TekStack vs Dynamics 365 for Sales

Executive Summary

• Microsoft provides their 400,000 partners with low-cost access to business apps like Dynamics 365 for Sales and Business Central.
• You can check out information about Partner Launch, Success Core, and Success Expanded Benefits packages from this article.
• Many partners want to run their companies on Microsoft technology because they truly believe in the products. So they take full advantage of these “internal usage rights” offers.
• But the problem is that these platforms, especially Dynamics 365 for Sales, are really built for much larger organizations and require a lot of customization to get working.
• With over 60,000 hours of product enhancements, TekStack gives Microsoft partners an immediate lift allowing them to run their business on Microsoft technology taking advantage of these benefit packages.
• We have all the Revenue Operations processes covered from sales to professional services management to customer success to billing.
• If you are a Microsoft partner, TekStack is a much better option than running non-Microsoft products like HubSpot or Salesforce. Many partners do because they just gave up on Dynamics 365.
• This article outlines the functionality that we’ve added to help Microsoft partners drive more revenue and increase profitability.

What is TekStack

TekStack is Integrated Revenue Operations for B2B tech companies, supporting every step of your customer’s journey.  B2B tech companies need to find customers, implement customers, bill customers, and support customers.  They then need to renew those customer subscriptions each year hopefully upsell them along the way.  The more you sell, the higher your customer net retention, the more money you make; the more your business is worth.

50% of our customers are Microsoft partners.

All of these customers migrated from Dynamics 365 for Sales.   TekStack and Dynamics 365 for Sales are both model-driven Power Apps.  Because they are both built on the same low-code platform, they share many similarities like user experience, security model, and administration features.  They also share some common tables like Accounts, Contacts, and Activities.

Where they are different is in the features built and accessible to the users.  Dynamics 365 for Sales is a platform that partners or customers can take to customize.  TekStack is more of an application with over 60,000 hours of feature development that fit the needs of B2B technology companies.

General differences – TekStack vs. Dynamics 365 for Sales

There are over 1,000 features that improve the daily use of TekStack for end users, capturing key data automatically without user intervention.

• Account Centric Approach.  TekStack doesn’t use the Lead to Opportunity process because it doesn’t work well for B2B buying journeys.  We use the more modern B2B Revenue Waterfall approach which is account centric.
• Understanding Accounts.  Every account identified by their account stage.  Accounts move through stages based on their engagement.  If you have 50,000 accounts, its good to understand which ones should be prioritized by your sellers.
• Engagement Scoring.  A big part of figuring out which accounts have engagement is a scoring model.  We track scores for key events like email opens/clicks, events attended, pages visited, web forms filled.
• Attribution Tracking.  We capture first touch, last touch, and middle touch attribution.  Compare ROI based on source so you know where to put your marketing dollars.
• Customer 360.  Everything you need to know about your customers on one screen.
• Document Management.  Teams uses SharePoint.  D365 uses SharePoint.  But they don’t use the same SharePoint sites.  We fixed this, and smartly create Team Channels for collaboration and send notifications to inform your team of important events.
• Partner Tracking.  Partner deals are often the fastest moving, highest win rate opportunities.  Our partner module gives partners a portal to register deals, and notifies partner managers of deals to accept.  No more channel conflict, and you can see which partners are pulling their weight.
• Competitor Tracking.  Who are you winning and losing against, built in battlecards.  See your performance against each competitor.  Track which accounts are using competitor products.

Outbound Sequencing – TekStack vs. Dynamics 365 for Sales

Outbound sequencing is an easy way to get more productivity from your selling team.  The one in D365 for Sales is called Sales Accelerator, but its almost unusable.  TekStack has it’s own sequencing tool.  We think sequencing is an important go to market tool especially for B2B tech companies.

• Easier to build new sequences.  Sellers can easily clone existing sequences or write new ones from scratch.
• Track Sequence activity.  Key information like the open rate, click rate, reply rate, bounces.  You can track at every step of the sequence.
• Contact & Account Insights.  Track contact level information like last contacted date, last engaged date, click, open, sent, reply counts; and who is active in a sequence currently.  This information will roll up to the account as well.
• Outlook Integration.  TekStack sends emails directly from the users outlook so they can see the emails in their sent folder.  Makes everything less mysterious.

Marketing Automation – TekStack vs Dynamics 365 for Sales

D365 doesn’t have native marketing.  You either need to add Customer Insights or a product like Click Dimensions.  TekStack uses Click Dimensions as well, but we’ve added some really important features.

• Campaign Attribution.  Track campaign ROI including which opportunities are attributed to which campaign.  Helps guide marketing activity and spending.
• Web Inquiry Follow-up.  For your inbound inquiries we’ve added features that allow you to track when they were assigned to sales, and what the follow-up status is.
• Marketing information on Contact.  We integrated really rich information from ClickDimensions onto the contact form.  So you can see what pages a contact visited, which forms they filled out, what marketing emails were sent, all from a single view.
• Marketing Dashboards.  Marketing dashboards so the whole organization can see marketings contribution to sales funnel.

Sales Opportunity Management – TekStack vs Dynamics 365 for Sales

Tech companies need to track key information on opportunities, and they need to easily create quotes and proposals for prospects and customers.

• Quoting.  TekStack’s product configuration works out of the box and supports hardware, subscription software, and services-based products and price terms.  Sellers can create proposals with one-click.  Opportunity values are updated based on the products on the opportunity.
• Opportunity values.  Tracking ARR, One-time fees (like hardware or services), as well as total contract value.  Not just a single amount field like base D365.
• Opportunity Types.  Automatically determine if an opportunity is for a New Customer, Existing Customer, or a Renewal.  These are important for your reporting.
• Sales Process.  Many companies haven’t established a sales process, so we built one directly in TekStack that is based on best practices for tech companies.  We help sellers know when to capture the right information at the right stage and track how long each opportunity takes to move between stages so you can get insights over time.
• Velocity.  Key metrics that determine likeliness to close are pulled forward automatically.
• Sales Dashboards.  Countless dashboards for sales activity, funnel creation, win analysis, and sales velocity.  Every key metric so you can improve your performance.

Professional Services – TekStack vs Dynamics 365 for Sales

Dynamics 365 has something called D365 Project Operations.  It’s a project services app based on Dynamics 365.  It’s expensive and bloated for most Microsoft partners.  TekStack’s Delivery app is built to work out of the box and provide a ton of value out of the gate.

• Project Billing.  Combine T&M and Project Milestone billing on the same project.
• Utilization tracking.  Track past utilization and forecasted utilization for each resource in the company.
• Easier Resource Assignments.  Much easier to assign resources to project tasks.
• Teams Integration.  Project resources receive Teams notifications when they are assigned to new tasks.
• Project Tracking.  Manage risks, issues, actions, and key decisions so your PMs can manage change and issues live.  Status reports can be created with one-button click.
• User Stories.  Conduct hybrid or agile based projects, perfect for Managed Services projects where customer requests come in on demand.
• DevOps Integration.  Automatically create new Azure DevOps work items or link user stories to existing DevOps work items so that dev team and project teams are linked.
• Self-service portal.  Allow clients to track project progress in an online portal.

Revenue Management – TekStack vs. Dynamics 365 for Sales

Tech companies need to invoice one-time products like hardware, subscription products like software, and professional services.  Software subscriptions have lots of complexity related to subscription start, co-terming, invoice terms, and term length.  Services invoicing could be lumpsum upfront, T&M based, billing milestone based, or recurring in the example of managed services.

We handle all of it, including a handy integration to Dynamics 365 Business Central which will save you a ton of time rekeying invoices each month.

Summary

If you are a Microsoft partner, and you have a desire to grow your business, make more money, and increase the valuation of your company.  Then you need to improve your revenue operations.  Instead of trying to figure it out on your own, have a look at TekStack, we offer the tools, reporting insights, and managed services to turn you into a growth machine.  Plus you can actually tell customers you run on Microsoft tech.

Want to learn more?  Get in touch with us!