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There are a lot of articles on the internet that tell you why CRM implementations fail, but the facts remain constant: a significant portion do. Industry studies show that up to 63% of CRM implementations fail. So then, if you already own software that is fully integrated with your customers and your sales history, why would you spend more money on a project that has a less than 50% chance of success? Yet every year, there are posts on the internet from individuals who are in the throes of yet another CRM implementation gone south. I’ve been pontificating over the past year about particular treasures of CRM functionality baked into your Dynamics 365 Business Central / Dynamics NAV system you already own, and realized I’ve not taken a step back to provide you with an overall snapshot. If you’re shopping for a new CRM system or have yet to unpack BC/NAV’s glorious CRM functionality, let me show you the way.
As you know now, Business Central / NAV has CRM functionality, but many companies who implement Business Central do not realize Business Central has CRM functionality. Why? A rose is a rose by any other name: in Business Central, it is called Relationship Management.
Relationship Management has workflow automation and its setup is super simple. With Approvals and Workflows, your Sales Reps can create Contacts and Sales Quotes. Your Credit Manager, using information provided on the Contact Card, can review and convert the Contact to a Customer with appropriate Credit Limits.
Relationship Management has Sales Process Management. With Sales Cycles, you can establish standard processes and the underlying steps, customized to accommodate your different processes, to assist and remind your Sales Staff of tasks designed to close the deal.
Relationship Management is integrated with Outlook – show me a sales team that doesn’t love that! Your sales staff can sync their Contacts and Schedules in Business Central to their Outlook Calendars. And because Relationship Management is part of Business Central a Sales Rep who receives an email from a Contact or Customer can quickly respond with a Sales Quote right from his cellphone.
With Relationship Management your sales staff can track their communications between your company and their contacts using Interaction Tracking. You can log your communications, add notes to those entries, and evaluate the results of the interactions. You can postpone a scheduled interaction and easily retrieve logged and postponed interactions.
I love the power of Segmentation! With Segmentation you can define, track, and use minute details with which you can segregate your Contacts. As an example, you can define groups of Contacts as Engineers, Accountants, Managers and more. But you can also break those groups down further. With Engineers you can define categories for Chemical Engineer, Civil Engineer, Electrical Engineer and Mechanical Engineer. And of course, you can break this down with subcategories of each branch of Engineer.
You can supercharge your Segmentation with the Profile Questionnaires feature in Relationship Management. This power tool allows you to record answers to questions you define to capture even more information about the individuals and the companies you want to target. These Profile Questionnaires can be simple questions the Sales Reps complete or they can be automatically classified based on Customer data already in Business Central.
Using all the metrics you have captured through Segmentation, Relationship Management allows you to create Segments that pinpoint your Target Audience for any marketing or sales efforts. Because it is part of Business Central you can create these Segments based on sales history, interaction history, answers to your questions on the Profile Questionnaires or just the metrics you have captured on the individual Contacts. Want to try that with another CRM system? Hello complicated integration!
As the saying goes, but wait, there’s more! Before you create your pinpoint accurate Target Market, you can create a Campaign, tag it with a Dimension to capture financial data, set up special pricing or special discounts for specific Items and establish effective dates for the promotional pricing. Wow! After setting up your Campaign you can create a Segment that pinpoints your Target Market using all the criteria available from past sales history, results from logged interactions, values from Segmentation assigned to your Contacts and answers to Questions from the Profile Questionnaires. After pulling your Target Market into the Segment, you can share this with your Sales Staff and let them make it rain.
Relationship Management even has funnels and cues that Sales Managers love.
You also have access to Jet Express and Power BI. These tools allow you to supercharge your reporting and analysis.
Now that I have captured all this in one place, I am more confused than ever about why companies look at other CRM packages instead of evaluating the CRM functionality baked into your Dynamics 365 Business Central / Dynamics NAV system. A stitch in time saves nine. Or in this case, reviewing what you already have can save you tens of thousands of dollars. And how much more functionality do you really need?
Ready to dive in? Check out my list of previous blog topics, each diving into the setup and use of those features. If you do not know how to start your review of Relationship Management in Business Central send me an email. Inquiries are always free.
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