Dynamics 365 Business Central – Basic CRM Part 3

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 conclude our look at basic CRM in Dynamics 365 Business Central. In part one of the series we covered the contacts, accounts, and the use of Microsoft Outlook with Business Central CRM.

In part two we saw the basics of opportunities and interactions and now in part three we’ll walk through the marketing setup, marketing campaign, and marketing segments. 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, marketing setups, marketing campaigns, and segments comprised of our contacts. Let’s see how this works.

I’ll pull up my Business Central system. I’m logged into the sales and marketing manager role. I’ll navigate over to my list of functions and I’m going to scroll down in the setup area and talk real briefly about a couple of features that are real key. In the marketing setup of course we’re going to have things like our defaults. We’re going to be able to set up the numbering schema that we want to use for particular document types or contact types whatever. It might be but I wanted to point out in this duplicate section we have the ability to search for duplicate contact records, alert the user when those duplicates are found and give them the ability to manage or edit or merge those duplicate contact records.

You can specify what degree of overlap between two contact records you must find before you can declare it to be a duplicate and you can set up a function to allow you to auto search for duplicates during the pre-process of creating a new contact or updating an existing contact record. Once that marketing setup has been completed, we can turn our attention to creating a marketing campaign. I’ll navigate to my list of open and active campaigns I’ve got four that are currently being tracked and as you can see they’re in different statuses or different stages of their particular campaign to create a new one. We’ll click on the new link allow the system to auto assign the next campaign number. We’ll call this our sample campaign it’s initial status code we’re going to set in the planning stage we’ll walk it through the various stages over the life of this campaign but we’ll start with the planning. I’ll specify when I want this particular campaign to kick off maybe we’ll start at the end of January and we’ll run it through the end of April. Sales person code came over as a default from our marketing setup we can either accept that, we can change that to a different sales person or we could leave that blank entirely.

Now the next step in the process after I have the basics of the campaign that I want to go through is I need to tell the system who I want to target with this. I do that by creating a segment. There are no segments currently associated with this so I’ll click on new. I’ll give it a description here and we’re going to call this one all of my sample contacts, click on the add contacts button. I want to allow existing contacts they may be a member of a different marketing segment, they can be added onto this segment as well. I could use the filter, maybe i want to filter for just those contacts associated with a particular salesperson. In this case we again want to grab everybody so I can leave that blank and I’ll simply say I want to now add in all of those contacts as part of my segment I can expand that section out see all the different people that we’ve selected and realize that I’ve got more here than I really want to work with so as the marketing manager, maybe I want to go through and I want to start to eliminate some of these contacts and they’re not really relevant to the campaign that we’re going to be running so I don’t need to include them.

When I’m done I can simply back out of that back out again and now I have a group of contacts associated with my campaign I know who I’m going to be communicating with but I need to have a purpose behind this campaign. I’m trying to liquidate inventory maybe I’m overstocked in a particular segment and I want to clear some space in the warehouse getting ready for next season’s materials to be delivered. To do that I’m going to navigate into the campaign and I want to come down and I want to set some specific sale prices that are going to be associated with this that’s why I could grab a particular document. I could specify that in order to get this discount you’ve got to buy at least three of that table and that’s going to be the sale price that I want. Now we can put in my starting and end dates again into January and we’ll run this one through the end of April, back out. My change didn’t like that I’ll turn back into my campaign itself so now with the campaign set i would have the contacts associated who i want to work with.

It could be everybody could be a narrowed set of my contacts. I can associate particular items that I want to be included as part of the offering in this campaign. We’re trying to sell tables so i can specify that what quantity I want to use etc. and then I’d be ready to go through and start to actually send out the information, create the email print out the hard copy letters, do the emailing etc.

Once that campaign has been put in place now I can start to create opportunities and track those opportunities and relate them to the specific campaign that originated. That allows me to do that after sale campaign kind of analysis.

So in this video we look through the basic records of the CRM module, how to set up the CRM module for duplicate tracking, duplicate detection, how to create a quick campaign, how to create a segment of my contacts that are then going to be associated with that campaign, and then we can go through setting specific sales line pricing or sales line discounting and send that offer out to our contacts via email or via a formal letter in ups postal service.

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 this video and subscribe to our channel.