Lessons Learned from Moving to the Cloud - Dynamics 365 for Sales

What happens when you turn on all of Microsoft’s features for Dynamics 365 for Sales

Spoiler alert: If you’re turning on features that even Microsoft hasn’t fully vetted your computer will not explode; but, if you were looking for an excuse to pour your coffee onto your machine and call it a day, you’ll find one. The good news is, it is completely worth it.

Keep reading.

At Vox ISM, on March 4 2019, we will be fully live on Dynamics 365 for Sales, Service, and Project Service. We will also be live in the Cloud on Business Central and Power BI. We’re making the migration from CRM 2015 on-premise and NAV 2015 on premise. Being the eager person that I am, in January when this project started, I insisted we turn on every feature and tool available for these apps. What was I thinking? I have just shy of 3 months to turn on everything and I can be quoted as saying, “we have to, it’s awesome!” 40 users, a full suite of products, 4 departments going live, all happening on March 4. We enabled:

• LinkedIn Account and Contact integration
• LinkedIn Campaigns integration
• Business Central two-way integration with Sales
• BC and Sales Order integration
• BC and Sales Product integration
• BC and Sales Account integration
• Power BI integration in both systems (ERP and CRM)
• Organization Insights
• Dynamics 365 App for Outlook
• Relationship Assistant (AI)
• Email engagement (AI)
• Hubs <- and according to Microsoft we’re the 1^st ones to do so.
• Mobile device deployment
• OneDrive integration
• OneNote integration
• SharePoint integration
• Microsoft Teams
• We moved the entire company to Office 365 and Microsoft Exchange Online.
• Portals

And probably a few others that are eluding me right now.

So what happens when you turn on all of Microsoft’s features for Dynamics 365 for Sales? Several 16 hour days and 100s of cups of coffee later (here’s the twist) you get the most powerful sales tool you could ever imagine. I may have lost a bit more hair implementing this system for arguably my toughest customer, my own company, but the productivity tools we implemented are outstanding. Today I edited a quote sent to me by a rep directly from Outlook, converted it to pdf and sent it back without leaving the reply window of the email message. That’s right, I didn’t have to download it, open it, make my adjustments, save to a folder, then reply and launch the file explorer and attach the new file with the new filename, then upload it to my cloud storage to meet the company’s SOP requirements. I was able to edit it right in the reply window and it auto-saved and attached the file with my initials in the file name for revision control. I hit track and everything was taken care of.

The features our sales reps now have:

• 20,000+ LinkedIn connections in CRM now and when the April ’19 release comes they’ll even have live updated org. charts.
• More leads! Our sponsored content and website registrations automatically create sales leads for my reps to follow up on.
• Live accounting data for reference; outstanding orders, sales for the year, credit balance, etc. all available on every account screen in Dynamic 365 for Sales. No additional licensing required.
• Create quotes and orders in CRM that go straight to accounting when deals are closed.
• Power BI and CRM reports side by side on the sales dashboards. Providing my team with the ability to dissect and analyze then take direct actions on their sales activities.
• Everything on this list can be accessed directly from your Outlook (on your desktop, browser, tablet, and mobile)
• An AI-powered personal assistant that provides notifications for information requests, meeting invites, upcoming deadlines, customer sentiment and priority emails that may affect open deals, and more.
• Fully automated processes that with the click of one button can generate a polished quote addressed to the customer on file, pdf’d, send it to the customer with a thank you note, an automatically scheduled follow up activity and an update to your pipeline to reflect the correct sales stage of your deal.

Again and more….

What’s the takeaway?

Let someone else go through the growing pains, and then benefit from their hard work. In this case, we did the hard part and now we’re ready to roll out the system to all of our customers. If you have any questions about my implementation experience with this project or want to know more about Microsoft’s Sales productivity tools, send me your message and I will answer all of your detailed questions. My contact details are on our company page.