In sales, planning is everything. Without a plan, a sales rep might give up too easily on a prospect or appear too aggressive. A potential customer might forget about a proposal or become annoyed by too-frequent contacts. Creating a step-by-step plan for how to follow up with prospects in each stage of the sales process is the basis for a sales cadence. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales tools help you create, manage, and scale customized sales cadences across your organization.

The top salespeople have a well-crafted plan to get their desired results, whether they are demonstrating a product or following up with leads. A successful plan, or sales cadence, involves knowing where your prospects are in the buyer’s journey and understanding how to reach them the right way, with the right message, at the right time to move them to the next step.

If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.

A modern proverb

In this post, you’ll learn:

• What a sales cadence is
• What to consider when designing a sales cadence
• What an effective sales cadence looks like
• How Dynamics 365 Sales can help you build a sales cadence

What is a sales cadence?

A sales cadence is a detailed plan to connect with prospects and close deals. A sales cadence includes a prescribed sequence of activities, like reaching out on LinkedIn, sending emails, making calls, sharing case studies, arranging meetings, and sending text messages, which happen at specified intervals.

An effective sales cadence improves the efficiency of sales reps. A sales cadence guides sellers on which prospects to connect with, what communication channel to use, and what information to share at each touchpoint. This structured approach reduces guesswork and aims to grow the sales pipeline and conversion rate.

Managers create a sales cadence to guide sales reps in handling different types of prospects and sales scenarios. For example, one cadence could be used for inbound inquiry leads, and another cadence could be used for upcoming renewals.

As organizations mature, they can evolve their cadences to adapt to specific geographies, industries, companies, languages, and other parameters.

A strong sales cadence library also helps you scale your sales organization. Automated sales cadences ease the onboarding process for sellers as you grow, building in best practices and sequencing their activities.

How to design a sales cadence

When you design your sales cadences, consider these five elements:

• Prospects: It all starts with knowing your potential customers. What challenges or obstacles do they have? Why are they looking for a solution? What platforms do they use? What constraints do they contend with? What are their skills? Who is the decision maker?
• Communication channel:Reach out to prospects using the right channel, such as email, a phone call, messaging apps, or LinkedIn.
• Wait time: Consider a strategic delay between subsequent steps. You don’t want to be too soon or too late in your follow-ups.
• Attempts: Understand the optimal number of touchpoints to establish contact and build a relationship.
• Messaging:Use the right messaging, content, tone, and personalization to engage with prospects.

It’s important to note that creating an effective plan is not a one-time process. It takes time and iteration to fine-tune your sales cadences.

Example: A sales cadence for inbound inquiries

Here’s an example of a sales cadence for responding to inbound inquiries.

• Target: Leads that have reached out through your website or other channels.
• Purpose: Focus on and respond to high-priority inquiries to improve your conversion rate.
• Description: By responding immediately and through multiple channels, you are more likely to achieve a higher conversion rate. Since responding within the first hour increases your chance to close the deal by seven times, start with an automated email response, then follow up with a phone call. Connect on a social platform like LinkedIn. Finally, send an email that provides relevant information about your product or services.

Create a sales cadence with sequence designer

The sales accelerator capability in Dynamics 365 Sales helps sellers spend less time searching for the best next customer to reach out to. Design and build your sales cadences in the sequence designer. Sales accelerator gathers information from multiple sources to build a strong and prioritized pipeline, offers context, and surfaces recommendations throughout each step in the sequence, speeding the sales process.

To create a sequence, you go to the Sales Insights settings area and open the Sequences page. For more details, check out the documentation: Create and activate a sequence.

You can use the sequence designer to configure sequences of activities for specific prospects, leads, opportunities, contacts, and so on, applying different strategies depending on priority. For example, leads of lower priority might have more automated email steps, whereas leads from your targeted accounts might have more personalized touchpoints.

As in the example sales cadence shown earlier, sequences can include multiple activities, with wait times between activities as needed. You can branch activities based on the response, such as if an email is opened or a reply is received. Using sales accelerator’s tight integration with LinkedIn, you can even send LinkedIn InMail or create a connect request as part of your sales cadence.

Next steps

A good sales cadence is a necessary to improve seller productivity, increase conversion rates, and close more deals. As we adjust to virtual ways of working, digitizing sales becomes a priority for most organizations. To get started, use sales accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales to set up a sales cadence for the most common scenarios faced by the sales team.

To start building your own sequences in Dynamics 365 Sales, visit the documentation: Manage sequences. If you use a custom app, also refer to this section of the FAQ page for sales accelerator: How to add work list site map to your custom app.

Access to sales accelerator has now been made easier: new and existing customers using Dynamics 365 Sales (excluding Dynamics 365 Sales Professional) will now see sales accelerator and sequences available for quick setup. Read the documentation to learn more about setting up digital selling capabilities.

The post Improve seller productivity with a sales cadence appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Delays, constraints, and disruptions are frequent challenges for global supply chains. And they are costly. According to Gartner 70 percent of supply chain leaders report that they have been constantly responding to disruptions since 2019.¹ Supply chain professionals have long understood that the earlier potential disruptions and constraints are identified, the more successful the measures to adapt and overcome them can be. So, the question becomes, how do we identify disruptions and constraints at the earliest possible opportunity? The answer is real-time, end-to-end visibility across the supply chain, which is precisely what supply chain control towers provide.

While the benefits of supply chain control towers are easily understood, many organizations continue to struggle to make control towers a reality. The composable approach of Microsoft Dynamics 365 is changing this situation however, and providing organizations a path to rapid deployment of supply chain control towers. This article explains the composable approach and why it is an essential ingredient for success in supply chain control tower initiatives.

Learn more in our on-demand webinar: How to rapidly deploy a supply chain control tower with a composable approach.

The future leans towards composable solutions

The future of business applications is composable. We can see this in reports from analyst firms such as Gartner, who predict that “by 2023 organizations, that have adopted a composable approach will outpace their competition by 80 percent.”² But, what is a composable approach? Before we delve into the composable approach and what makes it different, let’s briefly explore the evolution of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions as this will help us understand why composability is key to achieving end-to-end visibility.

The challenge of achieving end-to-end visibility

In the past, ERP systems were sold as one massive application. This meant that they were expensive and difficult to change. As these applications matured, vendors looked for ways to give customers greater flexibility. To provide this flexibility, business functions, like sales and supply chain, were increasingly offered as modular components such as customer relationships management (CRM) systems, warehouse management systems (WMS), transportation management systems (TMS), and supply chain management (SCM) systems. While modularity did provide flexibility, the flexibility itself created other problems, as we discuss next.

The main issue is that once business functions could select the components that best suited their needs, such as CRM or WMS, replacement and implementation of these systems often took place at different times, and systems were often from different vendors. Also, due to the possible differences in maturity levels and solution architectures of these disparate systems, they required time-consuming and expensive custom development to achieve end-to-end integration across the enterprise. And after integration, end-to-end performance was often plagued by latency, synchronization, and data unification issues. This is the situation where many companies find themselves today and it is the primary reason that achieving real-time end-to-end visibility of the supply chain has been so elusive.

Microservices are composable

Technology vendors began offering business solutions assembled application experiences built on microservices architectures in the continuing drive to improve customer applications. Whereas in the past, a specific business function, like warehouse or sales, would select the right system for their needs, such as CRM or WMS, businesses can now choose solutions tailored to individual workloads. For example, a simple order management workload could be composed by bringing together order orchestration, fulfillment, and inventory.

These microservices, such as real-time inventory and fulfillment, not only provide greater flexibility, but because they easily connect to other microservice applications and utilize API-driven messaging, data and actions can be pulled and pushed between different systemsdecreasing latency, improving synchronization, and enabling real-time end-to-end visibility in the process. This is why a composable approach makes the rapid deployment of a supply chain control tower possible.

Our vision

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 80 percent of companies will suffer significant value loss due to failure to merge their digital supply twin and control tower initiatives.³ We agree. And, our solutions help companies avoid this outcome by providing a composable approach that makes merging these initiatives possible.

At Microsoft, we see supply chain control towers as a shared service process that can be composed from a mix of supply chain workloads. For example, a supply chain control tower and digital twin can be built using Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Insights^preview together with Microsoft Power Platform, and our growing digital supply chain applications ecosystem.

Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management is often a great place to start when building a supply chain control tower in a retail, distribution, or direct-to-consumer (DTC) manufacturing business. This is because Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management is built on a microservice architecture that includes rules-based order orchestration and fulfillment, real-time inventory, and AI. As such, it is step-forward to the composable approach that allows companies to achieve the real-time end-to-end visibility of a supply chain control tower. The composability of the solution also means that organizations can get up running quickly and maximize the benefit of existing investments through easy integration with existing legacy ERP systems.

What’s next

Supply chain control towers that include Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management positions organizations to respond faster and more intelligently to disruptions and opportunities. Dynamics 365 Intelligent Order Management works seamlessly with any ERP and CRM system. It is also a stand-alone application that allows customers to start their control tower initiative without dependencies on other Dynamics 365 solutions. It integrates seamlessly with many market-leading API-enabled applications, using our out-of-the-box pre-built connectors to order intake sources, tax calculation, and third-party logistics partners ecosystem. Moreover, it automates and optimizes fulfillment using AI and real-time omnichannel inventory data. Supply chain and commerce professionals can proactively overcome disruptions through quickly order flows reconfigurations with drag and drop actions in a low-code/no-code interface. And by enabling them with all these capabilities, help them accelerate their order management digital transformation and turn order fulfillment into a competitive advantage.

Learn more in the on-demand webinar: How to rapidly deploy a supply chain control Tower with a Composable Approach.

Sources:

1. Gartner, Hype Cycle for Supply Chain Strategy 2021, September 14, 2021.
2. Gartner, Composable Commerce Must Be Adopted for the Future of Applications, June 18, 2020.
3. Gartner, Predicts 2022: Supply Chain Technology, November 17, 2021.

GARTNER is the registered trademark and service mark of Gartner Inc., and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and has been used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Dynamics 365 composable approach enables rapid deployment of a supply chain control tower appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.