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Table of Contents

1. Cost ................................................................................................................................................ 4

2. Office 365 and Exchange Integration .............................................................................................. 5

3. Business Process Flows (BPF) .......................................................................................................... 7

4. Marketing ....................................................................................................................................... 9

Marketing Automation .......................................................................................................... 9

Marketing Lists ...................................................................................................................... 9

Campaigns/Quick Campaigns ............................................................................................... 10

Sales Literature .................................................................................................................... 10

5. Support/Services .......................................................................................................................... 10

6. Reporting and Dashboards............................................................................................................ 13

7. Mobility ........................................................................................................................................ 14

8. SharePoint Integration .................................................................................................................. 15

9. Azure Extensions........................................................................................................................... 16

10. Expandability ............................................................................................................................... 18

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Objective

The Principals of Reach for the Clouds, Inc. have invested much time and effort over the past decade and have worked with many CRMs in the software industry to determine that Salesforce.com has always had the upper hand in pure functionality and ease of configuration. That is…until now. With the release of Dynamics CRM 2013, Salesforce.com finally has a serious competitor. We broke down 10 reasons why an organization should consider Dynamics CRM 2013 based on such criteria as cost, office integration, document management, expandability, managing customers for sales, marketing, and support. After reviewing each reason in this informative document, coupled with the supportive research that backs it up, we are confident that you too will be ready to implement Dynamics CRM 2013 to enhance your business. So let’s “hit the ground running” and get your business on the cutting edge of Microsoft Cloud technology!

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1. Cost

One of the biggest things to consider when investing in a CRM is cost. When determining cost there are a number of variables to consider: number of users, office suite integration, document management, invoicing telephony, and web integration. From the table below you can clearly see that Dynamics is less expensive as the leading brands. The power of Exchange, Office 365 and SharePoint Integration with Dynamics makes this application a sales persons dream and make companies happy by driving down the cost per sale.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is built on reliable, industry-standard technology and is an adaptable and affordable CRM system that can grow and change with your business. The new online subscription model allows you to add and drop users when needed and is a pay as you go model.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides a globally accessible system on world class hardware with automatic load balancing and failover support. All this hardware is maintained and updated regularly to ensure that your CRM system is always available. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is backed by a 99.9% uptime service level agreement is not offered by any other CRM application on the market.

Commented [MC1]: Broken link?

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It is important to be able to access your data at all times. With state of the art, secure data centers coupled with a 99.9 uptime SLA eliminates the need and expense of hardware on premise. 2. Office 365 and Exchange Integration

Microsoft Office is the standard in office productivity applications and is instrumental in the operation of companies around the world. Moving your Office environment to universal platform in the cloud you can integrate all of the Office Suite into Dynamics seamlessly. You can login to one portal and have access to all of your email, your calendar, your contact list, and all of the applications your organization has granted permissions for.

Easily access administration dashboard and current health status

Easily access your business applications all from one tenant whenever you want,

wherever you want

Additional applications are accessed through the 3 dots in the ribbon.

Commented [KG2]: missing graphic here?

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Each user/employee has their own corporate OneDrive with 1TB of space for their own hard drive space. Being able to store all of your documents on OneDrive increases your mobility to have your documents wherever you go… as long as you can access the internet. Storing your documents in your OneDrive allows for immediate recovery from a hardware failure.

Access and administer your applications from the same console.

Assign appropriate applications licenses to the user.

Set up users easily in Office 365

Simply check boxes next to the

application that applies for the user.

Easy shortcuts to commonly used areas

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3. Business Process Flows (BPF)

Defining a process helps the organization track where anything is during a process. Create other entity records, assign tasks, and send emails and so much more, via a process. When you configure a BPF there are multiple processes that can be configured in a single BPF. Design and automate business processes to unify line-of-business systems with flexible, easy-to-use tools built on the Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation platform.

• Create Multiple Processes per Entity • Create Multi-Entity Processes • Create Role Based Processes

Easily create Business

Process and Workflows to

gather the data you need and streamline the

way you do business.

Build Process in all of your entities and

easily activate and deactivate,

giving the ability to have

on-demand workflows or manually use

when needed.

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Create new, and use existing, templates to define processes

within the CRM environment for

each entity.

Easily Create, Edit and Manage your processes.

Add Multiple Steps to the process and have it

run seamlessly.

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Here is a step-through process for a user working through a Business Process Flow from Eric Boocock, Senior Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft Dynamics:

4. Marketing Marketing Automation: Dynamics CRM 2013 easily enhances marketing effectiveness by managing your marketing automation life cycle. Plan, manage and track your marketing campaigns from development to launch. Dynamics CRM 2013 optimizes your marketing efforts using the familiar and intelligent marketing capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics CRM business software. Use flexible segmentation tools, intuitive campaign management features, robust workflows, and insightful analytics to increase the effectiveness of your marketing programs.

Marketing Lists Microsoft Dynamics CRM has search features for managing and filtering accounts, contacts, and leads, and you can use these features to set up targeted marketing lists. You set up the list with the criteria you define, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM does the rest. Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes all the tools necessary to comply with growing list of anti-spam regulations.

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Campaigns/Quick Campaigns For a marketing campaign, the most useful information you can track is what you do throughout the campaign, how much it costs, and the response you get. Microsoft Dynamics CRM can help do just that on a long term scale and a short term scale using the Marketing Campaign or the Quick Campaign Feature.

Sales Literature A sales literature item is the basic unit of the marketing encyclopedia in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You can use the sales literature management entities to create a central repository for your organization’s sales information that provides an easy way to distribute information to users, both online and offline. Sales literature can be organized into categories and types to provide easier management and searching. Microsoft Dynamics CRM also supports a subject manager and knowledge base.

5. Support/Services An organization can nurture customer satisfaction through automation of business processes within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013. There are many powerful Customer Service and Service Scheduling functionality capabilities within Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013. Additionally, the process of working with your customers has never been easier than in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013. The support functionality streamlines the customer complaints and service issues in a cost effective manner and provides insight on managing all related correspondence, documents, contacts and conversations pertaining to that case. Gain a rich and relevant view of your customer that provides your team with actionable insights, including the use of knowledge management in a centralized knowledge base. Through the utilization of Service Level Agreement and advanced workflows you can ensure that your customers are being provided the level of service they require. The application of entitlements allows you track the amount of support a contact or account is entitled to. These features allow you to run an efficient support system across a diverse group of customers. Dynamics CRM 2013 provides an easy-to-use set up wizard to get your support organization up and running tracking cases within no time.

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Dynamics CRM 2013 has an easy to use interface to easily create a case and start logging information and tracking.

Easy out of the box set up service console.

Set all of your rules and queues

Set up Service Level Agreements, templates,

resource groups and schedules.

Keep up-to-the-minute information on cases through the activity notes or through real time Yammer feeds.

Configure and Manage Service Terms terms

Set up Business Closures for Locations and Sites

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Create Views to keep cases organized and visible.

Schedule and keep track of all Support Team,

activities, calendars, and cases all can be synched

with Outlook.

Define a “Business Process Flow” for phone to cases.

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6. Reporting and Dashboards Reporting and Analytics: With Dynamics CRM 2013 and the integration with Excel and Power BI, and reporting services through SQL Server, you can start treating your customer data more like customer information. Establish new business intelligence in real-time to uncover business trends and performance results Microsoft Dynamics CRM dashboards are collections of view lists, charts and iFrames that can easily pull in things like website information that you can modify to show key performance indicators and other important data. Here’s an example of what a dashboard looks like:

Develop Dashboards from different areas of your business in one

dashboard. Each dashboard component is a report that you can drill down into. These reports are highly customizable.

Activities drive revenue. Here is a dashboard that gives you the number of

activities by owner. When you drill down into this report you can see how many calls, emails, appointments have

been logged by who and what client and contact was touched.

Track the amount of leads by day, month, year, month over month and year over year.

See what campaigns are creating warm leads. Get a deep understanding of what campaigns

are driving new leads to revenue.

This dashboard shows where the revenue is coming from and what stage of the process

the opportunity is in.

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7. Mobility

Microsoft Dynamics offers great mobile support that helps enable field workers to get instant access to customer data from the most popular portable devices including mobile phones with Web browsers, and laptops. It provides CRM data and functionality to their mobile workforce no matter where they are.

Empower your mobile workforce to work more effectively by enabling them to access and use Microsoft Dynamics® CRM whether they’re in the office, traveling, or at a customer site. Make it easy to quickly take CRM data offline so that your people can continue to be productive even when they don’t have an active connection to the network. Create innovative mobile solutions that fit your business using readily available tools and expertise with Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

Manage your Accounts, Contacts,

Opportunities, Cases and Orders

with Dynamics directly through

your tablet.

Manage your Accounts, Contacts,

Opportunities, Cases and Orders

with Dynamics directly through

your phone.

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8. SharePoint Integration Document Management and Version Control- How many times have you had multiple versions of a document or datasheet that was outdated or missing information. This is a true way to have version control and have more successful marketing campaigns because the document library is organized and there is only one version visible to the masses.

Assign which documents can be accessed through specific entities.

Easily Configure, Manage and Deploy SharePoint Sites.

Easily Manage Company Documents.

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9. Azure Extensions Dynamics CRM 2013 gives developers the ability to register plug-ins with Microsoft Dynamics CRM that can pass run-time message data, known as the execution context, to one or more Microsoft Azure solutions in the cloud. This is especially important for Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online because Microsoft Azure is one of two supported solutions for communicating run-time context obtained in a plug-in to external line of business (LOB) applications. The other solution is the external custom endpoint access capability from a plug-in registered in the sandbox. The Microsoft Azure Service Bus combined with the Microsoft Azure Access Control Service (ACS) provides a secure communication channel for Microsoft Dynamics CRM run-time data to external line of business applications. This capability is especially useful in keeping disparate Microsoft Dynamics CRM systems or other CRM servers synchronized with Microsoft Dynamics CRM business data changes.

Assign entities where you want to give SharePoint access and manage documents, teams,

and Queues.

Easily administer the organizations SharePoint Environment through

the admin panel.

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Manage your Cloud environment through the

Azure Administration Portal.

Develop and deploy enterprise-grade web apps.

Simply click into the directory and drill down

into subgroups

This section is the drill down section that you can setup

and configure

See active accounts

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10. Expandability Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides several methods to extend the system beyond the out-of-the-box interface. Microsoft has provided a rich JavaScript interface, both SOAP and REST web services and an extensible frame work that allows for the development of plugins and workflow steps to extend the business logic and process control well beyond the out-of-the-box capabilities.

Easily administer your Azure environment.

Integrate all of your Applications.

Spin up SQL Environments.

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Summary

The world as we know it is evolving at rapid speeds, becoming more mobile with each technological advancement. With customers needing real-time data, along with our ever-changing economic climate, organizations need the ability to manage their internal IT costs with simplicity and ease. Driven by the fact that more and more organizations are using cloud computing services to integrate their IT practices, Reach for the Clouds, Inc. was strategically formulated to take the complex, disparate infrastructure you have today and bring it forward into the cloud, taking advantage of the immeasurable scope the cloud offers while still meeting security and compliance requirements. Reach for the Clouds, Inc. has strategically partnered with Microsoft, CU2 Global and Tech Data Worldwide to build, deploy and support your IT infrastructure in the cloud with complete confidence. We can assure you that teaming with Reach for the Clouds, Inc. will enable you to take your business to the next level in cloud technology.

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