Migrating from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 — Here’s everything you need to know

Dynamics is the best solution for businesses that want to drive growth through a customer-centric approach.

Migrating from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 — Reasons, advantages, and key considerations

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has seen incredible growth since 2017 till now as per Gartner. In 2017 and 2018, Gartner reports mentioned that CRM has become the largest software market; now, the Customer Relationship Management market is predicted to grow at a 13.7% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) through 2021. While implementing a CRM for an organization can have a profound positive impact, sometimes, despite your best efforts, a CRM may turn out to be a poor fit for your business. Then the companies have to acknowledge that it is not working efficiently and start looking for a new CRM solution that best fits. As a CRM and ERP, Microsoft Dynamics is the best solution for businesses that want to drive growth through a customer-centric approach. Microsoft Dynamics is one of the largest platforms implemented with a 67% growth rate and a 47% revenue. More organizations are switching from Salesforce to Dynamics to enjoy the flexibility and compatibility of working within the Microsoft suite products they use across their business. There are many strong reasons that more companies take this decision to shift from Salesforce to Dynamics.

Reasons for businesses to shift from Salesforce to Dynamics 365

• Leveraging the larger Microsoft ecosystem of solutions and adopting more applications over time.
• Strategic Microsoft partnership initiative.
• Lesser costs compared to Salesforce.
• Significant investments and ROI from Microsoft on these organizations.
• The lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and maintenance.
• Inability to meet growing business requirements with the current system.
• Additional functionalities that Salesforce CRM does not offer.
• Easy integration with Microsoft products like Word, Office 365, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, etc.
• Quickly scale the usage of the products and apps they need to use.
• Microsoft PowerApps and Power BI.
• No extra cost on basic add-on functionalities

Advantages of Microsoft Dynamics 365

Get up-to-date analytics: Microsoft Dynamics enables you to gather data that keeps you informed and up to speed. This allows you to make better decisions by identifying and prioritizing key opportunities.

Cut down delays with centralized information: Centralized information in the system can ensure you can access information across the organization. It helps you cut down delays experienced by your customers by helping you save time by reducing search and follow-up time.

Multi-channel marketing capabilities: Microsoft Dynamics 365 offers marketing capabilities that enable you to determine the types of messages you should send your customers through their preferred channels and enhance your marketing ROI.

AI-informed processes: AI-fuelled CRMs provide real-time insights into customer behavior, identifying buying patterns that turn into conversion opportunities. Because of Microsoft’s investment in AI and machine learning, they continue to be a leader in this part. Dynamics 365 is such AI-powered platform that helps increase productivity and help you grow through advanced insights.

Exceptional customer experiences: Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help you improve your customer experience by using data and intelligence. This enables you to provide customer service that meets your customer’s expectations, builds trust, and keeps them loyal.

Scalable and adaptable to the legacy system: Microsoft Dynamics CRM solution suite flexible to your legacy system, but it also customizes your security levels to fit your needs. And this, of course, is scalable as your business grows.

Deployment options: With Dynamics 365, you can choose whether you want an on-premise solution or through the cloud. If you are coming from Salesforce, having more than one deployment option with CRM for Dynamics 365 is a luxury.

An important fact is that migration from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics 365 can be complex and even disrupt your business. So if you’re planning to migrate from the Salesforce system to Dynamics 365, here’s everything you must know about migrating from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 with better results.

Key things you need to consider before migrating from Salesforce to Dynamics 365

Planning: The first best practice you can put into action to ensure your switch from Salesforce to CRM for Dynamics 365 successfully gets the right parties and people involved early on in the planning process to have champions and advocates aligned when the switch is made.

Change management: When migrating to Dynamics 365, change management requires an abundance of upfront planning. This way, the actual switch from Salesforce to Microsoft Dynamics 365 follows the detailed plan from data migration to user adoption.

Deployment options for Dynamics 365:

• Dynamics 365 Online — It is the most similar to your Salesforce CRM deployment. The online deployment option provides you the flexibility to access your CRM data from anywhere and on any device connected to the internet.
• Dynamics 365 On-Premises — An On-Premises deployment is for deploying your CRM system on your servers within your own data center. The most significant benefit to an On-Premises deployment is direct access.
• Dynamics 365 in a Private Cloud — This deployment option for Dynamics 365 solution is similar to on-premise. But, instead of your server, it would be your Partner’s private data center. The most significant benefit to deploying in a Private Cloud is that you don’t have to manage the infrastructure of managing services.

Data migration: Businesses today have to deal with vast amounts of data, because of which big data and data migration have become topics of the utmost importance for business leaders. Any business must maintain top-level data quality. When shifting from Salesforce to Dynamics 365, you may want to execute the straight migration to be running on your new system as quickly as possible before adding new functionality. The data migration process can be challenging.

But, there is a way to plan your data migration to secure a smooth and seamless data migration process in a few steps.

• Plan: Assess and find out the data sources and determine what needs to be migrated. This step is significant, and it helps determine the most suitable migration.
• Map: Once done determining, map fields from the source system to the corresponding target fields/entities in CRM.
• Extract: Post to past steps, extract the data from the source systems.
• Transform: Transform the data (including changing data types, modifying formats, and at times, data cleansing and de-duplication) to be compliant with Dynamics CRM.
• Load: Import the data into Dynamics 365 system through automated scripts, tools, or manually.
• Verify: The last and essential part of the data migration process is to verify if the data is migrated successfully by comparing record counts, spot-checking records, or developing validation routines.

Migrate to Dynamics and accelerate your business now!

From what we have seen in this article, migrating to Dynamics 365 exposes your business to a world of better possibilities. It comes with rich features and extensive capabilities to accommodate every company with their unique business need. Microsoft’s integrations with ERP, Office 365, Suite, Power BI, and Flow is an added advantage when we aim for business growth with Dynamics 365.

As a Dynamics partner, we can support you with a smooth Salesforce migration to Dynamics 365. Our consultants will help you throughout the planning, migration, data preparation, and implementation with years of technical experience in data migration and Dynamics migration. To know more, talk to us.