New Microsoft Dynamics CRM breaks down silos between marketing and sales

REDMOND, Wash., Sept. 16, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq "MSFT") on Tuesday 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 revolutionize 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 personalized 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. Organizations 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. Microsoft Dynamics Marketing will also be available in Japanese and Russian.

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.

Expanding into new markets, Microsoft announced that Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online is available for purchase in 17 new markets in Latin America on Tuesday, making the service globally available in more than 65 markets worldwide. The company confirmed that the global expansion of Microsoft CRM Online will continue and is expected to reach over 130 markets and in 44 languages by the end of calendar year 2014. The company, which recently announced the opening of a Brazil datacenter to service the Latin American region, also noted that in calendar year 2015, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online would expand into additional Microsoft regional datacenters. More capabilities and features of the new Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 and Microsoft Dynamics Marketing, such as productivity improvements, automated business processes and real-time forecasting data, are detailed in the Release Preview Guide. A blog post series by Bob Stutz is available on CRM Connection. In addition, all can follow and engage with the Microsoft Dynamics CRM community @MSDynamicsCRM at http://www.twitter.com/msdynamicscrm, #MSDYNCRM.

About Microsoft Dynamics

At the heart of every successful business are the people who make things happen. Microsoft Dynamics designs modern business solutions that empower individuals with intuitive tools that allow them to do their best work. Our proactive, easy-to-use business applications adapt to the way people and systems work, enabling businesses to rapidly deploy and be forward-looking in an ever-changing world.

About Microsoft

Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq "MSFT") is the worldwide leader in software, services, devices and solutions that help people and businesses realize their full potential.

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SOURCE Microsoft Corp.