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Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Pinpointing The Best Prospects
Microsoft's target market is a collection of rapidly growing emerging businesses, the SMB (small and midsize business) market and the middle market. Microsoft's target market definition is most broadly identified as organizations between $5M and $500M annual revenues, 50 to 1000 employees and 5 to 250 CRM (Customer Relationship Management) users. However, the company's target market is more accurately identified by procurement and utilization characteristics than demographics. In that regard, Microsoft's true target market consists of organizations that desire to subscribe, instead of procure, sophisticated CRM business applications.

The Microsoft CRM solution is best received by organizations that choose not to invest $100K or more to procure sophisticated CRM systems, a comparable amount for implementation consulting fees and the additional recurring costs for the additional IT resource(s) needed to manage the servers, network, relational databases, connectivity, wireless or other devices and provide user support. The Microsoft target market instead prefers to remove the up front financial barriers to sophisticated CRM information systems by acquiring the software on a monthly pay-as-you-go rental basis, achieving a very short software implementation period, and completely offloading the hiring of additional IT staff, support resources or other personnel. Microsoft's new technology CRM application suite puts in place the commercial solution for organizations to conduct customer-facing business expeditiously and within their preferred procurement and operational terms.

dynamics crm

Microsoft's customer market actually includes a spectrum of three demographic markets:

Emerging enterprises: These organizations tend to be smaller, high growth companies or divisions/departments of larger organizations. Examples of emerging companies include dot com's, high growth start-ups or companies making large investments in R&D but not yet generating revenues.
SME: Small and Midsize Enterprises (SME's) are generally classified as organizations from $1M to $500M in annual revenues or 10 to 1000 employees. Microsoft's early customers will largely come from this market.
Middle market organizations – middle market organizations are defined as approximately $250M to $1B in annual revenues. As Microsoft matures and becomes more recognized in the marketplace, this market will become the core of Microsoft's business.

Ideal Customer Profile:

Decentralized (multiple offices, home offices, traveling sales staff)
Committed to hosting and subscription-based pricing model (want to rent, not buy)
Solution Selling (sell solutions, not widgets; typically incur longer sales cycle)
Understandgs and looking to achieve CRM (not contact management)
Desire to outsource IT admininstration, maintenance and management (system administration, DBA, security expertise, antivirus, other safeguards such as continuous backups, offsite storage, emergency restoration teams, disaster recovery team)
Value business process automation (value Aplicor CMS and workflow tools)
Reporting and analytics - on-demand access to information
Strong customer support (Aplicor dedicated Account Managers)
Desire for partnership (not just a vendor relationship)
Will to pay for value
SOON: Front to Back office solution

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