My 2024 Review of Dynamics365 Sales : Key Features and More

What Does Dynamics 365 CRM Do?

This cloud-based solution is designed to help businesses build stronger relationships with their customers, improve marketing campaigns, make data-driven decisions, and deliver great customer service to enhance business growth.

Dynamics 365 CRM targets businesses that want to integrate many of their business functions from tracking leads to onboarding prospective customers, and deal closure. Its integration with other Microsoft products, AI-driven insights, mobile app, and multiple customization options makes it a popular choice for organizations.

Let’s delve into an in-depth review of Dynamics 365 CRM.

Dynamics 365 Key Features

When it comes to CRM software, there are a few features you expect to see, such as workflows, pipelines, and contact management. Dynamics 365 CRM offers several features that make it a popular choice for businesses of all sizes. 

Customer Insights

The software helped our organization to centralize customers’ data including their contact information, purchase history, preferences, and all the communication history in one place. This gave us a better understanding of our customers and helped us improve customer interaction. 

Included with Dynamics 365 you also get access to an AI co-pilot that gives you insights and suggestions on how to engage with your customers the right way. This feature helps to empower your sales team while also ensuring that customer needs are met.

In addition, it helped us to track customers’ behavior and customer analysis data enabling us to send personalized email campaigns to drive engagement. This has also led to an increase in our customer base optimizing our organization for growth. It has also helped us to resolve customer issues amicably through its self-service portal.

Dynamics 365 also provides ways that businesses can benefit from their customer insights. With the CRM platform you can easily optimize the customer’s journey through your sales process by creating a custom pipeline based on AI recommendations.

The reporting tool of Dynamics 365 is robust. You can easily draw a number of useful reports and forecasts to help drive the success of your sales team. While the forecasts are useful for identifying trends and monitoring company revenue goals, there are numerous other reports that can also assist with providing customer insights.

You can easily draw reports to help identify market trends, customer behaviors, preferences and more. This information, along with the contact information, can be used to create personalized campaigns that are more likely to convert leads.

Real-Time Leads

Stay on top of all your leads in real-time when using Dynamics 365. You can capture leads easily in the platform, ensuring that the information is available for all other team members. The tool even has automated data capture which can help to automate the lead capturing aspects of the software.

Users will also be able to score leads as they come in to give the sales team a better idea of where their priorities should be. Once again, you can also use AI to assist with the opportunity scoring of new leads as they enter your pipeline.

Dynamics 365 has built-in analytic tools to help users gain leads on prospective customers. Users can analyze customer data, resolve customer issues, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions to drive business growth.

Moreover, it has tools that streamline sale processes, enabling teams to create, update, and forecast the sale pipelines. This helps users to optimize their marketing efforts. 

Power Platform Integration

The software seamlessly integrates with several Microsoft products such as Outlook, Office 365, Azure, and Sharepoint which helped us to improve productivity and responsiveness. 

Also, it has built-in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities with lead-scoring recommendations giving the next-best course of action. These recommendations enabled our organization to make informed decisions, prioritize tasks, and answer customer needs.

Pricing Plan

Dynamics 365 CRM offers a 30-day free trial. Their sales team is available to chat and answer any queries about the platform for signing up. 

I found their pricing structure to be a little confusing, and I wouldn’t classify it as a cheap CRM. That being said, the pricing plans are structured in such a way that it’s easy to scale as your business grows and you can add additional Microsoft products without too much fuss.

The paid plans for the CRM are broken down into the following tiers:

Sales Professional

This plan goes for ＄65 per user per month. This is for the First Dynamicss 365 app and ＄20 per user per month for the subsequent qualifying Dynamicss 365 app. 

Sales Enterprise

This plan goes for＄95 per user per month for the First Dynamicss 365 app and ＄20 per user per month for the subsequent qualifying Dynamicss 365 app.

Sales Premium

This plan goes for＄135 per user per month.

Microsoft Relationships Sales

This plan goes for ＄165 per user per month. 

Scalability

Dynamics 365 allows businesses to start with features that meet their current requirements and later scale up adding more capabilities such as more users when they grow.

Is Dynamics 365 Easy to Use?

Dynamics 365 comes with a user-friendly interface which makes it easy to navigate. It offers a wide range of customizable tools and features that let organizations tailor the platform to their specific workflow needs and processes promoting productivity. 

The multiple integrations made it easy for me to incorporate previously used tools and apps making my onboarding process seamless. This added more functionality to the CRM and also helped to make collaboration between different departments easier.  

It also offers mobile app access on iOS, Windows, and Android devices allowing teams to perform essential workflow processes while on the go. Having a mobile app might not be a requirement for all business types. However, if your company does any field work, an app is immensely useful. Also, the app is great for keeping an eye on things while traveling for work.

Training Resources

Dynamics 365 has an excellent sales team that assists with the onboarding and training of new users. In addition, their website is a rich source of information such as; 

• Free product trials
• Training and certification
• Guided tours on how to navigate the dashboards
• Product updates
• Onboarding etc

Available Integrations

Dynamics has enabled seamless integrations with popular brands such as:

• Power BI
• SharePoint
• Office 365
• Outlook
• Azure
• Exchange
• OneNote
• Yammer
• ESB
• ProjectPro
• Business Central
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Dynamics CRM Customer Service

Customer support is available for both chats and calls. It’s available from Monday to Friday 6 AM to 3 PM PT and you can also request the sales team to contact you. They are quite responsive to customer queries or concerns.

Personally, I would’ve expected to see 24/7 support, especially considering this is a Microsoft product. Navigating the available timelines can be a challenge, especially if your business is managed outside of that timezone. This can introduce delays in getting assistance to solve issues.

Which Companies Work with Dynamics 365 Sales?

There are quite a number of well-known brands that use Dynamics 365 to help improve the sales and customer relations of their businesses. Here’s a popular list of companies using the software:

• Microsoft
• Mercedes Benz USA
• Coca-cola
• Nigel Frank International Limited
• Hitachi Solutions Limited
• Catch Resource Management Limited
• Pearson Carter etc

Suitability Assessment

Before choosing a new CRM, there are always questions regarding whether the tool will be best suited to your needs. Not every CRM tool is made equal, and some are simply better suited to specific business types. Let’s take a look at whether or not Dynamics 365 is a good fit for your company.

Choose Dynamics 365 CRM If:

• You run a medium-sized organization.
• You need to access the CRM on a mobile device.
• You want AI predictive insights and recommendations.
• Your organization is rapidly growing.

Avoid Dynamics 365 If:

• You have fewer resources or are running on a tight budget.
• You’re looking for an easy tool to use.