Looking for a CRM solution in 2020? Microsoft have put a CRM deal on the table (until June)

Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sales and/or Customer Service, is what all know today as Microsoft’s CRM offering. 

Sales and Customer Service Apps come in Professional and Enterprise versions. So, you can pick and choose how comprehensive you want your base solution to be. There are plenty of differences between the two, which continuously evolve from Microsoft (I sense another blog post coming too).

Back to this blog, the Professional level is Microsoft’s introductory offering while Enterprise has everything Microsoft can offer in their base solution.

You can start with Professional and move up to Enterprise in time (if you need to). What is cool too, is that you can also take Sales at Professional level and Customer Service at Enterprise level, or vice versa.

I’m going to focus on Sales Professional for the remainder of this blog (which is where Microsoft currently have an offer available).

Sales Professional offers core functionality including:

• Accounts & Contacts
• Marketing Campaigns
• Marketing Lists
• Lead Management
• Quotes
• Opportunities

You also get the ability to tailor (to a level) the system to meet your needs as a business. With Outlook integration available too, Sales Professional fundamentally allows a sales and customer service operative to manage accounts and revenue opportunities in a central place and understand the current position you are in with every account.

It’s the same old situation where your data should be central, and accessible by all. Insights into a client along with prospects should be central.

However, I still find it surprising that some organisations still don’t think a central customer (and prospect) management solution is required. Whether a simple Power App to manage account and contact records, a base CRM professional solution or the full Enterprise offering, one of them would surely not only help with visibility, but also give the opportunity to be ‘proactive’ opposed to reactive.

Whilst I now lead a CRM team, I’ve been a user for nearly a decade, and it offers insight to not only the customers I’ve worked with, it also provides a picture as to how the whole business is operating.

Without a CRM can you, quickly, easily, from a central source…

1. Find when you last spoke to a customer/prospect? And know what it was about?
2. Understand what revenue opportunities you have won and lost in the last 12 months with a client? And why?
3. See what your account plans are per customer?
4. See what your next set of activities and appointments should be with a client?

Your memory, your inbox, your notebook is not a CRM solution, nor does it provide insight to others in your business when they need it. People who fear that a CRM solution exposes output for the business should think differently, it should be there to aid them so the rest of the business can support them and be more successful. Also, it stops the constant ‘can you just let me know where we are at with XXX’ questions that I’m sure occur frequently.

I haven’t even touched on Customer Service functionality that you can take advantage of, however I’m an advocate of keep an implementation simple and build on it over time.

Therefore, if you don’t use a CRM tool today, or the introductory tools (Zoho, Hubspot etc.) aren’t cutting the mustard, then why not start with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Professional?

Microsoft host the Sales Professional solution for you and provide a user license all for £49 per user per month. But what’s even better is that through until 30th June 2020, you can get 25% off the RRP license, if you are a brand new customer of Sales Professional, you have a minimum of 10 users (max. of 75) and you use Office 365. You can also get this offer locked in for up to 3 years.

So you are paying less than £40 a month for one of the best-in-class CRM solutions in the market, and if you evolve and you need Enterprise functionality in the future, you won't have to start all over again. You can make the step up with Microsoft.

There are of course a number of terms and conditions that Microsoft put into their offers, which TecMan as a partner can go through with you.

What are you waiting for? Start, or take the next step on your CRM journey in 2020.