Dynamics 365 Business Central – Basic CRM Part 2

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. We’ll try to make that happen.

Today we’re going to continue with basic CRM in Dynamics 365 Business Central. In part one of this video series we covered the contacts, accounts, and the use of CRM and Microsoft Outlook.

In this video we’ll go over the basics of opportunities and interactions and we’ll conclude with part three where we’ll walk through an example of segments and marketing campaigns. My name is John Hoyt, Solutions Specialist for TMC. let’s get started in this video we’re going to go over the basics. We’ll set up our interactions and our opportunities and then create those for a contact. Let’s see how this all works.

So I’ll pull up my business central system and again I’m logged in as the sales and marketing manager. So I’ll expand out to all of my functions I’m going to begin by going to my contacts list. In our example today, I’m going to be making an outbound phone call to one of my contacts following up on a particular transaction and I’m going to start by pulling up Ben’s contact record. As we saw last time the contact record includes general information about Ben. How we communicate with him, I see summaries of the statistics over in the fact box. In this case I simply want to create a record that I’ve made the phone call and using the CRM interaction. I can share that information with my colleagues, so i’ll click on new and create an interaction the interaction defaults to the contact that I started from with Ben and next I’ll need to select the interaction template these are created in advance and you can determine what goes into each one of them but this allows me to fill in by default a variety of different pieces of information.

Now in this case we’re making an outbound phone call so I’ll find my outgoing template and select that and then it fills in the other information for me again all based upon that particular template -were there any costs associated with this? Maybe my time, maybe some materials, so maybe I’ve got 25 there lasted for 15 minutes in duration and at this point my interaction is not going to be associated with either a campaign or an opportunity although you would have the up the chance to do so the opportunity to do so.

This is starting to tie records together which is really of course the heart of a CRM system tying those records together into a logical pattern and sharing that information with your colleagues. So with the details on my phone call with ben recorded, I’m ready to click ok and we’ll save that interaction and then business central prompts me to create an opportunity based upon that. An interaction is simply my experience, my interchange with that individual, phone call, email, random meeting at a coffee shop whatever it might be. The opportunity then relates to some type of potential transaction so in this case I’ll create an opportunity for ben, click on new and create that opportunity it will auto number for me and I need to put in some kind of a description for this so maybe he wants to buy a new table again. That contact information comes over for me automatically. I would have the option of tying this opportunity to a campaign and we’ll focus on that in the next video series.

In this case though it’s simply a one-off and I don’t really have to do anything else at this point. I’ve got the basics that I need for this, so I can go ahead and say I want to process this. I’ll activate my first stage here. Opportunities are going to be walked through a series of stages or statuses you control what happens at each one of those opportunity stages and it could be simply a record keeping it could be generating an outbound email it could be generating a sales quote etc. What I’m doing is putting into this system now the ability to track that information, if there’s going to be a document associated with it. Maybe it’s a quote that I want to pull up, create a new quote for them. So the opportunities represent some exchange- some transaction that we’re going to go through. The interactions simply memorialize I spoke with someone or I had an email with someone, am I putting that in the CRM system? Am I putting that in the CRM system? It becomes a shared record. If I’m absent next week for some reason and one of my colleagues gets a phone call from ben, he can pull up the contact record he can review the opportunities and the interactions that are currently being worked within that system and take over in my absence.

So in this video we look through the basic records of the CRM module, the interactions and the opportunities. In part three of this video we’ll cover creating the marketing segments and the marketing campaigns themselves.

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 and if you need any immediate technical support, I invite you to visit our website www.abouttmc.com . Also don’t forget to like and subscribe to our channel.

Thank you!