4 challenges affecting sales productivity

In today’s fast-paced sales environment with more competition than ever before, businesses need to make the most of the time spent with their customers. This is especially true for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that operate with fewer resources and lower levels of brand awareness in comparison to larger organisations. Many of these larger organisations have turned to the cloud to increase sales productivity and gain an advantage over their competitors.

The good news is cloud solutions are not just for the big players, there are solutions available that have been designed specifically with SMBs in mind. One such solution is Dynamics 365 Sales Professional, which is allowing sales teams to streamline their sales processes, create positive customer experiences and adapt to a post COVID sales environment.

This blog outlines how Dynamics 365 Sales Professional can help overcome some of the issues SMB sales teams are facing in today’s sales environment, namely:

  • Finding & Managing Leads Effectively
  • Multiple Disconnected Sales Tools
  • Providing Personalised Customer Experiences
  • Adapting to Changing Business Models

Finding & Managing Leads Effectively

Do you find yourself spending more of your time researching contacts and trying to identify suitable targets? Did you know that as much as 50% of sales time is being spent on unproductive targets?

Finding suitable prospects takes time and effort and efficiently managing these leads to ensure as many as possible are turned into paying customers requires even more attention. Lead generation and management can be a labour-intensive activity for sales teams of any size, so how can SMB sales teams handle their lead activity more effectively?

The lead management capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Professional let you store and manage leads in a whole new way. Sales teams gain intelligent insights such as predictive lead-scoring within Microsoft Teams and can create a sales pipeline including custom predictive models. Ensuring that high potential leads are followed up efficiently gives your sales teams the best chance of converting them into paying customers.

Multiple Disconnected Sales Tools

Sales teams everywhere find themselves using more sales tools. The average number of tools used by a salesperson is 4.9 with some reporting they use as many as 9 sales tools. Many of these don’t work cohesively, instead, salespeople spend their time switching between disparate sales tools. An increased number of tools results in a more complex sales process. If you find yourself overwhelmed by the number of tools needed to make a sale maybe it’s time to make a change?

With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Professional your sales team can work together on sales documents, manage schedules and host meetings in one place. They can also surface customer engagement records, sales insights and, alerts from inside their Outlook inbox.

The best thing about Dynamics 365 Sales Professional is its ease of use. Working out of familiar apps like Outlook, Excel & Teams means that if your team know how to use Office, they already know how to use Dynamics 365. Streamline your workflows and give sellers more time to spend with customers with Dynamics 365 Sales Professional.

Providing Personalised Customer Experiences

Buyers are demanding a higher level of customer experience with 73% of people stating that customer experience (CX) influences their buying decision. It’s also playing a part in customer retention with CX driving over two-thirds of customer loyalty  more than “brand” and “price” combined. Good CX requires personalisation, with 80% of buyers more likely to buy if they’ve received a personalised experience from a brand. Providing the kind of positive, personalised experiences buyers are looking for requires companies to leverage data to drive their sales processes. With the importance of digital sales doubling as a result of Covid-19, providing personalised digital experiences has become increasingly important for SMBs.

With Dynamics 365 Sales Professional, sales teams can get a holistic view of the customer’s interactions with the company to tailor more compelling, personalised experiences. Salespeople can craft personalised emails using contextual sales data directly in Outlook. These data-driven, tailored interactions can increase customer engagement and loyalty, close deals faster and boost your sales revenue.

Adapting to Changing Business Models

As the world emerges from the Covid-19 crisis, the number of organisations working remotely or in hybrid situations is set to increase. With 73% of employees expressing their desire for flexible work options to stay, 66% of leaders are considering redesigning office spaces to facilitate remote work. The way we sell has changed over the last year and it looks like it’s changed for good, so SMEs need to be ready to adapt to customers new business models.

By using a sales tool like Dynamics 365 Sales Professional combined with a remote working tool such as Microsoft 365, companies can stay on top of the challenges facing them as customers adopt to new business models. Sales teams can collaborate on deals from almost anywhere with an integrated cloud platform including enterprise-class video conferencing. Individuals can also work on-the-go across multiple devices, so they can stay connected with the team wherever they are.

Modernise Your Sales Processes to Improve Productivity

Dynamics 365 Sales professional offers functionality and capabilities to ensure your sales processes are as productive as possible. With Codec, you can get started with Dynamics 365 Sales Professional quickly with a package price that includes support from Ireland’s leading Microsoft Partner. We provide discovery workshops with key stakeholders, deployment of the solution within your teams, full user training, support through a client success program as well as licenses for up to 5 users to get your team up and running. To find out more click here.

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