Since its founding in 1975, Microsoft has grown to become a household name, offering an array of software products for computing devices, including its CRM solution, Dynamics 365 CRM, that was released in 2016. With its practical functionality, flexibility, and customizability, Dynamics 365 quickly became one of the top CRM vendors in the market and has helped thousands of customers gain control of their sales process.
That already sounds like a pretty sweet deal. However, like all other CRMs, Dynamics is only as valuable as the data it stores. Clean and accurate data will make your processes fly, but working with unreliable and erroneous information is a miserable experience.
Maintaining an error-free CRM database isn't easy—and no, your salespeople shouldn't update it. Fortunately, in this age and day, there's no shortage of solutions that promise insights and information on almost any company in the world.
Vainu collects available information from open and public sources, transforms this raw data into meaningful company insights, and connects the data to our customers' business systems. By connecting Vainu to Dynamics, you'll be able to enrich the data in your CRM and gain access to relevant and actionable information on millions of companies. Moreover, you'll get all of that data in real time.
In this article, we'll be walking you through the ins and outs of our Dynamics connector, as well as discussing some other noteworthy features. Let's get this show on the road!
How to connect Vainu and Dynamics
Although important, we'll largely be skipping over the more practical aspects of establishing a connection between Vainu and Dynamics. You know, the "click here, scroll down, type something there". But, if you do want to learn more about that, you should check out our article on the integration process in our Help Center. It walks you through the integration process step-by-step in a simple, digestible manner.
I know you might think that setting up this type of connection would be a resource-intensive task, but with our native Dynamics integration, you'd be able to implement the connector yourself in no time. No grand implementation project. No external consultants. Just plug and play. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. But, enough about that. In this article, we'll focus on the "fun" stuff, which is giving a high-level explanation of how this connector works and talking about the advantageous things you can do once the connection has been established.
The three steps of Vainu-Dynamics connector
There are three steps in the connector process, which can be summarized in the following triad: match, map, and update.
Step 1: Company matching
Company matching is the functionality that links organizations from Vainu's extensive company database to accounts that already exist in your Dynamics CRM on the basis of a specified parameter, such as a business ID, company name, or address. This is a crucial step in the connector process, as the other steps heavily depend on it. To indulge any curiosity you might have, here's a little teaser of what it looks like in our graphical user interface. By using our interface, you'd be able to see the number of accounts in your CRM that have been successfully matched with companies in Vainu's database at a glance. Looks pretty cool, right? You can read more about the company matching step here.
Step 2: Data mapping
The next step is data mapping. This functionality "maps" data fields in Vainu to the appropriate data fields in your CRM. So, for example, you might choose to map the "Company" data field in Vainu to the "Account" data field in Dynamics. This way, even if we use different lingo in our UI, you can still get all the data you want in the place you want it. Read this article if you want to know more about the different fields that are available for mapping.
Step 3: Data Updates
The previous two features are valuable, to say the least, but I saved the best for last—Data Updates. All those companies that you've matched and all those data fields you've mapped? They're now getting a Glow Up. With Data Updates, all the account data records in your CRM will be updated, corrected, and enriched. So, despite what the name might imply, Data Updates doesn't only make your existing data more accurate and reliable by keeping it updated, it also gives you access to even more relevant data about your potential and existing customers.
Considering that our algorithms update millions of data points in our company database every day, it wouldn't be bold of me to say that data quickly becomes outdated. This fact alone makes Data Updates and automatic data enrichment critical for a reliable company database. You can read more about Data Updates in this Help Center article.
Just in case you were wondering, these steps aren't limited to the companies, or accounts as Dynamics likes to call them, that you already have in your CRM. With Vainu, you gain access to more than eight million companies in the Nordics and even more in Europe, which can easily be imported as new accounts into Dynamics with the click of a button. This way, your CRM can be filled to the brim with new potential customers.
Mass Export
Exporting one company at a time is an incredibly time-consuming and arduous process. It’s for that reason that Vainu created the Mass Export feature, which allows you to send a list of up to ten thousand (10,000) companies from Vainu to your CRM with a single click. That’s a lot of time saved. If you’re interested in learning more about the feature, then make sure to read our Mass Export article.
What can I do with all of this data in my CRM?
“So, the Vainu-Dynamics connector has been established, what then?” I hear you thinking. While there are many things you can do with data, such as simply taking in its beauty, I want to take this time to highlight a few use cases that pop up regularly amongst our customers.
Target market analysis
I'm sure that we can agree that, in order to be able to conduct an analysis, you need data. This is where Vainu comes into the picture. By using Vainu's comprehensive company information in conjunction with your own sales data, your organization would be able to conduct some pretty heavy-duty target market analyses.
As you likely already know, your target market is the customer group you want to sell your product or services to, and, obviously, they should be a good fit for your company. Why obviously? Well, it doesn't make much sense to try and sell to organizations that won't be able to derive much value from your offering, right? Even if you manage to sell to them, they're likely to churn, which is not the type of customer base you want.
But, by doing a target market analysis, you'll be able to establish which organizations are the most productive for you so that you know who to focus your energy towards. How do you figure out who your best potential customers are? An excellent place to start is to look at your current customers—is the composition of your customer base skewed towards certain industries? Do your highest CLV customers share certain attributes, such as a specific type of technology?
You might already have some hypotheses about which types of organizations are the most fruitful for you. Still, you'll only be able to confirm, or refute, those hypotheses by digging into the data. So, where does Vainu fit into all of this? Vainu provides you with the data you would need to complete these types of analyses and develop the associated insights.
Advanced segmentation
It should almost go without saying that, to truly be successful as a business, you have to understand your potential customer's situation and the challenges they might be facing. However, knowing itself is not enough, you have to apply that knowledge. This means that a generic, cookie-cutter approach isn't going to cut it. Modern B2B sales and marketing requires personalization, which is dependent on effective segmentation.
Traditional, simplistic segmentation—based solely on company size or official industry classifications—often isn't enough to produce genuinely meaningful segments. Your segments need to be more granular than that. That's why it's beneficial to have access to more data. The more data points you have available in your database, the more pointed and accurate B2B segmentation can be.
When you have enough firmographic and technographic data points, you can create segments like this one:
SaaS companies in Sweden that use Dynamics and have over five million euros of revenue.
By having access to a comprehensive dataset, sales and marketing teams can create precise and meaningful target segments, which would allow them to meaningfully personalize their approach at scale.
Time for a plug: Vainu Custom Industry is an AI model that Vainu developed in response to the outdated nature of official industry classifications. It identifies unique company industries to help facilitate even more relevant B2B segmentation and targeting. Check it out.
Automate prospecting and other CRM tasks
Once Vainu and Dynamics are connected, you can automate your sales prospecting and make finding new potential customers a walk in the park. With the connector in place, data would constantly be flowing between our systems. This means that when Vainu detects a change in a company, e.g., the appointment of a new CEO, the associated data field in your CRM would be updated in real time. It also means that when a new company meets your specified criteria, they would automatically be added to your CRM, which almost feels like a cheat code to sales prospecting.
Unfortunately, the sad truth is that these changes often occur under the radar and go unnoticed by your salespeople. To help companies avoid that, we created Workflow Triggers. Workflow Triggers allows you to set up automated alerts and automatically trigger CRM tasks based on changes having occurred within your target accounts, such as whether a new CEO has been appointed. This means that your salespeople will never miss a sales opportunity again.
Personalization at scale
On the whole, by turning raw data into actionable company information and feeding it into Dynamics in real time, Vainu can help organizations achieve personalization at scale in their sales and marketing. How? Well, with access to a wealth of data points, such as industry category, employee count, technologies in use, revenue, and the latest developments within an organization, you'd be able to tailor your sales outreach and marketing campaigns. You might even end up knowing your potential customer better than they know themselves.
Other valuable Vainu-Dynamics features
Disclaimer: this next feature isn’t related to the way in which you can use the data that the connector would put inside your CRM. However, it is a significant quality-of-life feature that improves the usability, experience, and effectiveness of working in Dynamics, and is very popular amongst our existing Dynamics customers.
Vainu View
Vainu View is a functionality that allows for the embedding of Vainu's company profile data in any system that supports iframe embedding, which, surprise, surprise, Dynamics does. As it is very difficult to compress hundreds of company data points into Dynamics in a way that is digestible and usable for salespeople, Vainu View presents a huge improvement in the usability of Dynamics for salespeople and other customer-facing personnel. With it, you’ll have access to our detailed graphical company profiles in your CRM in an instance.
This might sound like hot air, so, to provide some proof, for one of our customers, Telavox, having these embedded company profiles cut the time that meeting-bookers spent prospecting by 50%. The feature can be a little hard to describe, so check out the video below to see what it looks like in practice:
Sounds good—what now?
That was the short but sweet run-through of the connector process. Considering the comprehensiveness of Vainu's company database, establishing this type of connection would mean that you would have swathes of accurate data points at your disposal. That translates to your salespeople and marketers having the necessary resources available to them to make better-informed decisions, which would grow your bottom line. Plus, as I said earlier, it doesn't take long to establish the connection, whereafter it doesn't require much if any, manual labor from you. Wins all around.
If any of that sounds of interest to you, and you would like to hear more about the connector, or perhaps take it for a spin yourself, please feel free to contact us via our chat or sign up for a free trial.
