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Microsoft announces new Dynamics CRM 2015 release. This new release updates Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing to help marketers and salespeople collaborate more effectively and deliver amazing customer experiences.
REDMOND, Wash. — Sept. 16, 2014 Microsoft Corp (Nasdaq “MSFT”) announced that Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015, as well as updates to its Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing services, will be generally available in the fourth quarter of 2014.
The new updates revolutionise the way sellers and marketers unite and collaborate by bringing outside-in insights to sales and marketing professionals so they can understand the impact of their campaigns to customers, giving them more personalised experiences. Salespeople now have the visibility to impact campaigns and targeting with unprecedented insight into marketing calendars and campaigns. The updates also enable marketers to more effectively plan and execute marketing campaigns and better track their impact, while strengthening synergies with the sales process. Microsoft Dynamics CRM continues to deepen its interoperability with Microsoft’s leading productivity applications, including Microsoft Office 365, Yammer, Lync, Skype, SharePoint and Power BI for Office 365.
The new release is designed to address ongoing needs for businesses to collaborate among different divisions and groups to better take advantage of opportunities and to meet the evolving needs of their customers.
According to Ray Wang, principal analyst, founder and chairman at Constellation Research Inc., “Closing the gap between marketing and sales is required for a successful customer experience. Organisations need tools to track the customer interactions from marketing to sales and back, collaborate on leads and opportunities, and measure the metrics that matter to both sales and marketing.”
“Unlike vendors that want to separate businesses by selling them countless different clouds and solutions, we have designed Microsoft Dynamics CRM to facilitate the kind of collaboration that businesses need to thrive and grow,” said Bob Stutz, corporate vice president, Microsoft Dynamics CRM. “This means that marketers and sellers can work more closely together to engage customers, bridging the chasm between marketing, sales and service to truly deliver end-to-end experiences that customers will love.”
Uniting marketing and sales
To break down the silos between sales and marketing, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing introduces the new Sales Collaboration Panel, which allows sellers to provide input into campaigns and targeting. The release also gives marketers the ability to streamline campaign creation and improve segmentation with graphical email editing, A/B testing, integrated offers and approval workflows. Marketers can more effectively collaborate with the click-to-call feature in Lync and easily schedule and execute webinars as part of their marketing initiatives. The new Interactive Marketing Calendar allows marketers to visualize and manage their end-to-end marketing plans.
In addition to providing salespeople with the ability to more effectively collaborate with marketing, the new release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides the ability to recommend products to up-sell and cross-sell across product families, improving their selling effectiveness. The new release enhances the Guided Sales Processes to help steer sellers toward desired outcomes and ensure the enforcement of business rules across all devices. New mobile sales capabilities across mobile platforms increase productivity with flexible RoleTailored dashboards and analytics, as well as personalized home pages.
Continuing to enhance capabilities to Microsoft Social Listening, the company added Italian as a sixth native language for sentiment tracking and analysis and expanded listening capabilities to include news sources. These capabilities give people access to real-time insights so they can see what is happening and make the right decisions to take advantage of opportunities the moment they arise.