Scott Guthrie – Executive Vice President, Cloud and Enterprise Group, Microsoft – announces today exciting new Dynamics 365 capabilities and invites you to join the Microsoft Business Forward web live event.

Here are a few highlights from today’s announcement. Make sure to visit the Official Microsoft Blog to view the complete article.

Improving sales with Dynamics 365 + LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Dynamics 365 for Sales is now integrated with LinkedIn to help salespeople deliver better outcomes using insights from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and LinkedIn’s 500 million professionals.

Modern talent solutions for a modern workforce

Introducing a new application for HR organizations called Dynamics 365 for Talent to help companies better manage everything from employee sourcing and recruiting to onboarding and retention.

Customer-centric retail experiences designed for an omni-channel world

Dynamics 365 for Retail, a new intelligent cloud service, provides retailers with an integrated end-to-end view of their operations with centralized management and clear visibility across stores, employees, customers, inventory, and financials.

Additional updates across Dynamics 365 include:

• Dynamics 365 Business Edition apps for Sales and Marketing, available in preview July 1
• New industry-specific solutions available in Microsoft AppSource
• Plans to deliver Dynamics 365 from local datacenters in the U.K. and Germany.

On Wednesday, May 3, at 10 a.m. Eastern Time (UTC-4), we invite you to join Microsoft Business Forward to learn more about Dynamics 365, these new solutions and how they can help you and your employees from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Corporate Vice President James Phillips and Executive Vice President Judson Althoff. You’ll also hear from leaders in a variety of industries about the steps they’re taking to reimagine how they operate, innovate and compete.

Visit the virtual event site here to receive event updates and attend this live web event.

The post New Dynamics 365 capabilities to drive your business forward appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Recent Dynamics 365 announcements create great opportunities for partners going forward. The key is to determine how to best position your Dynamics 365 business going forward. eXtreme is the place to get a deeper understanding of the changes at hand and assimilate them into your future.

eXtremeCRM is the one event for both established and new Dynamics CRM Partners to understand the impact of change! eXtreme has locked on the final keynote lineup and is excited to share the news. Help chart your path ahead with insights from outside analysts, industry experts and Microsoft Executives.

Here is the lineup:

• Jujhar Singh, Corporate Vice President of Dynamics 365 (CRM) and our Executive host, will share the exciting strategy and vision during his Roadmap Keynote.
• Ron Huddleston, Corporate Vice President MBS Partner Strategy & Ecosystem Microsoft will paint the vision of what the partner of the future will look like.
• David Bahnsen, Chief Investment Officer and Managing Director of The Bahnsen Group of High Tower Advisors. David is a regular Forbes magazine contributor as well as frequent guest on CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, and Fox News.  We are thrilled to have him share his insights and knowledge on how the election results will impact the technology world.
• JC Quintana as a Keynote speaker. JC is author, professor and thought leader focused on building customer relationships and delivering exceptional customer experiences.
• Stephen Boyle, Vice President, US Partner Group will talk about how Microsoft will support partners their Dynamics 365 strategy.

Standard Pricing Ends and Sleeping Room Rates increase November 13
November 13 is a key date to save! Register to save $300 off at the door pricing. Book your room at the five-star Island Hotel for just $229 per night. Being on premise allows you to be where the action is and get the most out of the conference!

There is no better place to learn how to rethink your forward business strategy than eXtreme. Learn about eXtreme at the eXtremeCRM website.

December 5-8, 2016 Newport Beach, CA

The post Hot off the press! Final keynotes announced for eXtreme! appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Written by: Wayne Morris

As a CMO, I am in the middle of the marketing evolution, as are all my fellow marketing professionals. We are adopting new ways of connecting with and engaging our customers, prospects and partners. While our ability to substantially increase our reach is growing through social outreach, viral adoption, and an increasing number of communication channels, conversely our ability to manage our brand image is impacted by this very same new marketing reality. At the same time, through the use of behavior analysis, social listening and analytics we have much more insight into the concerns and interests of our customer and prospects. Using this and the shift to more focus on digital channels allows us to do more two-way engagement and deliver more personal, differentiated experiences.

This has led to an increasing awareness of the business value marketing can bring – we are now very much in the spotlight. Because of this, there are higher expectations of the results marketing can deliver and a corresponding increase in and accountability for technology budgets allocated to the marketing function. The majority of us are under a CEO mandate to improve marketing effectiveness, while most of us are struggling to account for how our budgets are spent and how to quantify the associated returns from this spend.

Typically, we have limited ability to obtain a complete 360 degree view of our prospects and customers. If we don’t have a closed-loop approach to measuring and optimizing campaign effectiveness our visibility is reduced, which makes it harder to improve the return on our marketing investment. Many of us have felt frustration at our IT department’s slowness in delivering these capabilities and so we may have moved to cloud-based marketing and CRM solutions that didn’t involve the IT department as an expedient way to obtain the supporting systems we require. However this may be a short term fix with longer term consequences.

We already understand that marketing needs to partner closely with the sales and operations functions to ensure we are delivering qualified leads into the hands of a selling organization equipped to take the lead through the sales cycle to closure. Similarly, we also need to build strong partnerships with the IT department to ensure we have an integrated marketing management system that enables our ability to execute effective marketing while also supporting overall business and financial goals. The benefits of this partnership are two-fold:

• It ensures we have a safe, secure environment that protects customer and prospect privacy;
• It enables closed-loop measurement and analysis of marketing effectiveness across the full customer lifecycle.

We’ve all heard or experienced the negative consequences associated with privacy breaches and the loss of trust from customers and prospects that is a result. This continues to be a highly visible concern for most organizations, not just in terms of a brand’s reputation, but also in regards to compliance. A core competency of professional IT departments is security and privacy protection, so by working together, we can mitigate the risks associated with potential security breaches.

While we are mostly concerned with the outreach to and initial engagement with potential and existing customers, we really need to see a complete picture of what happened to the lead generated by these marketing. What was the outcome in terms of purchase? How much revenue did we generate? How are the customers using our products and offerings? Are they experiencing any issues or usage difficulties? How satisfied are they? Are they advocates? What might they want or need next?

These questions can only be answered if our marketing, social, sales, customer care, financial and product instrumentation systems are all working together. Most IT departments able to implement the necessary integration or, at the very least, will be needed to open access to these core systems.

Enlightened CIOs and IT departments already understand the business reality and want to support effective marketing. As CMOs we can champion strong partnerships with IT in the same way we have built strong working relationships with our sales channel partners. If we do so, we mitigate risk and increase our overall marketing effectiveness. CMOs and CIOs – delivering better business results together.

Post originally written for Forbes.com: http://www.forbes.com/sites/microsoftdynamics/2013/03/18/cmos-and-cios-better-together/

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