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It happens to every B2B sales organization: flatlining. Not as in “dead,” but as in hitting a plateau, an even line, maintaining. And while holding steady doesn’t sound too bad for most things in life, in B2B sales, if you’re not growing, you’re dying.
Let’s take a look at a few problems fueling flatlining in B2B sales, and how you can leverage Dynamics 365 Sales and its extensions to fix them.
Unlike in the B2C world where a buying decision is often made in a moment, B2B buying cycles tend to be loooooooong.
If you’re a Dynamics Partner, this ain’t news: no one buys D365 Finance in a week: it’s six months minimum. CRM sales have a shorter sales cycle (sometimes as little as 30 days), but that still, like most B2B sales, dwarfs the time your average B2C sale takes.
Fortunately, with the ability to track every interaction, set every meeting and reminder, and store every document, Dynamics is built for the long haul.
Not only that, but by connecting your entire Microsoft ecosystem (Finance, D365 Sales, Outlook, LinkedIn, and more), the long haul may even be preferable as the data you collect therein can give you a far more complete profile of your prospects and customers.
So let’s rephrase: Dynamics isn’t just built FOR the long-haul: it’s built to THRIVE in the long-haul.
Quality leads are the name of the game, but $#!~ leads are usually what’s at the top of your funnel.
How do you tell your good leads from your bad leads? You don’t. Let your leads tell YOU. Dynamics 365 Marketing, for example, has dozens of tools that help you automate the qualifying process.
Rather than wasting valuable human resources on qualifying every lead you acquire, use what’s built in to Dynamics to automate that task: capture website visits, email opens, social media activity, and other critical engagement metrics to score leads, and let Dynamics automatically route leads to a rep when the score is right.
Setting a “win win” price has always been a challenge: most B2B reps would love to start a pricing conversation by simply asking a prospect, “Whaddya got?” But most prospects would then reply, “Nada.”
So what’s your starting point for the pricing conversation? Dynamics can help. And it can help even more when you extend it with a configure, price, quote (CPQ) solution.
How Dynamics helps uncover the right price
When you’re using D365 Customer Insight as part of your solution, you’re able to merge all data form every interaction to enjoy a 360 degree view of your customers and get insights into their buying behavior. Couple that with contextual AI from D365 Sales, and Competitor Entity in CE, and you can quickly get a better idea of what price is right for the market overall and the prospect in particular.
How CPQ helps deliver the right price
CPQ (such as our solution, iQuoteXpress, which has a single sign-on for Dynamics) has at its heart a dynamic product and pricing configuration engine that enables a sales leader to centralize and optimize product configurations and pricing.
With CPQ as part of Dynamics, you can rest assured that the latest product configurations (and their upsells, cross-sells, and upgrade paths) as well as the pricing attached has been proven-out by other sales reps in your enterprise.
With CPQ, every rep is working off the same script at the most important part of the B2B sales cycle — the proposal.
And while we started this article talking about “a few things” you can fix to improve sales, if you ONLY fix how pricing is configured in your sales quotes, you’re on a path to grow with every quote you send.
