Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 features significant advances to facilitate collaboration between sales, marketing, and customer service departments. It is the first release that attempts to bridge the gap between sales and marketing, removing the need for marketers to use many disparate systems and allowing the sales executives to really engage with the marketing process.

How often have you planned your sales strategy around a previous quarter’s result or the latest competitive wins rather than building a well-planned strategy built upon data-driven analysis of historical trends and future predictions? Sales teams can crush their sales goals by seeking to implement a fact-based decision model, that provides continuous access to unbiased data to perform past, predictive and prescriptive analysis.

By leveraging sales analytics, sales management can effectively recognize, understand and respond to emerging trends in sales cycles and markets. Successful sales analytics positioning delivers competitive rewards in improving agility, and exploiting opportunities quicker than competitors.

Have you ever felt like you and your technical counterparts are speaking two different languages?  Here are three items that are on many sales manager’s CRM wish lists that may require close coordination with your IT department.  We’ve provided some insight to help you cut through the technical jargon so you can get exactly what you want out of your CRM.

Cold calling is exactly what it sounds like: uncomfortable, unwelcome, and tedious. Some say it’s a numbers game, others say luck plays a large role. For both sales representatives and call recipients, the cold call is a relic that has not quite disappeared from business protocol. 

While there are many sales tools out there, a customer relationship management (CRM) system is increasingly common to manage sales processes and customer relationships. The key to choosing the right one is to pinpoint the CRM that your whole organization will actually use to effectively track and deliver best in class experiences for current and future prospects. No matter which CRM system you implement, here’s a list of some of the latest features that CRMs deliver that make an investment into CRM worth it.

With 1.7 billion social users and over 400 million tweets per day about products, services and brands, it’s no surprise that customers are 57% through the buying process before they talk to you. Therefore, sales people who are maximizing social media platforms are outperforming their peers who aren’t, by 73%.

Click through to see how to best use social media and the tools that will change the way you sell.

As we close out 2014, many sales teams and sales managers are fighting to finish strong and win those last key opportunities. Here are some sales trends for 2015 we have seen that will give your sales team a robust competitive start: