Although they work symbiotically, too often, sales and marketing teams work in silos and struggle to communicate effectively. Not only does this mean that your organization is wasting time and missing out on valuable leads, but it also means you’re not providing the personalized attention and customer journey that takes your contacts from leads to buyers. The gap between sales and marketing has been a longstanding issue, but with changing customer demands, it is no longer a viable way to run a business. A customized, unified approach has never been more vital to sales success. Sharing tools, tactics, and technological solutions is key to this approach. Technology can be especially useful, particularly Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing.

*Dynamics 365 Marketing enables your sales and marketing teams*

What is Dynamics 365 Marketing?

Dynamics 365 Marketing is Microsoft’s marketing automation application, developed to provide all the marketing tools small and medium businesses need, and it provides a 360 degree view of your contacts. It sits natively within Microsoft Dynamics 365, so there are no integrations to worry about, but it is also a separate app, which serves as a standalone solution as well. Dynamics 365 Marketing can also be attached to your Dynamics 365 Sales module and use all your Dynamics data as the engine.

How Can Dynamics 365 Marketing Help Your Sales Team?

Having one system that both your sales team and the marketing teams can record data in and use as a single source of truth regarding your contacts and leads, has a hugely positive impact on both teams.

Dynamics 365 Marketing Provides One Cohesive System for Sales and Marketing

Ideally, marketing and sales work symbiotically. Marketing finds leads, nurtures them, and hands them over to the sales team to convert them to customers. If the marketing team is using one system to manage their processes, and the sales team is using a different system for theirs, it’s very difficult for that transition to take place – especially when there is no automation in place. The sales team can’t see who’s been engaging or interacting with what. This can lead to a situation where the sales team has a lead pegged as a prospect in one area, even though all their interactions are showing interest in a different area. Without one system to provide that visibility across departments, it’s difficult to get that information over to your sales team.

With Dynamics 365 Marketing both your sales and marketing teams have 360 degree visibility into each contact, lead, and customer, including every engagement and interaction they’ve had with your organization. Dynamics 365 Marketing also makes the process of moving leads from the marketing funnel to the sales pipeline seamless, through automation of lead scoring, which can be set up to correspond with your lead process timeline. It also gives the marketing team visibility into which leads did eventually convert (and where they came from) – valuable information that the marketing team can use to enhance lead generation techniques.

The kind of cohesive system offered by Dynamics 365 Marketing also really encourages CRM adoption. When everyone is working with one source of data, they are more motivated to keep that source accurate and up to date, especially when they know that successful automations rely on the data being correct.

Sell More Effectively

Dynamics 365 Marketing can help your sales team become more effective salespeople. By gaining visibility into all sales activity and the embedded Power BI reports and dashboards they’ll have access to, your team will be able to better forecast sales. Because Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing use the same database, your sales team can see all lead interactions and a full history of any communications that have taken place for every account. Using the lead scores, customer insights, and out-of-the-box dashboards, your salespeople always have access to up-to-date information at their fingertips. This empowers them to make decisions in a more timely and informed manner to target active leads and opportunities.

Win Customers

Dynamics 365 Marketing provides the ability to nurture leads based on your defined customer journey, which integrates seamlessly with the opportunity process in Dynamics 365 Sales. This empowers your sales team to manage their pipeline and win more customers, faster and more effectively. The process can be easily automated to determine when a lead moves from a marketing lead to a sales-qualified lead. You can set triggers, tasks, and activities for the sales team to pick those leads up and begin the sales process. No two organizations define ‘qualified lead’ the same way, so with Dynamics 365 Marketing, these automations and triggers can be customized to suit your organization’s needs.

Work Together as a Team

Dynamics 365 Marketing gives you the ability to fully integrate your calendar. This means you can set up automations that create tasks or alerts for your sales team when leads reach certain thresholds or criteria in your customer journey. This automation really ties the marketing lead nurture process to the sales team, creating one seamless process.

What are the Features of Dynamics 365 Marketing that Sales Teams Love Most?

Now that you’re sold on the idea of one cohesive source of truth for your marketing and sales teams, let’s take a closer look at some of the specific features of Dynamics 365 Marketing that make it so valuable to your sales team in particular.

Detailed Customer Dashboards

Dynamics 365 Marketing gives you access to all the data on your contacts’ activity and communications from across your organization. This information is available to you in an easy-to-use dashboard. In the “Insights” tab, you can see an overview of the contact’s interactions, or you can narrow your focus to email, website, event, forms, or subscription list interactions.

*Contact dashboard in Dynamics 365 Marketing showing emails delivered to a specific contact*

For example, you can see the emails that have been sent to each contact, which emails were opened, and what links were clicked. You can see how many times a contact visited your website and what pages they viewed. You can see how many events a contact has registered for and attended. See what forms a contact has completed along with the information that was entered. You can even see what time they opened emails and set a custom send time based on this information for future communications. As you can see, Dynamics 365 Marketing offers not only data visibility, but enables you to use that data intelligently.

The Ability to Create Segments

Instead of something like marketing lists, Dynamics 365 Marketing uses segments as a smarter way to determine which contacts will receive what communications. Segments are essentially a way to group together contacts that have something (or things) in common – what these commonalities are, and how detailed you want to get, is up to you. You can start with templates for some of the more common segments a business might use, or dive straight in and build your own segments from scratch. This is not as challenging as it might sound.

First, you decide if you want a dynamic or static segment. A dynamic segment will update when new contacts meet the criteria for the segment, or when contacts in the segment stop meeting the criteria. A static segment is more of a snapshot in time of where your contacts are right now. For example, if you create a dynamic segment of contacts who have made a purchase in the past one month, it will always be adding new contacts as they make purchases and removing contacts once they reach one month from the time of their purchase. However, if you make a static segment of contacts who have made a purchase within one month, you will always have an unchanging list of contacts who made a purchase in that one-month period. Both are useful, it just depends on your organization’s specific needs.

The best thing about segments, and what makes them so useful from a sales perspective, is that you can use all the account data from across Dynamics 365 and all the interaction data from the contact dashboard. You could create a segment of all your contacts who live in Calgary, or a segment of everyone who has clicked a link in an email in the past month. But, by combining the two, you can make your segments very specific, and can target very specific messaging. You could make a segment of all your contacts who live in Calgary and have clicked a link in an email in past month. Or you can make a segment of all your contacts from businesses in a certain industry who have also filled out a specific form. This lets you send very personalized emails, very easily.

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Email Functionality

For many small and medium businesses, email is where most of your marketing efforts go. Therefore, Microsoft put a lot of thought and invested heavily in the email functionality within Dynamics 365 Marketing.

Many email systems can be difficult to get familiar with, but Dynamics 365 Marketing makes it easy to get started with tonnes of templates to choose from and an intuitive and easy-to-use interface with drag-and-drop design.

The way buttons are handled is highly intelligent. Of course, you can select a general button and link it to URL as usual. But you can also use specific types of buttons that have extra functionality. For example, you can invite someone to an event with a Teams check-in. This button will give the recipient a unique Teams URL that will check them into the event in the background, auto-updating for you in the back end. When you select the marketing page button, Dynamics 365 Marketing dynamically populates a list of all your landing pages for you to choose from, so you can easily link to correct page without having to copy and paste. Similarly, when you select the survey button, all your customer voice surveys will be dynamically populated for you to choose from.

*A list of landing pages that can be linked to an email button in Dynamics 365 Marketing*

*An example of an email spam checker showing “low risk”*

It’s also easy to preview and test how your email will look on different devices and different email clients before you send it out. As part of your Dynamics 365 Marketing subscription, you also get a free subscription to Litmus, so you can see what your email will look like to someone with a Gmail account – you can even see how it would look if that person were using dark mode! Another handy feature is the spam checker, which shows you how likely your email is to be flagged as spam. If the risk is medium or high, you’ll also be given some suggestions to improve your score.

The Customer Journey Workflow

The customer journey feature in Dynamics 365 Marketing is essentially the workflow that ties all the above features together. Again, you can start with a template, or build your own workflow from scratch. Once you’ve created a custom workflow, you can even save it as a template too.

*Customer journey templates in Dynamics 365 Marketing*

To set up a custom customer journey, you start with a segment, and then outline what you would like to happen to the contacts in that segment based on the actions that they take. This can be as simple or as complex as you need.

For example, say you start a customer journey for a dynamic segment of contacts who work in the tech industry. The first step in the customer journey could be sending them an email with some relevant content about how your product works for tech companies. Then, if the contacts click on the email, you can send them a follow up email with more information about your products. If they click a link in that email, you can automatically create a task for a sales team member to reach out to them.

*Setting up a new customer journey workflow in Dynamics 365 Marketing*

You can also set up a workflow for the people who didn’t click on your first email. If they opened the email but did not click, you can send those contacts another email with targeted content such as a case study, demonstrating how a tech company used your products. Then the people who click through on that email can be sent the product information email, and tasks can be automatically created for salespeople to follow up with the contacts who click through that email.

Through customer journeys in Dynamics 365 Marketing, you can also view insights into how your emails are performing, and the specific actions your contacts are taking, which can help you to optimize your workflows.

Lead Scoring

Lead scores are a way for the marketing team to define some of the metrics that are going to be important for your sales team in Dynamics 365 Marketing. This is how you determine what constitutes a nurtured lead. Lead scores show the sales team who the most qualified leads are without having to sift through pages of data or trawl through multiple dashboards.

Essentially, each lead is assigned points based on the different attributes they have or actions they take that would indicate that they are a good lead. This will vary based on your needs. You may want to focus on a certain industry, so you would assign leads in the tech industry 5 points, for example. If a lead attends a webinar, they could have another 5 points added. Opening an email may be less of a sign of a nurtured lead and could add be worth 1 point. This makes it simple for your sales team to determine which leads to focus their attention on.

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