Dynamics 365 Business Central – Basic CRM Part 1

Hello and welcome to TMC’s “How-to” demo series for Dynamics 365 Business Central, where we explore the features of Business Central for basic tasks within your organization.

If you can’t find a demo you’re looking for let us know in the comments below and we’ll try to make it happen today. We’re going to begin with basic CRM in Dynamics 365 Business Central.

In part one of this CRM video, we’ll cover the basic entities of the CRM module. In parts two and three we’ll walk through examples of interactions opportunities and marketing campaigns.

My name is John Hoyt, Solutions Specialist for TMC. Let’s get started! In this video we’ll begin with the basics in the CRM module. We’ll work with contacts and we’ll link contacts to an account either a customer or a vendor and will create contacts from Outlook.

Let’s see how this works. I’m going to start by opening my Business Central instance and in this case I’m logged in as the

sales and marketing manager and you can see all of their capabilities if you use the little function here. So I want to start simply by bringing up the contacts. Now contacts in the Business Central system like in most CRM systems are the people that you work with we draw a distinction between the people who represent his contacts and the accounts who will nominate as either a customer or a vendor.

So here’s my list of all the open contacts in the system and let’s take a look at some of the details that we’ll be tracking. I’ll open the record here for ben and like we’ve seen elsewhere in the Business Central system. The master record for Ben is divided into multiple tabs. We have a general tab across the top with his contact number, his name and the company name that he’s associated with. This will end up being linked to an appropriate contact record either for an account or for a vendor later on in the process. In the communications tab will indicate address, vocal, phone number, email address all the means that we’re going to use in terms of contacting him if our contact works with a foreign entity of some type. When i also have access to the foreign

trade section where I can nominate both the currency code that i want to use as a default – Mexican peso, Canadian dollars etc as well as a territory or a region division and then finally now at the bottom for all of the contacts we can create a profile, questionnaire, and you can fill out the details on that questionnaire and capture information like their role, their title their previous job experience, anything that you really want add into that profile. You’ll see where that profile comes up in one of our later videos during the marketing section we start to create a campaign segment and we’ll use the qualities or the ideas generated out of that profile to help us determine which one of our contacts we’re going to segment and then market to for that particular campaign. On the right hand side we’ve got information like we typically see in our fact boxes, add a picture, add attachments, and some general information about this particular contact and our experience with them.

Now once the contacts have been created and again remember the contact is just a person, so we need to make an association now between the person, the contact record and the company name, who they actually are associated with. In this case, Ben’s associated with Abram’s legal services and so any of my activities with ben could be viewed either by looking at his contact record or by going back through the associated records with that particular company. Whoever he’s been linked to I’m going to switch back out of that contacts view. We’ll go back into the sales and marketing manager and it’s just as an example if i pull up my customers list I come down to Abram’s legal service.

Now when I look at that customer record as I go through, I can add in the contact information that’s appropriate for that whoever that might be. In this case it’s going to be Ben Charles, so now I can start to make that link between who is a person, what is the organization that they work with. I can divide that into my customer contacts, I can divide that into my vendor contacts and again I’m just making that linkage between the people that i work with and the various companies that they are associated with and we do this as a soft association. Right now Ben is linked to Abram’s legal service but if ben for some reason chose to leave that job and go to a different job, one of our other customers perhaps I can simply reassociate his contact record from Abram’s legal services and now I could associate him with a different company. The value here is I don’t lose any of that prior contact information or any of that history I still have all of those details. I’m

just associating it with the current customer, not the previous customer record. And that same concept of course could apply for the vendors as well as your contacts move from one vendor to another. We can track that movement and not lose any of their history.

So let’s turn our attention next to Microsoft Outlook because

we could obviously create a new contact here directly inside the Business Central system but for many people the first point of contact may actually be something like an email and in this case I’ve gotten an email from someone who’s going to be redecorating the conference room they want to get a quote on a new table they need some chairs also and I can start from this email and come up to my Business Central connection in Outlook, click on contact insights now as the link gets made between Outlook and Business Central. I’ll get prompted to get logged in here and John Hoyt does not exist at the moment as a contact inside my system so I’m given the option to add him in as a new contact name, email address – he correctly shows as a person but i could also be creating a contact that is simply a company and i need to associate it to one of the companies inside my system and i’ll associate him with maybe Williams and Henry when I click ok I’m now creating that relationship in the background between the little bit of information that I have about John. I don’t have much at this point and the company that he works for in the background. Now I could go through and I could add in some more information for this I can do whatever updates I might want, but that’s as simple as as easy as it is to create a contact based upon an email record and then i can go in and start to work further with that.

So in this video we look through the basic components of the CRM module, the contact, the accounts, and working with those entities in Microsoft Outlook.

In part two of this video series we’ll walk through tracking an opportunity and recording an interaction with a contact in part three we’ll create and track a marketing campaign that wraps up this video.

if you have any questions or would like to make a suggestion on what we should cover in the next video please comment down below I’ll do my best to answer your comments if you need immediate technical support I invite you to visit our website www.about tmc.com also don’t forget to like this video and subscribe to our channel!