While many companies use Dynamics 365 to track leads, opportunities, and contacts, many still create quotes in Excel spreadsheets. This blog aims to demonstrate why your company should create quotes in Dynamics 365. This blog is part 6 in our series about forgotten features in Dynamics 365.
Creating quotes in Dynamics 365 is extremely time efficient.
Time management is a major challenge to sales teams. Only about 30% of a salesperson’s time is actually spent talking to prospects. The other 70% of a salesperson’s time is spent on administrative tasks, such as creating quotes and data entry. That’s a lot of time! Manual quoting though Excel templates or Word documents takes away precious time that could be better spent engaging with your prospects.
When you use an integrated quoting system, like Dynamics 365 Sales, the quote and customer data is accessible to sales reps all time. So, quotes can be conveniently generated quickly at any given time.
You can even set your Dynamics 365 to autofill vital customer information – which is a real time saver! An accelerated quoting process means more quotes. More quotes means more deals and a higher revenue!
Generating quotes in Dynamics 365 ensures accuracy
Since the quotes created in Dynamics 365 are are updated and accurate, you can be less concerned with human error like you would have to be if you were creating your quotes manually.
Salespeople are able to stay up to date by utilizing the product list. This ensures that all your salespeople know when there is a price change.
An integrated quoting system improves collaboration
Because your entire sales pipeline is under one roof, everyone is kept in the loop. A unified quoting system promotes seamless collaboration. Sometimes multiple contributors getting their information from different places can cause a disconnect in information.
The enhanced productivity and efficiency that you’ll experience with a unified quoting system keeps your pipeline moving smoothly.
Another feature that can be set up is automated approval workflows. This also eliminates errors and ensures accuracy.
All of this together means happier customers
When you let Dynamics 365 handle the quoting, you are able to focus more on clients. You will, in turn, be able to quickly present prospects with a well-structured and accurate quoting document. Delays in obtaining quotes can lead to dissatisfied customers and lost business.
Using Dynamics 365 for your quotes helps you to be more organized. Not only, does the increased organization increase your efficiency and productivity, but it also makes you appear more professional to your prospects and clients.
New clients are great, but data shows that existing clients spend around 30% more than new clients. Using a unified quoting system also ensures that your salespeople don’t miss important upselling opportunities.
Reports and analytics
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement includes reports, charts, and dashboards that provide useful business information to users. The insights from accurate reports helps inform business decisions. Not only can reports and analytics can help you make more informed and educated business decisions, but the insights also help you understand areas needing more attention.
Visit Microsoft docs for directions on running reports or for more information on working with reports.
Using products with opportunities
An easy way for you to increase your sales is to add all the products to the product list that a customer might possibly want. Adding products beforehand makes cross-selling, up-selling, and adding products to an opportunity easier. In part 2 of our series on Mastering the Dynamics 365 Sales cycle, we focus on opportunities and using products with opportunities. This blog gives directions for adding products to opportunities.
How can we help?
If you have questions about how quotes and products in Dynamics 365 could help you, turn to enCloud9 for assistance.
From platform selection to licensing to implementation and go live, we guide you every step of the way. Once you are live, enCloud9’s Dynamics 365 Management Services support your users and keep your system up-to-date and running smoothly. To learn more, contact us today.
We’d love to hear about your business and discuss how our custom Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions can work with your business and its specific needs.
Other “forgotten features” in Dynamics 365 that we’ve recently written about include:
