The Dynamics CRM platform has always been strong on its campaign marketing functionality and this latest rollup is demonstrating how this part of the product is evolving.

 Creating a new campaign in this roll up now has the same staged “process flows” as the sales and customer services functions. This allows you to develop a managed marketing campaign from scratch where each stage of the campaign has a defined requirement before you move on to the next. This ensures you and your team run campaigns in the same way without neglecting important elements of your campaign. The management of the tasks are defined by the activity, the owner and the activity’s due date. This allows the marketing manager to instantly see who is doing what and when they should be doing it, anything overdue is easily detected.

 The stages start with planning, this is where you define the campaign name, the activity types, the budget, define the marketing audience and the other activities prior to making it live. This then moves through the initial process flow of marketing activity like emailing, attending events, advertising, mailshots or ring arounds. Each stage in the process flow can be reviewed and approved before moving on to the next.

 As the marketing activity progresses the process allows you to capture the generated leads and associate them with the campaign. This means that as your sales people are closing deals you are collecting sales data and making a direct connection to the marketing campaigns which generated the original leads. As a marketing professional would you like to sit in front of your directors and tell them the exact revenue each of your marketing campaigns generated? 

 The Sheffield IT Partnership is running a CRM Marketing event at the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The event title “An integrated approach to Marketing using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013” will demonstrate the entire end to end process.

 You can book yourself on to the event here  or contact the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce and Industry on 0114 201 8888