Aligning your business with Dynamics 365

Dynamics365 is one of the most under-appreciated Microsoft products, with many brushing it off as just another CRM solution. It’s so much more than this however, with capabilities to completely align a business from the origins of a sale to a project’s closedown. Every business department can implement data into CRM, all of which can contribute to the same cause.

How can each individual business process be indoctrinated into CRM, to better align an organisation and provide customers with excellent service?

The Marketing department can create a campaign, for example, a campaign on Microsoft Azure which produces information to inform others about the benefits of moving to the cloud. The campaign is detailed on CRM and given a specific code. As part of the campaign an event is arranged for a hands-on Azure capabilities session. Ten people sign up to attend and their details including name, email, job title, company and phone number are entered into CRM along with details surrounding the event they’re attending.

A company’s Sales team can then have sight of the attendees under the specific campaign code, knowing that Bruce Wayne, Director of IT at Gotham City Council is interested in Azure and attended the event. A member of the team can then reach out and contact Bruce Wayne, discuss his councils needs and then secure a sale for the deployment of Azure. The salesperson will then enter this into CRM and forward the order onto the Project Management Office team.

The Project Management Office (PMO) team will then pick the order up and issue project start-up documents and assign a consultant to the project. This can be done by searching on CRM for an employee who has the skills to deploy Azure on a large scale.

This then leads us to the HR department, who can also play a crucial role in smoothing the process for the rest of the team. The HR department can manage employee records within CRM, updating their skillset and availability so that the PMO team have a better understanding of which consultants have the capabilities to carry out the deployment.

When this is sorted and the consultant has been made aware through an alert tell them their calendar has been updated, the Finance team are then positioned to issue an invoice to the customer after the project’s details have been finalized. Finance will send the invoice to the customer and can then update the project details on CRM of when this has been paid.

Finally, the project will fall back into PMO’s hands as they decide on a start date. The PMO team can then continue to update the project’s timeline on CRM, giving everyone involved sight on its status from start to finish.

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