Dynamics 365 Sales (CRM) – How to Access & Use the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook

Hello and welcome to TMC’s “how-to” demo series for Dynamics 365 Sales, where we explore the basic functions and features of Dynamics 365 Sales. If you’d like to request a topic that we haven’t already covered please let us know in the comments below and we’ll try to make that happen.

Today we’ll be covering the Dynamics 365 app for Outlook. I’m Miriam Florio, CRM Practice Manager here at Technology Management Concepts. Today we’ll be covering:

How to track an email from a CRM contact
How to add a new lead from Outlook
How to track an appointment from Outlook
Global functions within the app

So let’s get started.

I’ve opened the outlook on my local machine. My system administrator has launched and deployed the dynamics 365 app for outlook so I now see an icon in the ribbon of my outlook. I’m going to go ahead and click on that app to open it and launch. Once it’s open I recommend clicking the pin to leave it open. I can see that Gwen Ross is a contact in my CRM. I can also see that this email is not tracked in CRM. Remember once an email is tracked, it always contains the tracking token so any replies or responses to that email will also be tracked in the future. In order to track an email you want to set the set regarding value and set regarding is really just a way of saying what are we linking this email to inside of CRM.

Now generally you may want to link the email to the contact itself Gwen -you may want to link it to a sales opportunity associated with Gwen or her company. You can link it to a case really any entity that you have even custom entities. I’m going to actually just set this regarding Gwen Ross. Now I have a response that says the email has been successfully tracked. I also have an email from William Clay. Let’s go ahead and click on that email as you can see on the right in the Dynamics app. The email is not tracked and the recipient is an unknown recipient. This just means that William Clay was not found in our CRM. In order to add a new record to CRM for William Clay, simply click on the plus sign in the lower right hand corner in order to add him.

Let’s see what our options are. So I can add William as a contact. I could add him as a lead or an account. I’m going to go ahead and click on add as lead and if you had a business card you could scan it at this point. I’m going to put a topic in. We’ll call it request for demo and we’re not sure about the budget amount purchase time frame I’m just going to take a guess here and say this quarter and since he came in from our website, I’m gonna say web. It pulls in the information that it knows from the email. So his first name and last name have been filled in. I’m not sure about his job title based on his email so I’ll leave that blank company name that he’s associated with. I’m not sure yet either, so we’ll leave that blank as well and any other information that you have regarding that lead, so we can just go ahead and click save and close.

So now what we’ve done is we’ve added a lead to CRM. We’ve tracked that email against the lead record and what you’ll notice inside of my outlook is that once an email’s tracked, there’s an icon for it or it shows me in a visual way that that email is tracked with that blue box right here. So it’s really nice and easy to be able to tell what emails are tracked and what are not tracked. In the same way that I can track an email either from my inbox or for my sent items i can also track an appointment. So let’s go ahead and create a new appointment. Once you’ve entered in the information for your appointment then all you need to do is click on the Dynamics 365 app icon at the top on the ribbon.

Once that loads we can actually just set the regarding to William and that appointment will be tracked against his record in CRM. So the other really cool feature about the Dynamics 365 app for outlook is that I can perform CRM functions within outlook without navigating to my browser and logging into CRM, the blue bar inside of the app actually represents CRM itself and really doesn’t have anything to do with the email that we’re looking at or the contact on the email message. It’s actually totally independent of what you’re seeing underneath it and what I mean by that is I’m able to search CRM in the global search by using the magnifying glass, which will search my entire system. I can also add information to CRM directly from here using the plus symbol which uses the quick create forms. So for example, let’s say I happen to be in outlook and I receive a phone call from a lead. I want to add that new lead record to CRM. I can simply click on the plus symbol choose new lead and enter in a completely new lead into CRM. Again, having nothing to do with William Clay, you can see that the information. First name and last name are not populated nor is the email. I can do the same thing with activities so let’s say I am on the phone with one of the leads that I’m working with or I want to perform some other function, I can click on the plus symbol and add an activity. So maybe that’s a follow-up task. So we’ll go ahead and create that so we’re going to send a quote, give it a due date, and save and close. So it’s a really handy feature living inside of outlook. That allows me to stay in here without leaving. I can also click on this hamburger looking icon on the far left which is the site map and I can look at recent records and this actually shows me the CRM form, which is really cool. I can click around on the tabs. Now it’s an abbreviated version because the size of the screen just doesn’t let me see everything at once but I can use the ellipses to look at other tabs. I can also go back. I can look at my pinned items dashboards, so just keep in mind that that blue bar is really independent of the email, but if you leave your app pinned it comes in handy a lot of times, at least for me, it does.

So what did we do today? We tracked an email from an existing record to CRM, we added a new lead to CRM from outlook, and we learned about additional functionality for CRM from within the app for Outlook itself.

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Thanks for joining me and I hope to see you next time!