Dynamics 365 Sales (CRM) – How to turn your Leads into Opportunities

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 how to progress a lead to an opportunity. I’m Miriam Florio, CRM Practice Manager here at Technology Management Concepts. We’ll be covering:

How to create a lead or use an existing lead, possibly from your website
How to qualify and progress that lead
The account contact and opportunity creation
How to view your opportunities in the pipeline

So let’s get started.

So I’m logged into the sales hub and as you can see on the left pane of my screen I have options to move to the various areas of the system. So let’s go ahead and click on leads. When I click on leads it brings me to my open lead so this is the view that it’s defaulting to for me which means any leads assigned to me. The logged in user that are still open have not yet been qualified or lost so I’m going to go ahead and click on one of these leads here. Tommy jones who came in from our website put in a request for a demo and so his information was automatically loaded into CRM. Now you may have leads that you import from a spreadsheet into the system and you may also key leads in by clicking new on this screen or on the previous screen. So we could go ahead and enter in information. So let’s say that Tommy was calling to get pricing on product x and we’ll say that this was Sally Smith that called and put in her business phone and I happen to know Sally’s email address.

So once you enter in the information that you know about the lead then you can go ahead and click on save and what that does essentially just creates the lead record just like the previous lead record that we were looking at. So we’re going back to Tommy Jones so just take a look at the lay of the land here. So I’m looking at tommy’s record and I can see information regarding the lead on the left. Now remember these forms are customizable so your system administrator can change the fields, change the field names, add fields to it, or clean up some real estate on the screen by removing some of the information that you may not find necessary or that you may not frankly have when you’re working on leads.

I also have the timeline so any communications or interactions that I have with Tommy Jones would show up in the timeline key stakeholders and any competitors that are also working with Tommy. There are other tabs so there are details files associated with this lead and then also related information so let’s go back to the summary.

Now if we focus on the top of the screen what you see is the business process flow just a fancy way of saying the stages that are involved in order to progress a lead to an account contact and opportunity. So these are formal stages that you can go through in order to enter information that takes you through the stage of whatever you think is necessary or organization this particular business process flow actually comes canned with Dynamics 365 Sales and so it was just turned on from the get-go you may turn off business process flows you may have multiple different business process flows for leads so one might be for those folks that come in through your website. Another might be for those that phone in etc. Might be a different process that might also be product based, so you can decide on that but it’s really a way to move through these steps and stages and gather the correct information. In order to take that lead and turn them into accounts and contacts as you can see it’s listed under customers. When the leads jump to turn into accounts and contacts, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve ever purchased from you or exist in your ERP system. So, we can progress through these different stages in the business process flow by entering information and then clicking on next stage I can also qualify a lead by clicking qualify at the top of my screen. So let’s say I make contact with Tommy and I really want to qualify I think this is something that’s going to be really viable and he’s very interested so what does that mean when the lead is qualified? When I click that button or if I take them all the way through the steps and stages of the business process flow, well what happens is this turns into an opportunity if you look at the top of the screen it’s taken the topic from the previous lead screen and applied it and created an opportunity so we can see we’re focused on an opportunity in the system. Also on the left pane you can see it says opportunities and it’s highlighted. So we’re no longer in that leads area what it’s done is it’s created a contact and an account now if we click on these they’re hyperlinked. So with the magic of technology the account and contact were created and the information was pulled from the lead now if I go back using my internal back button I can go back to the opportunity and then same thing for the account and so all that information now sits in these three different areas. So I have my lead that’s already been qualified and converted I have my account that’s newly created, I have my contact. There’s Tommy Jones and I have my opportunity. Let’s change the view here to my open opportunities and as you can see here’s my web request from Tommy Jones. Now once opportunities are created and they’re assigned to you, they’re visible in the pipeline so I can take a look at a dashboard for example I can look at my opportunities here on this view and show the chart so I can see what I’m working on here I could also run a report regarding opportunities.

Now if we want to take a look at a real interactive pipeline view, you’re going to want to look at your dashboards. So if I click on my dashboards it brings me my sales activity social dashboard. Now I could change this. Could go to the regular sales dashboard, where I can see information in a more text format and then also scroll down and see my opportunities in a pipeline format. Now when you’re looking at this, it’s color coded in the different stages. So qualify develop propose and close I can expand this chart. If it were hard to read I could pop this open and take a look at it in a larger view. If I want to look at it in more detail I can hit the top three dots for more commands and click view records, so now that I’m in this view it’s showing me my open opportunities in a list form on the right and then the pipeline on the left.

Now as I click on the different areas of the pipeline, you’ll notice that the information on the right is updated. So right now I’m looking at only those in the qualify stage, I could also click on the develop stage and then drill down for more information. Now if I wanted to actually go into one of the opportunities I would click on the opportunity and it would take me to that record.

So what did we do today? We took a lead from a web submission and we qualified it. It then turned into an account contact and opportunity and then we were able to view that opportunity in the pipeline on our dashboard.

Thanks for joining me today and watching the video on our D365 Sales demo. Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe, because it lets us know that you like what we’re doing. Hope to see you next time!