Which Dynamics 365 Sales license is right for my organization?
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is an important part of the Dynamics 365 Suite. It is used to manage leads and opportunities and facilitate more conversions for your business. There are license types that are currently offered which can be somewhat confusing to a first-time buyer who may not know all the different options available to them. The licenses which tend to be the most confusing are between Sales Professional and Sales Enterprise. This blog will help explain the differences between these so that it’ll be easier to make informed decisions about which users need which licenses. To read more about these licenses, visit Microsoft’s pricing page here.
The most notable difference between these licenses are the prices. Sales Professional is $65 per user per month while Sales Enterprise is $95 per user per month. This just underscores the importance of knowing what is included in each application so users aren’t paying for additional functionality that they won’t need.
It’s important to note here that Microsoft does not allow for different users to be licensed differently while on the same instance of Dynamics Sales. It is possible to have differing licenses while at the tenant level, but not on the same instance. For many, this will mean that when choosing which license type to buy for their users, they will need to purchase the highest level license type needed for all users.. This is primarily due to Microsoft being unable to provide extensive customization options to some users who are modifying higher level systems, but not others who are using those same systems at the same time. It is possible to upgrade licenses should the requirements of the users shift. It’s also very important to stress here that, though the differences may seem relatively large on the customization front, Professional provides users with almost all functionality that Dynamics Sales has out of the box. If the base functionality is enough, there is no need to upgrade every user on the instance.
Sales Enterprise and Sales Professional primarily break down the amount of access that a user has to customization options. As a general rule, Enterprise allows for much greater personalization choices that Microsoft has created to help the user gain more control over their own system sales process. Sales Professional, on the other hand, tends to lack or limit these options.For example, the Sales Professional license has a maximum allowance of five dashboards and charts for a user. That is below the number of dashboards and charts a user who deals with higher level analytics or management, but for a user who is going to be in the system to view progress on opportunities on a monthly basis, it’s a reasonable number to have access to.
Another feature that is limited like this in Sales Professional is the ability to create custom entities. For complex sales funnel processes or users with extensive knowledge, custom entities are an invaluable tool to bring functionality that doesn’t come out of the box to any tool in the Dynamics 365 suite. With Sales, custom entities work very much the same way. With Professional licensing, there can only be fifteen custom entities in the system. This may be a very limiting number to those seeking more in-depth functionality in Sales, but if the users only need access to what is provided in the default Sales application, Professional licenses may be a perfect solution.
There are a number of other functions of Dynamics Sales which will be inaccessible without the Enterprise license. There are ten options that are unavailable to Professional users and they are as follows: Forecasting, Series Playbooks, Business card scanning (which is available as an optional, separate extension but included in Enterprise), Competitors sales goals and territory management, Partner relationship management, gamification, knowledge management, portals, Power Apps, and Power Automate. The final two, Power Apps, and Power Automate, are separate applications which would have licenses granted to users who have Sales Enterprise licenses. Both apps can be incredibly difficult to use without a technical background, however, so they may not be relevant to most users. The rest of these features are mostly customization options or options that may be niche to a specific company’s needs. The ones that may be missed, however, are related to revenue projections and insights that provide important information for companies who are trying to plan out their futures.
There are two more license types that are less frequently used in Dynamics 365 Sales. The first is Microsoft Relationship Sales, the highest license type, which costs $130 per user per month. This license requires at least 10 users. It provides everything that the Enterprise license does, with some added integrations into LinkedIn. Microsoft Relationship Sales embeds LinkedIn Sales Navigator into Dynamics 365 Sales and syncs all data with active LinkedIn accounts. This functionality is targeted at companies who have an extensive amount of contacts which need to be managed and sorted through with an active integration into Sales.
Frankly, the use for this license is usually just covered by an Enterprise license anyway, so smaller companies, or even companies who don’t need the integration typically only need an Enterprise license.
The final license type is an add-on license that can be applied to other Sales licenses. Dynamics 365 Sales Insights uses detailed machine learning that Microsoft has developed to provide insights into the Sales process. It runs for $50 per user per month and includes 3 hours per user per month of conversation intelligence. Conversation intelligence provides analytics into conversations that a salesperson has with a prospective client and determines most effective marketing strategies to employ.