Dynamics 365 for Sales/CRM: A Day in the Life of a Sales Person (Webinar Recording)

TRANSCRIPT

Jess: All right, let’s go ahead and get started. We’ve got a lot of great content today, so we’ll go ahead and get this kicked off even though we’ve got a few people logging in.

First off, thank you for joining us today. We’re gonna talk about Dynamics 365 for Sales. We’re gonna go through the day in the life of a salesperson. For those of you who are not too familiar with Dynamics 365, especially the latest versions, it’s really great to see all of this stuff from a user case scenario, being able to see what a day in the life looks like. And so our presenter is gonna be able to walk us through that with some great scenarios and kind of give you some perspective on the technology other than just showing you the tools and what they do.

So before we get too far into the goodies we’re gonna get today, I’m gonna show you just a little bit of housekeeping and then maybe a little intro and then we’ll get going. So first off, you’re gonna see that GoToWebinar panel on your right side of your screen, most likely. If you want that to pop out of the way, you just click that little orange arrow and that way you’ll be able to see more of the presentation in front of you. If you wanna ask a question, please do that at any point throughout the presentation, but we do ask that you enter it in the questions pane instead of having the mics open and calling them out. We’ve got a lot of good stuff to go over. We wanna make sure we stay on track and that we do not go down any rabbit holes, which does happen.

So what we’re gonna do is I will collect those in the background then at the end, I will feed those to the presenter one by one. If some of the questions get a little involved or if it seems like there should be a little more conversation around it, we can definitely unmute the mics. Other than that we are absolutely happy to take any questions offline if there’s deeper conversations to be hadd, or connecting you with other resources. So please feel free to send us any questions that you have surrounding Dynamics 365. We will absolutely make sure you get all the answers you need, whether it’s during the webinar or right after. So please don’t be shy about that.

And a little bit about Encore. I know a lot of you on this call are familiar with us, but I think I’ve seen a couple of new names here. Well, first off, I wanna introduce myself. My name is Jess Mooney and I work with the marketing team and with our sales team to provide a webinar series that we’re gonna be doing throughout the year. But Encore ourselves, we’ve been in business for 25 years. We’re Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and we support Dynamics AX, GP, CRM, NAV and Power BI. We also have proprietary solutions that we serve our clients with. And then we have…our professionals have over 130…or sorry, our professionals are a staff of over 130 very well-qualified, deep expertise professionals across Canada and the US. And speaking of which is just a quick… Excuse me. I’m just going back and forth in my presentation. I’m trying to get my keys working properly. These are our locations across Canada and the Pacific Northwest U.S. And like I said, we do have 130 professionals across those areas. So that’s it for my quick and simple pitch.

I just wanna go ahead and introduce you to Alex Fredrickson. He’s an account executive on our Dynamics 365 team, and he is one of our absolute best when it comes to explaining the functions and features of the new tools. Alex, can you hear me okay?

Alex: I can and thank you for that kind introduction. So I’ll go ahead and take the screen here.

Jess: I just handed you the control, so you should see it in a second.

Alex: Yeah. We should be looking at a PowerPoint slide now.

Jess: Yep, looks good. We gotcha.

Alex: Let me catch up there. So Jess, if you don’t mind keeping a close eye. I know sometimes switching between PowerPoint and my internet browser, sometimes it doesn’t port over. So just let me know if that happens.

Jess: Gotcha.

Alex: So I’m here today to present a day in the life of a salesperson. So really, we’re gonna be walking through all the tools that Dynamics 365 for Sales can provide. And we are gonna cross over a little bit into some of the modules and how they can be relevant to your sales team. And so we are going to be moving pretty fast looking at inside sale scenarios, some outside, some new business sale scenarios. So I’m definitely gonna leave a little bit of time at the end so that if there are any questions or if anybody wants to dig in and take a closer look at anything that we presented today, we’ll certainly have some time to do that.

So here’s our agenda for the day. I wanna start just for those who maybe aren’t familiar with Dynamics 365, whether they’re CRM users who are on a previous version or they’re just starting to look at the potential of implementing a CRM system. I wanna make sure that everybody is familiar with the navigation and the different modules available and so forth. And then once we go over that, we’ll jump right into our demo portion of the day, jumping into our sales scenario, which I’ll brief you on in just a moment. And then, again, we’ll open up the microphones and allow folks to either type in or ask questions live and we’ll take a look at those as well.

All right. So I wanna quickly go through the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement overview. And so Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement is now what Microsoft is calling their CRM product. So, you know, now that they’ve introduced project functionality and field service and all these other things, they wanted a term that kind of encapsulated all of that and didn’t just focus on CRM or customer relationship management. I just wanna make sure that that’s clear for the audience today.

So switching over to my browser here, and Jess let me know if that didn’t work properly, I’ll quickly go through our navigation and some of the basic elements of our CRM. So starting with the navigational bar up top, we have what’s called the waffle icon. And so that’s gonna allow us to navigate throughout all of our Microsoft tools. So whether it’s my mailbox or maybe I’m doing some reports out of Power BI, or I like to store my documents in SharePoint, I have access to everything I could possibly need throughout the day right here from within the interface in my CRM system.

The Dynamics 365 icon here is our home button, and it also allows us to navigate around based on our functional role. So today I’ll be working mostly out of our sales app here. And so this is essentially a subset of our CRM. So if I’m a sales user, I wanna access through my sales app to keep my navigation simple, to keep my options very focused and of high importance, whereas if I was in the customer service or some of these other areas, I could navigate to my CRM through these apps to make my tray and navigation simple in that way. And so you’ll see here, as I click down on my main navigation, I am currently in the sales module and so you can see, you know, we have all of our customer accounts and contacts, all of our sales leads and opportunities, some product collateral, orders, other related records, and kind of all of the elements that make up our sales organization. But then you can also see I have access to all of these other modules within Dynamics. So my customer service area, which we’ll take a little bit of a look at in the reference of a sales user today, marketing, field service and project service. So, you know, we have a lot of functionality within the Dynamics 365 suite. So today we will be focusing on sales, but I just wanted to kind of highlight all the different elements that are available out of the box here.

And then moving over to our right side of our navigation bar, these are a couple things that I’ll use throughout the day, so I just wanna make sure people are familiar. Here we have our global search. So this is gonna allow me to search across the CRM system. They’re not specifically for an account or an individual, but across all the records that we keep, whether it’s a project record or a customer service ticket, or a phone call that I have scheduled for later this week. I can use one search term to get results across all of those different records.

And then we have our recently viewed items. So this is where I can quickly navigate throughout the CRM system. I can go directly to a record I viewed recently or what’s called a view, which is essentially a list of records within an entity. And then I can also pin things. So, you know, today I’m gonna be working with an Alpine Ski House opportunity and I’m gonna be working with Jess on a lead here, so I wanted to make sure I had those things pinned because if I’m gonna be working on this throughout the week or maybe this month, it will allow me to quickly navigate around.

And then we also have our Quick Create. So we’ll be looking at a lot of different ways to create content, to create records within CRM. The Quick Create is one of those that simplifies and just ask for the most important kind of attributes of any given record. And then we have our Advanced Find area. So this is how you can query your system. You can create different views and lists of records based on various filters. Whether you wanna filter, you know, customers by industry or by annual revenue, or maybe you wanna find people that are in your geographic location, you can use the Advanced Find to do that. And we’ll take a closer look later on today. So that’s kind of our main navigation. So I just wanted to make sure everyone was familiar. Here’s a landing page which is called a dashboard, which are very important in the world of CRM. And so we’ll dig a little bit more into this when we get into our main demo portion of the day.

So let me jump back to our slides here. So just to highlight this scenario we’re gonna be looking at today. Let me jump into my slideshow. So today I’m still Alex, but I’m gonna be a sales coordinator for Contoso. And so as a sales coordinator, I’m responsible for selling products across our product line. So, you know, we do hardware sales, we do IT infrastructure and managed services, as well as other IT services and professional services. So, you know, there’s a lot of things we have the option of selling, whether it’s hours or products. And I’m gonna be working with new businesses as well as existing business. And so we’ll see kinda how we can tie all that into, you know, using CRM to give you a good feel for all the tools that are available, and also some of the automation capabilities, and just to give you some ideas around business process in a workflow within CRM.

All right, so without further ado, I’m gonna go ahead and jump into our day in the life scenario. So let me get back here. Go to my mini dashboard page. And so as a sales user and as a sales coordinator, the place that I like to start every day is on my dashboard because I’m working with a lot of customers at once. You know, they’re all emailing me and I have calls throughout the day and different activities and follow-ups that I need to keep track of. And then I also have my own sales pipeline, my targets, my goals, those sorts of things. So by using dashboards as a landing place and a place to start my day, it gives me a good feel for what I need to get done that day and it also makes me confident that I’m not letting any balls drop, right? I’m keeping track of all the opportunities we have going on, I’m following up with all the leads that are in my pipeline, and I…you know, I can feel comfortable knowing that all my data is in CRM, so I don’t have to dig, you know, into those 200 unread messages to make sure I’m not leaving anybody hanging. I can just focus in one place here.

And so one way that I like to do that is by creating all my tasks in CRM. And so what that gives me is a list every time I log into CRM of what I need to do next. So as I can see here, these are my open activities that need to be completed. I can assign myself due dates, as we’ll see you later. You know, some of these are gonna be created via workflow. And so when I get in first thing in the morning, maybe it’s a Monday and I’m still a little disoriented, I haven’t had a cup of coffee yet, I can jump on and just get a good feeling for, “Okay, do I have any demos today? Do I do I have a call later? What are my other follow-ups?” So as you can see here, I have a few tasks to complete. I have some appointments later in the afternoon, and then I have some other follow-ups with my sales opportunity.

What I also have here on my dashboard is all the records that are owned by my users. So here are all my opportunities, and so I like to organize these by estimated close dates so I can try to prioritize and figure out what to focus on next, but then I also don’t wanna lose sight of my lead. So they may be a little bit further out, maybe they aren’t qualified yet, but I wanna make sure I’m keeping track of those things.

And then another thing that I like to do as a sales coordinator, especially because I’m doing inside sales, I wanna see all my customers’ interactions with our support desk. So, you know, before I go into a meeting or jump on a call, I wanna have an understanding of, you know, are things going all right? Are there issues with some product deliveries that I wanna know about? And so by adding this view of all of my cases related to my customer account, I can quickly go in and just have a stream of all the tickets that are being created by my clients. And so, you know, I’m never gonna be caught off guard when I reach out to a contact and he says that something’s going wrong or he’s having an issue right now with the support desk because I’m already gonna be well aware of that.

So, you know, once I’ve logged into CRM and gotten a good feel for what I’m gonna be doing for the day, the next thing that I’m always gonna do is check my email. So as we saw earlier, you can do this all from the same window. Just, you know, creating new tabs and so forth. And as you can see there, in 13 minutes I have a meeting with Jess regarding a lead within the system, so I’ll go ahead and dismiss this and we’ll take a look at that later. So now I can see, you know, I’m coming in for the morning, I have a few unread emails, so, you know, where to start. So, you know, here I shared some things with Jess last week. Let’s see. Okay, here we go. I sent her a product catalog and she’s looking to purchase some laptops for her team. So, you know, now what I can do to try and help Jess is I can pull this record up in CRM. I can, you know, navigate back and take a look at the information I’ve sent her in the past.

So to get us started here, I’m going to go ahead and jump right into that lead. So here within the CRM lead records, I have a lot of elements that are tracking what we know so far about Jess herself, about, you know, what she’s interested in, what her budget is. You know, whatever we’ve been able to figure out, whether it’s from a web form that she filled out or, you know, maybe it was a marketing lead that got handed to me from the marketing side of things. So I’m gonna have some information in here to work with. So, on the left-hand side, I have all my basic contact information. In the middle, I have what’s called the social pane. So this is kind of our live feed of everything that’s going on.

And as you can see in the activities, I have all the emails and all the appointments, all syncs between my Outlook calendar in my mailbox and my CRM system. So as we can see, I have this meeting at Jess’s office. I may not make it there in the next 15 minutes, but that’s the same meeting that actually got created here in CRM before showing up on my Outlook calendar. And so whether you’re using OAuth or the desktop client, you’re gonna have all of these capabilities. I can also dig into some of these emails. So I actually never have to leave CRM because I can jump in and say, “Okay, well, you know, I forget, what did I send Jess?” And so I can take a look at this content. Okay. Okay, so yeah, she wants to move forward with this purchase, so I’m getting a good feel for what’s going on with this lead.

And then I can also look at some other pieces of information. So here we have our insights pane. So this is where we’re actually connecting with various sources online, whether it’s LinkedIn or I know Equifax provides a lot of details, to see a little bit about Jess’s organization. And so here I can see okay, where are they located? What do they do? If I want I can pull all these details into the CRM record to save me some time in terms of record creation. And then I can also jump in and do some more research into this organization. So here I can see okay, what’s been going on lately? Oh, okay, I know backcountry.com. I just realized, you know, they were related to this organization. And I can get a good feeling for how big that organization is, start a conversation or insights. Who are my key contacts at this organization? And so forth.

And for those of you who are heavily using Sales Navigator with LinkedIn, you can also do more due diligence from LinkedIn directly. So I wanna look up Jess here, and since she doesn’t actually work for this organization, I wanna search for [inaudible 00:18:31] look her up. And there we go. So I can match with Jess on LinkedIn. I can navigate to LinkedIn to view her profile. I can see okay, I have a lot of shared connections maybe I can leverage these to speed up the sales process and to further this lead. And then I can look at other ways to get introduced to Jess, so here’s some more details about all our shared connections. And then relatedly, maybe there are other people at her organization with similar job titles or who are working in different departments that I can start to connect with on purchasing laptops and other hardware for their users. So I have a lot of great information here within my lead records.

And then I can even go and reach back out to Jess. So she wants to purchase some more laptops, so maybe I wanna create a new email directly out of my CRM system. So as you can see, my email signature is already included here within my email window, so I can start to create this email. “Hey, Jess. Great to hear from you. I’ll attach some more details about the laptops we offer.” It’s as easy as that. I can create my new email, I can attach templates. So if I have a, you know, a standard introduction to Contoso template that has all our product brochures and those sorts of things, I can do that. I can also attach any attachment. So maybe I wanna grab something from my PC. I can go ahead and attach a document there and then send that off to Jess. And so immediately, that’s gonna continue the string of email records within our CRM system. So whether my manager is coming in to check on me or, you know, maybe next time I work with Jess I wanna go in and see what our last interactions were, I’m gonna have all of those capabilities.

And so now that I know Jess is a little bit more serious, I can start to work through my sales process and even go as far as qualifying this lead. And so when I qualify the lead, whether, you know, Jess is as an existing individual in our system or if Adventure Works as an existing account record within our system, I can fill out these details as well. So if I look for Adventure Works, I know they exist. I don’t think Jess exists. And then here’s my business process flow where I’m checking off some high-level boxes. And then I can qualify this record, which is going to go ahead and create a contact record for Jess, and then create a new opportunity record where we can associate products to this opportunity. You know, if she wants some laptops, or we can further these requirements discovery. Learn a little bit more about okay, what types of users need this hardware? How fast do these PCs need to be, and all the other things that are gonna be important in that conversation such as, you know, do they need monitors? Do they need HDMI cables, those sorts of things.

And so now that I’ve moved these things along, I’m waiting on Jess for some feedback, I’m gonna go straight back to my dashboard and figure out what I need to do next. And so let’s see here. We can, you know, look at some tasks. So, you know, all these tasks, you know, none of them need to be done today, so I’m gonna go ahead and let those slide and go back to my email. So now we can see in my email I have also been working with Youngha Kim. So I’m a little bit further along in the process with Youngha. He already has an active opportunity and he’s looking to really finish this sales process, to get his user set up with new laptops and some other keyboards and mice. So here we can pull up our Dynamics app within Outlook to take a look at, you know, how is this being tracked in the system? How can I, you know, contact Youngha. Those sorts of things.

So if I go into this window, I can hit ‘Track,’ and this is where I can look up this opportunity. So I have this opportunity with Youngha, and I’ve tracked emails to this recently so I can go ahead and click on this opportunity, and it will immediately set regarding to Alpine Ski House. And so now all our back and forth between Johan I is gonna be tracked to this opportunity. I can also see some additional details about Youngha. So I know he’s a contact within the system. I can see his job title and the organization he works with, as well as this phone number. So if I’m using a voice solution for phone calls, I can just click the call here. What I can also do is create some additional records within Dynamics CRM. So if I wanna schedule a phone call, tap appointment, what have you, I can create those directly out of CRM and then those are gonna sync back here to my Outlook. So I can manage everything in one calendar and in one list of tasks.

So for now, I just wanna jump back into this opportunity and keep things moving along. So it looks like Youngha wants to go with the 15-inch screen, and then he wants to know a little bit more about the prices to add keyboards and some mouses to this order. So I’m gonna go ahead and pull up this opportunity. So as you can see it’s just gonna pop up in a new window. So it’s really easy to navigate around for my email back to CRM. So we can see that, you know, this is a very similar layout in our opportunity as is in our lead. So it’s very easy on your users to pick this up. So I have all my information on Youngha. You know, we have this hardware sale for Alpine Ski House, all our contact information, and then some information such as budgets and sales probability that are gonna help fuel those dashboards. So as you saw, we have our sales pipeline and our weighted forecast revenues within those dashboards. And so this is really what’s fueling all of that, just data from our opportunity records.

And then as you can see here, we have some posts. So a post is just a quick note that I made. Just, you know, if anyone else checked out this record, they can see okay, I’m working on it, right? I’m pulling this information together and I plan on giving that to Youngha shortly. And then I have some of the same options around, you know, connections with insights and LinkedIn and those sorts of things. And so the last thing I heard from Youngha is that he wanted to go with the 15-inch screen. So we can see here okay, what does Youngha need to do? He needs 35 desktop machines and 125 laptops. So it sounds like he wants to go 100% with the 15-inch screen. So I’m gonna go ahead and update this, and I’m gonna remove our 12-inch line item. And so I had that just in there as a placeholder so I could show you on all of the pricing. Then I’m gonna put in the 125 for our laptop.

And so Youngha also mentioned that he’d be interested in looking at the wireless keyboard and mouse for his users. So I know that my organization has set up some accessories within Dynamics, so I can go ahead and look and see okay, so what are some common accessories? We have our laptop keyboard and wireless mouse. So I’m gonna go ahead and pick these items and add them to my list of the sales records here. And so, you know, I’m just gonna assume that he’s just trying to evaluate this for every single one of those employees that’s getting a new laptop, so I’ll update my quantities there. And then now that I have kind of my final quantity and product selection, yes, Youngha may change this, but this is definitely the product selection we’re gonna go with, I’m gonna change my revenue to system calculated. So what that’s gonna do is it’s gonna automatically update my estimated revenue, and it’s gonna lock that down so that I’m certain that this is a reliable number and it’s actually based off of products here within our products list.

And then I know Youngha wanted to take a look at those prices as well, so I’m gonna go ahead and create a new quote. So let’s delete this address that I had created earlier or deactivate that. So this actually isn’t going to delete this for good, but it will deactivate that and remove it from my list there. And then I’ll create a new quote. So this is really just gonna pull all those line items into a form where I can share with Youngha. So whether I wanna set up a Word template to share this with Youngha or maybe I wanna set up a mail merge, if I prefer that or some other type of SSRS report, you can set all those things up against the quote, and then email this off to Youngha. So in the typical scenario, I could use my Word template or I could pull this down using my mail merge.

But for the sake of our demo, I’m gonna go ahead and take a step forward and say, “Okay, Youngha was good with the pricing, and he actually just wants to go ahead with a proposal for this. So I’m gonna go ahead and continue to move through my sales process here. So as I’m working through my business process flow, I’m gonna be completing all the required fields and all the other information gathering to make sure that, you know, one, I’m gonna, you know, make my sales manager happy, right? I’m collecting all the details we need for reporting, for when we go and look back on our year of sales or our month of sales and all those sorts of considerations, but also some important details to help our delivery side of things. So maybe their services needed or maybe we need to confirm inventory, those types of things. So I wanna make sure that I fill out all our required fields here.

So as I move through this sales process, a couple different things are gonna happen. So not only am I gonna move in the sales process stage, which we’ll see when we get back to our pipeline in our dashboard, it’s also gonna update records throughout our CRM system. So here when I move from qualified to requirement, I actually…my probability change from 15% to 25%. And you can see that if I refresh this page quickly. It’s gonna repopulate and complete that workflow action that asked to update that probability. And so by incorporating these things within your sales process, you’re automatically gonna have the probability updated based on how far along that sales user is. So it’s really gonna help with the accuracy of your weighted revenue forecasts and any other reports that you’re doing based on, you know, close day or, you know, probability to close those.

And so here I can continue filling out the various aspects of this. So I know Youngha. I’ve had a couple conversations with him. They’re a 250-employee-organization, but right now they’re just supplying new PCs to…you know, to most of that organization. And then do we have a signed MSA? You know, I don’t think we do with this particular organization. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna go ahead and send that up to Youngha. So here I can create a new email. And I know my MSA is on my email template. So now I can take a look at my various email templates. And so here I have my standard MSA, so I’m gonna select that, include the attachments, and then that will pull in all the data we need here. The email needs to be created, as I’m remembering before I add any attachments, so let me add that one more time. And then I can send him something. So now in my activity pane, I can see okay, I have the attachments there, this one out to Youngha. And so once I get that signed and get that back then I can generate a proposal for him and get that out of the door.

And so now that I’m done with Youngha for now, I’m gonna go ahead and say, “Okay, you know, waiting on MSA.” In the meantime, I need to finish this. So this is my next step for this opportunity. Let’s see. It’s probably not gonna happen until let’s just say tomorrow. Then I can save this record. And so now with CRM data and the workflow, it created a new task. And it created a task for me due on the 19th for me to complete this proposal and send it to Youngha. And so now tomorrow, when I log in for the first time, I’m gonna be able to see okay, that’s right I need to get this proposal out to Youngha and keep this opportunity moving forward. So if I go back to my dashboard here, refresh the page, I now see that I have that new task. So if I click into my new task, let’s say tomorrow morning, I can jump in and see okay, I’m waiting on the MSA but now we’re ready to actually get the proposal out. So I’m gonna navigate directly back to this opportunity and continue moving things forward. So young Hong got the MSA back to me, and so let’s keep chugging along.

And so now I’m ready to create my proposal. So have I developed the proposal? No. You know what? I haven’t done that yet. And so I have all the details, I know what Youngha wants. He let me know that he does want the keyboard and mouse, and so I’m gonna move this thing along and go ahead and create a proposal. And so what we have here in Dynamics 365 is a direct integration with our Microsoft Word suite or Microsoft suite. So here we have our Word template and I have my sales proposal. So I can go ahead and pull this proposal. It’s gonna download as a Word doc, and then we can see we have these details pulling in.

So this is a very simplified proposal, but you can see we have, you know, our standard layout, we have some information filled out based on who this individual is and what company they work for, and then down below we have the various products that we’re selling. And so now we have our pricing information, we have, you know, any other terms or considerations we wanna include there. And so what I can now do with this is I can email this to Youngha or if I’m a DocuSign user I can attach this to a DocuSign envelope to get approved. And so I have a lot of different options around that proposal.

And so I’m gonna go ahead and close this for now, and jump back into our opportunity. So yes, I’ve created that proposal. You know, let’s say my discount percentage that I offered was 15%. As you can see, that dynamically is gonna create another step within our business process flow. So now if I’m gonna be offering a large discount, I’m gonna need to get a manager’s approval. And with that, an automated email was sent out to my manager asking him to navigate to the record and take a look and give me his approval. So that’s another way that you can leverage these workflows to make things really easy between, you know, team members within a department or between sales team members and managers to really make it streamlined and eliminate a lot of those…you know, those one-off emails where you’re saying, “Oh, hey…you know, hey, Jim, can you please check into this today and get this approved?” It’ll just pop up in his mailbox and he can get it done.

But I don’t wanna go through all that. So I’m actually going to only offer, you know, a 10% discount so that I can move this along, because, you know, Youngha is really interested and I think he’s going to get this done either way. And then as you can see, because I have some required steps still incomplete, I wasn’t able to move forward to close. But you can see I have my final proposal ready, and let’s say I passed it through a colleague for internal review and I can move to close. So now that I’m in the closed stage, I’m gonna be waiting for Youngha to get back to me with his final decision, with a signature and so forth. He did let me know that he’s gonna know by the end of the week, and I presented this to him earlier, but we’re gonna go ahead and wait to hear back from Youngha.

So in the meantime, back to my dashboard, right? So what’s up next? What else do I have to get done? So I just did some work with Alpine Ski House, but I’m remembering, “Okay, yeah, Jess was reaching out to me yesterday. She works with Adventure Works, right? And we haven’t done much work with them lately. I’m not too familiar with them, so I wanna take a deeper look into that. So I can go ahead and just search for Adventure Works. And I’m gonna put this wildcard indicator in front of my search because then it’ll show up even if Adventure Works isn’t, you know, the first sequence within that register. So now I can look into them and see, “Oh, well, you know what? We actually know quite a bit about these guys. So we have some other contacts that I can look into, we have some other opportunities that I can reference, right? So maybe we sold them…it looks like some home PC equipment, maybe some printers in the past. And so I can leverage this knowledge when I’m working with Jess even though I wasn’t the salesperson who was involved in that sale.

Another thing we can do, I know they’re big in…they’re a sporting goods stores, they do some retail, some wholesale, some other things, so in preparation for my meeting with Jess, I wanna get a good idea of what work we’ve done with similar organizations in the past. And so what I can do is use my Advanced Find query to just quickly pull up some information based on the accounts we’ve worked with. And so here I’m looking at my accounts record, I can just do a quick search based on the industry type. So maybe I wanna look up, you know, accounts that we’ve worked with that are in the…let’s see. You know, I think they could be doing some wholesale distributing, so I wanna check that box. I know for sure that they do…let’s see. What do they do? They do rental, so let’s go and find that option. I know we have it in here or somewhere, but we’ll select wholesale and some other things for the meantime, and just see what we can come up with.

And so now I see, you know, we only have work done with one account so, you know, maybe we don’t have a ton of experience within her industry, but I can go ahead, you know, maybe we’ve done a lot of work with these guys. And so I can see okay, well, we’ve done…sold some audio equipment within this industry. You know, we have some of these contacts so maybe this would be a good account to bring up in my meeting with Jess. And maybe we could get some referrals if she wants to do, you know, a little bit of due diligence before starting to work with us. So that’s just a power of having all your information within one system. You can really, you know, dig into what’s been done in the past, whether or not you’re familiar with that off the top of your head. You’re just referencing historic information. So I can close that out.

So now I can jump back and, you know, maybe Youngha got back to me and he’s ready to move on, right? So as a sales user, I’m really bouncing around all day, right? I don’t really know what’s gonna happen next, who’s gonna move things forward quickly, who’s not. And so, you know, Youngha finally got back to me. So I’m gonna jump right back into that opportunity and get that done, right? He’s ready to sign up on that proposal and I wanna close that before the end of the day so my manager can see that I got this deal done. So now I can jump into my Alpine Ski House. I can see, you know, kind of the things that were happening in the background as I was working on this opportunity. You know, my probability was changing as I was moving through the process, that changes my weighted revenues and, you know, I have activities here for discount approvals and for our next steps. And all these things are kind of happening behind the scenes without me having to do any of that. So it makes my job really easy because I’m just kinda doing the core things that I have to focus on to move things forward with Youngha and the rest kinda takes care of itself.

And so, you know, yeah, a CRM is gonna be asking me as a sales user to, you know, fill out some fields and, you know, maybe sometimes I have to type in some descriptions and other things that, you know, may not get you too excited about it, but kind of the trade-off of that is that there’s all these things that are helping me organize my day and to help me move deals along and get things done that I never actually have to do. It’s just all being taken care of by Dynamics.

And so now that we’ve received word back from Youngha, maybe he signed that via DocuSign, I can go ahead and say, “Okay, I wanna send a thank you note,” which again, is gonna fire that off based off of our thank you template, or it can also, you know, generate an email trap if I’d rather have it do that, where I can go in and personalize it a bit more. And then I’m gonna close this deal with Youngha. And so really this is just asking for some simple information. So was the actual revenue the same as being quoted here? So maybe I offered some additional discounts right at the end and I can update that, or maybe I wanna add some details based on, you know, what it took to get this deal closed. Maybe, you know, I had to go and meet with the president or there were some additional steps. I can make note of that so when you report back on these deals we have all the information. And then I’m gonna go ahead and close this.

I always forget about that. So since I have an active quote, I’m not gonna be able to move forward until I finalize that. So I’m gonna go ahead and finalize this quote, and then I can go back to my opportunity and close this deal. Looks like that didn’t close for me, so I’ll go ahead and confirm, create order. Let’s just close the quote. And then I should be able to close this opportunity. And so once I do close this opportunity, what it’s gonna do is it’s gonna update my pipeline. If my manager is watching my sales goals, it’s gonna get all that updated as well. And so if I just go back to my dashboard here, looks like my quote is messing with me a bit there. We can see, you know, as we’re moving through these processes I have my big sales pipeline, but it’s constantly, you know, ebbing and flowing, right? It’s moving from qualify to propose, to close, and so I can constantly see, you know, what I’m working on and how close to done I’m getting.

And so this is where I can really, you know, focus on am I nearing the end of my sales process? Maybe it’s the end of a quarter and I really wanna focus on some of the deals that are really getting close. I can actually interact with these charts at a much more granular level. And so if I pull up this chart here I can see I have my list of records, but I just wanna focus on what’s getting closed. And so here I can see okay, well, my two big deals is, you know, the one that I just finished, that I’m gonna go back and close here in a minute, and then, you know, this other deal for coffee houses that maybe I wanna focus on next.

So that’s how you can kind of use your dashboards and the workflows in CRM to kinda tailor your day and to figure out what do I need to do next? Because that’s really why CRM can be so powerful. Because it keeps me focused on my sales opportunities, it keeps me focused on things that I can have a positive effect on, that I can positively change. And so I really can just focus on let’s make sure I’m following up in a timely manner and let’s just focus on, you know, what’s coming up next, right? Whether it’s a phone call or a task or, you know, a proposal creation, those sorts of things. And it helps me organize my day in such a way that I’m not scattered, I’m not searching through my email, I’m not bouncing around between various windows. As you saw from our demonstration today I don’t think I ever left Chrome. So I’m just, you know, working with one tool. It makes it really easy and streamlined to go about my day and to get things done. And so that’s really one of the key benefits for CRM, for that sales user, right?

And so a lot of sales individuals will see CRM as, you know, additional work for them or maybe there’s their manager wanting to keep tabs, but if you actually take the time to develop that sales process, to introduce the automation in the workflow, it can be a huge time-saver and it can also provide a ton of value in terms of simplifying that individual’s day, and just making everything really easy for them, right? Just kind of handing them one thing at a time and allowing them to take a streamlined approach to their job into the various tasks.

So that’s really the core about what I wanted to present today, so I’ll let Jess open it up to questions, or I’m seeing a little icon popping here in the corner of my eye so maybe a few already came through and I’d be happy to answer those.

Jess: Yeah, Alex, well done. That was great. You covered quite a bit actually in that 50 minutes. I appreciate that. So we haven’t had any questions come through just yet, but I’m sure people are still absorbing and trying to formulate based on the storyline that you went through. I just wanted to double-check what version of Dynamics 365 are you showing right now?

Alex: Sure. So this is Dynamics 365 version 8.-something.

Jess: 8.2?

Alex: So it is a 2017 release of Dynamics. And so there has been one more release since this version. So if anybody went and, you know, decided to sign up a free trial or if they just sign up a tenant today, it would likely have one version ahead of this. But mainly the functionality is similar. Just a few minor changes.

Jess: Great. I just wanted to be clear. Okay, I’ll double-check here.

Alex: Yeah. And really everything we looked at today for, those who are using Dynamics CRM 2016 update 2 specifically, all this functionality is available to them as well.

Jess: Okay, that’s a great call out. Let’s see, no questions yet. I’ll give people just another moment to can add those in the questions pane if you’re still curious about anything. I also wanted to mention that we are recording today’s session and we will get you a link. If you attended today you’ll definitely get a link to that recording for download, and we’ll also make sure that you get the presenter’s information as well. So if there are any questions that do occur to you after the fact, you can go right to the horse’s mouth with those and contact Alex directly. I also wanted to mention that we’ve got a lot of other webinars coming up across the different products that we do serve. I mentioned earlier that we do serve out AX, GP, NAV, Power BI, and of course CRM, which is Dynamics 365 you heard about from today. And then some other topics as well. So there are quite a few that we’re going to be scheduling out all across 2018, so please be on the lookout for that information as well.

If you’re not currently getting our newsletter, please do let us know. You can actually let me know right now through the chat pane, through the questions pane. Let me know you’d like to be getting that. That’s how we get a lot of our information out about upcoming events, particularly the webinars, and you’ll be able to make sure that you stay up to date on all of that. And Alex, unless you have anything to add I haven’t had anything else come through the questions pane, so we could actually give people two minutes back if you’re interested.

Alex: Yeah, that would be great. I don’t think I have anything else to add. So just feel free to email or give me a call if you have any questions after the fact or wanna dig a little bit deeper into anything we covered.

Jess: Perfect and as I said I’ll definitely be giving everyone that contact information afterwards. Oh, sorry, of course, we had one question just walk through. One second here, Alex. It says, “We sell memberships to our cloud services, of which the bulk of those transactions occur through our websites, would this application be overkill when managing those transactions?”

Alex: No. So what you can do is actually connect it directly with your website. So you could have those transactions flowing in so that your sales team has that history, right? So if you have customers doing repeat orders or maybe you wanna use CRM to manage the subscription billing piece, it’s actually quite proficient at that. And we have some solutions that we built in the past that can handle that. So it can still do a lot for you, right? A lot of organizations will take their transactions, big and small, professional services organizations, for example, and go as far as invoicing through CRM to make sure that their sales team has all the information, right? Because you don’t want your sales team having to go into a like an ERP system or have multiple licenses or multiple systems. You can put it all in one place. So even if they’re, you know, mostly just managing a few big deals in CRM, they’ll still have all that history from the smaller online traffic and online sales transactions all in one place here within CRM.

Jess: Perfect and if that question does have any secondary or any peripheral topics that you’d like to hit like I said you’ll get Alex’s information. Feel free to ping him. He can probably talk CRM process all day long. So just warning you, but please do feel free to reach out. That was a great question.

Okay, I don’t see any others coming through. I hate cutting people off if you’re out there typing. So if we do close this webinar down and you’re still interested in asking a question, please do contact us through email. You can also go to our website, encorebusiness.com. There’s plenty of ways to contact us through that as well.

So okay, Alex, great job today. That was an excellent look at Dynamics 365. Really appreciate the time. And we can give everybody back, looks like eight minutes, so well done.

Alex: All righty, thanks, Jess, and thanks everybody for giving me your lunch hour. I appreciate it.

Jess: Thanks a lot, everyone. Hopefully, we’ll see you on another webinar very soon. Bye.