How to evaluate Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online without losing focus

The introduction of Dynamics CRM Online by Microsoft brought a serious new competitor into the cloud CRM market. In case of CRM, a cloud solution makes it easy for your company to get started with a new system or start planning a move away from your current CRM application. But getting started with cloud CRM can be confusing.

It is easy to get lost in all new features and possibilities of a modern CRM solution, especially in a system as feature-rich as Dynamics CRM Online. You can subscribe in few minutes and your cloud app is ready to use. But like buying a car, you easily add a lot of extras like SharePoint, Yammer, Office 365, mobile, social, storage, and more - and we have not even talked about the out of the box functionality yet.

Dynamics CRM opens a new world, starting with many basic capabilities in areas like relationship management, sales force automation, marketing, and service. At the launch of the latest version, CRM 2013, Microsoft published many short tutorials to introduce you into basic functionalities and new features (compared to previous version). Despite these efforts, starting from scratch with Dynamics CRM is often overwhelming for newcomers.

In my experience as consultant, I see an increase in companies who would like to leave the Excel-based "CRM" behind and step forward to start using Dynamics CRM. They often start with a CRM Online trial but commonly losing focus while getting started. The challenge for me in this case is to get your focus back and start simple, taking it step by step.

Back to basics

In order to use basic CRM capabilities, there is one key factor - your ability to get customer data into the system.  Without good data ...