Exploring the sales process in Dynamics 365 Sales, part 3: Quotes and Orders
Welcome back to our blog series on the sales funnel, and the tools that Dynamics 365 Sales provides to help your team create excellent prospect experiences from the very start of the funnel all the way to a successful sale. We’re on part 3 of this series, and we’ve already covered how to create and manage Leads in the system and how to qualify those leads into Opportunities and nurture them into the next stage of the process, which is to begin quoting and then ultimately create an order. If you haven’t yet checked out part 1 and part 2, we encourage you do so before jumping in here.
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).
Creating a quote
We can create a quote from an opportunity record, which will automatically associate that quote record with the opportunity. There’s a “Quote” tab in the Opportunity, and clicking “New Quote” will create one with auto-filled fields from the opportunity record to minimize data entry.
1) Quote ID – This is a unique identification number for tracking and searching purposes.
2) Revision ID – This field is automatically filled to document how many times the quote has been changed. In this example, the Revision ID is 0 (zero) to indicate it is the original version of the quote. The quote revisions are kept for historical review purposes and can be accessed from the quote or the opportunity.
3) Owner – The owner of the quote is automatically set to the user who is logged in but can be altered if needed.
4) Name – The quote name is auto-filled from the opportunity, and you can change it if you wish.
5) Price List – Price lists tell your sales agents what to charge for your products or services. You can create multiple to maintain separate pricing structures that are based on region, sales channels, or sales territories (for example). In this example, a price list the company has titled “Default” has been chosen. This is a clickable field with a link to that specific price list record, which is called a “lookup” in CRM.
6) Associated Opportunity – This is the opportunity that the quote was made from and is also a lookup field.
7) Potential Customer – This is the account associated with the opportunity and quote.
8) Add Products – By clicking “Add Product,” you can choose from your existing catalogue or create a write-in product that is not already documented in your catalogue. You can also adjust the price, quantity, discounts, and other things like delivery details.
9) Look Up Address – This button in the top ribbon allows you to fill in the bill to and ship to address on quotes that generate from any associated records (like the Opportunity, Contact, or Account linked to the Quote).
We can also create a quote from scratch, but besides the Quote ID and the Revision ID from the list above, the other fields will need to be manually entered.
Sending quotes to customers
Once a quote is activated, it can be sent to the customer for review. You have two ways to send the quote out of Dynamics 365 Sales and into the prospect’s hands.
First, we can choose the “Run Report” in top navigation ribbon. We actually recommend this option above the other one we will share, just because of its customizability. This is a formatted document that includes pertinent information for quotes, such as ship to addresses, the date, and the product details. You can also customize this report to include the Item Details you prefer (Product ID, Unit of Measure, Quantity, Price per unit, Tax, Discounts), and you can save it as popular file types like Word, Excel, PDF, etc.
Second is the “Export to PDF” option, also in the top navigation ribbon. Just like it sounds, the system will generate a PDF of the quote that you can email or download. This is a pretty rigid format, however. You have some templates to choose between, but customizability of content and formatting is limited.
Revising a quote
While the quote is in “Draft” status, it can be edited as needed, but once the quote has been activated—by clicking on the “Activate Quote” button in the top ribbon—it becomes “read-only.” This is a built-in block to prevent an active quote from being altered so there is no confusion between the customer and the salesperson which terms they are agreeing on.
From here, the only way to change it will be to “revise” the quote, which will technically close the current version of the quote and create a new version with a new “Revision ID.” These older versions of the quote can be accessed from the Quote tab in the Opportunity record.
Creating an order
You may find yourself revising a quote a few times, but when a prospect accepts a quote, you can proceed to the next step of the sales funnel, which is to create an order!
At this point, a company may choose to move the process from the CRM system that they had been using thus far and complete the order and fulfillment process in their accounting or ERP system. If that is the case, it’s important to note that Dynamics 365 Sales has default functionality that will create an order automatically when a quote is closed as “won.”
But if you don’t want this to happen, Syvantis can customize your system to both create a button to close the quote as won without the automatic order creation and remove the order entity from your system and navigation.
It’s also important to note that, just like all the other steps of this process, though we are creating the next record via the current record (creating opportunities from leads, creating quotes from opportunities, etc.) we can create orders from scratch without an associated quote, too. We may choose to do this if a current client contacts us and just wants to buy another of your products without needing to discuss it with you in a standard opportunity phase, for example.
To create an order from a quote, we will select the “Create Order” button in the top navigation ribbon. A window will open to add some additional information, such as the date the quote was won and a description.
We also have an option to close the opportunity associated with that quote at the same time. Up until this point, we’ve had the opportunity open because a sale was still being negotiated. But now that the quote has been accepted by the client, we can close the opportunity as won.
Now we have an order record, with our related quote, opportunity, and account records, and we have fields that have flowed from the quote and filled automatically here.
From this point, we have a few primary actions we can take, which are all selected from the top navigation ribbon:
Create an invoice to send to the client so we can be paid
Fulfill the order, either partially or completely, if shipment is involved
Cancel the order if the client changes their mind
Data continuity and archiving
A significant benefit of using a single connected system for all these steps of the sales process is the continuity of data that flows from one record to another, with no repeated manual entry and the chance of errors that come with that extra work. Each step of a sale is traceable and archived if they are ever needed, and you can analyze that data to help reveal areas where you can improve your processes.
Next (and last) up in this series, we will get into what comes next. Once we’ve landed a sale, how can we use the data we’ve collected to improve our processes? Dynamics includes dashboards to help you analyze just that!
As you can see from this series, Dynamics 365 Sales is built to guide your team through the sales process in a consistent, holistic way. It accounts for so many business needs—because no two businesses have the exact same sales process.
So, if you’re currently using D365 Sales, is there anything you now want to experiment with, any customizations you want to make to get your system working even better for your needs? And if you’re not using D365 Sales, what entities and processes look like they will work out-of-the-box for you, and what’s your vision for how your sales process could work in the system? Get dreaming, because we can help make it a reality!