Dynamics 365 vs Backstop: Which is a better fit?

Adoba: Hi everyone, my name is Adoba. I lead technical and product at Alphora, a team of roughly seven to nine. I rate Dynamics at a four out of five. So we use Dynamics most for sales and our marketing. The sales Microsoft relationship, sales is a big part of what we do. We also use the service part, which is the customer service. The marketing part of Microsoft Dynamics help us keep in touch with our customers and our sales reps with the product. So being in the Microsoft ecosystem is one of the best things with Dynamics. You have access to the entire product line that just works seamlessly together. Like I said, we do sales, CRM, marketing. All of those things are the individual products that we considered, but Microsoft was able to bring them together. The product for our sales, which we use the most, has really grown. The features that they've added has just been tremendous, and that's the best part about Microsoft Dynamics for us. I think there's always an issue with seat based billing, which is what we have with Dynamics today. I think that's just the biggest issue, and sometimes I think being part of the ecosystem of having access to Microsoft Dynamics to their products is an advantage but sometimes it can also be a disadvantage because, for us, we had everything siloed before in different other products but when we decided to use Dynamics we had to bring sales together into one product, bring marketing together into one product, bring our [inaudible 00:01:22] together into one product. That's sort of a disadvantage. I'm not sure how well these three things are able to work outside of each other if they're not connected under the same system so it was a huge consideration for us and I think for anyone who is wanting to use Dynamics.

Kenneth L.: Hello, my name is Ken. I'm a senior product manager. Backstop, I'm going to give a four out of five. For more reviews like this, please click below. Before we had Backstop, we were using Excel, we were using share folders in analog and exchange. We were using Access Database. It was a hybrid of technologies, but none of that worked really well. The reason why we chose Backstop, we want some CRM that just works, and we would need to be able to have some document management and also the contact management, and most important, the relationship management, so we can see the progression of the buyer's journey and all the user engagement behaviors. And Backstop does it wonderfully. How we started to bring Backstop on board, we engaged with the professional services team. And it's a top notch of consultants that we're working with. They took our requirements, they took our data, Excel, attachments, PDFs, and all those kind of documents that we had on the numerous share drives and stuff like that. And they were able to put some metadata around and did the mass import for us. And then nothing went as planned, but we did a couple iterations and we were able to get all the information in pretty much in bulk. And I say the first run, we were able to get about 80%, 85%, which was very good. And the next round was some scrubbing, some massage to get it exact shape that we wanted. In terms of recommendations and suggestions if you're thinking about deploying it, I think the, again, the professional services team top notch. Really recommend them. Also, I think some planning ahead is just really imperative. The information, there's so many ways to get into Backstop because it's so flexible, but the more shape that you're thinking about how you want it to get it out and how you want to do reporting on, those pre-planning is really key in terms of getting a successful implementation. And highly recommend you spend some time doing the pre-planning. After the implementation, the knowledge management team from Backstop is, again, really wonderful to work with. Once you build the product, you're end users, they still need to get comfortable with it. And you can schedule one-on-one knowledge management sessions with the team, and then they will just give you the hand-holding. Highly recommend it.