As a business renting equipment or products to multiple parties, you always want to be at the top of your game when it comes to customer satisfaction. But here's the thing — to ensure you have happy customers, you need detailed and personal insight into each of your customers. Be it understanding customer acquisition, customer retention, tracking the customer's buying patterns, or having visibility into your customers' lead to cash cycle.
Some common reasons for customer dissatisfaction in the equipment rental industry are delayed quotes, incorrect delivery, overdue maintenance, and so on. So, how can you ensure that your customers are always happy? An efficient customer relationship management (CRM) solution could be beneficial.
With comprehensive experience in the rental and manufacturing industries, we at To-Increase have collaborated with global organizations to streamline their operations by leveraging the power of DynaRent, our rental-specific ERP software embedded in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management.
In this article, we’ll share why rental companies need a CRM solution, explain the offerings within Dynamics 365 F&SCM (ERP solution) and Dynamics 365 Sales (CRM solution), and highlight the value of combining both solutions.
Why do rental businesses need a CRM solution?
Your sales team requires real-time access to intelligent information offered by the CRM to obtain the correct information about the customer. Direct access to the rental equipment data shortens the sales cycle and improves quoting accuracy. It also provides insight into customer behavior, which you can leverage to grow your rental business.
Now you must be wondering: I already have an ERP solution; do I need a CRM as well?
Yes, you do! While an ERP system helps you run a successful business by connecting your financial and operational systems to a central database, a CRM solution helps manage how customers interact with your business and build stronger customer relationships.
In our experience within the rental and manufacturing industry, we've observed that the sales team prefers using a CRM solution instead of an ERP, as a CRM solution is easy to use, customer-focused, and designed to address and assist the needs of the sales team.
To help understand this, we will discuss the CRM capabilities in Dynamics 365 F&SCM ERP against Microsoft's CRM solution - Dynamics 365 Sales.
What are the ‘CRM capabilities’ offered by standard Dynamics 365 F&SCM for rental companies?
You can carry out certain sales and marketing activities in D365 F&SCM, such as obtaining, storing, and using customer data within the sales process.
Activities you can carry out with the marketing functionality in F&SCM are:
- Conduct marketing activities such as analyzing and developing marketing plans
- Manage relationships from when a business becomes a customer in your database
- Create telemarketing and email campaigns
You can do the following activities with the sales functionality in F&SCM:
- Generate sales quotations and sales forecasts
- Cross-sell and up-sell with the account information
DynaRent leverages the existing functionalities offered within Dynamics 365 F&SCM with additional rental-specific functionalities to manage the entire rental lifecycle efficiently.
What is offered by Dynamics 365 Sales as a CRM solution?
Dynamics 365 Sales is a customer-focused, business-specific solution built on Microsoft Power Platform and uses Dataverse to store and secure data. The platform allows you to extend your business requirements by building customer apps directly from your core data without the need for integration.
It is a cloud-based solution that enables the sales team to:
- Access relevant customer information quickly
- Build strong customer relationships
- Take actions based on insights
- Close deals quicker
As a CRM solution, Dynamics 365 Sales manages the complete sales cycle from lead to cash: lead generation and qualification, opportunity management to order management. All this is stored, organized, and tracked in a single solution.
There are three types of offerings under Dynamics 365 Sales:
1. Sales Professional
Best suited for any primary sales role, such as salesperson or sales manager, the Sales Professional solution is ideal for enterprises that need a sales automation solution.
2. Sales Enterprise
The Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise works for enterprises looking to automate their sales processes, get contextual insights, and advanced customization capabilities.
3. Sales Premium
This solution combines D365 Sales Enterprise with Sales Insights automation and AI-driven features. You can analyze data to understand business relationships better and evaluate activities to take the next step. It includes all the capabilities of Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and some additional features.
Value-added solutions
You can enhance the capabilities of the above solutions by utilizing specific add-ons to the Sales solutions: Sales Insights and Relationship Sales. Sales Insights provides AI capabilities and is a part of Sales Premium but can also be added to Sales Enterprise. Relationship Sales combines LinkedIn Sales Navigator with D365 Sales Enterprise or Sales Premium for more personalized customer interaction.
Why do equipment rental and industrial manufacturing companies need Dynamics 365 Sales added to Dynamics 365 F&SCM?
With today's competition in the rental landscape, businesses must adopt new solutions to enhance sales and focus on nurturing and growing their existing client and prospect base. Dynamics 365 F&SCM as an ERP offers certain sales and marketing capabilities from the point a contact becomes a customer, but not beyond. However, Dynamics 365 Sales provides an end-to-end picture of your customer's journey from the lead to cash stages, making it a perfect CRM add-on solution to your already existing ERP system.
If you’re an equipment rental or manufacturing company involved in local and global operations, complex projects, or multiple revenue streams, investing in Dynamics 365 Sales will help you unlock the maximum potential of Dynamics 365 offerings. You will leverage your existing investment into Microsoft productivity tools and technology stack while increasing revenue and customer satisfaction.
With Dynamics 365 Sales as the CRM, you have additional benefits and can:
- Have a single CRM solution with anytime, anywhere cloud access
- Easily integrate with Microsoft Teams, Word, and Excel
- Connect with Dynamics 365 Marketing or Click Dimensions
- Leverage a solution that is easier to use for the sales team
- Gain unique insights into buying patterns, account history, etc.
- Track your Outlook emails and appointments to leads, contacts, and opportunities, converting unstructured communications to structured
Furthermore, it would help to consider connecting the ERP and CRM solutions, as it can be challenging to have siloed ERP and CRM systems.
How can we help rental businesses manage lead-to-cash processes in a single solution?
Just as we’ve built DynaRent to support the rental-specific processes, we have created a rental-specific integration for Dynamics 365 Sales that you can use easily, called DynaRent for D365 Sales.
DynaRent for D365 Sales has rental-specific fields added to it, so you can gain insights into the rental information of your assets and generate rental quotes quicker with a unified data view on rental equipment availability.
With DynaRent for D365 Sales, you can get rental-specific information such as:
- Forecast categories
- Rental calendars
- Rate codes
- On-rent date and time
- Expected off-rent date and time
- Equipment delivery and pick-up date and times
- Invoice profiles
Additionally, we’ve enhanced the entire process of quotations and approvals by adding a Microsoft Power Automate Cloud flow, which can be easily set up and modified to your needs.
DynaRent, combined with DynaRent for D365 Sales, acts as a lead-to-cash solution that handles all your business requirements in one location.
Are you looking to streamline your rental business with software embedded in Dynamics 365?
If you’re interested in managing your entire rental lifecycle, from lead to cash, in a single solution, you might be interested in DynaRent for D365 Sales, which works in combination with DynaRent.
You can explore more about the solution in this factsheet which shares information on:
- How DynaRent integrates with the workflow in Microsoft Dynamics 365 F&SCM
- How the solution fits into your lead-to-cash process
- The benefits a single solution offers to each team member in your company
Ankit Bhadana
Anastasia van der Wielen
