“What is Dynamics 365 used for in professional service organization?” is like asking “What is there to do at Disney World?” Where do you even start?!
Though this may be a bit dramatic, if you get excited about increasing revenue, streamlining processes, and reducing silos… this might be your Disney World.
In all honesty, there are so many ways that professional service organizations can use this robust tool to improve their operations. Let’s break it down.
# 1. Relationship Management – Who knows whom
We wouldn’t be good at our jobs if we didn’t start with this one. Relationship management should be at the forefront of any Professional Services D365 deployment. Any CRM will bring table stakes functions that handle things like Account Management, Contact Management and Activity Management, but don’t stop there. Think about all the other relationships that bring value to your organization.
Are you an AEC firm that does a lot of work with specific architects, GCs or property managers? Maybe you’re an accounting firm that does a lot of referral work from law firms or estate planners? How do you currently measure the value of these relationships—who is your top referral source, what firms/partners are you always winning big deals with or even more importantly, who do you spend a lot of time with that yields minimal results. Understanding the answers to these types of questions will help your organization drive priority, allowing you to spend your valuable time with the right people, and avoid the wrong ones.
#2. Removing Silos and Improving Collaboration
Most major CRM platforms offer robust ecosystems that typically include multiple integrated Marketing Automation solutions. By bringing Marketing and CRM under one roof, you are removing silos and thus improving your overall client experience. In most firms, marketing owns the outbound messaging, and the client teams own the client relationships. In a world that is all gum drops and lolli-pops, that is all well and good, but think about a non-happy path situation.
Maybe a client relationship is strained due to an unforeseen project overage, and the client team is working hard to repair the relationship and address the situation. Your marketing might not be aware of this challenge, and handles this account like any other account, sending them content and case studies about how 96% of your projects are completed on time and on budget. You can imagine how this would not help the situation.
With a fully functional CRM paired with your Marketing Automation solution, you can get ahead of issues like this, working to ensure that the right content is being delivered to the right clients, and most importantly, at the right time.
#3. Process Automation
Think of the amount of time your team spends on monotonous tasks—maybe it’s your client intake process that takes 24 hours to complete, or MSA/NDA contract generation and expiration management. An enterprise CRM system will allow you to streamline these internal processes, providing efficiencies to free up your people to manage the tasks that really matter.
#4. Integrations
The last and arguably the best way Professional Service organizations utilize Dynamics 365, is its ability to bring data together, providing a true 360-degree view of your business. Not only is it a huge time savings, but it saves your staff, and you, significant headaches. Think about all the different functional areas within your organization, and how your teams likely bounce to each of them throughout a given day to do their job:
- Finance > ERP, Practice Management, Time and Billing, Client Onboarding
- Relationship Strength > CRM, Outlook/Exchange, Teams/Slack, Phone Systems
- Employees > HRIS
- Marketing > Practice Management, Proposals Management, Marketing Automation
- Analytics > BI, data warehousing
- Risk > CRM, Practice Management, Time and Billing
- Resourcing > CRM, Time and Billing, Practice Management
- A robust platform like D365 paired with an efficient integration strategy brings all of this into a single place – removing the need to bounce from application to application, saving time, money and effort in the process.
The list above is just a start. We have seen professionals in the ProServ community thrive after switching to Dynamics365. If you are interested in learning more about how this platform could help your organization, reach out to us. We would be happy to help.