SharePoint vs Sales Literature
Heavyweight Title Fight: SharePoint Integration vs. Sales Literature
Anytime a company chooses to extend Dynamics CRM past the standard out of the box functionality I have to commend them. It’s this “make it your own” concept that makes Dynamics CRM a true leader in the industry. So, if you’ve implemented Dynamics CRM with SharePoint document integration then my hat is off to you. The foremost beneficial feature of Dynamics CRM and SharePoint integration is the direct collaboration between your sales and marketing teams by allowing them to work within one document management system within a single screen.
On the other hand, you could default to the mindset of, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” After all, Microsoft Dynamics CRM includes Sales Literature functionality. The value of sales literature is that it makes product brochure, flyers and more available to sales reps from where they work—sending emails in Outlook. It also allows related documents to be grouped together, so if a product has 5 documents that have to be sent when someone emails a customer with a quote for that product, sales literature can be a big time saver.
Ultimately, documents only stored in SharePoint are not going to be as easily accessible to salespeople as they send emails to clients, nor are they going to be connected to products and campaigns like they are with Sales Literature. If you choose to use the out of the box Sales Literature then you lose out of functionality like “Quick Linking” within SharePoint. This feature allows linking of specific documents with other entities inside the CRM system like a marketing campaign, a case or an opportunity.
If you can’t make up your mind then consider this! You could choose to have your marketing team collaborate on a new promotional flyer in SharePoint. Administrators could then expose it to the sales team via sales literature. Finally, a sales representative saves time when sending this flyer to their prospects and customers via email.
