What Is Dynamics 365 Sales?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales functions as a high-powered Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, specializing in sales pipeline management and full transparency into relationship activities. It also offers powerful flexibility, allowing it to go far beyond traditional CRM functionality.

Dynamics 365 Sales can be implemented to help your sales team manage their sales cycle, from lead capture through to closing the opportunity to generating an order. It can also integrate together with your other business applications, providing a streamlined experience with shared data across multiple applications and departments.

This article will cover D365 Sales features, limitations, integrations, and more. Let’s start with a quick overview table.

 
Note: Dynamics 365 Sales is one of the five different Dynamics 365 apps that serve various CRM needs. In some contexts, you may also see those products referred to as “Customer Engagement” or “CE” apps.

Features of Dynamics 365 Sales

The key features of Dynamics 365 Sales offer reliable sales forecasting enabled by process governance, comprehensive activity tracking, and automating complex workflows.

Dynamics 365 Sales provides configurable automation, enforces business rules, and guides users through company best practices as they perform day-to-day sales tasks. With Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) integration, Dynamics 365 Sales surfaces all communications, appointments, and tasks — including upcoming scheduled ones. It also provides rich relational data, such as hierarchies and defined connections, to give your users a 360-degree picture. It supports employee satisfaction by limiting manual data entry and repetitive processes through machine learning and automation.

Dynamics 365 Sales will help you:

• Understand where leads come from and their success rates.
• Track all activities associated with the sales pipeline.
• Use aggregated customer data to provide insights and build relationships.
• Create prioritization in all sales processes.
• Create efficiency and uniformity, along with flexibility, in your sales processes.
• Collaborative selling and internal information sharing.
• Track and control the quote-to-invoice process.
• Understand win/loss causalities.
• Share marketing and sales collateral in a completely transparent way.
• Understand and pivot against a customer’s interactions with your business.
• Create forward-looking, interactive reports with live data.

Dynamics 365 Sales Use Cases

Dynamics 365 Sales is commonly used for companies that are sales-led organizations or who have a strong, integrated salesforce. While the increasing license levels offer more advanced functionality as you move up the tiers, the same common use cases remain.

The main function of Dynamics 365 Sales is building, working, tracking, reporting, and forecasting sales. Ensuring consistent quality with governed sales process and flexible sales playbooks allows management to keep both quality and employee satisfaction high. Predictive alerts and reminders shorten the time it takes to move a sales process through the pipeline.

Pricing

Dynamics 365 Sales starts from $65/user/month USD or $83.20/user/month CAD for a Professional license.

For pricing info on the other common license types, review this table:

 
Based on the contract commitment, the per month price may differ from the price listed above. All pricing is subject to change without notice. Contact Encore for the most current product pricing and available contract options.

The main advantages of the Enterprise and Premium over the Professional licenses for D365 Sales are greater leveraging of AI and machine learning, and integrations to better identify and understand your customers.

Limitations

While D365 Sales is a very flexible solution, on its own it is not meant to cover every possible interaction between customers or prospects and your company. For instance:

• It doesn’t offer specific tracking of customer service-related issues, such as trackable tickets and ticket queues.
  • For that, you should explore Dynamics 365 Customer Service.
• Furthermore, it doesn’t have bulk communication tools governed by subscription management to satisfy customer preferences and privacy laws.
  • For that, you should explore Dynamics 365 Marketing or ClickDimensions.

For a comparison between D365 Sales and these other applications, read D365 Sales vs Customer Service vs Marketing.

Integrations With Other Apps

Dynamics 365 Sales is built to join with any other Dynamics 365 application to form a unified solution. From the user perspective, these systems are essentially one, and the entire experience is centralized and streamlined. Each Dynamics 365 application can be configured to provide only the functionality and data that each type of user requires.

For example, if D365 for Sales is integrated with D365 Business Central, where financial staff are the primary users, the Sales Order can flow from Sales to Business Central through a Connector; and finance data, such as payments, can flow back into D365 for Sales. If your business policy states that only sales staff can see payment information, the security inside D365 for Sales can prevent all other users from viewing that sensitive data while giving sales users the data they need to interact with customers and move on to the next order, confident in the account’s financial status.

Outlook Integration

With the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, you can hook into the power of Dynamics 365 Sales on your desktop, web or mobile to view records and link your emails to account, contact or opportunity records. Subsequently your users can view communications, appointments, and tasks linked directly from the D365 Sales app itself, allowing your users to see the same data from whichever application they are currently using.

Integrating Microsoft Teams With D365 Sales

With Microsoft Teams integration, your staff can view and collaborate on D365 Sales records such as Accounts or Contacts, directly within the Teams chat or channel. If Microsoft Teams is also your primary voice communication application, you can also make and receive calls directly from the Account or Contact record inside D365 for Sales.

Note that this integration is not supported for on-premise environments.

Integration With LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator offers a seamless interface that allows your users to build solid relationships with current or potential customers, increasing the number of available opportunities and chances of a successful sale through powerful knowledge-merging functionality.

Use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to:

• View the target company’s organizational structure using live org chart (within Unified Interface).
• See surfaced warm introductions through the users’ network, or use icebreakers to identify common matches.
• Transition from Navigator to D365 for Sales via links.
• Keep track of activities including InMails, Notes, Calls and Messages.
• Auto-import matched Accounts and Contact data.
• View headline information, news or job changes from your contact records.

Note that this integration is not supported for on-premise environments.

Implementing D365 Sales

With the flexibility and power of D365 Sales comes complex possibilities, so it’s important to engage with an experienced Dynamics 365 Sales partner, such as Encore Business Solutions, who can help you navigate through them. It takes a skilled and knowledgeable company to discover your underlying requirements, then match up your business needs and processes to the right functionality in the Dynamics 365 suite.

To learn more about the implementation process, read CRM Implementation: 12 Key Questions Answered.

To get specific advice about Microsoft applications for your business, please contact us.