and providing a streamlined sales process, from the first call through product configuration, pricing, and quote generation.
Dynamics 365 Sales is well-known for automating many aspects of your workflow, including automated data processing, tracking, and action procedures. But why should intelligent automation only carry you halfway through the pipeline? CPQ picks up where CRM leaves off; it provides the necessary functionality to fill in those gaps.
As an example, imagine that your salespeople could send a proposal to a prospect the same day… or even in a matter of minutes. On receiving an organized, accurate quote, customer confidence increases greatly, and they feel the representative understands their needs. Unnecessary bottlenecks are eliminated, and opportunities turn into sales.
2. Dynamics 365 and CPQ Produces Faster Sales Cycles
It’s been proven that CPQ solutions help companies get through the sales cycle faster while simultaneously delivering a superior customer experience. When it is easy for salespeople to create a proposal, they can quickly send a quote, capitalizing on the desire to make a purchase and reducing lost opportunities due to indecision. When integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales, CPQ becomes a natural, optimized part of their workflow.
Fewer errors and delays. Pairing Dynamics 365 Sales with other standalone applications has some disadvantages. For one, the potential for error in data entry and application use is much higher. Lost productivity is another factor, as sales professionals search for pricing information and sales content they need in various places because they’re not in an integrated workflow.
By contrast, a CPQ solution integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales fits like a glove, becoming a natural progression of the sales process. Automation reduces errors and empowers salespeople to create proposals, contracts, and other materials with ease, as if “pulling them out of a hat.”
Giving clients and prospects the information they want – when they want it – is a crucial part of landing the sale.
Sales managers must understand this point: If you already have a CRM solution in place, adding a separate application will create confusion – even resistance – among users. Some have difficulty navigating two distinct user interfaces. Others think the current system works well and don’t want to invest the time to learn another paradigm.
Conversely, an integrated CPQ solution drastically reduces the end-user learning curve. And it provides a vehicle to introduce other best practices, such asguided selling with a sales playbook.
If it’s easy for your representatives, and they have greater success by using it, they become more motivated to generate revenue – which adds a great deal to your bottom line.
CPQ/CRM Integration = A More Efficient and Stronger Sales Team
Here’s the takeaway: CPQ is the perfect complement for Dynamics CRM, making your sales team more efficient and productive. Like chocolate and peanut butter, they’re wonderful by themselves, but irresistible together.
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