Rules to Better CRM for Users

The Dynamics 365 Release plans provide a snapshot of what Microsoft has been working on in the Dynamics 365 CRM business. You can use it to find out what was recently made generally available, released into public preview, is still being developed and tested, or is no longer developed.

While there is a web app available, Microsoft has now released a CRM mobile app for Apple, Android, and, of course, their own phone OS. It is only for CRM Online and CRM2013 On-Premise.

We used to use the CRM Outlook Client Plugin for tracking emails and appointments in Outlook. With the latest Dynamics update, now we have another choice, the Dynamics 365 Outlook App, which is much lighter than the plugin.

Although you can create a Contact first, it's better to always create the Company first so you don't get orphan Contacts.

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Tip #1: Avoid duplicates - Make sure that there is no existing company before you make the entry.

Tip #2: Generally you should be creating these from leads, as it speeds up the process.

Tip #1: Avoid duplicates - Search to see if the Contact already exists before creating it.

Tip #2: Generally you should be creating these from leads, as it speeds up the process.

You need to know what's in the sales pipeline, and the way to do that is by entering a potential sale and it's value. ** **

Note: In order to enter new Opportunities into CRM, the company the Opportunity belongs to must already exist.

CRM 2013 has a nice way of reducing the amount of work needed to create a new Contact, Account and Opportunity. Simply make a Lead, and all three entities will be created in one go.

The process is:

Once you create an opportunity, you should click the "Add phone call" button to create an activity to call up the client after approximately 1 week. Each time you make this call, you should complete the activity and create a new one to follow up again when appropriate.

The general principle is that you track important emails as per Do you track important emails in CRM?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 allows users to track activities such as appointments, phone calls, emails, etc. This feature can be easily abused by users to record unrelated activities inside CRM. It is difficult sometimes to work out which type of activities should be recorded. These are the types of activities you should track in CRM:

There comes a time when some contacts in your CRM database might just be taking up space and not giving any value. At this point it is best to deactivate them.