List Building in Microsoft Dynamics 365
List building presents challenges to both Salespeople and Marketers. This challenge can be solved using the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales App. Yes, you can perform your list building using tools in Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Let’s identify the list building challenges:
- Identifying new organizations suitable to sell or market to.
- Acquiring contact information of individuals at these organizations.
- Importing the data into Dynamics 365 as Lead or Contact.
You and I know there are plenty places to purchase lists or subscription services that provide leads. Personally, I’m skeptical of the list vendors. The subscription services I’ve found to be more reliable but cost per lead (or opportunity) gets expensive. Microsoft Dynamics 365 provides a nice solution and it’s built right in!
It’s called Insights, Powered by InsideView. It is included with the Dynamics 365 Sales App or Customer Engagement Plan license. Insights includes data on over 40,000 organizations and 13 million contacts. That’s a pretty broad base from which to pull lead and prospect data.
Obviously, marketing to 40,000 organizations would be impractical if not downright foolish. After all we’re creating a marketing list, not a phone book (look it up millennials). Here are the steps to narrowing down the list of organizations and people to something smart and manageable. First, go click on the Insights tile in Dynamics 365 and choose List Build and New List:
Creating your list is a function of filtering the Insights data to yield prospects that match the criteria you set for your list. Here are some of the data points you can filter on:
- Location: Zips, cities, states
- Company Revenue
- Head Count
- Industry
- Ownership: Private vs. Public vs. Government
- Job title
- Job level
For this example, I’m building a list of organizations and people that match the following criteria:
Organization
- Location: California based
- Industry: Industrial manufacturing and services
- Head count: 100 to 10,000
- Annual revenue: $10 million to $1 billion
People
Job titles include:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Finance
- Operations/Admin
- IT
Job level:
- Director
- Vice President
- Senior Executive
- C-Level
We’re keeping it simple here. There are several more options, e.g., pulling organizations with recent news articles, people with whom you are connected on LinkedIn, college alumni, etc.
This search results in a list of 432 businesses and 602 people.
From here you can:
- View company’s firmographic or contact’s data.
- Selectively add companies or people to Dynamics 365. Companies imported will create new Account records. People can be added as Leads or Contacts.
- Bulk export company or contact data to Excel. Use Excel sheet as is, import into another application or bulk import into Dynamics 365 (click here for help with simple import routine).
With the service that is included with your Dynamics 365 license, there is a limit to the number of records you can sync, export, or add to Dynamics 365. The number is 500 credits per month. Unused credits expire at the end of the month. If you want more monthly credits, contact InsideView about an InsideView Enterprise license.
Insights adds a ton of value to Dynamics 365. With list vendors charging in excess of $1.00 per, Insights is saving you a lot of money. Use it to your advantage!
By Mark Abes, Vice President Sales and Marketing, Dyn365Pros, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partners, San Diego, Southern California.