Why People are Choosing Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (Video)

TRANSCRIPT

Debra: Good morning everyone. Welcome to our webinar today. I’m so excited to be sharing this with you. So today’s webinar’s starting a webinar series talking about Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, and the information and the conversations that I’ve really been capturing over the last few months and over the last year and a half. So that’s what spurred this webinar today. I want to be able to introduce myself and my colleague who will be joining me today. My name is Debra Ward. I am an Account Executive with Encore Business Solutions. And joining me today is Patti Schreiber. She is our Team Lead for Dynamics 365, our customer engagement team and we’ll be able to expand a little bit today on what that entails. Good morning, Patti.

Patti: Good morning Debra, and good morning everyone. Thanks for having me today, Debra. And as you mentioned, my role here at Encore is the D365 Customer Engagement Practice Lead. And what that really means is that I work with the team of seven pretty senior D365 resources who for the most part have seen the evolution of not just D365 from back in the old CRM days, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say that word anymore, but the overall evolution of technology that’s really driving a lot of the ways that we work today.

I’ve been at Encore for just about two years, but I’ve been in the industry for over 20 years. I almost wanna say 25, but I think that ages me, so I’ll say 20. And I’ve been really fortunate to gain experience from many different seats in this industry. Spent time in the partner ecosystem, some time managing partners with Microsoft as well as managing the existing customer business for a large municipal ISD. So with that said, I wanna thank everyone who’s on the webinar ahead of time for spending time with us today. We know how valuable your time is and I’m very confident that your investment today will provide you with insights on ways that you can work towards some efficiencies and streamlining the way you work. So thanks, Debra. And with that said, I’ll pass the floor back to you.

Debra: Oh, great. Thank you so much, Patti. I’m so happy that you’ve joined us. So again, my name is Debra Ward. I’ve been with Encore for a little over two years myself. And the position that I hold is a little bit of a hybrid within our sales team and account management where I help brand new customers or new prospects looking at leveraging Dynamics 365, and looking at what or how this application can be able to help them versus researching against other applications in the market.

I help our existing customers look at how to continue to evolve and to advance their application and look at what updates Microsoft is releasing, and how they can leverage that internally and how it benefits them, as well as I help the other members of our sales team. And I speak on behalf of the Customer Engagement Team, so to be able to look at what applications and functionality would suit them. So that’s why I really wanted to be able to share this information today with you because I’ve been part of a lot of really great conversations over the last two years and learning as, Patti had mentioned, how Dynamics 365 and the applications within it are expanding and being able to work together.

So I wanted to be able talk about the five…highlight the five reasons why prospects or our customers are reaching out and saying, this is what my current application or our current business processes internally are lacking, and they’re looking for something that’s gonna facilitate this. So first, of course, is always visibility. So we all work with many applications in our daily tasks. So whether we’re working in an ERP, we’re working in Outlook or Office applications, we’re working in a CRM of sorts or multiple spreadsheets to be able to track our tasks, our transactions, how we’re capturing information with our companies, it could be customers, vendors, third party contractors that we’re working with to be able to provide the services and products that we do. And it’s pulling that all together and bringing it in one platform so that we have visibility and ease of tasks and effort.

And of course, improving communication, better metrics, being able to, once I’m starting to capture that information, now be able to see how I can improve, how strong are my relationships, what do I need to do next? Right? Allowing or ensuring that things don’t fall through the cracks with my next steps that I need to do. And now I can start to be a little bit more proactive and reaching out to my organizations that I work with and how I can improve my daily tasks versus being reactive. And then there’s as you know, there’s so many other things that we can be able to start doing.

The other thing to talk about with better metrics is now that I’m starting to capture this information, what can I do to automate with machine learning or artificial intelligence so that we can start to again, be more proactive? The ability of accessing our information anywhere, this is becoming more and more important for us as our current modern workspaces have evolved whether you’re working within an office space that you have a desktop application, you’re working either remotely or on the road or be able to work from your son’s soccer game, right? To have that availability of your information anywhere. So from your desktop application through… I work with a Surface, so I’m quite mobile to a tablet or a mobile device.

The integrity of information, this is a big one. So it’s very respectful in both sides of both your associates and the tasks and efforts that they put into their work every day, and making sure that the information is useful. It’s not just being entered into a spreadsheet or written down on a piece of paper to say, “Oh, I have to enter this somewhere later.” So it’s respectful of their efforts. Being able to look at collaboration, creativity when we start capturing this information about how we can start to make improvements, as well as time and cost savings. So rather than it being a paper-driven process, paper gets pushed aside, about now if we’re automating or we’re capturing this within a platform, how we can be able to move that information forward and share it within the organization.

And last, as I touched a moment ago, is the ability to be proactive. This is huge. So whether it’s account management and being able to task certain stages of engagement throughout the year, so whether it’s a quarterly check-in or a weekly check-in that you may need to do or tasks throughout the year that anyone within the organization may need to do for that account, whether it be a salesperson, an inside customer service representative or someone on your finance team or operations, what are the trigger points to making sure that those accounts are nurtured the way they should be? And making sure, of course, that the right infirm individuals are tasked for the right job, right, so that we are being able to help them.

Once we have this ability to be proactive, we can be able to create manual steps or automated steps. So when something happens, it can be able to trigger the next action to ensure that productivity. And of course, as we start to analyze information and becoming more proactive, we have ability to be able to monitor or be able to analyze our opportunities or win-loss ratios, strategize how to become better internally, how maybe for training or mentoring efforts in some situations or team collaboration or strategy development may be needed, right? So how would we be able to use this? And of course, all of it being better at relationships and better customer service.

Patti: So Debra, would it be fair to say then that D365 is really allowing us to remove those silos of information where we have many disparate systems that aren’t really talking to each other?

Debra: Definitely, definitely. And that was really where I wanted to highlight today is the direction in which Microsoft is taking Dynamics 365, and how it’ll allow you to be able to leverage it to be able to get rid of those silos. Definitely. Thank you. As I move forward, the next couple slides are kind of fun. And it just kind of speaks to you again, as I just mentioned what Microsoft’s direction or their roadmap is for Dynamics 365. So again, the strategy and the ability to be able to engage your customers, right? So, whether it’s forecasting, account management, tasks that need to make sure that they’re actioned and not forgotten about.

One thing that I like to when I analyze a situation or when speaking with someone, there’s two things that I always refer to is a) what information or what metrics do you wanna be able to see? What data do you need to capture, right? Because really there’s fields of records that we’re allowing a space to be captured. And then secondly is how do we choose to communicate them? How do we choose to communicate them internally with our staff? How do we give either security permissions or we use Power BI or create reports or give them visibility to the data?

And then how do we share information and encourage organizations outside of our facility? So how do I share information? Is it through marketing, through nurture campaigns, through a portal to be able to communicate? And it’s being really respectful as to how to communicate is really the topic. Of course, now once we start to optimize our operations through workflows, through clarity or easy access of our information, now we can start looking at strategic and transforming our products and services. How do we wanna be able to move forward with our customers?

So of course, as I just mentioned, it’s all about the data in which we’re starting to capture. So if I’m capturing data, both engaging customers, how I’m empowering, optimizing my operations, now I can start to leverage some of the machine learning or artificial intelligence that Microsoft is starting to release. We’ve always been over the quite a few years now, we’ve already…working with artificial intelligence, even with like auto-corrector or correct spelling or grammar within word documents and emails, Microsoft is always being able to help us be able to move forward in ease of use.

So once we started to capture some of that intelligence, now we can start creating action moving forward. And some of that may be manual action that’s gonna task an individual to do something or of course leveraging automated workflows and transactions. So when something happens, when a field gets updated, maybe an email would be actioned or the next task would be moved forward. And then of course, we are gonna be able to then move forward and be able to have deeper relationships, be able to build better services and products, and be able to grow as an organization.

Last but not least, of course, so now we can be able to see the evolution of a relationship. So what happened? When did it happen? Why did it happen? What are we gonna be doing next? And that’s what, of course, Microsoft is developing again the next stages for you. I really like this screen and it’s something that I like to continue to use. I think it’s a very clear image of Dynamics 365 and all of the application that lies within it. So when we look at licensing or we look at functionality, you can definitely from a functionality point of view, you can leverage any of these applications or modules as I call them individually or you can start leveraging them together. And that’s the cool part of Dynamics 365.

So if we look at Customer Engagement or CRM as it was previously called…and this is why Microsoft has rebranded it and given it a new naming convention because it’s expanded so far past that. It does have core CRM functionality at its heart. Accounts and contacts still reside and is the powerhouse of what we do. But now, we have the potential of having that connectivity. If I’m leveraging the sales application and doing my lead qualifying and my opportunity management and being able to see the pacing of my opportunities and my win-loss ratio against products, now maybe I require customer service in being able to create cases and be able to help resolve issues or requests from our customers. And I can be able to track my service level agreements and scheduling of resources if necessary.

So again, quality of information as it flows through the organization because it all ties in together or maybe marketing application where you would require it to be able to help nurture campaigns and be able to help your customers understand the services and new features that are being offered and be able to help move them forward. So overall, Dynamics 365 has a lot of opportunities that reside within the platform for you. But the way it is currently licensed for Microsoft is you can be able to leverage it individually or you can be able to attach different applications together and build a business process for you.

One of the webinars that we’re gonna be doing later within the series, I’m sure it’s gone out, is Walk, Crawl, Run. So if you hypothetically want to start within the sales application and be able to then later be able to phase in other applications or other work processes that you want to develop, that’s the underlying goal that you have this ability. So within Dynamics 365, of course being able to look at relationship selling within the sales module, modernizing your customer service, how do you want your customers reaching out to you? Is it through your website? Is it through a portal? How would you want them to be able to contact you for concerns and queries?

Field service. For any individual that will be going out into the field and providing a service for your customers, it could be anywhere from healthcare workers to field technicians to repairs that can be executed. Field service would be able to help you with a series of great functionality. Finance and Operations is the Enterprise Level ERP that sits within the platform. If enterprise and finance and operations is not something that is within your wheelhouse or requirement at this time, Business Central has been added to the platform as that SMB cloud ERP. That is really, really great and you will be able to see how it all ties in within the application.

HR within Talent, Marketing and being able to leverage all of the applications heavily through being able to look at how all of these applications tie together. So again, if we’re looking at leveraging any aspect of Dynamics 365 in any of those modules, you now have the full ecosystem of Microsoft at a quick disposal. If you’re leveraging Office 365 being any of the business applications, you now have access to PowerPoint in teams, SharePoint, be able to see that document repository for you as well as Yammer for building internal culture and communication.

Once we start looking at leveraging extensibility, again, from a platform perspective, being able to leverage third-party applications or to develop power apps yourself, to be able to develop that extensibility from the platform, to be able to capture the information and to capture that interaction that you’re seeking, Microsoft flow and of course, getting visibility into your information from Power BI. I know it’s a lot to take in looking at what Dynamics 365 could be for you, but I wanna be able to highlight all of the options that are available to you and how you can be able to again, start from one application and be able to grow.

So in today’s session, I really wanted to talk about staying within the sales functionality and looking at small daily transactions but how these applications could all fit together, and how can potentially improve the process and potentially quality of your transaction. So at this point, I’d like to be able to move over to the Dynamics 365 live environment. I do have a Chrome browser open incognito that I’m gonna flip over to. And here I’m gonna be able to…I’m starting my day within the dashboard. So a couple of scenarios that I wanna be able to highlight today is just the ease of use. Here, I’ll be able to highlight the capturing of information here within the platform as well as ease of use with Outlook, potentially teams and be able to see how this information can flow together.

So normally like I like to start is like a day in the life scenario or some tests and tasks that would be executed in the course of the day. And one I like to start with because it’s really, really great about how I’m gonna bring my information together is hypothetically I was reading the newspaper last night, and I had noticed that there was an acquisition and it was actually two of my customers that were being acquired. And I wanted to be able to send an email of congratulations to one of my customers.

I wanted to send an email. So what I’m gonna do really quick is I’m gonna reach out to Tiger Paw. I’m using my universal search. I’m just gonna research Tiger Paw. And I can be able to see Tiger Paw, my contact, Steve Zatkin who I will be contacting and I can see any other activities or opportunities. So it’s a great search engine to be able to see what is happening with Tiger Paw at this time.

So here on my account card, I have access to all of my current pertinent information. I could be able to see all of my account information here on the left handside, their address, their contact information. My timeline, the last time that I communicated with Tiger Paw, there’s an opportunity that was completed, phone calls that was executed. And of course, here on the left handside, this is some of that machine learning that Microsoft is providing. So within relationship assistance is showing me that I have no activity currently within this organization since July. So we’ve had a quiet summer, as well as there’s no activity within a case since August 15th. I should really look into that and be able to see what’s happening there.

But I wanna be able to send that email to Steve. So here, I’m just gonna click my little plus button and select my email. And there’s just gonna be a note of congratulations to Steve. And here, I’m gonna just type a little quick email to him just saying again that I was reading in the newspaper last night, and I wanted to provide that congratulations to the acquisition and to see if he needs any help. Because I know we’ve been working with Steve for a long time and with quite a few opportunities and be able to see if they need anything with the merging of these two companies. So I’m gonna add Steve to the email. Just gonna bring it up through my, there we go. From my account box and I’m gonna get rid of Tiger Paw.

So something I really wanna highlight here. This is really great also through relationship assistant is email insights. So now we can actually track if the recipient has opened this email, how many times they’ve opened it. If they’ve clicked on a certain link within the email, maybe if they’ve forwarded to someone else. I can schedule this email to be sent at a later time if I want to. And of course, I can schedule a followup email to be able to see if I haven’t heard from him based on this inquiry in the next couple weeks. Maybe I should reach back out. We can go for a cup of coffee. So I’m quickly gonna send this out to Steve.

So just as you can be able to easily send emails from Outlook and track those emails to Dynamics 365, you can also be able to create all of those actions here within Dynamics. So as I click the little plus button again, again, I can create an appointment, a phone call, a task, a booking alert. I can be able to create a OneNote with the integration of LinkedIn sales navigator. As of October, I will be able to send connection requests or be able to send notes.

So before I leave of this account page, I just wanna click on related and be able to show you all of the other entities that are available to me on the account record. So I can be able to all of the activities. If there’s social profiling that I have connected, I could be able to access this. My documents, I can be able to see all of my documents or contracts that have been stored within SharePoint or OneDrive that’s attached to my Dynamics environment. Easy access to all of my information. If I scroll down, I can see all the quotes, quote lines, entitlements, any opportunities that are currently open or projects.

And again, all of this is heavily configurable or editable where you can be able to modify what information you’d like to have access to either at the user level or at the organization level. But out of the box, it has all of these options available to you. So before I leave here, I do wanna create a connection, which is really, really great. So I’m gonna connect Tiger Paw to Blue Yonder Construction. And here I already see that there is another connection or a parent-child relationship to Coho Winery and it’s identifying that they are brothers. So there is a connection between the two organizations. I’ll just quickly create a connection to another. Helps if I could type today I guess. Look at my accounts. Try that one more time. Something like a user issue. Look at my accounts. There we go.

So Blue Yonder Airlines or development, I am gonna select development, not airlines. And I am gonna be able to put a roll in here. Again, you can be able to edit this, but I am gonna be able to put that this is a partner in business. Fall 2019. And I’m gonna save and close that. And the underlying idea behind this is that you have visibility to all of your information if anyone reaches out to the account record here, I have access to all this information and now other people within the organization can see before they reach out or create a proposal or strategic effort moving forward and what are the ramifications or be able to understand the different connections between the organizations that we work with.

So what I’m gonna do next is I’m gonna go back to Dynamics 365 button here in the upper left hand corner and continue back to my dashboard. Then next I’d like to be able to do is look at my opportunities. So here I can be able to see on my dashboard all of my open opportunities and the stages in which they sit in. Everything here is live information that updates. So I can be able to see what is currently sitting in qualify versus develop what’s coming close. If I wanted to open this up, I’m just gonna view my records. Now, I can see all 19 opportunities that reside within this pipeline. If I scroll down, if I wanted to be able to see my probability, so I have probability ratings to see how they’re gonna close. And as well as what the…if it’s a heat map if it’s hot, if it’s warm, be able to see how I’m gonna close.

So what I wanna be able to do is I wanted to go into Popeye’s Gas Plant here and be able to look at how this opportunity is developing. And I’m just gonna very quickly change this too because this is a project opportunity, not a field service when it popped up as a field service. There we go. Great. And I can still see after 81 days, it’s still sitting within qualify phase, right? I can be able to see what’s going on. What am I gonna do? So what I wanna do is think about how am I gonna be able to help move this forward? So I’m gonna click on Ken Zimmerman, who is our contact here. You can be able to see all of his contact email information quite easily, but I wanna click on his contact record and see how can I help? This has been a while now what we’re doing. And I’m gonna leverage my LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Oh, I just need to sign in real quick.

Great. And I wanna see who my connections are associated with Ken Zimmerman and I be able to identify that I know my friend, Dan, has a connection with him. And I can start looking at what icebreakers and what we can be able to start to identify here. So if I wanted to send a message, I can be able to say, Hey Dan, it’s you and Ken will be at the trade show next week. I was just wondered if we can grab a cup of coffee, see if we can build… Dan will help me get an introduction back in and see if I can help move this along.” And send this off.

And again, I’m gonna bounce back to my dashboard and see what other things I can be able to do next. I can be able to see what leads or opportunities have been given to me over the course of the evening or early this morning to see what I can help move forward. Any relationship assistance, I can be able to see, Oh, Hey, that email that I just had to see you a few minutes ago, Steve just opened it. So there’s that email insights I’d mentioned for you. So that note of congratulations, that’s pretty cool. So maybe I’ll reach out to him in a few minutes and be able to see what’s up next. I can see that there’s an opportunity that needs to close, that’s closing soon and I should follow up on it.

But as I scroll down the dashboard here, I can see all my opportunities, all my closed opportunities. And then secondly, I have all my activities. So these are all the tasks or transactions that are currently ready for me to action care within Dynamics and within my Outlook. I have an integration from my Outlook, so I get to see all of my tasks. So here I can be able to see I have an MSA agreement renewal that is for Coho Winery that I need to follow up and send out today actually. And I have a proposal for Grand Coulee that is due tomorrow. So I wanna be able to get moving on both of those.

So if I look at this task force sending out a proposal, I can be able to see if there’s other notes of what I wanna be able to do. So how do I wanna reach out to be able to do this? So I can send an email to Peter Warren who is our project manager who’s helping me with this task. I can be able to…if you’re using Skype for Business, we have an integration with Teams here and we use that internally in Encore as well. And so for this project, for Grand Coulee, I wanna be able to send out a meeting request for Peter.

So I can call up Peter Warren. So I’ll reach out to Peter and send him a quick message to see if he has any time this morning. I can be able to do this or I can just send a meeting request if necessary, but I wanna have a little chat with Peter first and see where he’s at. There’s no sense us having a meeting if he isn’t quite ready and then we can chat maybe later in the day. So I’m just gonna send that out to Peter real, real quick.

Now, if I go back to the other tasks, so I’ve got that at least working. And the other one, of course, I think there was an MSA agreement that needed to be sent out. Yeah. For Coho Winery. So what I’m gonna do is I’m just gonna click on Coho Winery. And what we’ve done recently is that we’ve created some word templates. So on the account page, I’m gonna click on my little ellipsis here, be able to go to my word templates. And now I’m gonna see that there is an MSA agreement that we have created internally. And so what it’s doing is while it’s being generated, it’s pulling the pieces of information that we want to pull from this account record. And here as I open it, I can show you here.

So again, so Coho Winery has been brought forward into this agreement and we can able to save this document. So if I wanted to quickly save this document and bring it forward, I can be able to do that and then be able to attach to an email. I’ve already previously done this. So if I go into my documents record, here, you can be able to see, I believe this is it. I apologize, I didn’t rename it. So again, looking at opportunities that we do have within your…all the documents, I can save it here to my SharePoint. And I can have different locations if I wanted to have it depending on how I wanna to be able to configure that. And now what I would be able to do of course is be able to go back to my timeline, be able to send an email and attach this MSA agreement out.

So very quickly I’ve created this agreement, be able to modify it internally if I need to from that word document that was created, I save it and be able to send it out. Now, I just wanna do one little task here on my other screen. Just take one moment. There we go. It’s just timed out for a second.

Patti: You definitely have a lot of screens open, Debra.

Debra: This is good, Patti.

Patti: And one thing I wanted to shout out just a few minutes ago is that when you typed in that message to Peter in Teams, that really is replacing Skype. So it’s a great way to be able to quickly message people, communicate internally and externally if you so choose.

Debra: Definitely. Definitely. So, and again, I touched on it briefly at the beginning of the statement, but again, the way Microsoft has configured this is that you can be able to of course leverage the other Microsoft products teams as it is moving forward within the Microsoft applications, as well as any other third party application. If you have a preference of another type of integration that you would seek, it does have that capability and that’s the really cool part. You get to decide how you wanna be able to put your applications together and bring those work processes together for your organization.

So the other thing I wanted to be able to highlight before we get too farther on with the time is going into Outlook. Now, I do have my web browser open today. It would function the exact same way as it would be it on the desktop application. So you can be able to see here, I have a new email that has come in from Steve. So again, I sent that email this morning, the note of congratulations. You saw on the account record how I can even see when Steve opened, to be able to indicate that he’s received it, which is great. And now he’s actually responded, which is awesome. So he’s just said that he’s so glad that we reached out and that they would actually like to kick off a project with us winter 2019 while the plant is being shut down. So that is so great.

So what I can do is when anytime we have these requests that are coming in through Outlook, I can be able to create different workflows or processes to that. Here, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna leverage the Dynamics 365 app. So I have this little launch button here within my email, the same launch button that would reside on the desktop app. It would be up in the toolbar rather than here in the email. I’m gonna click on it. And now it’s actually gonna open Dynamics 365 here within the Outlook application.

So now I have an opportunity of tracking this correspondence to either Steve’s personal contact record, which would eventually roll out to the account record as well because they are connected or to maybe something more definitive. So here, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna click on the little hourglass and now I can actually start to track…it’s regarding an account, an opportunity, a case, a knowledge-based article, a lead maybe or an opportunity. So I’m gonna select my opportunities and I’m gonna select new here at the bottom. And now I can actually create an opportunity here within Outlook that will reside within Dynamics 365. So this is a window that Microsoft has provided.

So we have the opportunity out of the box to be able to identify if this is item-based being a product, if it’s work-based for services that you’re offering or for service maintenance, say if you would be leveraging field service. So within this process, I can identify what type of products and services will I be offering. I’m gonna say work-based. My contact is gonna be Steve and he actually came up there because I contacted him earlier today. All right. There we go. And the account is Tiger Paw. I’m gonna identify what my contracting organizational unit is. So you can be able to set up different organizational units depending on what country it resides in or what territories. I’m gonna select Fabrikam USA.

And any other critical information or important information that we’ve captured so far. I don’t have a budget yet. I’m not too sure. My close date, it is for fall. So I’m gonna give myself a target of closing this by October 15th. And I’m just gonna highlight this. I’m gonna add it to my customer need. So I have a little bit of notes there. I’m gonna save and close. And now I’ve created that opportunity here from Outlook. I don’t have to flip through tabs or applications. I have that.

Now, it has been successfully trapped as it as identified here. I can continue to be able to scroll through and drill down into my environment here if I wanted to, I can select Tiger Paw, I can drill in, but I wanna be able to go into Dynamics 365 now and be able to see that same opportunity. So again, winter 2019 plant shut down. I’m gonna slide back over to my browser and I’m gonna go into my opportunities. So I start looking at my opportunities and I’m just gonna quickly do a search for Tiger Paw. I don’t wanna do the scroll.

So I can be able to see that there’s three opportunities now available to Tiger Paw. There is a two-year inspection that we’re currently working on for half a million dollars. We have a new product being, we’re creating a training manual for them as well as the shutdown. I’m gonna open that up. Load. I apologize. I was having a little bit of problems with this morning. My timeline and my opportunity wasn’t opening. I was hoping it would do that for us now. But I wanna show a couple more things before we get from here and then I can go into different timeline and show you the same premise.

So again, I am within a project opportunity as it’s highlighted here. Because we’ve identified that it is a work-based opportunity. If it was a product-based or field service-based there would be…you can build to signify different stages or requirements of each of those different types of opportunities. So you can identify say if it’s an RFP versus an RFQ. What are the stages and the requirements of each?

So here within the qualify stage, a lot of the information has pulled forward. I have a purchase time frame. I’m gonna say it is gonna be immediate. My budget, I’m not too sure yet. My purchasing process, right? I can be able to identify that. What I wanted to do to be able to satisfy some of these questions is I was gonna trigger a phone call to be able to understand what other things might happen here. So I’m gonna try it from a different approach. I’m gonna go to Steve and see if the timeline will pop up there for me today. There it is. Great.

So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna create my little plus sign and create a phone call. And again, I can do this even if I’m triggering off my cell phone and I can still have this open and I can write notes while I’m chatting on it or for later if I want to. But I’m gonna be actioning it through Dynamics. I like working within my environment. So I’m gonna give Spencer a quick call, see what’s going on and I get to write some notes now on what he wants to be able to do next.

So I’m chatting with him. I’m gonna be able to write in some notes here that I’ve identified. So it’s a budget of $50,000. I have a November one start, so it’s even more urgent than I thought. And I now have a project lead as to who I would be reaching out to before the end of the week as to who I’m gonna talk to you. So I’m just gonna record that here. And then with my recently viewed, I’m just gonna go back to that opportunity. So ease of access, I love this. And be able to identify. So my budget is now gonna be $50,000. My purchase process is gonna be Gary, so I know it’s an individual. And then I will be able to… So if anybody else looks at the opportunity, they’ll kind of have an understanding as to what is going on, what is happening next. I can say that.

My next course of action, of course, would be able to identify my opportunity lines. So again, what services am I offering? So this is really great, especially from a win-loss ratio. What products am I offering? What services am I offering? So we’re tracking about the type of services. So when I look back a few months from now or I look at metrics and I can see what my win-loss ratio, how long did I take to work on this opportunity, why did it close? And then of course being able to identify and be able to create a quote here within Dynamics.

So again, that information is consistently building. I’m creating all of the requirements of this opportunity. I’ve identified what services or products are gonna be available to me and then I can be able to create that quote. Something really, really great here. If you look on the righthand side of the screen is again, we can be able to identify if they are stakeholders. So Steve would be a stakeholder to this opportunity. If I’m gonna change my primary contact to be Gary, once that happens. My sales team, if there’s any sales, other members of the organization that I need to be able to add, say Peter as he is working for Grand Coulee Dam with me, he can be able to be a part of my sales team and be able to see the allocation of resources as to where the effort is being put and who needs to be able to maybe jump in and help, as well as I have the ability to be able to track my competitors.

Who else is maybe if this is really only something that we are having the opportunity to bid on or if there’s other competitors that are open to this bid as well. So being able to capture all of that information. And as you can see here, customer need that information that I highlighted and added into the Outlook we’ve now added to…it’s just the information carries over.

Perfect. So something else I wanted be able to move through next is be able to go back to Coho and see what’s happening there. So, and again, I have my recently viewed buttons open and I can be able to just click on Coho and I’m just gonna analyze that. And see how else I can be able to help service this customer be able to move forward. If I wanna be able to say add them to a marketing list and be able to nurture them forward or be able to take them forward for next steps. So there is that task of…that new MSA agreement and be able to look at what other services and what are their opportunities I can be able to bring forward. And so again, Microsoft is trying to provide the opportunity of giving you that 360-degree view of all of your information.

So one thing I wanted to be able to highlight as I scroll down here so again that centerline, I can be able to see all of the correspondence that’s happened with Peter and be able to see how are we…how’s my relationship developing with him. On the lefthand side, I can be able to see who my contacts are. But what’s really, really great, you can able to see that this is still a fairly new relationship with Coho. But now I get to see an integration into an ERP. In this scenario, I have the Dynamics 365 Business Central Integration. So I can see their high level financial statistics. I don’t require a license for that application, but I have a visibility or I have a window.

So I kind of understand statistics. I have I the potential of seeing the account balance, the sales orders, what’s shipped, what’s outstanding if they’ve exceeded their credit limit, what’s going on with this customer, how can I be able to facilitate in the best interest of the organization before I move forward to another opportunity? So it’s really great that there’s nothing outstanding here. So when I reach out and be able to follow up with this MSA agreement, I can be able to potentially follow up on other topics as well.

Patti: So, Debra, this is really the opportunity that we have of breaking down those silos of information, being able to come to one place and really see that account overall.

Debra: That is right. That is so right. And that’s what again, what Microsoft is trying to provide is that visibility. So whether it’s capturing all the information here within Dynamics 365, leveraging Office 365 in any of its capacity, whether it’s through a Word template as I showed you, Excel, being able to leverage Excel for reporting, Power BI and communications. So again, leveraging teams. Skype for Business is an option if you’re currently using Skype for Business to be integrated into Dynamics 365 or looking forward into the roadmap leveraging teams quite heavily.

Patti: Awesome. Thanks.

Debra: I know I rushed a little bit today and as that timeline pop opened, there are a little bit other features I to show today, but I wasn’t able to. I was just wondering, Melissa, is there any questions so far?

Melissa: I’ve been watching the question pane. I don’t see anything yet, but if anyone wants to type any questions into the question pane, we can take a look at those.

Debra: Yeah, I would love that. I do get really excited about all the process, even just within the sales module, all of the things that you could do. It’s really, really great. So again, if you can identify like if we just stay here on Coho for a moment and I can look at relationship type. So again, I can be able to look at are they a customer, are they an investor? Any organization in which I’m doing business. And I know some people are like, “Oh, I don’t have a traditional sales process.”

True, but it’s really about, again, from at its heart, how am I managing my accounts and contacts? So accounts being any organization and contact being individual. So it could be member services, it could be patients, it could be healthcare, it could be from any perspective. And then how am I helping them and giving them the information that they need to move forward.

So if we think about workflows and automation, if anytime that field, any field is satisfied within Dynamics or they’re modified, it could create a trigger. So say hypothetically, this moves from a lead to a customer or from a customer to an influencer, that means the type of relationship I have with this organizer has changed. And that impact of changing one record might impact someone else within my organization. It could be finance, it could be a salesperson or an account representative. And so a task could be issued to trigger next steps. What are they gonna do forward next? Right? So again, making sure certain tasks don’t fall through the cracks.

A certain idea or a recommendation I give is hypothetically…if what’s the word I’m looking for? If a title changes of an individual and to a person, say they’re no longer the purchaser or they’re no longer the lead engineer, well maybe that’s an important piece of information that somebody else, somewhere else in the organization has captured. But the key organizers of that account maybe needs to have that understanding. So we can be able to trigger either a manual process where that can be reminded or given to someone or it can be an automatic task to be able to trigger next steps.

Melissa: Hi, Debra. We did have a one question kind of come in just asking if the presentation will be available after the webinar. And yes, we are recording this so it’ll be up on our website and then we will be sending a followup email with a link to the recording.

Debra: That is great. One other thing, I do wanna be able to highlight and just kind of leading into teams for one moment and just kind of the direction of teams and how it works so well with Dynamics 365 and some key benefits. And I was just speaking to one of our clients earlier this week. So when we start looking at like, I can…staying here with Grand Coulee Dam for a second, I can be able to look at all correspondence as we started to develop them here, right? So any chats or feedback that I have within this project, I would be able to see this, right? So whether I’m allocating on advocating for OneNote for people to put their comments in and what their steps have been or being able to look at what is actually happening within this project. So large thunderstorms that have happened recently and they had to reallocate resources. That could be a huge flag that this project might be deterring or extra costs might apply.

So it’s really great to keep all of the conversations and the chat if you will, specific to the topic, whereas in this case, it’s this project. Leveraging the files, so here through an integration of Work 365, I have visibility into all of the documents that would reside in Dynamics 365. So it was just a window into those documents that reside within SharePoint. So it’s not a double-entry of the documents. It’s just multiple access to the single point. I can be able to develop Power BI dashboards and be able to embed them here within this project.

I could be able to do a notebook. I can be able to leverage OneNote and create some meeting notes. And of course, my favorite is you have the ability to be able to in bed Dynamics 365 right here within teams. So I don’t have to flip tabs if I don’t want to. I have easy accessibility directly into Dynamics 365, being able to see all of the information regarding this project and the current type of information that I wanna be able to capture and move forward with. I can see the timeline, what’s happening externally and my points of communication with them.

And of course, I can be able to action it right here within teams. I can be able to send an email, I can create an appointment directly to any of the users. I can look into LinkedIn and again, I can be able to have access to all of the other opportunities or quotes that are currently happening. So this is what’s really, really cool about it and why I’d be pleased to speak with any of you and all of you about what potential within this platform and vast options that Dynamics 365 can have for you. So hopefully, going back to our original statements, I’ve given you a little bit of insight into the different things that people are seeking currently within Dynamics 365.

So again, visibility of your information. So whether it’s inputted within Outlook or here within Dynamics 365, depending on the licensing and the security factors that you give to an individual, they now have visibility to this information in multiple perspectives. Better metrics. So once they start capturing the information, say in an opportunity and being able to see what the opportunity was about, I can see it’s the staging, how long it took within each stage, what information am I capturing, who my competitors were, what the products and the dollar value associated to that? What are my win-loss ratio? The power of accessing the information anywhere, so I can access this information as I showed today in just two examples here within Dynamics or within teams. The integrity of the information, again, respect of the information and effort that every individual in the organization is inputting.

So once you put it into one place, that information moves forward. And there’s no double entry. And again, how to be proactive and reactive. Now, that I have access to this information, I can now be able to create next steps. I have visibility into how I’m communicating, what the information is and now either manually or automatically, I can be able to trigger workflows or next steps for forecasting or goal development. I know we’re just a little shy today and I do apologize for the timeline not popping up. Melissa, is there any other questions for today?

Melissa: I don’t see any other questions coming through.

Debra: Okay, great. I hope this was beneficial to you. Please, if you have any questions or if you’d like to talk about this in a little more detail, please feel free to reach out. I do believe my contact information is on the webinar as well. That will be released. And I would love to be able to speak with you about how we can be able to integrate into GP or into NAV or how we can be able to facilitate work processes for you.

Patti: Thank you for the presentation today, Debra.

Debra: My pleasure. Thank you.

Patti: Good afternoon everybody. Bye.

Debra: Have a great day.