The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed businesses into uncharted waters. From the time the reality of the pandemic had begun sinking in, it had become apparent that COVID-19 would have a major impact on sales. A couple of months ago, CMO had conducted a survey that stated – most of the companies across US have recorded a decline in sales of 50% or beyond. In the current scenario, generating revenue and upkeeping company growth is a huge challenge and a time sensitive one at that.

The situation is not the same for all. Some of the industries such as pharma and FMCG have recorded a jump in sales, making it challenging for companies in the sphere to keep the show running. When trying to get to the heart of the issue, analysts discovered that sales leaders are facing great hardship to meet increasingly demanding customer needs. However, as they say, ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’, the sales professionals are innovating and evolving to capture the customers’ attention and build fruitful relationships.

How are they doing it?

Organizations that are training their sales team to leverage the given digital arsenal and foster customer relationships effectively are expected to stay afloat in these challenging times. Undoubtedly, the sudden digital shift is not easy to handle; however, there is no other option than to make wise use of it for enhancing customer experiences and increasing and managing sales conversions. 

To help companies battle out the COVID-19 chaos, a mature deployment of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Insights, Microsoft Digital Sales came to the rescue and it has been successful in scaling at this time of increased demand. Dynamics 365 has been supporting customers without disruptions, helping medical centres, educational institutions, and suppliers of essential goods to march ahead and speed up vital digital initiatives. From the time Microsoft deployed Dynamics 365 to its Digital Sales team, revenues for the segment have shot up consistently and have reduced the cost of sales by approximately 10%.

Improving Sales

Enhance your sales productivity with Sales Accelerator:

Sales teams in companies must concentrate on high-velocity selling! Valuable time is spent by these sales teams to identify the potential customers in their customer list, and when and how they should be approached and engaged.

To overcome this challenge, the Sales Accelerator in Dynamics 365 offers a customized experience for the sellers by reducing their time spent on searching for the next potential customer to approach. The Sales Accelerator consolidates information from multiple sources and enables sellers to concentrate on how to approach their customers in the best way. It assists the sellers to sell smartly, by building a prioritized pipeline, providing context, and surfacing automated suggestions throughout a sales sequence which helps to pace up the sales process.

Without exception, the top-performing sellers too find it troublesome to jump between screens and swap contexts. The Sales Accelerator that combines information and insights for easy access comes handy in such cases. Sales Accelerator shows sellers their past notes so that they are able to instantly drop into the zone with that customer to provide him/her a better experience than the previous one.

Advanced forecasting and pipeline intelligence:

To truly understand business status and make informed strategic decisions, companies need to forecast sales targets accurately.

How can the sales team of a company uncover top deals using Dynamics 365 Sales?

Simple! Through these features:

• Predictive forecasting
• Pipeline intelligence
• Predictive lead scoring
• Predictive opportunity scoring

Intelligent scores provide sellers with guidance on where they should best invest their time. It also assists them in fine-tuning resource allocation and enhancing productivity. The latest Microsoft release has enhanced the prediction insights on both predictive forecasting and predictive scores.

Strengthening customer engagement

Relationship intelligence:

This Microsoft D365 release includes a premium version of auto capture that enables sellers capture data easily and swiftly so that they can direct their efforts to revenue generation. In simpler terms, it helps sellers identify, build, and foster relationships with customers.

Conversation intelligence:

Conversation intelligence offers meaningful insights by automatically transcribing calls, and analysing content, sentiment, and behavioural style. Sellers can now effectively guide customers toward a purchase by making use of proven conversation techniques.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice:

Dynamics 365 Customer Voice helps you collect and track the customer metrics and rapidly act upon these insights. In the latest release, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice enables sales managers and sellers to measure sentiment and NPS metrics which helps them hear and act on customer grievances around products, sales processes, and experiences. With efficient integration with Dynamics 365 Sales, companies can directly track and analyse customer sentiment within Dynamics 365 for a better experience.

The new features in Dynamics 365 Customer Voice for improving feedback capabilities within Dynamics 365 Sales are as follows:

• Email template enhancements
• Short URL support
• 5 million responses per survey (up from 500,000)
• Better question branching
• Real-time follow up management
• Automatic survey reminders

Conclusion

These are uncertain times and companies must adapt to the changing conditions while delivering consistent results. Dynamics 365 is here to help by empowering companies to sell more through proper understanding of customer psychology.