Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales is a powerful CRM offering a multitude of capabilities to consolidate customer information, optimize collaboration with other teams, and effectively manage existing and new opportunities. However, many Microsoft Dynamics users rely on inefficient manual processes to generate quotes and proposals. Although MS Dynamics 365 for Sales does come with some quoting capabilities, it lacks the ability to send accurate, branded, professional sales proposals, track buyer interaction with those quotes.
Manual Sales Processes Lead To Errors, Time Wasted, and Money Left on the Table
The ability to efficiently create reliable price quotes is crucial to accelerating sales cycles, impacting business growth, and creating a satisfactory customer experience. However, the process can involve numerous parameters and become a complex and time-consuming task. This is especially true when the quote involves an ensemble of components and variables whose costs depend on multiple considerations such as industry, product configuration, etc.
As a result, salespeople often find themselves manually computing prices and then using tools such as Excel or Word to issue a sales proposal. This not only makes the process tedious, but also leads to calculation errors, discrepancies in pricing and legal policies, inconsistency in how the organization’s brand is represented, and wasted time and effort on generating customized quotations.
In fact, according to Aberdeen Group, only 38% of companies are sending accurate price quotes, leaving significant revenue on the table.
So how can organizations simplify the process and increase their speed and efficiency when generating quotes in Microsoft Dynamics 365?
3 Ways to Streamline the Quoting Process and Increase Sales Efficiency
Implement Playbooks and Guided Selling
If you are reading this, you are probably using Excel or other manual templates to calculate and create your company’s price quotes. Playbooks are intuitive and configurable wizards that use “guided selling” to walk salespeople step-by-step through each customer engagement and content generation activity. These guided flows can be customized to every type of sales scenario, enabling salespeople to create personalized quotes within minutes effortlessly.
Employ Digital Proposals Instead of Word, Excel or Manual Templates
Digital proposals release Sales teams from time-consuming manual entry when creating business proposals. The whole deal cycle can be managed and nurtured from one point of interaction instead of sending and tracking numerous files. This not only saves time and minimizes errors, it enables prospects to share proposals with their internal stakeholders with just a couple of clicks.
Use Insights to Optimize Every Stage of the Deal
Getting real-time alerts on customer engagement allows salespeople to quickly identify buyer intent, track progress, and see which content is resonating. They can pinpoint friction areas, and quickly make changes to optimize the experience for customers and guide the deal forward quickly and more efficiently.
As organizations grow, the manual processes and templates that served them when they were small become difficult to scale, unmanageable, and time-consuming. I have worked with dozens of Sales Operations professionals, IT managers, and other Sales related capacities and one of the things that almost always surprises them is how easy it is to implement tools within Microsoft Dynamics 365 that automate processes and make quoting simple, easy and fast, leaving salespeople time for what they do best, sell.
If you would like to learn more about how your organization can optimize your quoting process, please feel free to contact me at – Ben Blugrond Director of Global Sales at DealHub.io or request a demo.
