To be successful, a business needs growing sales and satisfied customers. In theory, it may sound simple, but how do you achieve this? Today, we will talk about the benefits and capabilities of CRMs and analyze the most popular ones. In addition, we’ll show you how to implement CRM right to your Microsoft Teams environment and scale it across your organization.
Table of Content
CRM system is a software that allows you to automate and facilitate business processes. The CRM market is growing and improving every year, and all companies are trying to install the systems themselves: from small ones with 2-5 employees to large ones. Of course, the platforms themselves and their functionality are different. But their core is the customer base.
The system allows you to better build interaction with customers:
CRM systems help organizations increase sales and employee efficiency. They clearly show analytics for the sales funnel and put all work processes in order. And that’s not all!
So, what can you do in practice by implementing a CRM in your organization?
Thus, CRMs perform operational routine tasks: create documents and online reports, generate necessary tasks, send emails to customers, calculate the cost of services using a built-in calculator, remind of important dates, and automatically performs the necessary actions (for example, invoices or renews contract). The possibilities are truly endless and depend on the platform you choose.
Since our focus is an efficient use of Microsoft Teams, let’s see how CRM and Teams integration would work.
Microsoft Teams is a platform that allows you to organize your business processes with enterprise security and compliance features. As you probably know, Microsoft Teams is a unique tool for collaborating, communicating, and sharing data across an organization. One of its key capabilities is a seamless integration of Microsoft or 3rd party apps right into your Teams environment. And CRM platforms are no exception. Why would you need this integration?
The first is the opportunity to improve collaboration. You can easily optimize all business processes and share data. This integration creates a kind of unified platform for collaboration and connection of all business processes, records, and other content.
Secondly, it is time-saving. Instead of juggling between apps, your colleagues can work in a single Teams environment. This leads to increased employee efficiency, reduced task delays, and improved data management.
Finally, Microsoft Teams is the ideal platform for effective communication for all employees. This is especially true in our time when remote work has become a new norm to the whole world. Quick response to any changes in customers’ data, effective communication with external agents, optimization of internal processes, and much more.
Alright, the above was just theory. Let’s take a look at real examples of popular CRMs and their integrations with Microsoft Teams.
Dynamics 365 is a set of intelligent business applications that helps you run your business. There are more than a dozen of apps that fit into your needs for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and much more.
Dynamics 365 CRM can help you keep track of the sales pipeline, accounts, and customers and collaborate on sale deals with your team. This includes Dynamics 365 for Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Project Service Automation, and Filed Service. Regarding the sales process optimization, Dynamics 365 Sales provides you with information about your prospects and customers. So, your team can plan and forecast the next interactions.
As a part of Office 365 Product, Dynamics 365 CRM gives you an amazing experience to connect data from different platforms. For instance, you’re able to get insights from LinkedIn Sales Navigator and track profiles and insights as part of an account, contact, lead, and opportunity record. Next, you’re able to optimize sales processes with multichannel communications such as softphone dialler or Outlook email templates.
With Dynamics 365 CRM you’re able to reduce the number of manual tasks by getting suggestions to automate new records creation. In addition, with AI technologies you will be able to get proactive guidance such as internal relationships, icebreakers, next best actions, and much more.
Control revenue with a flexible forecasting solution to avoid any risks. Build interactive dashboards and reports to track your sales team performance and deliver more effective coaching. Moreover, you can use a flexible and no-code tool to quickly implement next best action recommendations for your team.
As usual, you can add Dynamics 365 as a new tab in the right team. Thus, you will be able to collaborate on any information, such as customer accounts, opportunities, and more without leaving Teams environment. After connecting Dynamics 365 you can select Entity Selection or View Selection.
Entity Selection
By choosing Entity Selection, you can add any records to your channel tab. If you’re an owner, you will be able to edit records right from Microsoft Teams. Changes will be synchronized with the customer engagement app in Dynamics 365.
View Selection
Also, you can add available views as a new tab. Just choose your own or organizational views and track any activities and changes right from a Teams channel. Thus, you will be able to work with your team members on customers information and share files right from Microsoft Teams
Communicate with colleagues
Easily start a new conversation right from a channel tab or set up a video meeting. Mention your team members, communicate on key deals and quickly react to any changes without missing time. On the other hand, you can collaborate with your colleagues from Dynamics 365 app. On a record page, click on Collaborate and display a list with all the connected Teams channels.
Chances are you’ve already about Salesforce CRM. It’s a cloud-based software to connect marketing, inside sales, commerce, and services into one platform. With Salesforce you can manage your contacts, opportunities, create sales reports, automate marketing campaign, and much more
Contacts Management
With this cloud-based platform you can collect all needed information about your customers, such as activity history, any communication you’ve had with them, and even detailed information from social media.
Opportunities and Account Management
Collect any information about sales deals with customizable sales dashboards. Track where each prospect is in terms of sales process stage, product interests, and any upcoming actions that need to be taken.
Marketing Automation
With AI technologies you can identify new customer segments, forecast marketing conditions, and, in general, improve lead management and prospecting. This allows you to target the right customers at the right time and increase your efficiency.
By connecting Salesforce to Microsoft Teams, you get your team members the possibility to mention and interact with Salesforce records directly from Microsoft Teams environment.
For example, with Teams and Salesforce integration, you can mention any Salesforce records in a team channel or chat. Next, you’re able to easily preview the records without leaving Teams. Finally, add Salesforce record right to your Teams tab and simplify your collaboration on opportunities and accounts. Read more about Salesforce and Microsoft Teams integration
Would you like to know how to improve collaborative processes at scale? Integrate Salesforce with Microsoft Teams templates :
HubSpot is another amazing platform. At SalesTim, we really love it, and we use Hubspot for our sales and marketing management process. HubSpot is a web-based platform where you can manage all your data. Based on Inbound methodology, HubSpot provides you a single platform to attract visitors, convert leads, and close sales deals.
With Hubspot CRM you’re able to improve your customer relationship management by organizing and tracking your leads and customers. Let’s look at its key capabilities:
By integrating Microsoft Teams with HubSpot you can make sure that your business, employees and customers are on the same page. Just add the HubSpot App to your Teams environment and avoid frustration and miscommunication among your team members.
Cross-channels collaboration
Microsoft Teams can be connected to HubSpot CRM, Marketing, Sales, and Services Hubs. All information from your HubSpot Workflows, such as emails, names, job titles, etc., will be tracked in Teams. Thus, your sales managers can find the most up-to-date information right from the Teams environment.
Increased Productivity
By using Automation Workflow, you can provide crucial lead and customer details to the right team members. Thus, they will spend more time nurturing and less time on finding contact data. For example, you can build a workflow to manage Microsoft Teams notifications. Thus, your team members will be notified through a team channel each time when a needed trigger is updated.
Real-Time Communication
Add the action “Microsoft Teams notifications” to any HubSpot contact, deal, ticket, etc., so your colleagues will be automatically notified about important activities. Start new conversations through channel posts, set video meetings, and share data without wasting time.
Zoho CRM is an ideal tool for small and medium-sized businesses. It is an online service that allows you to minimize the “human factor” in regular tasks and reduce the involvement of sales staff in the process, through automation, real-time alerts, and built-in gamification. ZOHO CRM is an electronic sales assistant based on artificial intelligence that will help you make more balanced and accurate decisions and predictions.
The service allows you to set up your own security model, restrict access by IP, track user activity and create regular data backups. In addition, you can extend the core functionality of Zoho CRM through integrations with third-party applications: Google Drive, DocuSign, MailChimp, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Google Ads, and more.
Instead of sharing each dashboard with individual members or collating them into a presentation, you can connect Zoho CRM with Microsoft Teams.
Go to Microsoft Teams Store, search for Zoho CRM app and add it as a new tab to the right channel. Thus, you will be able to select any dashboard and pin it as a new tab to collaborate with your team members.
In addition, you’re able to include records from Zoho CRM as cards in a conversation with your team members. Thus, your leads, contacts, accounts, and deals module will be displayed.
One more great CRM is a Pipedrive. With Pipeline, you can bring better and more engaged leads and convert them into deals. With a flexible and easy interface, you can customize your pipelines in stages to visualize your processes.
The great thing about it is that every call and email are automatically tracked, thus you will get a transparent view into the past and future of every sale. As in other CRMs, you can build workflows to streamline routine tasks, such as sending follow-up emails. Finally, you can gather insights into your business and measure performance against set goals.
To integrate Pipedrive with Microsoft Teams you will need to go to the Tools and Integrations section right in the Pipedrive app and choose Microsoft Teams Connector. Thus, you will be able to schedule Teams video meetings right from Pipedrive. In addition, bot integration will allow you to get updates on Teams about all deals, activities, and organizations.
You can also create workflow automation that will send notifications to Teams. Send a message to a channel or a private message every time an event is triggered. This way, your team members will stay notified and focused on any important changes.
If you still have not found a CRM system suitable for your organization, you can use different software from Microsoft. Integrate them with your Microsoft Teams and get an efficient system for managing sales and storing customer data. Let’s look into it with real examples.
Microsoft Lists to collect customer data
Microsoft Lists is a simple and flexible space where you can create your customer lists and work with large amounts of data. Here you can store all customer information and sort it using various functions. For example, note here the name of the firm, its size, product preference, the start date of contact and estimated closing date, and more. Read more about all the interface options here.
Microsoft Planner to track daily tasks
With Planner, you can track tasks for your sales team. Here you will see handy cards where you can add due date, comments to the task, checklists, attach files, and much more. With the help of various boards, you can easily track the dynamics of your team’s development. Read more
Microsoft Yammer to stay up to date on news
Add any community as a new tab to your sales team. This way, your colleagues will be aware of all the news from your team with the following needed tags feature. Read more about Yammer with Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Forms to collect customer feedback
Use Forms to collect product reviews and ratings for your service. With this, you can not only quickly and conveniently collect information, but also draw up reports, compare results between teams, and much more. Learn more about Microsoft Forms with Teams
Finally, we would like to talk about SalesTim – the collaboration processes management app for Microsoft Teams.
With SalesTim you will be able to build your own Collaboration Templates Catalog to create dozens of pre-built teams.
Next, during template creation, you will be able to manage Teams governance policies, such as a naming convention, permanent membership, security settings, and much more.
Finally, using SalesTim APIs you can connect any 3rd party app right to your Teams with Teams templates according to your personal use cases.
As we told you before, you can use Microsoft apps to manage your sales processes. What if we told you, that you can build Teams templates with pre-configured tabs with apps? For example, build Planner just once to track the sales process. It will be automatically added to a newly created team from your template. The same goes for Forms, Yammer, SharePoint, Microsoft Lists, etc.
Moreover, you can connect your internal app right to Teams environment with Microsoft Teams templates. Let’s see how it works with Salesforce. By connecting Salesforce with Teams, you will be able to:
Sounds interesting? Schedule a demo with us and we will discuss how SalesTim can fit into your organizational needs.
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