The main benefits of Microsoft Dynamics 365 are better customer retention, a lower cost of sales, more of the right leads converted, more productive staff and better customer service. They all come from the same thing, which is having every customer interaction, opportunity and case in one system that your sales, marketing and service teams share, rather than spread across inboxes and spreadsheets. This article goes through each benefit and the Dynamics 365 features behind it.
Dynamics 365 is Microsoft's set of cloud business applications. The CRM side includes Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, which is the product previously called Dynamics 365 Marketing. The ERP side includes Business Central for small and medium-sized businesses and Finance and Supply Chain Management for larger ones. You license the apps you need, and they work with Outlook, Teams and the rest of Microsoft 365.
For a wider look at the platform, see our article on Dynamics 365 key features.
Keeping a customer is cheaper than finding a new one, and the first step is knowing which customers are at risk. Dynamics 365 gives every team the same view of an account, including recent emails and meetings, open opportunities and open service cases, so a seller about to call a customer can see they have had three support cases in the last month.
Dynamics 365 Sales also includes relationship analytics, which uses activity from Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 to give a health score for each relationship and flag the ones that have gone quiet. Sales Enterprise includes basic relationship insights and Sales Premium adds the more detailed version, which also draws on Exchange email data. Either way, account managers get a list of customers who need attention rather than finding out at renewal time.
New business is expensive to win, so it pays to make the most of the customers you already have. With a full history of what each customer has bought and how they engage, sellers can see upsell, cross-sell and renewal opportunities and act on them at the right time.
Dynamics 365 Sales manages the whole process from lead to closed deal, with sales forecasting so managers can see what is likely to close and track performance against quota. Predictive lead and opportunity scoring uses your own sales history to rank which leads and deals are most likely to convert, so sellers spend their time on the right ones. Sales Enterprise includes predictive scoring for up to 1,500 records a month, and Sales Premium removes that limit.
Marketing and sales often work from different lists and argue about lead quality. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights brings the two together. Customer Insights - Data combines customer data from different sources into unified profiles, and Customer Insights - Journeys uses those profiles to run email, text message and event campaigns that respond to what each contact does.
Because the campaigns run on the same data as the sales system, leads pass to sellers with their full engagement history attached, and you can report on which campaigns produced pipeline and revenue rather than just opens and clicks. We cover this in more detail in our article on business intelligence with Dynamics 365.
Sellers and service agents lose a lot of time to admin, such as looking up contact details, logging calls and copying information between systems. Dynamics 365 cuts that down in a few ways:
The time saved goes back into talking to customers, which is the part of the job that actually builds a pipeline.
A good product loses customers if the service around it is poor. Dynamics 365 Customer Service handles cases, service levels and a knowledge base, so every agent can see a customer's full history and previous conversations before they reply. That stops customers having to repeat themselves and helps agents give consistent answers.
It also stops the wrong messages going out. When marketing can see that a customer has an open complaint, they can hold back the promotional email until it is resolved, and a seller can see that a new customer is still being onboarded before pitching them something else.
The benefits depend on people using the system and the data being reasonably clean. Before you buy, agree which processes you want Dynamics 365 to support first, who will own the system internally and how existing customer data will be cleaned and migrated. Our guide to building a Dynamics 365 business case goes through this in more detail.
Sales Professional covers core sales automation with a subset of the features in Sales Enterprise. Sales Enterprise adds more customisation and includes limited use of premium features such as predictive scoring and the sales accelerator. Sales Premium adds the full set of AI features, including advanced relationship intelligence and unlimited predictive scoring.
Copilot is built into Dynamics 365 Sales, where it can summarise records, prepare meeting notes and answer questions about your sales data. The basic features of the Sales agent are included with Sales Enterprise, Sales Premium and Microsoft Relationship Sales, and the full functionality needs a Microsoft Copilot licence.
Yes. Emails and meetings can be tracked against Dynamics 365 records, and Teams chats can be embedded in Dynamics 365 Sales so the team can discuss a deal in context.
It can be. Sales Professional and Business Central are aimed at organisations that need core functionality without the full enterprise feature set, and because Dynamics 365 is licensed per user you only pay for the people who need it.
If you would like to talk about how Dynamics 365 could work in your business, or you already have it and need help running it, see our Dynamics 365 support or get in touch with us.