Salesforce Sales Cloud vs. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales: A Day in the Life Comparison

Over the past few weeks, we’ve broken down a recent Ledgeview Partners webinar one piece at a time.

This week, we’re putting all of the teachings together and taking you through the entire sales process in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Salesforce Sales Cloud, comparing them back-to-back.

Before you dive in, here’s a little background information on the webinar if you’ve yet to tune in…

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Salesforce Sales Cloud vs. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales: A Day in the Life Comparison

For the purpose of this webinar, we laid out a few ground rules for comparison:

• Both demo environments are free 30-day trial environments:
  • Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise
  • Salesforce Sales Cloud Enterprise
• No configurations or customizations were made – both are out-of-the-box solutions
• No add-ons or integrations were included with the exception of the Outlook add-on
• Sample data was loaded/created to ensure Visual are populated
• Data examples that are shown during the comparison match
• Scenarios walked through in one tool are repeated in the other

This webinar shows you all about what’s possible with each solution, emphasizing their strengths and functionality.

Scenarios compared in each solution include:

• A salesperson planning their week (access through desktop)
  • What does the upcoming week look like?
  • Lead management
  • Account/Contact management
  • Opportunity management
• Outlook integration demonstration
• A salesperson on the go (access through mobile)
  • Walkthrough similar scenarios as above, but through mobile

Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce are both SAS solutions, which means that you can access them through a Web browser. All major web browsers are supported.

So long as you have a URL, login, and security set up, you can access your solution wherever you have access to the Web.

The best way to absorb this information is by opening your trial environment(s) and the Ledgeview Partners demo and trying it yourself as you read!

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Salesforce Sales Cloud

When you log in to Salesforce, you will see the homepage that shows you what your sales goals are and how much progress you’ve made in achieving them.

If you are meeting your goals, but want to go above and beyond to exceed them, you may look at your Opportunities. Evaluating your Opportunities will help you determine how you can close deals quicker.

On the homepage, you can also evaluate what you’re doing and what’s happening in your workday.

Events will show you what you’ve scheduled for your day, and Tasks will show you what activities you need to complete.

On the Opportunities panel, you can also see if new Leads have been assigned to you.

To plan your day, the first thing you will want to do is look at the new lead you’ve been assigned. (See image right, “Lisa Smith.”)

When you click on the lead, “Lisa Smith,” you will be redirected to the Lead form and see a path across the top that tells you where you are inside of your process.

Since this is a new lead, you are not that far along and will see that you are in the “New” status. (See image below.)

Key fields will tell you about the lead and the company they work for.

Activities will tell you about the next steps you need to take with the lead. For this example, you see that you need to schedule a follow-up call with Lisa Smith.

When you click on the Details tab, you will learn more about Lisa. Lead Information may include:

• Lead status
• Name
• Title
• Email
• Phone number
• Mobile phone number
• Rating
• The lead owner (sales rep the lead is assigned to)
• Website
• Company
• Industry
• No. of employees
• Lead source (how the lead was generated)
• Address

All of these fields are available, but you may not have this information right away in your “Details” tab. More information may need to be collected during follow-ups with your lead or through a simple web search.

Once you fill in all of the key information that you need, you can mark the “New” status as complete and the path at the top of your screen will move to “Working.”

Once you make a call with Lisa, you will want to log it.

To log a call, navigate to your “Activity” panel and click on “Log a Call.”

From there, you can start to fill in the fields:

• Subject
• Comments
• Name
• Related to

When you are done logging this call, you can mark the task to call Lisa as complete.

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How to Convert a Lead to an Opportunity in Salesforce Sales Cloud

Since Lisa is a good lead, you can convert her to an Opportunity. To convert this Lead to an Opportunity, navigate to the top of your screen and click on the dropdown menu on the righthand side that exists on the same panel as your lead’s name. In this case, “Mrs. Lisa Smith.”

A pop-up will appear in the middle of your screen called, “Convert Lead” where you can fill in all of your fields and make Lisa Smith an Opportunity.

Since Lisa is a new account and contact, the system will recognize this and prompt you to create the new Account and Contact along with your new Opportunity.

Once you’ve filled in all relevant information, click “Convert.”

You will see another screen pop-up that shows you your lead has been converted and your Account, Contact, and Opportunity information has been saved.

Click on “Go to Leads” to return to your leads list.

For this example, we are going to open “All Open Leads” from the dropdown menu on the Leads panel.

Evaluate your leads to see if there are any others you’d like to be working on.

If not, search for other firms that you know you have great opportunities with. Search for the firm in the search bar at the top of your screen. Once you type in the name, relevant information will appear.

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Manage Your Opportunities in Salesforce Sales Cloud

For this example, we’ve used “Ledgeview Partners.”

Since there is already an opportunity that exists with Ledgeview Partners, you will click right on the Account.

On Ledgeview’s Account panel, you see a couple of contacts, an opportunity on the account, some tasks that you need to complete, follow-ups, and appointments.

There is a lot going on with this account, but the first thing you need to do is add new contact information you’ve recently gathered. To add a new contact, navigate to your “Related Contacts” tab and click on “New Contact.”

A pop-up will appear in the middle of your screen.

Fill on all of the contact’s information, and then click “Save” when you’re ready.

Next, you want to look at details on the Ledgeview Partners account. See if there’s any additional information you need to fill in. For this example, there is no additional information you need to add.

You know that you will be going to visit Ledgeview Partners in-person, but you will actually be on your mobile device and will not have your desktop available.

So, you go back to “Related” and further investigate the opportunity you have with Ledgeview Partners.

You find out that you are on the Proposal stage, per the path at the top of your screen. This means you need to get an ROI analysis completed. You’ve yet to complete this task, so you add it as a new task that you must get done within the week.

Create your task in the Activity panel by inputting the information in each field, selecting a due date, and clicking “Save” once you’re satisfied.

Now that you’ve added this task, you will re-evaluate the Opportunity details. This is a good size opportunity that you’re almost ready to close on.

Before you go to see Ledgeview Partners in-person, you want to look at your emails to see what’s there and track any important ones related to this Opportunity.

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Log Opportunities with Outlook for Salesforce

Open Outlook in a separate web browser. You can open Outlook in a web browser anywhere you have internet access. However, if you are attempting to access Outlook on your mobile device, you have to use the Outlook app. You cannot use a separate/different mobile email application to access Outlook.

For this example, we see an email for this Opportunity in Outlook on our desktop that we want to track.

To put your email into Salesforce, click on the cloud icon.

Once you click on the icon, Outlook will log you into your Salesforce environment. (See image right.)

This is a very handy tool. If an email is coming in from a new contact, for example, it is easy to add them to your Salesforce Sales Cloud environment through the Outlook integration.

You will see via the image (right) identifies new people you may want to add as Contacts.

For this example, the most important thing we want to log is the email itself.

To log the email simply click on “Log Email” on the Salesforce for Outlook tab.

If you enable the toggle for “Log Emails Faster,” you allow the system to quickly pin it into your email. Otherwise, you can select where you want it to go.

In your dropdown menu, find “Accounts” and click on it. Then, search for the appropriate account. For this example, it’s “Ledgeview Partners.”

Make sure the right “People” record (Contact) is selected, and then click “Save.”

You know the process worked when you see a “Related to Salesforce” icon pop-up in your inbox.

The Salesforce for Outlook tab will also update to show you what accounts and people the email you’ve selected is linked to. You will now have the ability to “Edit Logged Email” if you need to.

Jump back into Salesforce. The last thing you should do before you hit the road and visit your Opportunity in-person is to make sure that you’re keeping all of your Opportunities up to date.

To do so, click on “Opportunities” and switch your view from “Recently Viewed” to “My Opportunities.”

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Use the Kanban View to Optimize Selling Time

By default, you will typically see a table view. The preferred view for most salespeople, however, is Kanban style. It provides clear visualization into your Opportunities and drag-and-drop functionality.

To switch to the Kanban view, navigate to the top of your screen. To the right of the “Search this list” bar, you will see a gear icon and to the right of that, a table icon. Click on the table icon. A drop-down menu will appear. Select the Kanban view.

Easily move Opportunities to different sales cycle stages in this view. Edit Opportunities directly in the Kanban view. Pull up this style during your sales meetings to optimize your time and have more productive conversations.

There’s actually one more thing you’ll want to do before you jump in your car and head out to see your contacts.

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Re-evaluate Your Sales Manager Dashboard Before Hitting the Road

Most salespeople are competitive. If you are competitive and want to see how you’re doing compared to other salespeople on your team, go to your Dashboards and click on “Sales Manager Dashboard.”

The Sales Manager Dashboard that comes out-of-the-box will show you the progress you’re making in achieving your sales goals, how you compare against yourself quarter-by-quarter, where you closed in the fiscal year, how you compare to the rest of your team, etc.

Looking at your dashboard before you head out to see a contact can be especially motivating for salespeople.

The goal is to get closer to the green than red, and in this example (see image above), you see that you are in the yellow.

Though you may still have a lot of time to reach the green, the sooner you reach it, the better off you are.

To drill into your pipeline more, click on “View Report” on the panel “Total Amount by Stage.”

You can very easily get the details around everything you’re working on and click on the Opportunities you want to work on directly from the report.

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Open Salesforce Sales Cloud Mobile

Now you’re ready to head out to see your contact and can switch to Salesforce Sales Cloud mobile!

Pull your screen down to refresh your view/information.

The first thing you will notice along the bottom of your screen is that you are looking at “Today.” See what tasks you need to be working on and easily complete any of them by clicking the square icon next to each completed task.

Before you head into your contact’s place of work (or wherever else you have chosen to meet), you should have their account pulled up on your phone.

Search for their name, “Ledgeview Partners,” via the mobile app. Click on the Ledgeview Partners account.

Look at the details to confirm everything looks good. When you scroll down to “Address Information,” you can click on the address itself, which will pull up Google Maps and provide directions as to how to get to your contact from your current location.

Once you get to the contact’s location, look at the related information. Revisit the Opportunity.

You will see that it’s in the Proposal stage and can properly articulate what’s going on with the Opportunity and how you need to act on it using your “Guidance for Success” notes.

For this example, we see these questions:

• Where are they in the buying process?
• What’s the process to generate purchase orders?
• Who are the key decision-makers? Have you added them to the opportunity?
• How can you communicate the value of our solutions to those decision-makers?
• What’s the status of quantifying ROI with them?

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Improve Sales Efficiencies with Voice-to-Text

These questions will help you remember the purpose of today’s meeting and how you need to handle it. Log this meeting under “Log a Call.”

However, you will call it “On-site Meeting” in the subject line and fill in the details of the meeting. How did it go? What goals did you accomplish? What are the next steps?

To save time, instead of typing out all of your meeting notes, you can use the voice-to-text functionality that translates what you’re saying into written format right within the app.

Now you can save that information and see how it is related to the Opportunity.

If you want to, before your next meeting or before you head out and get back to your own office, you can see your Sales Manager Dashboard via your mobile device too.

The only difference in working with your Sales Manager Dashboard via your mobile device is that it is visually smaller. Otherwise, you have access to all of the same information that you do on your desktop computer.

The application is intuitive and easy to use.

Salesforce Sales Cloud also includes offline capabilities that your system admin can set up in case the location you’re going to doesn’t have WiFi access.

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Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a SAS environment, so you are able to log into it via the URL  your organization has provided. All major web browsers are supported.

So long as you have a login and password, you can access Microsoft Dynamics 365 from anywhere, on any device.

When you open Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, you first see your Sales Activity Social Dashboard.

The Assistant tells you what’s going on in your Dynamics environment. For this example, we see upcoming meetings, reminders about Opportunities, tasks you need to complete, etc. (See image above.)

Much like a human assistant would in life, the Assistant functionality of Dynamics helps you manage your day.

When you scroll down, you can gain more visibility into how you’re doing. You will see Open Opportunities, Closed Opportunities, and your Task List.

You want to start with leads. You know a new lead just got assigned to you, so you navigate to the left side of your screen and click on “Leads,” which is located under “Sales.”

You will see “My Open Leads.” Click on the newest one. In this example, the newest lead you have is “Lisa Smith.” (See image right.)

When you click on Lisa’s name, you will be taken to a new page where you can see what stage of the sales cycle she is in.

If you click on “Qualify” near the top of your screen on the “Lead to Opportunity” path, you can determine the steps you need to take to move Lisa to the next phase of the lead to opportunity conversion process and close the deal.

Dive deeper into Lisa’s details when you analyze the other panels on your screen. These panels tell you her Contact and Company information, the tasks that you need to complete to move her to the next stage of the buyer’s journey, key competitors and stakeholders, etc.

One of the tasks says, “Follow-up with Lisa,” so you do. You give Lisa a call, and then you are able to complete the task and determine that she is a good lead. So, you qualify her.

Before you qualify Lisa, however, you should log that you completed the phone call.

Go to your Timeline, and click on the “+” icon. Select “Phone Call.”

A panel will pop-out from the right-hand side of your screen. In the “Quick Create: Phone Call” panel, fill in all relevant information, and “Save and Close” once you have.

Now that you’ve logged the call, you can complete the task. In your Timeline, hover over the task and click on the “✓.”

A pop-up will appear in the middle of your screen asking you if you’re sure that you want to complete the task. If you are satisfied and the state of the task reads “Completed,” click “Close.”

It will process, and then you can move on to qualify the lead since it’s a good one.

Click “Qualify” on the navigation menu that is located right below the top main navigation menu.

A pop-up will appear in the middle of your screen asking you if you’d like to create an Account, Contact, and/or Opportunity.

Since this is a new Account, Contact, and Opportunity, you want to select “Yes” for all from the dropdown menus and then click “OK.”

Behind the scenes, the records are created. If you get an error screen from prior testing, go back to your sales cycle progress path, and click “Qualify.” Make sure the lead you’re working on is set to “Active.”

If you run into this error, now you can go back and redo the few steps to qualify the lead.

Moving forward, the lead will process and now you will be in the “Develop” stage of the sales cycle.

You will be redirected to the Opportunity you’ve created for this lead.

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Manage Your Opportunities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

Go back to Leads and check out your list. Upon review, you determine the other leads can stay where they are. However, you know you have an exciting opportunity with one of your accounts, Ledgeview Partners.

So, you navigate to the top navigation bar and type in “Ledgeview Partners” in the search.

Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities for “ledge” appear.

Click on the account for Ledgeview Partners.

You see happenings, Opportunities, and Contacts at Ledgeview.

For this example, you want to create a new contact. To do this, scroll down to the “Primary Contacts” panel.

Click on the ellipses next to “Contacts.” (See image right.)

Select “Add Existing Contact.”

A new panel will pop-out on the right-hand side of your screen.

You can create Leads and Contacts in Microsoft Dynamics 365 by scanning a business card if you have one.

You can read the blog post that explains how to do this here.

For this example, we will enter the information manually because we don’t have a business card.

Once you enter all of the information you have on this Contact, “Save and Close.”

Now, this new Contact will show up in the account under “Contacts.”

What you really want to look at is the opportunity that is related to this account.

Click on the opportunity you see under “Recent Opportunities.”

When you click on it, you will be redirected to the opportunity where you see that you are in the “Propose” stage.

When you click on “Propose,” you can see what you need to do to get the Opportunity to move to “Close.”

Check off the tasks that you’ve already completed and follow through on those that you haven’t.

“X” out of it once you’re done, and then move to the Timeline to create a task for yourself.

In this “Quick Create: Task,” write a note to “get internal review scheduled” and add a due date for this Friday.

Now the task will show in the Timeline. You may also see pop-ups in the timeline for tasks that are “Past Due” or “New activities.”

You can easily see the status of pending tasks, records, etc.

Now that you’ve looked at the account and have managed the Opportunity, you want to look at your email.

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Track Opportunities with Microsoft Outlook

Open Microsoft Outlook in a separate web browser. You can open Outlook in a web browser anywhere you have internet access. However, if you are attempting to access Outlook on your mobile device, you have to use the Outlook app. You cannot use a separate/different mobile email application to access Outlook.

For this example, we see an email for this Opportunity in Outlook on our desktop that we want to track.

Click on the ellipses located next to the sender’s name in the body of the email in the upper right-hand corner.

Select “Dynamics 365.”

A panel will pop-out on the right-hand side of your screen.

Once the environment authenticates, you can track the email that is related to the sender’s account.

If it says “Not tracked,” link it to your Ledgeview account. Type in “Ledgeview” in your search bar that will Look for records.

Find the account and select it.

It will process and then show a message that it is “Successfully Tracked,” “Set Regarding.”

Within your inbox, you will see a bar that reads “Tracked to Dynamics,” which will reconfirm that your email has been tracked within Microsoft Dynamics 365.

Now you can go back to your Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment. Your sales manager really wants you to keep track of your opportunities.

So, you go to “Opportunities” under “Sales” from the menu on the left side of your screen.

You will see “My Open Opportunities.”

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Switch to the Kanban View to Optimize Your Sales Process

By default, it is in a table view. However, most salespeople prefer the Kanban view.

To see your Open Opportunities in the Kanban view, navigate to the ellipses near the upper right-hand corner of your screen next to “Export to Excel.”

Click on the ellipses and select “Show As” > “Kanban.”

The Kanban view operates differently than the table style but is the same concept. If you want to move something from “Qualify” to “Develop,” for example, you can easily drag and drop.

This will open up the “Opportunity” to ask you if you need to alter anything with the business process flow. If not, click close, but if you do, update the information before closing.

The Kanban-style is a visually appealing and user-friendly style that salespeople prefer when meeting with their managers as well. It optimizes their meeting time and productivity.

Before you meet with your contact, Ledgeview Partners, in-person, you go back to the Sales Activity Social Dashboard, expand the chart, and drill down into your sales pipeline.

You can drill into your data to change your views and view types.

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Improve Sales Productivity with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Mobile

Now that you’ve reviewed, you’re ready to jump in your car and head over to Ledgeview Partners.

You can access Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales for free via the app store. All you need is your login information to access it.

You can see the same information you see on your desktop computer, just from a small viewpoint.

See what you’re working on, what your day looks like through the Assistant, your notifications and reminders, etc.

For this example, look for your account, “Ledgeview Partners.” In the Categorized Search Bar click on the account.

(You can also see Contacts and Opportunities by sliding your screen left or right.)

You can see all relevant account information, and even get directions to Ledgeview Partners through the Maps integration that is there by default.

Go to your “Timeline” and add a new activity via the “+” icon.

Log this on-site visit as a “Phone Call,” but be sure to put the right details into your environment. Write “On-site Visit” in the subject line and fill in the appropriate details.

“Save and Close” once you have.

You can enter notes about the meeting with the voice-to-text integration that is included in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales mobile, saving you time and optimizing your workday.

Finally, go back to your Ledgeview Partners account and look at “Related Opportunities.”

Now you will see all of the information you’ve entered, the activities you need to complete, the steps you need to take, etc. You can mark tasks off directly through the mobile device much like you would with the desktop version.

The drilling capability is not included in the mobile version, but you can still see all of your dashboards.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales mobile does come with an offline version you can consult your partner or admin to configure that.

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This is a lot of information to take in – we get it.

Bookmark this page for later as you evaluate the best CRM sales technology for your team.

The best way to figure out what CRM solution best meets your business’ mission, goals, and objectives, is through conducting a personal business and technology analysis.

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Learn more about the benefits and functionality of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce in a NEW on-demand demo from Ledgeview Partners Specialists.