Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq “MSFT”) on Tuesday announced that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015, as well as updates to its Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing services, will be generally available in the fourth quarter of 2014.
The new updates revolutionize the way sellers and marketers unite and collaborate by bringing outside-in insights to sales and marketing professionals so they can understand the impact of their campaigns to customers, giving them more personalized experiences. Salespeople now have the visibility to impact campaigns and targeting with unprecedented insight into marketing calendars and campaigns. The updates also enable marketers to more effectively plan and execute marketing campaigns and better track their impact, while strengthening synergies with the sales process. Microsoft Dynamics CRM continues to deepen its interoperability with Microsoft’s leading productivity applications, including Microsoft Office 365, Yammer, Lync, Skype, SharePoint and Power BI for Office 365.
According to Ray Wang, principal analyst, founder and chairman at Constellation Research Inc., “Closing the gap between marketing and sales is required for a successful customer experience. Organizations need tools to track the customer interactions from marketing to sales and back, collaborate on leads and opportunities, and measure the metrics that matter to both sales and marketing.”
“Unlike vendors that want to separate businesses by selling them countless different clouds and solutions, we have designed Microsoft Dynamics CRM to facilitate the kind of collaboration that businesses need to thrive and grow,” said Bob Stutz, corporate vice president, Microsoft Dynamics CRM. “This means that marketers and sellers can work more closely together to engage customers, bridging the chasm between marketing, sales and service to truly deliver end-to-end experiences that customers will love.”
Uniting marketing and sales
To break down the silos between sales and marketing, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing introduces the new Sales Collaboration Panel, which allows sellers to provide input into campaigns and targeting. The release also gives marketers the ability to streamline campaign creation and improve segmentation with graphical email editing, A/B testing, integrated offers and approval workflows. The new Email editor provides marketers with the ability to select from pre-defined templates or create an Email from scratch using an interactive drag and drop build process or an advanced editor for the CSS & HTML experts
Marketers can more effectively collaborate with the click-to-call feature in Lync and easily schedule and execute webinars as part of their marketing initiatives. The new Interactive Marketing Calendar allows marketers to visualize and manage their end-to-end marketing plans. Microsoft Dynamics Marketing will also be available in Japanese and Russian.
In addition to providing salespeople with the ability to more effectively collaborate with marketing, the new release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides the ability to recommend products to up-sell and cross-sell across product families, improving their selling effectiveness. The new release enhances the Guided Sales Processes to help steer sellers toward desired outcomes and ensure the enforcement of business rules across all devices. This release further improves the business process flows introduced in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 by introducing the branching capability to allow organizations to implement complex business processes. The branch selection is done automatically, in real-time based upon rules defined during
the process definition. For example, in selling products or services, you can configure a single business process flow, which after a common qualification stage splits into two branches – one specific to products and the other for services. New mobile sales capabilities across mobile platforms increase productivity with flexible RoleTailored dashboards and analytics, as well as personalized home pages.
Product Families
Boost selling effectiveness with the ability to bundle products and recommend related products for cross-sell/up-sell and simplify and minimize product management with product attributes. Improvements to the product selling experience help sales operations managers and salespeople manage and sell their company’s products more effectively. Sales operations managers can easily configure product offerings that bundle related products together and provide tailored pricelists giving sellers the ability to position the best products at the best price. Salespeople can see suggestions for cross-selling and up-selling, and get recommendations for accessories or substitutes right on the opportunity form while they are working their deal.
Product properties (attributes) such as updatable, read-only, required and hidden allow sales operations managers to determine how they can be used by the sales agent at run time, that is, while adding an associated product to an opportunity, quote, order, or invoice. \
Continuing to enhance capabilities to Microsoft Social Listening, the company added Italian as a sixth native language for sentiment tracking and analysis and expanded listening capabilities to include news sources. These capabilities give people access to real-time insights so they can see what is happening and make the right decisions to take advantage of opportunities the moment they arise.
New hierarchical visualizations and roll-ups bring real-time territory and forecasting data to your fingertips. Visually explore and traverse hierarchies with key information displayed on tiles, launch actions or communications from any node, and query filter records using the under operator.
With this release, users can see how info is related or grouped by viewing accounts, products, or users in hierarchical charts. You can click a block of info to get more details and navigate to the info you’re interested in. Hierarchical views are also available on mobile
For example, from the hierarchical view for accounts, you can:
• See how an account is doing in overall revenue
• Drill into tiles for sub-accounts to see where the deals are coming from
• Find out who is working an account and enlist help from others by sending email or sharing the account with other salespeople
• View important details about each account, such as credit limit and latest activity posts for the account
Expanding into new markets, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is available for purchase in 17 new markets in Latin America, making the service globally available in more than 65 markets worldwide. The company confirmed that the global expansion of Microsoft CRM Online will continue and is expected to reach over 130 markets and in 44 languages by the end of calendar year 2014. In calendar year 2015, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online would expand into additional Microsoft regional datacenters.
More capabilities and features of the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, such as productivity improvements, automated business processes and real-time forecasting data, are detailed in the Release Preview Guide. Ask us for a copy 0097143365589
About Microsoft Dynamics: At the heart of every successful business are the people who make things happen. Microsoft Dynamics designs modern business solutions that empower individuals with intuitive tools that allow them to do their best work. Our proactive, easy-to-use business applications adapt to the way people and systems work, enabling businesses to rapidly deploy and be forward-looking in an ever-changing world.
