This article discusses how aligning sales and marketing with Dynamics 365 can reduce costs through unified insights, streamlined reporting, and automation of administrative tasks.Align Sales & Marketing with Dynamics 365
Sales and marketing often work in silos - creating inefficiencies, higher costs, and missed opportunities. Dynamics 365 bridges this gap with unified data, AI-driven insights, and automation - helping businesses align teams, cut customer acquisition costs, and improve ROI.
While many professionals are currently operating in a distributed work environment, even when colleagues are in the same office, sales and marketing misalignment is common.
Poor alignment can cost businesses 10% or more of annual revenue, and 48% of enterprises still struggle with alignment."
-Sara Williams, VP of Sales, Demandbase
Why Sales & Marketing Misalignment Hurts ROI
Most organisations use separate platforms for sales and marketing, creating data silos that slow down growth.
Dynamics 365 unifies both teams under one system, giving shared visibility into leads, campaigns, and revenue attribution.
Sales and marketing teams often have different goals, different KPIs, and different platforms - which means separate, disconnected data. Ideally, both teams would use the same solution, sharing insights to build a clearer picture of the customer.
During periods of economic disruption, this misalignment becomes even more costly.
This can lead to costly duplicative work, lost opportunities, and wasted time on administrative work that hurts the bottom line - and when you can least afford it. Organizations that proactively align sales and marketing reap many benefits. These include a more consistent, seamless experience for their customers, lower customer acquisition costs, less overhead spent on administrative work, and the ability to capture data that spans the entire marketing and sales pipeline. This data can then provide the clearest and most actionable insights on where companies should and should not invest to earn the highest ROI.
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The evolving buying process
Two trends have changed the way B2B buyers engage with a company.
- First, buying decisions are often made by teams, with different players and roles involved in different phases of the buying process. This means that sales and marketing must use their combined insights and knowledge to connect with a wide range of roles in their customers’ organizations, from procurement and finance to business unit leaders and IT.
- Second, most B2B buyers lean heavily on digital assets to educate themselves about companies and solutions. Digital selling requires salespeople to understand customers at every point of their buying journey and offer highly personalized and relevant content. Thus, they need to be familiar with acquisition and nurture content produced by marketing. Understanding these two trends can help companies reduce costs and efforts tied to customer acquisition
So here is what you should do to reduce the sales & marketing cost
1. Reducing Customer Acquisition Costs
Dynamics 365 helps both teams build a shared buyer profile by combining data from marketing automation and sales CRM.. When they work from the same platform, duplicate work drops, targeting improves, and the sales cycle shortens. The result: 18% fewer touches needed to move a lead through to conversion.
Dynamics 365 helps both teams build a shared buyer profile by combining data from marketing automation and sales CRM.
When they work from the same platform, duplicate work drops, targeting improves, and the sales cycle shortens.
The result: 18% fewer touches needed to move a lead through to conversion.
Sources and References
The statistics cited in this article are based on industry research on sales and marketing alignment:
- "18% fewer touches to move leads from marketing to telesales" - Sales and Marketing Alignment Study, Harvard Business Review
- "18% fewer touches to move leads from telesales to sales" - Sales and Marketing Alignment Research, Harvard Business Review
- Additional insights drawn from Microsoft Dynamics 365 case studies and customer success data
For more information on sales-marketing alignment best practices, refer to the Harvard Business Review's comprehensive research on revenue operations and lead management efficiency.
"The key to aligning sales and marketing isn't just strategy - it's data. When both teams are working from the same high-quality insights, they can target smarter, act faster, and close more deals together."
-Beth Powell, Senior Director of Marketing, Sales enie
2. Aligning reporting to cut unnecessary expenses
Dynamics 365 integrates campaign and sales data into a single dashboard, giving both teams a shared view of performance.
AI-driven insights highlight which campaigns deliver the highest ROI - and which ones to pause.
The result is transparent attribution and smarter budget allocation, with less wasted spend.
While marketing and sales have different responsibilities, each is critical to the sales process. Misalignment often causes frustration on both sides. For example, the sales team may feel marketing is making unrealistic claims about the company’s solutions, while marketing may feel sales fails to follow through on the leads marketing works so hard to surface. Misalignment leads to wasted efforts and investments.
When both teams align, the entire sales process becomes more seamless. The customer is the first to benefit, enjoying a consistent experience throughout the buying process. In addition, when sales and marketing align, they can integrate their knowledge for greater campaign impact, handle leads more fluidly and effectively, and better map and improve the customer journey.
By presenting a coordinated effort, sales and marketing can more easily gain support for further initiatives from their executive team.
As companies build a more data-driven model across sales and marketing, they can identify the most effective and investment worthy methods of acquiring new customers and driving repeat business.
Imagine tracking every lead across the entire customer journey - what could your organisation learn?
An integrated system reveals the effectiveness of marketing programmes (email, social, web) alongside sales efforts (calls, webinars, meetings).
When this data is combined with AI and analytics, teams can build acquisition playbooks, prioritise leads more effectively, and cut underperforming investments.
"If sales and marketing aren't aligned in their tasks and priorities, it creates a divide. Marketing has responsibilities beyond directly driving pipeline, but those efforts should ultimately support revenue targets."
- Sara Williams, VP of Sales, Demandbase
3. Automating administrative work and reducing overhead
Dynamics 365 and Power Automate handle repetitive tasks like lead assignment, follow-ups, proposal generation, and event tracking.
This frees both teams from manual data entry, giving them more time to focus on strategic growth.
When sales and marketing align, they improve productivity in many ways. One example is reducing duplicative work in areas such as planning, demand management, data management, and measurement. Also, sales and marketing teams are better able to identify tasks across the customer buyer journey that can be automated to improve efficiency. Automated tasks might include answering requests for product literature, sending relevant emails, scheduling sales calls, compiling sales reports, generating proposals and bids, and entering orders.
The Dynamics 365 Advantage for Sales & Marketing Teams
- Unified CRM + Marketing Platform
- End-to-end visibility of leads and campaigns
- Embedded AI insights and Co pilot recommendations
- Lower operational costs and increased ROI
Using an integrated sales and marketing solution not only increased sales leads, it helped salespeople better understand the customer journey. It also brought together rich information streams to support better lead nurturing, faster conversion, and reduced customer acquisition costs. The company used Dynamics 365 to analyse data from previous years tied to opportunities generated by each sales event, as well as the gross margin each opportunity produced.
The team used this information to make more informed travel budget decisions. It is also using marketing campaign history to be more targeted in their interactions. This includes tracking things like who opened an email, clicked a link, or subscribed to an event.
Save by aligning sales and marketing.
Align Your Sales & Marketing with Dynamics 365 Eliminate silos, automate workflows, and optimize customer acquisition costs with Dynamics 365. Partner with Terracez to implement an integrated system designed for smarter collaboration and measurable growth.
Alignment starts with talking and sharing information between sales and marketing. Yet to truly break down silos, both teams need to collaborate on process creation, measurement strategies and goals, and especially technology. Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps companies align sales and marketing teams. This helps them save money by lowering the cost of customer acquisition, eliminating redundant work, and reducing overhead for administrative and other work that can be automated.
Talk to a Dynamics 365 Expert Today.
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