CRM capabilities of Dynamics 365 Business Central – The Basics

Hello and welcome to this video series dynamics 365 business central and crm we’ll explore the crm capabilities of dynamics 365 bc in this video we’ll cover the basics the next videos will take a deeper dive into creating and managing campaigns and the full crm experience my name is john hoyt solutions architect here at TMC and in this video we’ll take a look at the basics of crm and they are very basic just four components to consider accounts contacts opportunities and interactions let’s get started.

Accounts

Accounts we’ll use the sales and relationship manager role for this video but you can access these crm functionalities from a variety of security roles inside business central i wanted to start with accounts and i used accounts in quotes because accounts in crm simply means an external organization a company membership charity it could be any company outside the walls of your own company that you have a relationship with and that you want to keep information about that relationship going forward in the business central world. Then accounts typically become our customers and in some cases they can also include some or all of our vendors as well it just depends on the nature of the business really. So the accounts are the outside entities that we have relationships with.

Contacts

Contacts are the people that we have relationships with and i will have contact people at my customers i’ll have contact people at my vendors and in the business central world and indeed in most crm systems we’re going to have a soft relationship between the account and the contact.Contacts if i pull up my customer list and we opened up one of our customers tray research we can see that currently the contact associated with tray research is helen ray that is a soft relationship and if i get informed by trey research that helen no longer works for them i could either reassign that contact to someone else that i’m already aware of or i could create a new contact record as the individual the person that i’m going to be working with over at trey research now that soft relationship works as well in the other direction. So if i open up any of my contacts and i want to go into the contact list and i can find helen down here helen may simply decide that she no longer is comfortable working at tray research but she really likes working for one of their suppliers and that new supplier at tray research just happens to be one of our vendors as well.

I could now move that soft relationship between helen and trey research and create a relationship between helen and that particular vendor that she’s now gone to work for the key to this soft relationship is that it does not disturb any of the history that we have either with the customers or the vendors or with the contacts themselves my prior relationship information with helen will move from tray research over to the vendor that she’s now working with and if i reassign an existing contact over to tray research their contact information follows so one of the real key concepts here are the distinction between accounts which are the companies and the contacts which are the people and the soft relationship that exists between them well. Now that i have a contact created what i’m going to do with these master records and they really are a master record i’m going to create them one time and then use them repeatedly going forward what i’m going to do with contact record is use it to keep track of either just a touch that i might have had with them i reached out and initiated a phone call or they called in to me with a question i want to document that interaction i want to memorialize it and make that available to all of my colleagues so that anybody else was reviewing this would have access to that same information move it out of my personal business space into that shared business space that my colleagues have access to so when the phone rings.

I pull up the contact record and immediately i can start to record either a new interaction just memorialize the call somebody called in we talked about this and maybe it represented a certain dollar amount or something we’ll use a template to record this that ensures consistency so that everybody who is receiving an email or receiving a phone call whatever the contact type or interaction type might be we’re going to capture the same information about that date and time stamp are automatic.

Opportunities

My assessment of the call was that it was very positive we talked about a business opportunity that’s worth maybe ten thousand dollars to me and i could add in at this point a campaign that helen was responding to and we’ll go into campaigns in the next video or maybe there was an ongoing business opportunity that i had identified previously and this was just one more interaction during the pursuit of that opportunity click ok and we’ll now add in that information down to the history section now the opportunity goes beyond an interaction because the opportunity gets a little more specific and says not only is there going to be some dollars involved here but there’s going to be maybe some specific products that are going to be sold or there are specific services that are going to be rendered the interaction talked about the potential but not any real detail now with the opportunity is where i’m going to get more detail and of course as i start to create those opportunities more and more add up over time and i’ll end up with a whole list full of opportunities in various stages of the sales process i can now run my filter list and look for everything that is not started everything that’s in progress everything that relates to a particular contact or a particular salesperson we start to move into the individual activities and individual opportunities and start getting to the point where as maybe the sales manager i can start to see the entire realm of opportunities that are available to me and any of the specifics that i need to dig into of course from the list i can drill back into those specifics Contact Record so then just to review the customer card is our account in the crm system could also be the vendor card potentially and the soft relationship that exists between my account and my contacts and the ability then make changes to those over time at the contact record.

Interactions

This is where i’ll see the history of all of the interactions going back and forth with that contact over time and what their nature was phone calls or emails drill back and see the details the information provided would capture the dates of the opportunities the dollar amounts that are involved etc with the opportunity card i’m going to identify not only who is the contact that i’m working with but who is the account that i’m working with what is the nature of this opportunity what are the estimated close dates so i can start to manage a pipeline of these opportunities what’s the dollar value with them etc and during the process of working that opportunity we will create interactions each time we have a touch with that contact whether it’s a touch that they’ve initiated or a touch that we’ve initiated capture that information make it available for review make it available to be shared with colleagues if someone has to pick up this particular transaction midstream they don’t lose access to any of that information so that’s it just the four basic building blocks for crm.

In the next video we’ll dive deeper into crm in business central where we are going to focus on creating and managing sales campaigns if you have any questions or would like to make a suggestion on what we should cover in the next video series please comment down below.

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