{"id":11033,"date":"2017-12-13T10:07:42","date_gmt":"2017-12-13T18:07:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=11033"},"modified":"2023-06-16T13:30:34","modified_gmt":"2023-06-16T20:30:34","slug":"creating-a-sales-productivity-solution-with-powerapps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/creating-a-sales-productivity-solution-with-powerapps\/","title":{"rendered":"Creating a sales productivity solution with PowerApps"},"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This content has been archived, and while it was correct at time of publication, it may no longer be accurate or reflect the current situation at Microsoft.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
Our highly mobile sellers need quick access to sales assets, data, and tools. We used PowerApps to develop a mobile app that gives sellers access to sales documents, training materials, and customer relationship management (CRM) data that gives them real-time visibility into sales opportunities. A collection of software services and app components, PowerApps allowed us to easily develop and merge apps into one experience for sellers on the go.<\/p>\n
At Microsoft, sellers rely on a powerful set of tools that support the sales process and improve collaboration. To further enhance the seller experience and increase productivity, we created SalesHub, a mobile application built with PowerApps. SalesHub gives sellers access to curated pre-sales assets and tools they need in a simple, mobile application. SalesHub makes it easier for sellers to prepare for customer meetings and helps our teams to work better together.<\/p>\n
To prepare for customer engagements, sellers spend hours each week connecting to multiple data sources to get the right information about the customer, the opportunity at hand, and the activities that have been completed. In addition, our sales force is constantly mobile, so they have limited time for training and learning about new products, promotions, and offers. While they can complete these tasks on their laptop, it is not always practical for someone who is always on the go. Some of the pain points our sellers typically face include:<\/p>\n
We realized that with their growing portfolio, our sellers needed a more efficient and flexible method to access pre-sales material. We also wanted to augment the customer relationship management (CRM) system by providing a mobile app that gives sellers real-time visibility into all aspects of an opportunity. Our team assembled some basic goals that we wanted to achieve for our sellers:<\/p>\n
With these goals in mind, we developed a plan to create an app that would offer curated content to our sellers and give them the tools they need to be productive on the go. We selected PowerApps as the platform for our app unification project. PowerApps gave us the flexibility to merge our apps into a single experience, offer a user-friendly and attractive UI, and integrate with other common cloud and mobility data sources.<\/p>\n
PowerApps is a collection of software services that offer a more direct, simple way to develop and integrate apps. It connects to existing cloud services and data sources and helps to quickly build apps to meet specific needs. PowerApps also offers enterprise-grade capabilities combined with easy-to-use authoring. PowerApps consists of four major components:<\/p>\n
Using PowerApps, a member of our team designed a functional prototype application to present how our application, SalesHub, would look and interact with the variety of data sources and tools in the sales ecosystem. The prototyping process was done by a power user on our team, not developer. It took the user a week to develop a functioning prototype, which enabled us to put the prototype in front of stakeholders so they could make a business decision quickly. The ability to quickly create a basic solution like this in PowerApps accelerated our development process. It enabled us to embrace an agile approach to development and ensured that our business requirements were met at every step in the development process.<\/p>\n
All parts of SalesHub are connected through the interface, including data sources, user interface, functions, and in-app processing shown in Figure 1.<\/p>\n PowerApps provides a GUI for connecting to data sources, such as Azure SQL and multiple APIs. SalesHub also includes the following components:<\/p>\n