Infosys powers digital transformation of sales with Microsoft Dynamics 365

Established in 1981, Infosys, an NYSE-listed company, is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting. It enables clients in more than 56 countries to navigate their digital transformation with ease. Infosys is ranked among the top three valuable IT brands in the world this year by Brand Finance.

Need for a unified digital ecosystem for sales transformation

Technology is at the core of any digital transformation, and the 2020 pandemic has accentuated the need for businesses to evolve digitally rapidly. Changing business needs require enterprises to sense and respond in real-time to changes in customer requirements, talent supply chains, and virtual working. Infosys embarked on a digital sales transformation journey to be a live enterprise with agility built into the core to stay ahead of the game. With the primary objective of transforming sales experience across the entire sales cycle, it identified specific interventions across every touch point where sales operate, from lead generation to order booking, by creating a data and insight-driven ecosystem.

Reimagining sales processes with Microsoft Dynamics 365

The Sales Effectiveness function at Infosys envisioned a break from traditional sales models and created a ubiquitous and sentient ecosystem across different stages of the sales process. Each stage of the sales process was transformed by integrating external and internal intelligence to enable seamless communication and collaboration between clients, sales teams, and other key stakeholders. The intelligent digital ecosystem completely transformed the “day in the life of a salesperson” through data-driven insights, enabling sales teams to be agile by shortening their decision-making cycle. 

Microsoft Dynamics 365 was central to the transformation of the digital ecosystem. It created a hyperconnected customer relationship management (CRM) solution that linked people, data, and processes, enabling the team to adapt and innovate quickly. Critical business processes, like business planning, prioritizing deals, and managing customer feedback, were tightly integrated. Infosys co-created AI features like Opportunity Scoring (iScore) and Digital Sales Assistant on top of the CRM solution. Infosys translated real-time buying signals of clients and past win experience into valuable insights for the sales teams to improve winnability of deals. Infosys also developed a central knowledge repository and integrated it with the CRM to generate enriched contextual insights, which helped the sales teams to make informed decisions and take quick actions.

Srividhya VS, Global Head, Sales Effectiveness and Enablement, Infosys, says, “Over the years, the transformation has been truly rewarding. Our sales transformation has helped us optimize sales processes leading to a reduction in overall sales cycle time. The built-in intelligent features have helped significantly in boosting our conversion rates and improving sales productivity.”

Driving transformation and innovation through the CRM CoE

Infosys launched a CRM Center of Excellence (CoE) to create a single source of truth for all its sales data. The aim was to attain next-level maturity in customer relationship management through process transformation, cultural transformation, and innovation.

Process transformation

CRM data integrity is critical for sales teams to visualize their pursuit pipeline and decide on the right winning strategy. CRM CoE plays a pivotal role in ensuring data is comprehensive, consistent, and accurate. In addition, the CoE team equips leaders with access to crucial operational and predictive metrics, including pipeline analysis, key deal indicators, deal closure risk, portfolio and service line insights, and forecasts.

Innovation

To increase efficiency, Infosys has incorporated several innovative features in the CRM ranging from AI/ML-based opportunity scoring that identifies top pursuits to easy integration of CRM with most-used apps like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, LinkedIn, and an all-inclusive powerful data cube on Power BI. Additionally, the account planning module is driven by Microsoft Power Apps.

iScore is an AI-based tool that grades opportunities and assigns a score based on the probability of converting them to wins. The tool also monitors the progress of deals, identifies roadblocks, and assists sales teams in prioritizing deals. As a result, processes are streamlined, and sales teams are better equipped to make informed decisions, leading to shorter sales cycle times and faster closure of deals.

Integrating Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn, Power BI, and Outlook has significantly enhanced day-to-day sales processes. For instance, CRM and Microsoft Outlook can be seamlessly integrated, enabling communication, lead generation, and prospecting. By leveraging LinkedIn Sales Navigator integration, the sales team can obtain insights into customers’ activities, connections, and the latest updates, allowing them to devise a more effective sales strategy.

With Sales Cube on Power BI, all sales organization members can create their dashboards and reports, gaining accurate and real-time insights, which increase their efficiency while reducing resource usage. 

Additionally, the newly launched account planning module on CRM assists the team in planning, strategizing, executing, and optimizing the overall account strategy. 

Cultural transformation

Infosys ensured true transformational gains by looking beyond digital excellence and keeping cultural change at the core of the transformation journey. It launched various initiatives like focused coaching sessions, fireside chats with super-users, gamification, case study competitions, etc.

With the launch of the CoE, sales efforts spent on manual tasks were reduced, allowing sales teams to concentrate on essential operations, resulting in increased face time with clients. . Cloud-based real-time dashboards and reviews offered sales personnel access to data and analytics anytime, anywhere, enabling them to make informed decisions. Gamification also made sales operations more efficient and enjoyable for employees. Coaching sessions helped sales teams realize that the platform was more than just data-driven, and they leveraged the insight-driven platform to connect better with customers and sell more effectively. 

Gaining more efficiency at lower costs

“With Dynamics 365’s rich ecosystem, we were able to help the sales teams focus on core selling. The sales teams have a 360-degree personalized view of key data points like market intel, client contacts, client communication history, win trends, and the ability to manage strategic account planning effectively on a single platform.”, says Saikrishna Kaparthy, Associate Group Manager, Sales Effectiveness and Enablement, Infosys. 

By connecting people, processes, and data, the CRM ecosystem delivers tangible benefits to Infosys -

• Infosys has improved its CRM hygiene score by twelve percent by implementing a robust data and governing strategy.
• The initiatives of CRM CoE have reduced costs and sales efforts. It has led to a remarkable improvement in sales productivity by saving over 1,000 person-hours per quarter.
• There has been a 74 percent improvement in the creation of contacts in CRM, and Infosys has further deepened its connect with key client executives.
• Lead creation improved by 10 percent YoY which has a direct impact on revenue growth 

Expanding the horizon to drive future growth 

Infosys is at the forefront of digital infrastructure by moving towards insights-based selling. With the rollout of an AI-driven digital sales strategy, it has successfully transformed its sales organization's productivity and client relationships. Given its rich experience in AI, Infosys has started harnessing the capabilities of generative AI with several use cases across its lead-to-order cycle.

With its AI capabilities, such as generating contextual responses and uncovering valuable insights for customers, Microsoft Dynamics 365 will play a crucial role in the Infosys journey.  Building upon the existing partnership, Infosys looks forward to collaborating more closely with Microsoft to build an AI-driven digital sales ecosystem. 

Srividhya VS, Global Head, Sales Effectiveness and Enablement, Infosys, says, “With the world moving towards generative AI, we want to leverage powerful features like self-learning chatbots and predictive models that would help us win blockbuster deals and bring about industry-leading growth.”