For growing businesses considering the adoption of a new CRM solution, the stakes are high. You’ve achieved a level of success and in order to continue expanding and provide your customers with the best possible experience, you know you’ll need to invest in new capabilities. But which solution is the right one for your business? It can be a difficult question to answer.
The CRM market has seen a major boost in recent years and that market growth is projected to continue to accelerate from an estimated 58 billion USD in 2021 to 129 billion USD in 2028. It’s yet another indicator of the importance of CRM solutions in today’s business world, but that kind of growth has significantly increased the number of available options in the CRM space, creating an often confoundingly complex software landscape decision-makers need to navigate. Researching and building an understanding of the many available option takes time most decision-makers simply don’t have.
At Catapult, we’ve been helping SMBs succeed and grow with business solutions tailored to their needs for over a decade and in that time, one CRM platform has risen to the top as the right choice for SMBs — Microsoft Dynamics 365. Having worked with many different software options over the years, Dynamics 365’s unique combination of robust capability offerings and platform flexibility have made it our go-to solution and the one we recommend for growing SMBs looking for a long-term growth. Of course, any business needs to do their own research when making a platform decision like this, but we’ve broken down the biggest advantages small and medium sized businesses have gained by choosing to adopt Dynamics 365 in our experience.
What does CRM mean to you?
One of the first things you’ll likely notice when researching platforms is that many of them are highlighting modules and capabilities that have no relevance to your business model. CRM is a broad spanning term and what it means to your business will depend on your needs and the problems you’re looking to solve.
For a business looking to more efficiently generate new leads, a CRM solution might be a marketing tool that schedules and automates communications to potential new customers and allows you to track and report on the results. For a business looking to boost their sales, a CRM solution might be a platform that allows your sales team to more effectively coordinate calls, build a sales funnel, and generate forecasts based on past results. For a business with a growing service team, a CRM solution might be a tool that allows your team to track and update the status of customer service appointments while in the field and easily report on their efficiency. Each of these needs requires a different solution, but all of them are considered CRM. It’s one of the biggest difficulties businesses face when choosing a platform. While SMBs usually only have a current use case for relatively specific capabilities, CRM platforms are often either too narrowly focused or too wide ranging in scope. Businesses that choose a platform that meets only their specific needs will find it difficult to evolve their solution over time.
Let’s say, for example, your business wants to adopt a CRM solution that is narrowly focused on marketing automation to help with your lead generation. You successfully adopt that solution into your business processes and your lead flow increases providing you with lots of new service contracts. But that boost to the service side of your business will now require new service operation tracking and management capabilities. Because you chose a narrowly focused solution to begin with, you’ll be stuck implementing an entirely new solution to manage your service contracts and left to deal with the complexities and headaches of multiple unconnected CRM platforms and databases.
On the other hand, businesses that choose to implement a solution offering a wide-ranging set of capabilities upfront are often forced into spending time and money implementing and deploying capabilities they have not use for and are left with an unnecessarily complex platform. This dichotomy of bad choices leaves many SMBs scratching their heads, but with Dynamics 365 CRM, businesses can have the best of both worlds.
A suite of connected applications
Dynamics 365 CRM is different from many other CRM solutions in that it exists, not as a single CRM platform, but as a suite of applications, each of which offers their own specific set of modules and capabilities. Dynamics 365 Sales, for example, is designed specifically to enable salespeople to build stronger relationships with their customers, make data-driven decisions and close more deals. Dynamics 365 Marketing, on the other hand, is designed to turn prospects into business relations through AI and marketing automation. Each of these applications address specific business needs and can be implemented as standalone apps, or seamlessly integrated with one another to work as a single CRM platform. Choosing Dynamics 365 CRM allows businesses to address their specific current needs with an initial lean CRM deployment while continuing to evolve their solution with new capabilities as their business grows and new needs arise.
Because all of the Microsoft Dynamics apps utilize a common dataverse and are built with a fully responsive unified interface, adding new capabilities and business process is a much more streamlined and intuitive processes for your internal teams. Data seamlessly flows between applications and, unlike other platforms, Dynamics 365 also offers an ERP solution specifically designed for SMBs. This allows businesses to easily track and report on their entire customer journey from lead, to sale, to revenue. On top of that, the Dynamics 365 Power Platform provides users with a wide range of low-code tools to build new customizations that can further tailor your solution to your specific business processes.
This unique combination of robust capability offerings with the flexibility to tailor the solution to specific needs makes Dynamics 365 the clear choice for SMBs. The real key to success with Dynamics 365 though is choosing the right partner to build and support your solution. At Catapult, we’ve built an understand the unique needs for SMBs when adopting a CRM and have formed a comprehensive framework that allows these businesses to get the most out of their CRM solution both now and into the future. You can read more about our four-step Success Framework in our recent eBook and learn how your business can achieve success with CRM both now and into the future.
