It is important to have goals. Wouldn’t you agree? Goals provide a visual, strategic, and emotional target to reach. Whether it is a financial, physical, or business goal, it motivates us to exceed “normal” expectations. It also supplies us with critical information on how we are doing to meet the stated goal. We can compare from month to month or even week to week to see the progress if we have the data available. Before the goals are met, we can review our current progress and most likely determine if the goal is too aggressive or limited. We can celebrate milestones and share with others of like mind to further generate excitement.

This blog series will focus on understanding goals and goal management in the Dynamics 365 Sales Hub in Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM solutions (otherwise known as CE). It does not emphasize the step-by-step process on how to set everything up in your system as that can be viewed here.

What is the Point of Goal Management in Dynamics 365 Sales?

Dynamics 365 Sales Goal Management does everything mentioned in the first paragraph above. Specifically, it can be set up to track sales goals, customer-interaction goals, lead-conversion goals, and much more. It provides in-progress and actual goal progress as well as custom measurements of goals.

How Does it Compare to Forecast Management?

Goal management is more about what is happening (present) and what has happened (past), and forecast management is more about what might happen in the future (future), specifically related to revenue and Opportunities. They are similar and related, but they are not the same. More information about Forecast Management can be found here.

What is the Order to Set Up Goal Management?

The high-level view on how to set up goals in your system looks like this:

Business Scenarios

If you can imagine it, you can probably create a goal for it. The image below demonstrates the range of entities (record types) that can be utilized by goals:

What are some common business scenarios that fit nicely into goal management?

Number of Leads

We want to capture the number of new and converted Leads for this goal.

Number of Customer Communications

It is essential to maintain prospective and current customer communications to generate sales and retain a solid client base. Do you know how your organization is doing? If you are not using goal management, how are you accomplishing this? My guess is you do not have the information you need to make daily business decisions, or it is quite a feat to gather the necessary data.

To collect goal data surrounding client communications, you first need to determine what accounts for customer communications and if that data is in your Dynamics 365 Sales system. For simplicity, I will regard the following that meets these criteria:

• Emails
• Phone Calls
• Appointments

We want to capture open and completed Activities for this goal, and this goal will be spread out across multiple Goal Metrics and Rollup Fields.

Number of Products Sold

We want to capture the number of Products sold for this goal. This will involve Order Line records (Order Products).

[Source Record Type State = Fulfilled; Source Record Type Status = Complete]

Amount of Products Sold

We want to capture the amount of Products sold for this goal. This will involve Order Line records (Order Products).

[Source Record Type State = Fulfilled; Source Record Type Status = Complete]

Amount of Revenue (Opportunity)

We want to capture the amount of estimated and actual revenue for Opportunities for this goal.

Over the next couple blogs, we will build Goal Metrics, Rollup Fields, Rollup Queries, and Goals for these.

Goal Settings

The Goal Administrator will need to make a couple of decisions before finalizing the goal framework for the organization. Navigate to the Sales Hub app, select App Settings at the bottom of the left navigation, and select Goal Settings.

You can see that the scrollbar will go a long way down, and it represents most entities that exist in the system. It includes core OOB (out of the box) Dynamics 365 Sales entities like Account and Contact; it includes Microsoft non-Dynamics 365 Sales entities like Purchase Order (Field Service) and Web Form (Power Apps Portals); it includes custom entities like Application which I created.

The above settings are self-explanatory.

This blog introduced the concept of Goal Management and laid the foundation for our next blog which will cover Goal Metrics and Rollup Fields. If you have any questions about Dynamics 365 for Sales, please get in touch with us.