Sales scenario

Scenario 1

Acme Ltd utilizes Dynamics CRM's out-of-box Sales module capabilities to capture leads from across three global sales offices and process them through lead qualification and the opportunity management lifecycle:

The following are the three global offices:

• New York head office, USA
• London sales office, UK for Europe
• Mumbai sales office, India for Asia

The requirements of Acme Ltd are as follows:

• Central reporting of opportunity management at the New York head office
• Lead capture and qualification based on the location
• Opportunity management

The following steps explain the process adopted by Acme Ltd for capturing leads, filling in the required information in the lead records, and then qualifying a lead to generate opportunities and close them as won or lost:

1. Click on the chevron or arrow to the right of the Microsoft Dynamics CRM text to display the navigation menu. Click on the Sales CRM Module:

2. Next, click on Sales in the top-right corner and, then, click on the Leads entity under Sales:

3. The browser will be directed to the My Open Leads view on the Leads entity. Click New in the top-left corner to launch the New Lead form:

4. The required fields, Topic, and Name, with the red asterisk showcase fields, need to be entered before the user can save the record:

5. Add details for the lead contact and company, and set the Lead Source in the header section in the top-right corner of the form:

6. These steps are outlined in the Qualify stage of the Lead to Opportunity business process flow. Existing Contact? and Existing Account? do not apply, as this lead relates to a new contact and a new account. Fill out the remaining fields as appropriate and click QUALIFY:

7. To move the lead to the opportunity stage, select the Qualify option from the command bar. Note that when a lead is qualified, an Opportunity record is created and the Lead to Opportunity business process flow moves to the Develop (Active) stage:

8. In addition, a new Contact record is created and populated with the data that was entered in the Lead Contactand Company sections:

The lead record will now be set to read-only.

9. Navigate back to the opportunity record (by choosing the Develop stage); enter a value for the Est. Close Dateand the Est. Revenue in the header section in the top-right corner of the form:

10. Optionally, the users of Acme Ltd may complete the fields in the Develop (Active) stage of the Lead to Opportunity business process flow. They may enter a description for the Customer Need and the Proposed Solution. Mark the Identify Stakeholders as complete (note that the contact for the opportunity has been automatically set as the stakeholder for this opportunity):

11. Optionally, users may complete the other fields in the Develop (Active) stage. To complete the other fields, such as Identify Competitors, it is necessary to create a new Competitor record. The completion of this data enables the reporting process to track the closed opportunities, as lost by the competitor. Scroll down to the competitor subgrid on the Opportunity form and click on the plus icon. Then, click on the lookup icon and, finally, click on the +New option to add a new Competitor record:

12. This will launch the Quick Create form for the Competitor entity on the top of the screen. Fill out the required fields and click Save:

13. The competitor record is added to Opportunity. Mark Identify Competitors on the process bar as complete and click the Next Stage link:

14. The Opportunity record now moves to the Propose (Active) stage. Proceed to complete the actions in the current stage. Complete the required fields for the Propose (Active) stage:

15. The opportunity is closed, dependent on the outcome of the sales activity. Opportunities can be closed as won or as lost from the command bar. In this case, the opportunity is lost by Acme Ltd to Bluebell XX Ltd, so select CLOSE AS LOST from the command bar:

16. The opportunity is now marked as lost and set to read-only:

The preceding scenario explains the sales lifecycle from leads to opportunity in a case where Acme Ltd lost the opportunity.

Scenario 2

Peter leads the sales team in Contoso, and wishes to go through the goals set for each of the sales members and understand how they are performing against the goals that have been set for them:

1. Create Goals for each of the team members:

In Dynamics CRM, we can define goals for each of the sales members. For defining the goals, navigate to Sales | Goals

2. For creating goals, we firstly need to define Goal Metrics. Goal Metrics indicate the criteria against which the goals are being set. Out-of-box, we can configure Goal Metrics on three points:
   1. Number of product units.
   2. Revenue earned.
   3. Number of cases.

Check out the following image for better understanding:

We will just go through one example of Revenue to see how it works:

The metrics could be of two types: Count and Amount. Count can be used in metric types such as the number of cases resolved or the number of product units sold, where we are interested in the actual number of items rather than the value in one of their attributes.

The rollup field's grid defines the collection of variables that are used in the calculation of the actual and in-progress fields. In the preceding example of Revenue Metric, we use the summation of the actual earned revenue in won opportunities as the actual earned revenue, and we use the summation of the estimated revenue in the in-progress opportunities as the in-progress estimated revenue field.

The following screenshot shows the roll-up query of the actual revenue:

3. After Goal Metrics have been defined for each Sales Member, we will go ahead and define the goal:

For creating a New Goal, click the New button. It should open up a form for entering the goal details:

The following are some of the important details for the same:

• • Name: This is the name of the goal
  • Parent Goal: This should be filled if there are some parent goals or a goal containing this goal as a child goal
  • Goal Metric: This is the metric used for creating the goal
  • Goal Owner: This field should contain the sales member responsible for the goal
  • Manager: This field should contain the name of the manager of the sales member to whom this goal will be rolled up
  • Fiscal Period: This is the period for which the goal is defined
  • Fiscal Year: This is the year for which the goal is defined
  • From: This is the date from which the goal is defined
  • To: This is the date to which the goal is defined
  • Target: This is the target defined in the goal; for the sake of this example, since we are using Goal Metric as Revenue, the target revenue will be added

This way, we can configure the goals for each of the users. In the previous step, we used Goal Metric as the Revenue. Therefore, as and when the sales manager closes any Opportunity as won, the actual revenue defined in the opportunity will be added to the target that the sales member has already achieved.

4. Let's now talk about the self-evaluation of targets by the sales manager:

Dynamics CRM provides an out-of-box sales member dashboard, which provides several insights to the sales manager as to how the member has performed so far. For navigating the Sales Manager dashboard, navigate to Sales | Dashboards | Sales Activity Dashboard. The following is a screenshot of the dashboard, along with the information it represents:

• • Goals Progress: This is a quarter-based performance of the sales manager against the goals that have been set up. As you can see in the preceding screenshot, the orange bar represents the revenue of opportunities that are in progress, and the blue bar represents the revenue of the won opportunities. The blue and white circles represents the target set.
  • Open Leads: This represents all the open leads in the system.
  • Opportunities Pipeline by Sales Stage: Out of the box, a Dynamics CRM opportunity can be in one of the following stages: Qualify, Propose, Develop, and Close. The chart shows the distribution of revenue present in these open opportunities in the stage category:

• • Sales Leaderboard: The chart shows a comparison of how different sales members are performing with respect to each other. The bar represents the sum of all the won opportunities of that sales member.
  • Open Opportunities: This is a view of all the open opportunities present in the system:

• • My Activities: This is a list of all the activities owned by the user.

5. Sales Manager Overview: As in a real-life scenario, all of the goals individually owned by the sales manager cascade to the sales manager. Dynamics CRM also provides a similar feature in which the goals owned by each user are cascaded to their manager. Once a sales manager logs into the system, he/she can navigate to Sales|Dashboard|Sales Management to understand how his/her team is performing. The following screenshot shows the dashboard, along with a summary of what the view represents:

• Sales Pipeline: This chart provides a distribution of the revenue present in the open opportunities in terms of their stage category.
• Actual Revenue by Month: This is a monthly analysis of the summation of the revenue earned in all the won opportunities.
• Opportunities by Close Probability per Rep: This is a revenue comparison of how each sales member is performing. For each sales member, the bar plots the Actual Revenue in terms of different opportunity stages.
• Top Open Opportunities: These are the top open opportunities in terms of their revenue.

  Scenario 3

  Acme Ltd has been using Excel files to manage their sales contacts, and they now wish to import their contacts (essential fields) into Dynamics CRM in one go. Dynamics CRM provides out-of-box data import files for this purpose.

  1. The following is the Excel file that the Acme Ltd Sales team wants to import into the Dynamics CRM contacts:
  

  The essential fields that Acme Ltd wants to initially import are as follows:

  • • First Name: This is the first name of the contact
    • Last Name: This is the last name of the contact
    • Company: This is the company to which the contact belongs
    • Email: This is the email for communicating with the contact
    • Address 1: City: This is the city where the contact is based
    • Address1: Region: This is the country where the contact is based
  2. Once the import file is ready, the next step is to start the import process. Navigate to Sales|Contacts:
  

  The user has now navigated to the Contact grid in Dynamics CRM. There are a lot of buttons available on top of the ribbon, one of which is the Import Data button. Click on it to start the import process:

  
  3. Mention the location of the file in the first step:
  
  Note: Only the following file formats are supported: XML Spreadsheet 2003 (.xml), .csv, .txt, .xlsx, and .zip.
  4. In the next step, the review summary is presented by Dynamics CRM. Review the details and click Next to continue the import process:
  

  Expanding Delimiter Settings will give options to change the delimiter used in your import file:

  

  If you do not have Field delimiter or Data delimiter, you can keep the default settings and continue with the import process.

  5. The next step involves the selection of a data map for your import process. The data map is a mapping between the file to be imported and the field name in Dynamics CRM. Data maps can be saved for usage later. For the current import, Select the default option (automatic mapping), and continue the import process by clicking Next:
  
  6. If Dynamics CRM is not able to map the entity type, the user needs to map the field type, and click on Next:
  

  The data fields need to be mapped to the entity field types in Dynamics CRM. Fields that are not mapped by the system need to be mapped by the user. One of the fields that need to be mapped is Account Lookup, as follows:

  

  Once all of the fields are mapped, the screen will look like the following:

  

  Click on Next to continue the data import process:

  7. There will be the Review Data summary screen, which can be continued by clicking Next. Following the Review Data summary will be the screen for Reviewing settings and Import Data:
  
  Note: In case you wish to use the data map again for future imports, the Data Map Name (optional) field needs to be filled in here. This will avoid the need to map the entity and fields on every import.

  Click on Submit to submit the data for importing.

  8. The data is submitted for import, and you will be presented with the screen to check the status of your data import:
  

  Click on Imports to check the details of data import:

  

  All three contacts are now completely imported.

  9. Navigating to the contacts grid in Dynamics CRM, you will be able to locate all of the imported contacts:
  

  The preceding scenario explains the process for three contacts. In a real-world scenario, there will be a number of contacts to be imported, in hundreds or thousands, when the data import feature should be used.