A Day in the Life of a Salesperson who uses Dynamics 365

The second blog in a series on integrating Dynamics 365 (CRM) with your ERP solution. Read part 1 here.

Dynamics 365 for Sales (CRM) is a customer relationship management solution under the Microsoft Dynamics 365 umbrella of products. One of most prevalent benefits of leveraging the Dynamics 365 platform is that it sits on the Common Data Service which provides seamless visibility of information across the applications: your CRM, ERP, Outlook, Teams and Office 365 are all part of the same Microsoft ecosystem, making it easy to navigate between systems seamlessly throughout your workday.

To illustrate this, we’re going to look at what a typical day for a salesperson using Dynamics 365 for Sales might look like (watch the recorded webinar here). We’ll cover a few different scenarios like making connections between accounts, integrating with Teams and Outlook, leveraging embedded LinkedIn Sales Navigator and sending a document from a Dynamics 365 account.

Let’s start the morning as you, a salesperson, are watching the news with your morning coffee. Imagine as you were watching the news, you noticed that one of your clients has been acquired by another company. Great! You want to congratulate your client, and you also want to make sure this new development is reflected in your CRM system so others in your organization see this too.

If you’re really eager, you might access Dynamics 365 right on your mobile device or wait to get into work to open up the Dynamics 365 for Sales dashboard as shown below. Here you can see your open opportunities and leads.

Using the global search at the top, you find your client who was just part of an acquisition, Tiger Paw.

You create a connection in the system showing that Tiger Paw is now connected with Blue Yonder Development.

Now any user in the system will be able to see this connection between organizations, which is good because that could reduce a lot of possible confusion with different departments in future.

In the Tiger Paw Account, you can see all the important information you have about the client and about your contact there, Steve Zatkin. In the relationship assistant on the right-hand side, machine learning has helpfully shown you the last time you had any activity on the account, and what that activity was about.

Since it’s been a while since you’ve communicated with Steve, this is a great opportunity to reach out with a note of congratulations, and see if there is anything he needs help with. You send the email to Steve right there in the system, without having to leave and go to your Outlook email. The email engagement on the right side is going to let you know if and when Steve opens the email and whether he clicked on any links you sent.

A little while later, Steve responds to your email while you’re in your Outlook checking other emails. And luckily it sounds like Tiger Paw does have an opportunity coming up that you can help with. Perfect! Now you can create an opportunity right there in Outlook by clicking on the Dynamics 365 icon.

Now that you have the opportunity saved in the system, anyone in your organization can view the opportunity and see what stage it’s at. This will also be helpful for looking back at the opportunity in future when it’s won or lost, to see what factors might have led to the win or loss.

Your activities with Tiger Paw wrapped up, you navigate back to your dashboard to take a look at your open opportunities. You can see a visual of your sales pipeline and what stages your different opportunities are at.

What’s the best move to make next? There’s an opportunity with Popeye’s Gas Plant you need to take a look at, and you decide to make use of embedded LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

It turns out you have a connection through LinkedIn with Ken Zimmerman at Popeye’s Gas Plant. Connecting through LinkedIn could be the perfect chance to move this opportunity forward.

You compose the email to your connection right in Dynamics 365, to suggest meeting up to discuss the opportunity at an upcoming tradeshow.

After reaching out to your connection in LinkedIn, you check out Microsoft Teams and decide to use the tagging @ feature to check in with your colleague on the status of a proposal due tomorrow.

Next you look at your tasks in Dynamics 365 and see that you’ve got an MSA agreement to finish and send out for a client.

That’s no problem, because you can access your Microsoft Word template for the MSA agreement right in Dynamics 365.

The information from the system about the MSA is brought forward into this agreement in Word.

Now that you’ve completed and saved the document, it will appear under your Documents in the account, and it can be emailed to the client when you’re ready.

Since you’ve got an integration with your ERP, Dynamics 365 Business Central, you can see client information from Business Central on the right-hand side under Summary. You’re able to get a look at some high level financial statistics, and see if the client has any invoices outstanding before reaching out.

Your company is using Microsoft Teams to house information and communication about ongoing projects to stay organized. Your files that are saved in SharePoint and also accessed via Teams, this way you can ensure there is no duplication of files, and your team members can all collaborate on the same document together. Power BI reports can be embedded right in Teams for easy access to any important data.

As you can see, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform and accompanying products like Office 365 help you and your organization break down those pesky silos of information. Team members in different departments and in different cities can come to the same place and get a great overall view of leads, opportunities, contacts and projects. This is all by design, of course. Microsoft has been working the last several years to help organizations realize a smooth and efficient experience while managing their business.

These examples showed a common usage for Dynamics 365 for Sales, but remember that accounts can be any organization from healthcare to non-profits and contacts can be any individual, like members or patients. If you are curious how your organization might benefit from an overall view into the entire business, please connect with us and we’ll show you how!