CRM – In almost every organisation where I have worked, marketing tools have operated in total segregation to the main customer database. In IT, we call these information silos. Too often I’ve seen the key information that makes the wheels of a business spin, spread across platforms that don’t talk to each other – to the point where I thought for a while that it was just the status quo.

However, now working every day at AlfaPeople on Microsoft Dynamics 365, I can see exactly how unproductive and illogical that is. So here are three reasons why every marketing team should get out of their office, have a chat to their IT team or provider, and bring marketing under the umbrella of their CRM tool.

1 – Create segments based on the leg-work of your sales team

Beyond the obvious goal of making sales, a key purpose of a Sales team is to gather information. Throughout the prospecting process your sales team is gathering all kinds of detail from the basics such as industry and revenue to justify the sales process according to business needs, right through to the roles of individuals, how much pull they have on a board of business decision makers and even whether they have an existing link with your company that you didn’t know about.

This can make for some extremely rich segments. By leveraging a CRM platform such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, you can build lists and extract information on your target markets at pace, continually ensuring that the message you are putting out there is relevant and timely.

2 – Access a record of actions

A huge plus side of having an entire organisation using a unified CRM tool is that you have a single record of actions rather than multiple silos of information about the same customer. What does this mean for marketing? It’s simple and all too familiar – you can avoid being a spammer.

Whenever you send out marketing messages via Microsoft Dynamics 365, a note can be made in the contact file that they have been sent information on a certain topic. If you’re super keen and have a nifty email marketing plug-in like ClickDimensions, you can even see if they opened it. Therefore, the next day if your marketing or sales team goes into a contact record, they can see exactly how much your company has probed for someone’s attention before they take the next step. What’s more is that if they hit unsubscribe on your messaging, it will turn a function off in the contact record so you don’t email them again. Too easy.

3 – The analytics are JUST GREAT

I have personally done the rounds with a lot of marketing analytics tools and I’m yet to find one that beats the analytic capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365, coupled with Power BI. These platforms which work symbiotically (the graphs are bit prettier and better laid out on Power BI), provide detailed insights on every email sent, every event participation and every SMS campaign you run on a single platform, in as good as real time gets.

Since it leverages a single source of information which is probably used by your Sales, Marketing, IT and service delivery teams alike, there is a strong element of reliability – and if an inconsistency is identified, it is solved for all parties involved.

From the stock standard basics of open rate and click throughs to more detailed drilldowns that can map the typology of recipients that engage, the analytics made possible by bringing your marketing functions under one umbrella are pure brilliance.

Want to find out more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 capabilities? Get in touch with one of our digital transformation experts.

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