Gaining Competitive Advantage Through CRM Data

Anybody in marketing will tell you that the key to success in any market is possessing some attribute that sets you apart from your competitors–a market differentiator. And in many industries, anybody in sales will tell you that’s the hardest part of the job.

Why? In most industries, very little differentiates one player from another. The products or services they provide are of roughly the same quality and price. The factor that often gives one competitor an edge over the others is how fast the sales team can propose a compelling solution to a given customer.

The workforce solutions market–providers of temporary and overflow labor–is a prime example. Every human, of course, has a unique set of strengths, weaknesses, and talents, but on average the accounting temps from one provider won’t differ much from those from another. Manpower Group, one of the oldest companies in the workforce solutions space, understands this. That’s why they are using their Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment to give them an edge.

Manpower Group deployed Dynamics 365 Sales in the cloud to have a single version of the truth for their sales team across the 80 countries they serve. But they took it a step further with Microsoft Power Apps, the low-code platform that enables organizations to build custom applications and leverage their existing data sources.

Their Power App, called the Account Planning App, is the sales team’s one-stop shop for managing their daily activities, from catching up on trends in specific markets to making contacts. It’s available on both their PCs and mobile devices so the team has instant access wherever they are.

The benefits of this environment have been substantial:

• Enhanced ability to leverage up-to-the-minute information to make decisions in real time
• Increased agility, enabling the team to build customized client solutions more quickly
• A more holistic view of their customers, prospects, and markets

Michael Dixon, Manpower Group’s Vice President for Client Solutions, put it this way: “Dynamics 365 gives us everything that our clients want and that our competitors wish they had.”

Are your data and applications giving you a competitive advantage? If you can’t answer that question with confidence, it’s a safe assumption that they aren’t. One way to find out where your organization stands is by using the Empellor CRM “Self-Assessing Your CRM & Process Strategy Checklist.” This checklist will help you think critically about your CRM strategy with questions such as:

• Can you prove your CRM supports your business strategy?
• Are you relying on workarounds, emails, and spreadsheets to share data between departments?
• Do team members complain about duplicate or incomplete data?

Without knowing your current state, it’s difficult to plan a path to a better future. Download the checklist today.