Convergence 2015: With sales productivity in focus, Microsoft, CRM partners offer a slew of complementary tools

At Convergence 2015 in Atlanta this week, productivity was a theme both in presentations and on the convention floor. At a session on "Sales productivity at Microsoft," team leaders from Redmond talked about how they used Dynamics CRM to support their own sales force. Meanwhile, on the show floor, a range of exhibitors large and small promoted and demonstrated their own productivity enhancing solutions to CRM.

As Maurice Rice, director of Business Programs, explained at the sales productivity session, Microsoft as a whole consists of a diverse lot of interests and stakes: 16,000 sellers; 30,000 partners; 100+ countries; 100,000 enterprise customers and more than $40 billion in the sales pipeline.

And, of course, to the company that practically put software on the world's business map, no single piece of software is going to dominate over its whole suite of software offerings. Microsoft's full sales productivity solution, Rice said, certainly involves CRM 2015, but it also includes the full Office 365 suite, Power BI, Azure cloud services, its own Windows phone and Surface tablet (with their respective CRM interfaces) and Windows 8.

As an example of tracking sales productivity, Rice described the old-fashioned way telephone sales used to be done compared to the way it's done today - and he recommended a Dynamics CRM solution that addresses it.

"Telesales is a lot more about productivity," he said. "Some of the elements we're trying to bring together including how many hours you spent on the phone. Did you make your 100 attempts in the day? The reality is in this new world, you really need to be able to know, of your day, how much of that is in calls versus chats versus emails. You really need to start looking at the overall level ...