Key Takeaways:

1) A place to network with your peers

2) Gain insights into the latest Dynamics market trends based on proprietary data from MSDW’s new account-based marketing/data capture system .

3) Hear from experts in…

• Technology buyer persona and buying journey
• Sales and marketing alignment
• Social Platforms: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram & others
• Email Marketing
• Event Marketing
• Partner and End-user marketing
• Technology tools

Full Agenda:

Wednesday: May 24th

● 5:30 – 7pm: (Networking reception and dinner)

Thursday: May 25th

● 7:00 – 8:00: Breakfast

● 8:00 – 8:30: Opening remarks (MSDW and DUG)

● 8:30 – 10:00: (Expert Panel & Breakout Groups) MSDW Research Study Results: Are Dynamics Marketers and Users in Sync When it Comes to Digital Marketing?

This session will reveal the latest trends in MSDW’s ongoing research and benchmarking of which digital content and sources are most important to the Dynamics user community. It will explain how user preferences have changed over time so marketers can make best use of marketing tactics that work, and dispense with those that waste resources. An expert user and marketer panel will comment on these trends and provide us with even more insights from their own perspectives.

Marketer breakout groups will follow to discuss and analyze focused topics based on questions raised from the survey results, concluding with sharing of group findings and guidance.

Facilitator: Jason Gumpert, Co-Founder & Editorial Director, MSDynamicsWorld

● 10:00 – 10:30: Break

● 10:30 – 12:00: (Expert Panel & Breakout Groups) Building a High-Performing Marketing Sales Funnel

ISVs and partners are concerned with both top-of-the-funnel awareness tactics or bottom-of-the-funnel sales activity. But it is the middle-of-the-funnel that needs time and attention for you to get to know your audience and build trust. Join Marie Wiese of Marketing CoPilot, and a group of ISV marketer panelists, as she lays out a simple formula for boosting marketing performance and explains the role that CRM needs to play in making this a success.

In this session, Marie will also share the secret to online relationship building for Dynamics ISVs and partners, including:

• The tools you need before you start the marketing automation journey.
• The secret formula to engagement.
• How to map the right data to the right tactics in your marketing sales funnel.

Marketer breakout groups will follow to discuss how the buyer journey has changed and the gaps between how people want to buy and how they’re executing as a business.

Bonus: All attendees will receive a special workbook after the session.

Facilitator:
Marie Wiese – Founder & President, Marketing CoPilot

Panelists:
Kelly Mazur – Manager of Marketing and Microsoft Partnership, Evenica
Nicole Vesser, Senior Solutions Manager, Abel Solutions
Kirsten Jordan – Digital Marketing Manager, Canadian Partnership Against Cancer

● 12:00 – 12:45: Lunch

● 12:45 – 2:15: (Expert Panel & Breakout Groups) Dynamics Marketers Share Their Secret Sauce When it Comes to Successful Marketing Campaigns

In this session we will hear from several seasoned Dynamics marketers who have figured out successful strategies to brand their companies or produce sales leads for their organizations. Whether it be with a strong thought leadership campaign, a holistic content strategy, establishing industry expertise, leveraging social media, or a 360 lead generation campaign, they will let you in on their Best Practices.

Marketer breakout groups will follow to discuss using diverse sets of marketing vehicles to run successful integrated campaigns.

Facilitator: Adam Berezin, CEO & Co-Founder, MSDynamicsWorld

● 2:15 – 3:15: Which ISV and Partner Content Resonates Best with Users….and Which Resonates Worst

The MSDynamicsWorld (MSDW) team constantly analyzes the content consumption trends and habits of people in the Microsoft Dynamics channel—everything from which types of content are consumed the most (white papers vs. videos vs. articles, etc.), to why certain messaging and themes tend to resonate better than others. While some topics are proven winners, we have discovered that certain characteristics predict whether a piece of content will be consumed by prospective buyers.

Join Adam Berezin, MSDW’s Co-Founder and CEO, to learn:

• Which types of ISV and partner content are being consumed the most by users within each Dynamics product group
• The evolution of content consumption in the Dynamics channel
• Our outlook on the future of content preferences

Marketer breakout groups to discuss the elements of successful content campaigns.

● 3:15 – 3:45: Break

● 3:45 – 4:45: (Expert Panel & Breakout Groups) What Dynamics 365 Systems Integrators Want from Their ISV Relationships

Business Applications is one of the fastest-growing sectors of Microsoft’s commercial business. We are seeing both SMB customers and global enterprises actively moving their business applications to the Microsoft Cloud. One of the results of this wave of digital transformation is the growth of the number of ISV partners and add-on applications. The panel will provide guidance on taking advantage of the lucrative but complex relationships ISVs are forming with systems integrator (SI) partners in the Dynamics 365 and Power Platform space.

Topics will include:

• Initial contact – building the initial relationship
• Getting to know each other – understanding the SI’s business and ISV’s offering
• Getting serious – the partner agreement
• Working your first deal
• Building a long-term, high-touch, high-value relationship

Marketer breakout groups to share successful strategies for working with partners.

Facilitator: Rick McCutcheon, Microsoft Dynamics MVP, Host of PartnerTalks

● 4:45 – 5:00: Closing remarks (MSDW & DUG)

Space is limited to just 60 ISV and partner marketers, so secure your slot today! To register, please go to: https://bit.ly/3GxqBAi

The post MSDW to Launch Partner Marketing Event at DynamicsCon LIVE in May, 2023 appeared first on MSDW Marketing.

CRM Isn’t Just About Tracking Prospects—It’s About Using Content to Attract the Right Prospects

“Why does everyone dislike CRM so much?” Marie Wiese of Marketing CoPilot posed that question to a panel of Dynamics CRM experts at a recent MSDW Marketing session, and was told that marketers and sales people too often misunderstand CRM’s most important purpose, which is to help marketers not just identify prospects, but identify prospects who will turn into profitable long-term customers.

Because CRM has become an increasingly powerful tool over the last 20 years, “People become overwhelmed with it,” said John Bush of Map2 Innovate. Thus, organizations may fail to fully implement it among their sales and marketing personnel.

The huge volume of data that CRM draws on can help ISVs and partners pinpoint their top leads. “There is a certain kind of client we resonate with,” said Chuck Ingram of congruentX, and CRM enables his company to hone in on those especially desirable prospects.

Once you have those top prospects and clients identified, “You can personalize your content even further,” said Kelly Mazur of Evenica. That means reenforcing the preferences of your most desirable prospects, and letting go of prospects that don’t fit your desired customer profiles. Added Marie Wiese: “A lot of owners are afraid to act on this data—they want all opportunities, but not all opportunities are good.”

The panelists offered these suggestions to get the most out of CRM:

*Buy-in: You have to get buy-in from your team to use CRM. it changes the game.
*Internal communication: Sales, marketing, service, IT—get them all talking.
*Repeat. Once you have a CRM system that works well and produces consistent results, you are hooked.

You can view the full panel session here: https://msdynamicsworld.com/video/how-marketers-can-use-crm-data-power-their-content-strategy

The post How Marketers Can Use CRM Data to Power Up Their Content Strategy appeared first on MSDW Marketing.

The BBC Event makes sense for a simple reason: Marketing professionals in the ERP and CRM space deserve their own virtual event.

Not a tech event focused on product features. Not a generic digital marketing event that has nothing to do with our industry.

Marketers in the Dynamics, Acumatica, and Sage channels have specific requirements. Now, more than ever, they need relevant training and community support. Long-time marketers have valuable knowledge to share. New marketers need to be welcomed to our channel and be helped to succeed.

This first event on June 23rd is a half day with a keynote, five sessions and 4 panel discussions. All of the speakers are marketers working directly in our industry. You will leave with actionable insights you can use in your business right away.

View the session list

Register now

The post A New Channel Event, By and For Marketers appeared first on MSDW Marketing.

When I’m discussing marketing strategies with ISVs, you wouldn’t believe how many of them tell me things like, “We generated so many leads at Convergence, our pipeline is full for the rest of the year”, or “We’re not focused on any specific marketing activities at the moment, because we’re trying to work more closely with partners.”

Here’s a reality check for ISVs who think this way…

1. There is no such thing as having “too much business” to handle. If you cannot focus on all of the leads you have, and at the same time, generate new ones, you need to hire additional staff—immediately.
2. Your sales pipeline can never be too full. You will never close all of the leads in your pipeline. That’s a fact. To make up for this, you need to constantly be adding new leads to your pipeline. Fresh leads invariably include prospects with a sense of urgency, who are likely to buy now. How can you do this? Marketing with a schedule of programs on a regular basis throughout the year.
3. VARs will never market effectively market your solution to their customers. Sure, your solution might be great, but there are hundreds of other ISVs out there who also have great solutions. To separate your organization from your competitors, you’ll have to do your own marketing and pass the leads off to the VARs you work with.

If you’re struggling to keep the leads coming in while keeping the nurture and qualification processes moving forward, then chances are you’re not using CRM, or not using it properly. Trust me, a lot of ISVs will privately admit to being in the same position with their CRM solution. We’ve learned this in various ways over time. For a good primer on the basics of CRM and the benefits of sales force automation, I’d recommend you check out CRM expert Rick McCutcheon’s excellent new presentation on this topic from Decisions Spring 2012.

Lead qualification and keep-warm strategies can and should be automated, bringing greater transparency and efficiency at many levels of your company. And that efficiency and visibility ought to illuminate the fact that a single burst of leads from an event or another one-time source is not going to fill your sales pipeline with warm leads for long.

The post Your Company’s Sales Pipeline has an Endless Appetite…How Well are Your Marketing Activities Feeding It? appeared first on MSDW Marketing.

So we began inquiring with executives of ISVs we know in the Microsoft Dynamics space to gauge their interest in direct integration to CRM of leads generated from their dynamic content. Wouldn’t they all be pleased to have a steady stream of real-time leads flowing directly into their system of record for turning leads into sales? No more Excel spreadsheets, no more reminder emails to respond to.

We have inquired with twenty sophisticated ISVs, and found, surprisingly, that three-fourths aren’t even running CRM and marketing automation initiatives. And among the rest, we’ve spoken with several who weren’t even aware of which CRM system their company owned. Those who did have CRM in place were not ready or able to accept web leads from an external source.

We also discovered that there are a lot of organizations out there that don’t do lead nurturing – they simply ship leads out to the sales reps sight unseen. Then, if they’re lucky, they get the emails added to an email newsletter list somewhere down the road. Of course, without screening, a spreadsheet of leads is as good as importing or integrating leads into CRM; if they’re just being doled out to sales reps to do all the legwork, then CRM plays a minimal role anyway.

Moreover, many companies don’t even seem to be considering the many benefits of sending leads directly into CRM from external sources – the segmenting that occurs, the standardized workflow, the essential data added to enable sales people to customize their pitches, and the informed follow-up that is enabled. Many ISVs are in the ironic situation of promoting CRM for their clients, but not recognizing its benefits for their own use. Once again, it seems, the shoemaker’s children go barefoot.

The good news from our surveying is that the opportunities for ISVs to exploit lead generation capabilities via CRM are extraordinary. It starts with simple qualification, but it easily move on to more sophisticated lead management, marketing automation, sales force automation, reporting, development of marketing content strategies, and cost-per-lead analysis. Not only that, there’s an opportunity to build significant competitive advantage over those ISVs that are slow to drink their own kool aid.

The time to get started, though, is now.

The post Dynamics ISVs: Time To Drink the CRM Kool Aid appeared first on MSDW Marketing.