If it don't fit, don't (Sales) force it

As the song goes: "If it don't fit, don't force it. Just take your time and check it out."

Are you in the early stages of your research or still narrowing down potential new solution providers? Whichever it is, it's important to invest time into reviewing the capabilities each solution offers to match them against your organisation's requirements. So before you tap into a new partner, ask yourself these 5 questions:

1) How's that productivity looking?

Does Microsoft Office 365 (think Excel, OneNote and Teams) play a significant role in your organisation? You're not alone. In most modern organisations (and in more modern times), these applications play a vital role in the way teams communicate and share ideas and work. With the addition of Dynamics 365, you are given a much deeper Office 365 integration across Dynamics 365 legacy and other third-party data sources through a single agent interface. So, your people can work as efficiently and effectively as possible.

As of yet, Salesforce doesn't offer immersive Excel, OneNote or Teams integrations.

2) Do you need AI with that?

Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence solutions are fully embedded in the Dynamics 365 platform, which means that Dynamics 365 offers some of the most advanced CRM and ERP features and benefits in the market. These include:

• A common development and AI platform.
• Mixed reality applications that visualise products and helps unlock deeper customer insights.
• A relationship assistant that watches over daily activities, generates tailored actionable insights, and provides a relationship health score.
• Sales Insights offer unique AI features (not found in Salesforce), such as conversational intelligence and built-in sales coaching.
• IoT alerts in connected field service that can initiate a work order in Dynamics 365.
• Customer Insights which enrich customer profiles with audience intelligence such as user interests and brand affinity from Microsoft Graph. Again, not found in Salesforce Customer 360.
• Fraud protection for your commerce revenue stream.

3) Measurable value?

Full disclosure here – we are a Microsoft partner. So, of course, we firmly believe that the Dynamics 365 solutions offer the best value for money available across SMB, SMC and Enterprise level organisations. But it's a belief based on facts.

• Salesforce Cloud Enterprise comes in at $150 PUPM
• Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise costs $95 PUPM

But the value of Dynamics 365 extends beyond just price. Having worked across both the government and private sectors, Fusion5 and Microsoft completely understand the need to maintain on-prem solutions, even today. Unlike Salesforce, we offer Dual-Use rights for both online and on-premises use.

Additionally, Salesforce has several different underlying applications (mostly through acquisition) that make up their platform, each with its own SLA, storage and compliance commitments, and encryption functionality. Microsoft has just one.

4) Common data service

We touched on the productivity benefits for employee collaboration with an integrated Dynamics 365 solution. But what we didn't mention is that it also integrates your front office and back office.

You can easily and quickly build, extend and customise your Dynamics 365 and Office 365 with Power Apps and Power Automate utilising Common Data Service (or as it's now called – Dataverse) for Apps across ERP, CRM and your productivity applications. The Microsoft Power BI solution has more powerful BI capabilities than the Salesforce equivalent Einstein Analytics (e.g., Data connectivity, data prep, hybrid cloud querying and geospatial capabilities).  

Microsoft offers a single vendor across CRM/ERP, IoT, AI, VR, with cloud infrastructure that scales globally and data that is encrypted at rest by default without loss of functionality. In contrast, Salesforce Shield comes at an additional cost.

5) One business cloud from one company

This table pretty much sums it up.

As the song says: "If you feel love is just right, don't hesitate, let's get it on!"

So, for more information on whether a Dynamics 365 Solution is right for you, contact us using the form below to chat with a consultant or book a demonstration.