What is Sales Force Automation?

Organizations use sales force automation (SFA) to automate sales activities, processes and administrative responsibilities for their sales professionals, and SFA applications are a core technology of leading sales teams.  

Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online has shifted and is now delivering functional modules which you can customize to meet the unique needs of your organization. The modules that make up the customer relationship management (CRM) portion of Dynamics 365 are referred to as “Customer Engagement” apps and include Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Service Automation, and their related services.

The benefits of the new for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement module include a revamped Dynamics 365 for Sales, Business edition (public preview). The new sales application is built on the Dynamics 365 for Sales Enterprise edition framework, providing familiarity for existing Dynamics 365 (online) customers. However, Dynamics 365 for Sales, Business edition is optimized for small-to-medium-sized businesses.

One of the major benefits of Microsoft Dynamics CRM is the ability to track interactions with contacts, whether they’re customers, prospects or leads. For many people these days, those interactions start right in their Outlook Inbox, much of them lined with subfolders galore to help organized the huge volumes of email coming in each day. With the Dynamics CRM App for Outlook, emails are easily organized and tracked back to CRM records, right from the comfort of your local Inbox.

Outlook email can be tracked to contact records, opportunity records, case records or just about any record type in CRM. The entire message is copied, as well as any attachments (if configured). The app even works with Outlook Web Access (OWA), so you can even use this when you’re out of the office in a web browser or smartphone using OWA. Your CRM administrator will have to do some setup on their end to push the installed to your Outlook client, and once that’s done here’s what the user experience is like:

The release of Microsoft’s OneNote may not have been as momentous as the first Moon landing or Neil Armstrong’s famous quote the blog title borrows from, but it was a giant leap in productivity as it relates to software tools that are available to collect and organize everyday notes. Now, Microsoft has amped up Office 365 productivity by integrating the popular program to Microsoft Dynamics CRM!

Released with CRM 2015 SPQ Spring Release, now all of those important OneNote notes, pictures, even doodles from those boring office meetings can be linked back to records in CRM. How cool is that? Let’s take a look at how it works:

Are you a cowboy riding an ostrich?

If your collection of software applications running your business looks like The Island of Misfit Toys, then it’s worth considering some new alternatives.

 

Have you ever found yourself frantically looking for your car keys, only to have someone point out that they are in your hand? I must admit I do this at least once a month, and it is usually my wife who “finds” them for me. It is no longer embarrassing to me, just something I accept about my personality and the way I think. I get into a project and have such laser focus sometimes it’s easy to miss something right in front of me. It occurs to me that this could be happening in the software world. Maybe not the same thing but I don’t care – I like a good “sort of” comparison for an intro, and this one will do. 

Many organizations have decided to use XRM to build a custom solution for their business, rather that creating it from the ground up using custom application development methods.

Could this be a good idea for your business?  Here are 7 good reasons that may get you thinking.

One of my favorite toys as a kid was Legos. It was that awesome feeling I got from creating something out of nothing. Usually, I would make some monster truck – it was the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, and Big Foot was a big deal. But I digress. So we weren’t building something out of “nothing”. We were starting with some building blocks that the Lego company provided.

No question there is a lot of thought, planning and precision engineering put into manufacturing those pieces so that they all fit together perfectly. As smart as we were, building a plastic Big Foot replica without those building blocks would have been beyond our ability. So we start with a pile of seemingly unrelated plastic blocks, wheels, people (with and without heads), shrubs, chimneys, car parts, etc. and create something entirely new from the seemingly random pieces. Fun!

CRM & SharePoint Integration 

If you are familiar with the very powerful interface which allows a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) user to attach seamlessly documents to a given entity (account, contact, opportunity, etc.) using the CRM/SharePoint integration, you may also be aware of a potentially dangerous gap in the security model.


I have found that the out-of-box integration is well designed, intuitive, and easy to use. I can take any document and with a few clicks of the mouse, associate it to a CRM entity while saving it in a SharePoint library. This interface gives users the best of both worlds: CRM for field level data and SharePoint for document management. The possibilities are seemingly endless.