Microsoft pivots to digital selling with Dynamics 365 to reach more customers

Microsoft has flipped the traditional sales model over the past few years, from inside sales teams supporting field sales teams to those inside teams now outnumbering their field counterparts. Today, more than 2,500 digital sellers serve customers from eight sales centers around the world. As more customers move to digital buying, the volume of leads generated has grown exponentially. To keep up, Microsoft Digital Sales turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Insights to scale for increased demand, engage customers remotely, and increase seller productivity.

Scaling for increased demand

As millennials move into the ranks of decision makers, they’re expecting digital buying experiences. In response, inside selling increased 89 percent in just four years, according to a 2017 InsideSales.com study. That has resulted in more leads, more contacts, more activities, and more digital channels—and traditional tools and processes no longer meet these new challenges. Microsoft found the answer in its own business solutions, Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Insights.

“In the past, we faced the challenge of serving customers and building strong relationships at scale. How could we help our sellers reach more customers remotely, yet keep their conversations contextually rich and personalized? The AI features of Dynamics 365 were key to answering that challenge.”

Chris Weber, Corporate Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Business, Microsoft

Accelerating sales with an AI-driven workspace

Since Microsoft deployed Dynamics 365 to its Digital Sales team, revenues for that segment have risen consistently for the past three years and have reduced the cost of sales by 10 percent. Most importantly, the company is providing its customers with a personalized experience at scale.

The Microsoft Digital Sales team leverages the recently deployed sales accelerator, an AI-powered workspace in Sales Insights that helps sellers close deals faster. Sales accelerator cuts through complex to-do lists and channel noise to surface priorities. “Our sellers face the challenge of balancing their time between the many tasks they have to do to stay on top of customer needs, actioning marketing leads, developing and closing deals, and handling administration,” says Justin McCarthy, a Senior Director of Digital Sales on the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) team. “We’re looking to optimize productivity because we strive to reach out to customers when they need us most so that we can deliver the best value. The AI sequencing in sales accelerator helps us prioritize and reach as many customers as possible and deliver on our mission.”

Even top-performing sellers find it jarring to jump between screens and switch contexts, but sales accelerator combines information and insights for easy access. Some of the experienced sellers have up to 200 customers. “Sales accelerator shows sellers their previous notes and other context so that they can immediately drop into the zone faster with that customer for a richer encounter than they would have had in the past,” says McCarthy.

Shelby Bleick, a Digital Sales Manager in the United States, regards Sales Insights as a virtual office for her team. “My team and I spend about 80 percent of our day in Dynamics 365 Sales Insights,” she says. “There’s really nothing else I need to run my team’s business.” Sales Insights has capabilities for every aspect of selling—as an AI-enabled workspace, it supports sellers throughout their customer encounters. Bleick uses the AI-powered features for a bird’s-eye view of her team’s overall status, such as quota, leads, opportunities, and closed deals. Her sellers have everything they need, including the ability to call customers directly from the solution. Sellers begin their day by viewing the next highest-scoring lead, so they no longer waste precious sales time churning through customer lists and email threads.

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Working together while apart

Brittany Pavek, a Digital Sales Manager, and Cassie Meyhoff, Sales Director, Southeast Region, typically work from Fargo, North Dakota. Their respective teams are based 1,200 miles away in Texas. Sales Insights empowers their sellers to work independently and yet share information and receive feedback from Meyhoff and Pavek.

“We rely on the AI features of Dynamics 365 to surface marketing insights to our sellers,” says Meyhoff. When a customer goes to the Microsoft website to start a trial or request information about a product, that information goes to the sellers in real time. The experience provides contact information—even pointing to the person’s LinkedIn profile. “We’re excited about this new feature, which gives us the ability to tie a customer’s activity to their licensing details so that we know what the customer has or doesn’t have. That helps us better prepare for customer meetings,” she adds.

Building and maintaining relationships first

Selling enterprise software is complex and requires a high level of trust. Customers look to Microsoft sellers not just for answers to immediate needs, but also for advice and guidance. To become trusted advisors, sellers need insights about the company, industry, and decision makers.

The Digital Sales team can access that critical information and build relationships at scale with integration between LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365. “My team and I use Sales Navigator every single day, so the combination with Dynamics 365 gives us all the relationship insights we need in one single place,” says Meyhoff. “It’s the first thing I tap into before every customer call because it helps us connect to customers on a deeper level. Rather than sending out a blanket email, Sales Navigator provides a way to personalize the message and shorten the distance between you and your customers.”

Pavek couldn’t agree more. “I think that people buy from people they trust,” she says. “I like that with Sales Navigator and photos, I can put faces to names of the people I want to connect with. I’m all about relationship building, and I like sharing articles or different top-of-mind topics that I think my contacts will enjoy outside of the sales process.”

Pulling valuable insights from every encounter

While many organizations have rich call recording data, extracting value from that data involved more effort than was practical. Microsoft Digital Sales harnessed the power of AI to analyze thousands of hours of call conversations automatically for actionable insights. Sellers now get concrete guidance on the topics, tone, and techniques to use for more effective conversations.

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“I get valuable insights on my team both as a whole and as individuals,” says Bleick. She likes the insights she gets from conversation intelligence, which categorizes positive and negative sentiment based on keywords in the conversation. “If I had to listen to calls one by one, it would take a hundred calls before I could build up meaningful insights and actions,” explains Bleick. “I use conversation intelligence to focus on the 7 percent of calls with negative sentiment to find out where I can better train sellers on a particular feature. I can use other keywords to know where we’re missing opportunities or better understand competitors. Our sellers can assess customer sentiment remotely and confidently steer the conversation while building rapport quickly.”

Adjusting to every situation

Like its customers, Microsoft works to help ensure that its global teams can support each other and their customers in all kinds of situations. When people had to quickly adjust to COVID-19, Microsoft sellers were able to continue supporting customers without disruptions, helping those in critical roles—from medical centers to educational institutions and researchers to suppliers of essential goods—forge ahead and accelerate key digital initiatives.

Suddenly working from home, Microsoft sellers quickly adapted. After sellers and managers made necessary adjustments in their family lives, teams across Digital Sales immediately switched to seamlessly supporting their customers from home using the same trusted and highly secure tools—Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams. “Microsoft Teams has been a godsend in terms of being able to communicate and collaborate remotely both within the organization and then outside the boundaries of our organization with our customers, partners, and suppliers. Teams is a complete collaboration and communication platform,” says Weber.

McCarthy knows his team hopes to reconnect in person, but he’s grateful for the resilience the organization has shown during the COVID-19 challenge with the help of digital tools. “Roll back the clock a few years and our ability to keep serving our customers wouldn’t have been possible,” he says. “Sales accelerator gives us tremendous flexibility to deal with whatever the future holds.”

“Technology is rapidly changing the world of sales,” adds Weber. “A digital seller who’s surrounded by AI-powered tools has a huge advantage in a business world that increasingly operates in a digital space.”

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