13 Reasons Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Wins Over Salesforce

by | Apr 26, 2018 | Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM

13 Reasons Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Wins Over Salesforce

by Apr 26, 2018Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Don’t have time to read the whole blog right now?

Take a look at our easy to read, colorful, and informational infographic highlighting the 13 main reasons Dynamics 365 is your superior choice in customer engagement solutions over Salesforce.

The blog gives more detailed information and expands on the ideas presented in the infographic.

Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement – Which is the better choice in CRM solutions?

When choosing a Customer Engagement solution for your organization, the options are more and more focused on two choices – Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce. Both are mature solutions, as well as recognized market and feature leaders. Having assisted dozens of clients to make the migration from Salesforce to Dynamics 365, we have compiled a list of what drove these clients to their decision to switch. For us at enCloud9 many reasons point to the conclusion that Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is the superior choice over Salesforce in CRM solutions. In this post, we will explore the top 13 reasons Microsoft Dynamics 365  is the better option.

1. Licensing Costs – Salesforce is the most expensive CRM solution out there.  The cost per user for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is about half of the cost of Salesforce CRM. With Dynamics 365, you get more features at a more reasonable price – a better value.  The features of Dynamics 365 Professional Edition is highly comparable to the Salesforce Enterprise Edition- only Dynamic’s solution is about half the cost. Also with Salesforce, add-ons are more expensive and less inclusive. For quite some time, Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics CRM) has offered customers the best value.

2. Seamless integration with the Microsoft Stack – More people choose Dynamics 365 because of its easy integration with other familiar Microsoft technologies. Dynamics 365 works well with apps such as Sharepoint, Yammer, Outlook, Azure, and Office. For example, you can create a quote right from Outlook without having to switch apps. Just think how productive your salespeople would be with this ability! According to the American Psychological Association, a worker loses 40% of their productive time when switching tasks. This leads right into the next reason.

3. User Friendliness – The ease of use of Dynamics 365 is due in part to its similarity and compatibility of many well-known and well-used programs. People are more comfortable with what they already know. Getting everyone in your company on board to use CRM can be a challenge, but having something easy to use can be a distinct advantage.

4. Ownership of Data – Salesforce and Microsoft have significantly different policies when it comes to the data that you enter into your CRM system.  Salesforce charges extra fees for API access or backups of your data.  Microsoft, on the other hand, believes that the data in your CRM system is yours to do with as you please. Backups of your Dynamics 365 data are available upon request and API access to your data is included with your subscription. Microsoft allows you to use outside Apps to update your data at no additional cost.

5. Development – Dynamics 365 employs universally  accepted programming languages including HTML,  C#, .net, and JScript to extend and integrate with customer LOB applications. Salesforce, on the other hand, uses APEX, a proprietary programming language for custom development. Dynamics 365 customers have a wider pool of developers to choose form, and these developers can quickly learn how to work with the Dynamics SDK and API. Access to the Salesforce API is one of the extra costs developers have when integrating with other systems. Dynamics 365 includes free access to the API.

6 – Data Warehousing and BI – Customers put their data into their CRM, but sometimes they want to report on that data in integration with other systems. Using Data warehouses allows this type of deep analysis which can link CRM data, ERP data and other LOB data. Dynamics provides an open API for this type of data warehouse functions. Once again, the Sales force API is an additional cost. As far as Business Intelligence – Dynamics integrates natively with PowerBI – a powerful data analysis and visualization tool. PowerBI is included with certain Office 365 subscriptions for a low or no cost data analysis solution.

7. Hidden Costs – Salesforce has a reputation for hidden costs. Many of the features that are add-ons with Salesforce are either built-in or available at a lower cost with Microsoft Dynamics 365.  Additional storage costs can also be very high with Salesforce. (For example, 1 gigabyte of storage costs around $250 with Salesforce, while the same amount of storage with Dynamics 365 would cost around five dollars per month).

8. Deployment options – Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is available through SaaS (multi-tenant hosting), private hosting, on-premise hosting, and Cloud Platform- while Salesforce only has one method of deployment. The SaaS Model of deployment is the only one available with Salesforce.   Some organizations (such as government) can’t risk sending sensitive data over the internet. Organizations such as this need security or control that is only achieved through on-premise. It is important to get a CRM that is right for your requirements.

9. Marketing Automation – Marketing Automation integrated with a great sales CRM has been the holy grail for growing companies. The ability to track leads from initial touches from a prospecting team to the cutover to a sales team and keep al of those touches in one application provides useful information about what works and what doesn’t when trying to find new customers. With this data, marketing and sales teams can make better decisions about how to spend those important marketing dollars.

Salesforce has two marketing tools – Pardot and Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SMC) – Both apps are aimed at different markets. Pardot is aimed at B2B while SMC focuses on both B2B and B2B. Pardot focuses on lead scoring and works within the Salesforce application. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the former ExactTarget application that was purchased by Salesforce. SMC is a separate application from the Sales Cloud, so they exist as two separate applications with different user interfaces.

Dynamics 365 has two world class Marketing Automation applications that both work with Dynamics 365 – one application for sales and marketing! The first app is ClickDimensions – a full functioned marketing suite that provides email marketing, webforms and web analytics, SMS marketing, and more. The second Marketing application was developed by Microsoft and is called Dynamics 365 Marketing. Both apps have many of the same features and are easy to learn and work with existing CRM data. They can be used in B2B and B2C situations.

10. Extendability – As mentioned previously, customization is much easier with Microsoft Dynamics 365. As companies grow and evolve, it is crucial that they can customize views quickly and not have to worry about slow development times or coding issues.

11. Data Visualization – Most CRMs include basic dashboards as part of their base solution. Dynamics 365 allows dashboards and charts to be surfaced on entity forms as well as custom dashboards. Not only that, but end users are enabled to create their own dashboards using simple to use tools built in to Dynamics 365. Dynamics 365 dashboards show real time data – Salesforce Dashboards only update 1 or 2 times a day, so the data in your dashboards might be out of date by the time you are viewing it!

12. Lead Nurturing– Built-in lead nurturing ability (Similar to, but not as limiting as Salesforce Sales Cloud).

  • Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement offers Dynamics 365 for Sales and Dynamics 365 for Marketing solutions for lead nurturing.

13. Innovation – Because of Microsoft’s ongoing innovation and investment in AI and machine learning, they continue to be a leader in the Digital Transformation movement. Microsoft is continually looking for ways to use technology to improve the way companies do business. Satya Nadella’s 2015 mission statement for Microsoft hold true. “Our mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,”

So, as you see, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is the better choice in CRM solutions. Both CRM systems have some great customizable features to offer, but for many reasons, Dynamics 365 has a clear advantage over its counterpart. The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Roadmap provides you information about what is being made generally available to the public and what is in development.

 

 

Want to Learn more?

To learn more about how Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement can help innovate and change the way you do business, contact the experts at enCloud9.  We have helped many businesses both to implement Dynamics 365 and to migrate from Salesforce.  We’d love to talk with you, learn about your company and their needs, and discuss how we can help you increase your company’s productivity and efficiency with Dynamics 365.

Visit our blog to read other interesting articles about Dynamics 365.

To learn about other reasons that Dynamics 365 is the right choice for you click here or download our PDF comparing the features of Dynamics 365 and Salesforce. 

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