Sales Case Study
A mid-sized bicycle company would like to grow its business, attracting new customers while improving the overall sales process to streamline quotes, orders, & invoicing.
The company would like to focus on the following initiatives:
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Tracking of advertising spend where the company needs the ability to directly correlate sales to the money spent attracting the customer to the product
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Creation of customer landing pages should be standardized and all leads should be processed consistently regardless of marketing or social media platform
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Sales opportunities should be stored within a CRM so the company can continue to nurture customers with future promotions
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Revamp how quotes are generated for customers along with the processing of sales orders
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Communication channels should be established to help with advertising campaigns and with supporting transactional events like payment & order confirmations
Solution
01
Managing Advertising Spend
The company chooses to advertise on social media platforms, which displays embedded videos covering the company's products. Social media platforms track users as they scroll through their content and advertisements. Each video is tagged with a product identifier from the company. As leads come into the company through landing pages and sales orders, customer information is sent to these social media platforms using attributes the company and the social media platform have in common: name, email, phone, etc.
How is data sent to social media platforms? As leads come into company, events are raised using Azure Event Grid to create Service Bus messages, responsible for sending lead data to the social media platform through their API. Azure Functions manage both events and messages as well as the sending of lead data to the appropriate social media API.
Once lead data is sent to the appropriate social media API, reports are created to show how many sales orders can be attributed to the video content displayed on the social media platform, matching on the product, name, email, phone, etc.
02
Landing Pages & Lead Processing
Each advertising video embedded on the social media platform is linked to one of the company's landing pages. Azure App Services serve up the landing pages, standardizing how the bicycle company stores leads in Microsoft's Dynamics 365 CRM platform.
As leads are stored in the Power Platform Lead table, Microsoft publishes Azure Service Bus messages through Power Platform Plugins, triggering Azure Functions for lead processing. Azure Functions validate and cleanse leads before associating them with the appropriate product information for storage in the Power Platform Opportunity table. Along with basic formatting validation, third-party integrations within the Azure function allow the company to validate email, phone, and address information to ensure they're actually being used.
03
Sales Opportunities
Microsoft Dynamics CRM comes with many out-of-the-box features to help the company manage their sales opportunities. The following Power Platform tables are core to the sales module: Account, Contact, Lead, Opportunity, Product, and more.
Through the Opportunity table, the company associates leads to products while also supplying initial costs and discounts for the opportunity. Sales representatives use the opportunity to follow up with the lead/customer to see if they have any questions. When the opportunity is won and it's time to close it, sales representatives use the opportunity form and built-in Power Platform actions to generate the quote, sales order, and invoice.
04
Quotes & Sales Orders
Not all opportunities result in sales orders right away. Customers often want to compare pricing with competitors and so quotes are created to support that need. Most quotes are generated directly from opportunities but the company has the ability to create quotes from scratch. Sales representatives finalize the price of the products along with supplying a date for how long the quote is good for before sending the quote to the customer.
Built-in actions from the Power Platform help sales representatives convert the quote to a sales order request from the quote form. Once the order is submitted, the order sent to the company's order processing application, which is an Azure Function. The Azure Function completes company-specific business logic, raises events for communicating with the customer so they know when to expect shipment for the bicycle product.
05
Communication Channels
Microsoft's Customer Insights is configured for the company to support email and SMS communication with the customer. Events raised from completed sales orders are processed through an Azure Function, which subscribes to the same Event Grid. Dataverse triggers respond to activities created by the Azure Function and send SMS and/or email communication to the customer.
SMS and email campaigns are configured through Power Platform segments so customers receive promotional content on the company's product catalog periodically. Customers have the ability to opt-out of any marketing communication. Strict opt-out rules can be configured for your emails to comply with any government regulations.
Reports are generated from a Microsoft Fabric workspace to allow the company to monitor any failures, bounces, etc., which might occur within Customer Insights. Power Automate sends weekly and quarterly Excel reports to company managers so they can monitor trends in domain providers, maximizing their reach success.