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Why Using Dynamics CRM with Sitecore Makes Good Sense

If you manage a website, you probably use a content management system, or CMS. If you want to run an efficient sales operation, you better take advantage of a quality customer relationship management (CRM) solution. But too often, the two don’t connect well enough for you to make the most out of either’s functionalities. Fortunately, Sitecore and Dynamics are here to change that. CRM and CMS, Explained Frequent readers of this space know about the benefits of a CRM, and particularly Microsoft Dynamics, to optimize your sales processes. It allows you to keep track of each potential and current customer, providing you with more in-depth information on them as they move through the sales funnel. A CMS, on the other hand, improves your website management ability. It offers you the opportunity to streamline, edit, and manage any content on your website, helping you build a website presence designed to gain brand awareness and audience attention. Rather than having to build the content directly in HTML, you get easy editors designed to create beautiful web pages. Today, almost 50% of the top 1 million most-visited website worldwide use a CMS. 5 Benefits of Integrating Dynamics CRM With Sitecore On their surfaces, CMS and CRM solutions may seem like they don’t have much in common, or that your business is perfectly fine using only one but not the other. But if you dig a little deeper, using Dynamics CRM with Sitecore actually comes with a number of tangible benefits for your target audience. 1. Build Targeted Content Based on Contact Information Personalized web content is becoming more and more important to impress and convert your website visitors. In fact, three quarters of consumers get frustrated when the content they encounter is not personalized to them. Of course, you need your visitors to convert in order to have a chance of turning them into customers, and frustration is not a great motivator to accomplish that. Given that statistic, imagine being able to leverage the information you gather about each of your CRM contact into more relevant website content. That’s exactly what Sitecore integration can provide. Now, you can show each one of your contacts information tailored specifically to their needs as soon as they visit your website and contemplate whether they should become customers. 2. Automate Lead Generation Stream into CRM As beneficial as a CRM can be for your sales efforts, it can be frustrating on the marketing side. Too often, there is no easily automated way to feed new leads into the software that then automatically assign to the relevant sales agents and territories. But what if you could build your lead generation web forms in Sitecore, and transfer them over to Dynamics automatically? Now, an otherwise manual process becomes easily automated. In addition, you can even configure Sitecore to capture information from partially filled forms, increasing your insights into your target audience and web visitors. 3. Improve Your Email Marketing Efforts Despite constant efforts to push it off its throne, email marketing […]

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Marketing Personalization is Real, Thanks to Increasingly Available Data Insights

We live in an age of personalization. Armed with more data than ever before, businesses now have the opportunity to move away from mass marketing ‘blasts’ and toward increasingly targeted, personalized messages. Consumers across industries are welcoming this opportunity. Ad blocking is on the rise, with an estimated 86 million U.S. internet users actively suppressing promotional messages online this year. At the same time, personalized marketing and particularly email messages generate significantly higher attention, engagement, and transaction rates than their non-customized counterparts. Increasingly, your audience expects personalization. And fortunately, the ability to gather and utilize data about your audience has made the process significantly more realistic for small and medium businesses to implement. The Rise of Big Data and Data-Driven Marketing A few years ago, big data officially became a topic for businesses. The rise of online marketing has enabled us to collect a large variety of information about our audience, allowing us to draw insights that can help create more relevant and personalized messages for potential and current customers. That rise of data, in turn, has led to an emphasis on data-driven marketing. As Ad Week points out, basing every marketing decisions on data you have gathered about your audience has turned from a novel approach into an integral business process in the course of just a few years. Your audience knows that you’re collecting information about them online. Now, they expect you to actually turn that information into value for them. Turning Big Data into Actionable Insights Of course, there’s a significant problem with big data and data-driven marketing that has long plagued small and medium businesses: the resources needed to accomplish that feat. Thanks to advertising platforms like Facebook, Google Analytics, and more, everyone can gather the sort of data needed to personalize your marketing. But few organizations actually have the budget and manpower necessary to turn that data into actual, data-driven insights and actions. As a result, the last few years have not just given rise to the importance of data. They have also widened the gap between audience expectations and small/medium business capabilities. Your largest competitors may be able to interpret and use real-time data, but if you can’t, you’ll fall behind in the eyes of your audience. Fortunately, the past may be the past. Increasingly, thanks to machine learning technology, data collection and pattern recognition are becoming more available to businesses of all sizes. In fact, machine learning has officially entered the sphere of possibilities in small business marketing. How To Personalize Your Marketing Using Data Every business can collect data about their audience. And thanks to machine learning, even small businesses can now use that data to create actual, personalized marketing strategies. The reason, as Tech Emergence shows, lies in the increasing availability of technology. Tools like IBM Watson, for example, allow businesses of all sizes to recognize patterns in their data and even predict user behavior for a reasonable cost. But pattern recognition still does not get to the core of the potential advantage […]

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6 Benefits of Integrating Your Dynamics CRM With QuickBooks

Customer relationship management software (CRM) helps you convert your contacts, improving your marketing, sales, and retention efforts in the process. Accounting software allows you to keep your finances in order, gaining both quick overview and in-depth knowledge about your revenues, expenses, and more. At first sight, the only thing these two types of software have in common is the fact that they improve business processes in some shape. Accounting and marketing, you might think, does not often overlap. But in reality, integrating both processes comes with a variety of advantages for your business. In fact, here are 6 benefits you can gain from integrating your Dynamics CRM with QuickBooks. 1. Enhancing Customer Profiles and Information Whether or not you already use a CRM to enhance your sales and marketing efforts, you know about the value of information. During their buyers’ journey, your audience receives more than 100 emails every day. Your only chance to stand out is with a message that is both relevant and targeted exactly to your audience. The same truth holds for the sales call. If you simply call sales-qualified leads with a blanket statement, they’re much less likely to become customers than they would if you approached them with a sales pitch tailored to their needs. By integrating your accounting software with your CRM, you can solve both of these problems. For existing customers, you can draw on financial information and order history to make a more relevant marketing and/or sales pitch. Considering the ROI of customer retention, this added information could be the difference in helping your business grow. 2. Avoiding Duplication for Increased Data Integrity When your Dynamics CRM and QuickBooks accounting software run separately, you almost necessarily risk data duplication. Two identical records will have to be maintained for the same customer. That, in turn, can compromise your data integrity, as duplicate updates are not always intuitive or easily followed. Through a CRM and accounting software integration, you can solve that problem. QuickBooks and Dynamics, for example, allow users to promote and link customer profiles on both platforms, making sure the information always remains in sync. The result is not just less required data entry, but greater accuracy and integrity. 3. Understanding Accounting Data in the Context of Your Customers Much of your accounting data will provide valuable insights into the health and success of your business. But do you know what that data actually means for individual customers? If you do, you can draw conclusions that help you improve your marketing, sales, and financial processes. Imagine, for example, running a report that shows you the average revenue created by one of your marketing automation campaigns. Alternatively, compare multiple campaigns or sales efforts in light of their actual costs. Adding customer context to your accounting data gives you a much fuller (and more accurate) pictures not just of your business health, but the reasons for that health and growth. 4. Syncing Price Lists and Inventory for Integrated Sales Information As part of your accounting […]

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How ClickDimensions Can Enhance the Success of Your Dynamics CRM

In today’s digital environment, even small and medium businesses can benefit significantly from customer relationship management software. Find the right CRM, and you can grow your business by more efficiently reaching out to potential and current customers, enhancing both your customer acquisition and retention efforts as a result. No less than 74% of businesses now use a CRM, and that number increases to 91% when only counting businesses above 11 employees. The increasing data availability, along with the fact that simply integrating the software into your business processes can raise your productivity by 30%, accounts for that adoption rate. Still, simply installing CRM software may not be enough. If you don’t connect it with a marketing automation solution, you may be missing out on a significant opportunity. That’s why ClickDimensions is such a perfect partner product to a powerful CRM like Microsoft Dynamics. ClickDimensions: An Overview ClickDimensions, at its core, is a marketing automation tool. In other words, it’s a software solution that helps you automate your marketing processes, saving both time and resources in the process. The software accomplishes this feat through a number of individual features that range from email marketing to reporting. Combined, they help businesses of all sizes create a more comprehensive and consistent marketing strategy designed to get prospects into and through the sales funnel. But unlike most other marketing automation tools, this one does not operate in isolation. Instead, it integrates directly with your Dynamics CRM solution, helping you take advantage of the sales data and processes you have already established for more personalized, effective marketing. The Marketing Features of ClickDimensions To accomplish its goals, ClickDimensions offers a number of individual features that are worthy of discussion. Each of them is related directly to marketing and marketing automation: Email marketing. Through a native email tool within Dynamics CRM, you can create beautiful marketing emails with a simple drag and drop system. Email data, such as open and click rates, is reported both on a comprehensive and individual level within Dynamics. Marketing automation. Dynamics uses workflows to help you create a set of automated emails. In ClickDimensions, the process is even easier. Create visual communication flows with multiple branches, sending automated email series based on actions that your visitors and leads are taking on your website. Landing pages and web forms. Any business focused on lead generation needs effective web forms to capture these contacts. Within ClickDimensions, you can create these forms, along with the landing pages on which they’ll live, using a similar drag and drop system as email creation. Data is dynamically filtered back into Dynamics for more comprehensive lead profiles. Integrated event management. Does you company rely on events or webinars to generate leads and convert customers? If so, you’ll love the integration with software like GoToWebinar and WebEx, helping you manage each registrant and recording information  related to their attendance. Reporting and Surveys. Naturally, the tool helps you improve your marketing reporting abilities. It also allows you to create surveys, which help you […]

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10 Ways Your Sales Effort Can Benefit From a CRM

If the ultimate goal of your business is to earn revenue and grow, looking for ways to improve both your business processes and sales efforts should be a constant effort. As we’ve detailed in this space, a CRM can help you in accomplishing both. At the same time, simply stating that ‘Customer Relationship Management software will benefit your business’ is vague. So allow us to go one step further, with ten very specific reasons your sales efforts can benefit from a CRM, based on an awesome infographic by Cloudswave.  After reviewing this list, hopefully you will have a better idea of the types of tangible benefits CRM can provide to your small or medium-sized business. 10 Reasons Why CRM Systems Are Popular in Sales In this infographic, Cloudswave cites numerous studies in coming up with data-based reasons to implement a CRM system. These statistics are particularly compelling in understanding the benefits of this software solution: When asked why they use a CRM, 61% of sales distributors responded that it allows for key access to customer information and data. In addition, 75% of sales managers say that using a CRM helps to drive and increase sales. On average, a CRM provides a $5.60 return for every $1.00 spent, an ROI of more than 50%. A CRM helps nurture leads that are not ready to become customers yet, but 75% of companies have no lead nurturing process in place.  This means that simply nurturing your leads can often catapult your company above your competitors. Customers of companies who use CRMs to engage with them spend between 20% and 40% more compared with those customers who only experience manual sales outreach. That’s because CRMs generate a positive customer experience — and as it turns out, 70% of customers with positive brand experiences will refer your product or service to their peers. Your sales representatives love the software because it helps them reach their goals: CRMs increase revenue per sales rep by 41%. Similarly, sales conversion rates for your sales efforts will rise by up to 300%. Customer retention also matters, as CRMs have led to retention rates of more than 25%. Given all of these reasons, it’s no surprise that implementing a CRM will increase your profit margin by more than 2%. Change is difficult, so you may encounter initial resistance in your sales department to changing ‘the way we’ve always done things.’ That’s where these statistics can be so beneficial. Not only do the above reasons provide leadership with a clear view of the potential of a CRM, but they can also help convince your individual sales representatives that after an initial transition period, they will be set up for success. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts: because your sales team knows about these statistics, they will be more motivated (and more likely) to accomplish them. Thinking Beyond Your Sales Department toward BPA Of course, one thing that the above infographic does not highlight is the ability of CRM software to benefit your business beyond sales processes. […]

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