{"id":10749,"date":"2019-09-17T16:31:02","date_gmt":"2019-09-17T23:31:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=10749"},"modified":"2023-06-15T13:52:35","modified_gmt":"2023-06-15T20:52:35","slug":"driving-sales-efficiency-with-dynamics-365-and-microsoft-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/driving-sales-efficiency-with-dynamics-365-and-microsoft-ai\/","title":{"rendered":"Driving sales efficiency with Dynamics 365 and Microsoft AI"},"content":{"rendered":"
This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Dynamics 365 for Sales and Microsoft AI are used to present the highest-priority sales leads to sellers. With this new solution, sellers can quickly act on the leads most likely to become customers. The solution creates a simple, intelligent system for discovering and contacting the best lead and makes our sellers more efficient and effective.<\/p>\n
In today\u2019s world of selling, Dynamics 365 and AI form a powerful combination that helps sales professionals stay as productive as possible. Microsoft Digital used Dynamics 365 for Sales and Microsoft AI to create a solution to present the highest-priority sales leads in the system to sellers. With this new solution, sellers can quickly act on the leads most likely to become customers. The solution creates an efficient and simple system for discovering and contacting the best lead.<\/p>\n
To generate global demand for Microsoft products and services, the marketing and sales organization collects leads when people request information or access gated content via an online form. The system collects leads by using marketing vehicles, such as:<\/p>\n
When someone signs up for a Microsoft product trial, sends us an email, or downloads content, the person or business becomes a lead for the purposes of sales and marketing. We market to over 10 million leads per year. These names\u2014which might be company or people names\u2014become records in the marketing and sales system. The salesperson takes the lead received from the marketing and sales system and works to convert the prospective customer into one who\u2019s ready to buy Microsoft products or services.<\/p>\n
As a sales organization, Microsoft has the primary goal of being as effective as possible in taking leads and converting them to customers\u2014that is, to users and purchasers of our products and services. The existing lead-qualification solution began the process by acquiring the lead information and ensuring that each lead was a potential customer with valid contact information. The solution then determined the intent of the lead. It profiled and nurtured the lead in preparation for a marketing qualification process that used AI and an email bot to determine the lead\u2019s intent, move the lead to an identified sales opportunity, and finally, move the lead to a sales win and to customer success. Find out more about this solution in the paper,\u00a0Microsoft increases sales by using AI for lead qualification<\/a>.<\/p>\n This marketing process provided a better assessment of our leads, but it still left a significant gap between the handoff from the marketing solution and the point of engagement by our inside sales team. We needed to further determine the eligibility of a lead for potential sales and route the best leads to our sellers as efficiently as possible. The following figure depicts the process of building lead management for sellers.<\/p>\n Although the preexisting system removed poor-quality leads and provided basic lead qualification, we recognized the need to do more for our sellers to give them the best leads to work with. The sellers were still working with numerous leads that didn\u2019t convert to customer successes, because the leads simply weren\u2019t ready. The sellers struggled with several issues:<\/p>\n The company wasn\u2019t using the sellers effectively. About 18 percent of the leads converted to customers, and we wanted to increase that rate. The sellers needed access to simple, accurate, and well-qualified leads. We needed a way to send the very best leads to our sellers\u00a0so they could convert those leads to customers.<\/p>\n We wanted to create a solution that would take the leads from our marketing system and give our sellers simple, actionable access to the next lead in the system that provided the best opportunity to create a Microsoft customer. We set several goals for the solution:<\/p>\nExamining the need for higher-quality leads<\/h3>\n
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Establishing the next best lead<\/h2>\n