Let’s face it, the more efficiently your internal teams work together, the more effective your company will be. Unfortunately, with traditional software, it’s almost inevitable that silos will begin to form. Your sales team might use one set of applications to track and monitor their customers, while marketing will use a different suite to plan and execute its campaigns. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone knew instantly what the other was up to?
The latest release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 focuses on breaking down the barriers between your sales and marketing teams. Improving collaboration between these groups should not only help improve efficiency by reducing duplicate efforts, but also help keep everyone informed and moving together as a team.
New Visual Email Editor
One of the most dramatic changes to Dynamics CRM 2015 is the improved email designer. The new email editor is based on pre-designed templates, so you can pick one that’s sure to get your customer’s attention.
Once you pick a template that works for your campaign, you can customize it easily with the new drag-and-drop interface. With this visual editor, you don’t need to be an expert in HTML and CSS to get the exact look you want.
Not only does this streamline the email campaign creation process, it also makes changes a snap – helping sales and marketing easily create a campaign that will be effective for both sides.
Improved Campaign Management
New for this edition of Dynamics CRM 2015 is A/B split testing. This feature will let marketers quickly find the most effective way to reach customers by seeing which version of the campaign gets the best response. The results are almost instantaneous too, with real-time analytics delivered straight to the dashboard.
Savvy marketers can also get intricate with their campaigns with multi-condition triggers and embeddable cross-campaign offers.
Sales Collaboration Panel
To enhance the new campaign management features, Dynamics CRM 2015 also includes a Sales Collaboration Panel giving sellers input in how messages are targeted at customers.
Not only do teams now have unprecedented control over how campaigns are targeted, they also gain new visibility into campaign activities and can set up and receive alerts based on these interactions, so they’ll know exactly when they’ve piqued someone’s interest.
Marketing Calendar and Process Automation
Your teams can now see exactly where they stand in their marketing plan with the new marketing calendar view. This is all made even more collaborative with click-to-call functionality.
We all know the power of face-to-face communications in business and now you can access that with a single click from within this edition of Dynamics. For those businesses that choose to enable it, Lync click-to-call will be an essential tool.
New as well for sales teams is a branching, automated sales process, which helps guide your sellers towards their goals. This feature builds upon business process flows that were introduced in Dynamics 2013, but introduces branching capabilities.
Dynamics NAV 2015
While it’s easy to focus entirely on the improvements to Dynamics CRM 2015, the companion ERP software, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2015 has also been updated.
This version lets NAV users go mobile by introducing tablet views. Now users can access their essential data right from their favourite mobile device.
The mobile flavour of this release can also be seen in tighter Office 365 integration and enhancements to the user interface.
Get Up and Running Faster
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 will be available in the fourth quarter of this year and with all these new features it’s a great step forward in maximizing your employees’ productivity. But you need to focus on your business not your software. To that end, we offer the Vox ISM Vertical Accelerator, a set of preconfigured industry solutions for Microsoft Dynamics. We’ve designed these industry-specific solutions to help reduce the cost, risk and time associated with implementing a solution like Dynamics, letting you quickly realize a return on investment.
Let us know what features of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 you’re most excited for in the comments below.