Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Tips and Tricks

The key to any sales tool is how well it enables your sales team and sales managers to work more efficiently—so they can spend more time with prospects and customers. To help your teams with this challenge, Ashish Rana, a Senior Solutions Architect for Velosio, presented the Aspire 22* audience with tips and tricks they can use in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE).

The pointers from Ashish can help your sales team close more deals while also assisting sales managers with keeping track of opportunities so they can intercede more quickly when necessary. Here’s a quick rundown of the key tricks and tips:

Tracking Opportunities

Dynamics 365 CE provides Kanban Board and Entity Dashboard views that allow individuals to track their opportunities and managers to view opportunity status across sales teams and business units. For example, if you set up your sales process to include stages such as Qualify, Develop, Propose and Close, you can see the total dollar value of the opportunities in each stage. You can also move opportunities from one stage to the next as they progress or set thresholds to move them automatically.

You can also sort by Open/Won/Lost, see the rating of each opportunity, and then drill down for the details. As part of this presentation, Ashish provided a preview of Deal Manager, a feature Microsoft will release soon. As managers view the number and the projected revenue of deals in the pipeline and their status, they can assign tasks to team members to manage and increase the chances of closing on opportunities.

Interacting with Customers

CE helps your sales team interact with prospects and customers by streamlining email attachments and creating automated follow-up reminders. For example, CE can convert quotes, sales orders and invoices into PDFs. After a salesperson emails one of these documents, CE will send them a reminder at a preset time to check if the prospect or customer responded.

Your sales team also benefits from built-in artificial intelligence that creates daily task lists and recommended processes based on prospect and customer activity. You can preset the system to set the number of days to wait before follow-up activities should occur so relationships can be nurtured efficiently.

Another key feature is the ability to track emails and phone calls within Microsoft Teams, which integrates with CE. Salespeople can make calls within Teams while accessing all customer history stored in CE. They can also take notes that are automatically uploaded into CE.

Searching and Editing Records

CE features global search capabilities so sales can quickly scan multiple tables all at once to find information about customers. This includes searching across leads, opportunities, phone calls, quotes, accounts, invoices, orders, contacts, cases, email messages, campaigns and knowledge articles. The editable grid feature in CE also makes it easy to apply changes to multiple tables all at once.

For More Help with CE

The tips and tricks Dynamics 365 CE offers are not limited to your sales team. IT will appreciate the Document Management feature that embeds files into CE rather than attaching files to records. This approach stores the files in Microsoft SharePoint rather than CE, which is key because CE provides limited storage.

To learn more about these CE tips and tricks, check out the full presentation where Ashish takes you through various screenshots and shows you all the steps to take. And if your business could use additional help on how to leverage Dynamics 365 CE to run your sales processes more efficiently, contact Velosio today.

• Aspire 22, the annual Velosio conference, brought together Dynamics users, finance and business leaders, and IT professionals from across the country. The one-day online event showcased the business possibilities of Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions powered by today’s modern technologies.