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Sales enablement is more than a buzzword: it’s a process and practice, and one defined by its platforms.
Dynamics 365 Sales (or most any of the Dynamics CRM platforms) offers a solid foundation for sales enablement. But it often requires extending your solution via integration of CPQ and Dynamics.
Adding CPQ to Dynamics enables sales teams to automate what’s perhaps the most critical step in any sale: the building, delivery, and signing of a sales quote. And a sales enablement strategy that doesn’t cover the proposal process is no strategy at all.
The catch is that, in some cases, CPQ disrupts existing practices and platforms, forcing a rep to go outside Dynamics to create and send a quote, which essentially derails the sales enablement process.
Fortunately, iQuoteXpress (IQX) works in Dynamics through a single sign-on, supporting an automated proposal process in the CRM environment, and making smooth sailing for sales from start to finish.
Think of your enterprise system as a good old-fashioned toolbox. Now, imagine assembling this “bricks and mortar” toolbox the way so many technology systems are assembled.
Instead of having your hammer and screwdrivers and pliers all in the same box, you have your hammer in the garage, your screwdrivers distributed throughout your neighbors’ garages, and your pliers in a different timezone.
We don’t organize our brick-and-mortar tools haphazardly, yet we almost always do so with our business tech: a separate login for CRM, another portal for marketing automation, and different providers and apps for creating sales quotes, managing workflows, invoicing, etc etc etc. And then we act surprised when salespeople avoid learning new tools.
For the average rep to fully take advantage of a CPQ solution to send more professional, more targeted, and more effective sales quotes — with product and pricing configurations that are dynamic and optimized — a single sign-on solution, one that feels native to Dynamics CRM, is critical. It needs to work inside the Dynamics system that reps access daily, and be available with zero heavy lifting.
All the sales enablement solutions and extensions in the world won’t matter one bit if they’re ignored, making single sign-on a must, not a nice-to-have.
Through its dashboards and displays, Dynamics, gives a sales manager almost complete visibility into what’s happening in every rep’s pipeline — but take note of the word “almost.”
Sure, a manager can view leads in the top of the funnel, which of those leads has been contacted, which has had a demo or webinar or engagement, and which have had a quote sent to them.
Yes, you can see a quote has been sent and if an opportunity has been won or lost. But what about the myriad of steps often taken between when a quote has been sent and when it has been signed? This is where Dynamics, as a start-to-finish sales enablement solution, often has a blind spot. Granular tracking at the individual quote level is typically outside any CRM’s feature-set. But it’s at the heart of a CPQ system.
Automated, granular tracking of every quote… optimized sales proposals with dynamic product and pricing configurations… all seamlessly integrated into your Dynamics system. While it may not be a sales enablement system by its lonesome, CPQ as part of your CRM is most certainly a cornerstone of any B2B sales organization’s overall sales enablement strategy.
