Is D365 marketing functionality a problem for Microsoft?

I’ve worked and consulted for with several organisations using Dynamics 365, some implementing, some optimising their D365 deployment, or assessing implementation of a CRM platform and actively considering D365 as part of the selection exercise. Over the years and across these different contexts a trend emerges; there are some issues around D365’s marketing functionality.

If we cast our minds back to the era of GDPR implementation, the spring of 2018, I was working an organisation with a limited budget looking to implement a marketing-lead CRM tool that would also be used for Customer Service and Account Management. It’s all-roundedness and cost effectiveness won the day in the procurement exercise, however that all-roundedness was propped up in a marketing sense by a 3rd party extension. The Click Dimensions plug-in allowed the organisation to map and build customer journeys using an interactive interface in a way that has become standard for marketing automation tools today. At this point the native D365 Marketing tool did not offer that functionality, and it seems that Microsoft have been playing catch-up and never quite catching up in the intervening years.

Fast forward four years to a global organisation utilising D365 Sales to manage generated leads and using basic nurture campaigns via D365 Marketing to follow-up. Previously I had a spent a couple of years consulting on the implementation of HubSpot Marketing for another education-based organisation. At this point the difference between D365 and HubSpot was stark. The ease of the HubSpot UX and UI enable fast set-up of necessary data syncs and the intuitiveness of the customer journey and campaign management in HubSpot shaded the equivalent functionality of D365. The level of up-front configuration required to make D365 viable and operational was significant compared to the ‘plug and play’ functionality of HubSpot.

By late 2022 I was consulting with a public sector organisation with D365 deployed across marketing, customer service, customer voice and operational workflows. The D365 learnings here were significant. The nature of the organisation meant that the protection of personal information was paramount. To the extent that the enterprise architecture effectively hamstrung effective data syncing, making segmentation an uphill task, a result was that the marketing functionality was not being utilised effectively; the Email Editor in D365 Outbound Marketing was not enabled, rather the engineering team were hard coding HTML all customer emails! This meant there was a perception that D365 was slow, which to a degree was unfair as the use of D365 functionality was far from ideal. This did provide the opportunity to turn things around and happily my team able to make significant improvements, implementing a drag and drop newsletter for the marketing team to build and own, and implementing a raft of automated emails for core customer journeys. However, there was still a naggin doubt I the organisation that D365 was the best-fit long-term tool from a marketing stand-point.  A system assessment exercise got underway comparing D365 with a number of competitors including HubSpot and Iterable. This direct comparison exercise demonstrated that D365 continued to play catch-up across key functional areas of email optimisation, personalisation, A/B & Multivariate testing, segmentation, journey orchestration and engagement scoring.

The period that this exercise encompassed saw Microsoft re-position it’s D365 marketing offering, launching Customer Insights and Journeys with it’s Realtime Marketing engine. The parallel transition from Outbound marketing to Realtime marketing was not without its challenges. It’s clear that some areas of Outbound marketing functionality are yet to be fully enabled in Realtime, and whilst the Realtime functionality sees a forward leap for UX and UI which is essential, there are still basic gaps to be filled, for example around A/B testing.

There are still some fundamental gaps. One of the key pieces of functionality that HubSpot provides is website tracking and the ability to build segments and automations based on customer behaviour on a website. The good news is that D365 Realtime marketing now finally boasts website tracking, roughly three years behind HubSpot, but frustrations remain. There’s still no way in D365 to use website visits or clicks to build a segment, and no way to use the visits or clicks for lead scoring. We can trigger follow-up emails based on website activity but not build segments to enable more sophisticated journeys.

Returning to our central question, it’s fair to say that whilst Microsoft ARE making big strides to improve the D365 marketing functionality proposition it’s imperative Microsoft keep-up with the market; nimble tech start-ups and fresh-to-market platforms offer deeper personalisation, sophisticated multivariate testing, engagement scoring and predictive AI-models. CRM and marketing professional crave this kind of enhanced functionality, and Microsoft need to keep developing at pace so that D365 remains a relevant tool in the marketplace.

Which CRM should you choose for your business?

The million dollar question. Sometimes quite literally! The answer, of course is, ‘it depends.’ On what does it depend? It’s an increasingly crowded and differentiated marketplace. What are the critical decision-making factors when it comes to choosing a CRM platform?

Over the course of the past ten years, I’ve worked with a number of organisation who have posed themselves this question, and I’ve helped them answer it. I’ve learnt a lot about the available platforms in the process, from big hitters like Salesforce and Dynamics to the nimble Ninja’s like Iterable. The key success factors for selecting the optimum CRM platform for your business are organisational fit and commitment to the implementation, whatever platform is chosen needs aligned commitment across the business to make it work.

A key factor is always going to be cost, but it shouldn’t be the only factor. A thorough vendor selection exercise will allow meaningful comparison of the cost models of short-listed systems. There are a number of differing commercial models that CRM providers utilise. SaaS (Software as a Service) tiered-models provide increasingly sophisticated functionality packages as the price rises, offered by the likes of HubSpot and Iterable. Whereas licence-based models such as that of MS Dynamics prices against the number of users and module access. Other vendors use models based on factors such as aggregated data-storage and per-user storage,these are utilised by the likes Salesforce. The key insight is to have a clear implementation scope, scale and use cases to enable an accurate costing.

In order to detail the scope and scale of implementation, it’s key to also have a clear understanding of the functionality required from the system. What is it within your business that you will use a CRM platform to achieve? The wider the use cases and business processes to be enabled and automated, the greater array of functionality that will be utilised. Will the focus of the implementation be marketing communications via email, SMS or app-push? Do you also want to be able to raise customer service tickets when dealing with your clients? Will use the platform to manage finance and internal resources? Again, in decision-making, clarity of scope is crucial. The different systems have strengths and weaknesses in different areas of functionality. We’ll dive into some of the key platforms and features in the coming weeks.

One often over-looked factor, that I’ve experienced to be absolutely crucial, is fit with the organisational culture, structure and digital maturity. There are the strategic and philosophical factors around Tech-Stack integration requirements that need to be taken into account. Does the organisation have a clear direction for it’s Tech-Stack and is the organisation appropriately resourced and skilled to manage the implementation and ongoing maintenance of the new system? How is data used and managed within the organisation, does the new system align with the data strategy?

Smaller organisations may be better off implementing a more ‘off-the’ shelf' or ‘plug and play’ platform that doesn’t require a great deal of configuration, customisation or technical skill to implement and manage. The complexity of the existing ‘As-is’ infrastructure need to be understood in order to scope the implementation effort. The level of experience and digital skill of the intended end users is also crucial to pick a system with the optimised balance of functionality and user experience, which will dictate the level of training required for the system to be successfully implemented.

I hope you find this overview useful. Let me know if you have any comments and questions in the coming weeks, I will break-down these core areas and dig into the detail. Stay tuned!