Sales Solutions/Sales Effectiveness

Customer information exists in a variety of systems and forms. The sources of customer information are growing, but this only makes it more difficult to manage and understand. Knowledge of past purchasing patterns, behavioral characteristics, and interaction with other parts of the enterprise are critical to successful customer engagement.

Microsoft and its partners provide a variety of solutions for understanding your customer. Customer information can be stored where it can be accessed by people at all levels of an organization, helping everyone make more informed decisions. Because it is aggregated and presented through familiar and easy-to-use Microsoft Office applications, customer information is available in the right format, helping leaders and sales personnel make the very best decisions to increase sales.

Tracking the activity, progress, and effectiveness of a sales team is one of the most difficult challenges facing sales leadership. As teams become global and physically separated, this task becomes even harder. Yet without connection, trends are harder to spot, difficulties are discovered late, and opportunities are lost. Further, sales teams that do not collaborate cannot deliver customer solutions quickly.

Microsoft offers a variety of tools to enable the collaboration of a worldwide HTE sales force. Real-time measurement of performance, activity, and call tracking can be presented in charts and graphs for instantaneous analysis. Portals and workspaces can be provided for the collection and sharing of information about campaigns, competition, new products, and customer solutions. And Microsoft Unified Communications solutions provide an "always connected" experience for the field staff and its management.

Sales personnel cannot be effective if they aren't connected to information. But time spent in the office is time not spent selling. As management places greater emphasis on increased selling time, sales professionals need a way to stay connected even when they're not in their offices.

Sales representatives can copy customer data onto handheld devices, which they can use while selling products or away from the office. Windows Mobile, integrated with Exchange Server and CRM, means that sales professionals are never out of touch and can improve their response time with anywhere access to customer information.

From lead qualification through closing of the deal, understanding the status of opportunities is critical to sales management. Yet much of this information is not centralized and therefore is not accurate. Companies need a better way to manage their opportunities so they can focus on the highest-value/highest-probability deals.

Microsoft and its partners provide technology solutions that can improve lead tracking and qualification to increase conversion rates. Opportunity management and deal tracking are simplified via real-time monitoring, predictive analysis, and dashboards. Integrated with Microsoft Office Outlook, CRM solutions can provide a single, familiar, and easy-to-use environment for managing all customer information, leads, and opportunities.