Dynamics 365 CRM, Dynamics 365 Marketing Emily Johnson Dynamics 365 CRM, Dynamics 365 Marketing Emily Johnson

Exploring the Sales Process in Dynamics 365, part 4: Dashboards 

Within Dynamics 365, it’s easier than you may think to create a dashboard yourself, and it’s a process that can be repeated multiple times over to ensure that you have the right data visualization for specific needs or user roles—for instance you can create a salesperson dashboard to show salespeople their open leads and opportunities and where they are in the pipeline, and you can create a sales manager dashboard to help managers see what their team has on their plates).

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Dynamics 365 CRM, Dynamics 365 Sales Emily Johnson Dynamics 365 CRM, Dynamics 365 Sales Emily Johnson

Make custom views with filters and columns in your Dynamics 365 Sales lists

In Dynamics 365 Sales, you have the pre-built list views available, which you can customize by changing filter and columns. This is one example (and some of our favorite parts) of the extreme customizability of the app’s interface. You can build your own views with only the data you want to see. Then you can save those views to use later, share them with your team, work with that data, and even export it.

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Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 CRM Emily Johnson Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 CRM Emily Johnson

Our Anticipated Features for Dynamics 365 CRM with 2024 Release Wave 1

Soon, we’ll be seeing many of the features mentioned in Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2024 Release Wave 1 Plans--a lot of items will become generally available in April. While they may not be here just yet, there are a few things standout features that we think lots of CRM users will find value in.

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Dynamics 365 CRM Hanna Madkour Dynamics 365 CRM Hanna Madkour

What’s the “New Look” in Dynamics 365 CRM?

As part of the 2024 Release Wave 1, Dynamics 365 CRM has been updated with a new modern look and feel. Early access to the New Look was rolled out in February 2024, with general availability in April 2024.

The New Look brings upon visual changes to make Dynamics 365 sleeker, more modern, and more intuitive to use. Here’s a breakdown of the subtle yet impactful changes you can expect to see.

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Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 CRM Emily Johnson Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 CRM Emily Johnson

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales 

If your company uses Microsoft business solutions such as Dynamics 365 Sales or Business Central, you’ve probably been seeing Copilot in your app recently. Copilot is Microsoft’s answer for how to begin integrating AI into your normal business processes and includes a variety of tools to improve efficiency, such as providing summaries and generating email content ideas.

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Dynamics 365 CRM, Dynamics 365 Sales Emily Johnson Dynamics 365 CRM, Dynamics 365 Sales Emily Johnson

Exploring the sales process in Dynamics 365 Sales, part 3: Quotes and Orders

Though it is true that every business handles its sales funnel a little differently, in broad strokes, an opportunity will be nurtured until it is either lost (if the prospect decides not to buy) or until they are ready to see a quote. Within CRM, the quote is both an extension of the Opportunity stage and a new record itself. So first we’ll talk about creating a quote from an opportunity, making a quote from scratch if you don’t have an associated opportunity, revising the quote, and then converting it into an order (if you handle orders in your CRM).

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Dynamics 365 CRM, Dynamics 365 Marketing Emily Johnson Dynamics 365 CRM, Dynamics 365 Marketing Emily Johnson

A/B Testing in Dynamics 365 Real-Time Marketing

If you’ve done any A/B testing in the Outbound Marketing module, you’ll know that the system is primarily based around setting the tests up at the email-level since that is the primary focus of Outbound Marketing. Real-Time Marketing has a couple additional channel options, such as texting, outside of just sending emails. As such, it pulls the A/B testing back to the Journey-level. Rather than setting up an A/B test on an email and then adding the element to the customer journey, we instead will simply add an action to our journey and select “Test which variation performs better.”

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Dynamics 365 CRM sandbox versus production environments

Sandboxes are for playing around and testing customizations and features. Production environments are where you do your actual work. Now let’s dig in a little deeper into how to work with sandboxes, and how to move your sandbox content into a production environment if/when you want to!

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Dynamics 365 Marketing will merge with Customer Insights – Here’s what you need to know

Microsoft has announced that on September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will be combined into a single product offering called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. The new unified application will help users continue to deliver excellent customer experiences and harness customer data in ways that further brand loyalty and growth.

Although this sounds like a major change, there’s no need to panic. We’ve broken down everything you need to know about the unified app and how you can benefit from it.

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Dynamics 365 CRM, Dynamics 365 Sales Emily Johnson Dynamics 365 CRM, Dynamics 365 Sales Emily Johnson

Let AI do the work: Duplicate lead detection to keep your CRM data clean

Dynamics 365 Sales offers duplicate detection for your account and contact records. Duplicate detection works by flagging fields with identical unique values (last names, email addresses, phone numbers, company names, etc.—info that is unlikely to be common) across several records. From there, you can decide how to handle these overlaps.

Until recently, though, only account and contact records had duplicate detection. But no longer! Now you can create custom duplicate detection rules for other record types. And the first place we ran to implement these rules was for leads, which, as all sales and marketing individuals know, is perhaps the messiest entity in a CRM, due to their impermanent nature. After all, they are potential customers at the beginning of the sales funnel. Some of them work out, and lots don’t.

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Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 CRM Emily Johnson Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 CRM Emily Johnson

Exploring the sales process Dynamics 365 Sales: Moving onto Opportunities

This is part 2 of a series exploring the tools and records that guide you along the sales process within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales CRM system. In part 1, we covered Leads and their role in the sales process and within the system. If you haven’t read that part yet, you can catch up here: Exploring the sales process in Dynamics 365 Sales: Starting with Leads.

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Staying focused with Dynamics 365 CRM’s Focused view

One of Microsoft’s primary goals when updating old features or developing new ones for its fleet of business productivity apps is right there in the name: Productivity. One thing that can lead to slowdowns and hang-ups is navigating between a bunch of different pages. Even aside from the slowdowns, it just doesn’t feel as good for the user. A relatively new feature to Dynamics 365 CRM is Focused View. This feature is aimed at reducing the number of screens users have to jump between when working with different record types.

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Assigning access and security permissions in Dynamics 365 CRM

Access and security in Dynamics 365 CRM is a pretty big topic and can be a complex undertaking when you get into the granular details. It is the system administrator’s responsibility to configure and assign access and security, but proper setup impacts every single user, and it’s not a bad idea to have a general idea of how you and your coworkers are given access.

When we zoom out and look at it in broad strokes, your admin gives you access to CRM in three main ways: security roles, business units, and field-level security.

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Understanding the Dynamics 365 Storage Capacity Models

Back in 2019, Microsoft implemented a new model for Dynamics 365 storage capacity. This was done in an effort to help organizations better take command of their database usages. The amount of data that organizations need to track and store has been ballooning as digital transformation progresses. Understanding data usage and storage is integral to maintaining a database of effective, relevant data.

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Customize your Dynamics 365 CRM command bars in a snap

In CRM, the command bar is the strip at the top of page that contains a bunch of different functions for the page. Recently, Microsoft has implemented an improved functionality for customizing the command bar to the Power Apps designer for CRM apps.

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2023 Release Wave 1: New features for Business Central, Dynamics 365 CRM, and Power Platform

The first batch of new features will soon be available for Power Platform and the entire Dynamics 365 suite. 2023 Release Wave 1 will continue to enhance the way you work with your business data, create personalized lead engagement efforts, optimize your sales cycle, and support industry-specialized functions. Preview access is now available, allowing you to test and validate features in a sandbox environment, and will become generally available in April.

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Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 CRM Emily Johnson Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 CRM Emily Johnson

Helpful additions to forms and timelines in Dynamics 365 CRM

We’re always watching the latest and greatest changes coming to the Dynamics 365 suite to see how they can benefit our users. Lately, there have been a few helpful shifts regarding the timeline and forms within Dynamics 365 CRM apps that allow for better workflow and easier management of what you’re doing within the system. Although these features aren’t brand new—they are generally available and your administrator or partner can help get you started with them whenever you want—but we’re highlighting them since they may not be on your radar.

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