Dynamics 365 Business Central: CRM Part 2- Salespeople

Dynamics 365 Business Central: CRM Part 2- Salespeople

Hey, everyone, I just came back from the Taj Mahal. It was really nice. I’m not in India anymore. As you can see, we’re back in front of the whiteboard in New York City, so we’re going to keep going on CRM in Business Central.

Before, I went into contacts, which was the beginning of CRM, but Business Central actually has a really nice CRM. Most people don’t know about that. Some people call it contact management because it has a lot of contacts, but it’s really a full-fledged customer relationship management. However, it’s hidden, and we’re going to try to uncover it in these areas.

What we’re going to do right now is we have the contact, and that is the main thing in CRM. The contact can be linked to a customer, or a vendor, or a bank, and that’s through a business relation. We have connections here. Now, the contact could also just not be connected at all to anything. It could be just free-flowing out there, and in that case, we could consider it to be a prospect or just a random contact that we got through a tradeshow or something like that.

Now, the way to approach the CRM in Business Central is to go through the salesperson cart. There’s something called salespeople and purchasers. That’s all kept in the same cart, being symmetric. A purchaser goes in the vendor, and a salesperson goes in the customer. Microsoft Business Central is just like the Taj Mahal, symmetrical. They put that into one table. We can argue whether that was a great idea or not, but it is what is.

Anyways, so the salesperson is linked to the contact. You can actually look at the contacts of the salesperson, and those contacts could be customers or not customers. Then you can see all of the contacts that the salesperson interacts with. From there, from the salesperson, you could get into other activities like tasks, opportunities, campaigns, and stuff like that. Let’s go ahead and zoom in on the salesperson in the next video and see what options we have from that cart.

Okay, so since we’re actually looking at the CRM aspect of this, I want to just jump right away into the salespeople cart. If I go into salesperson, you can see this, salespeople. It’s a little bit hidden here, so it’s Salespeople/Purchasers. If you go into this one, you’re going to see all the salespeople and purchasers in the system. Since Business Central is very symmetrical, you’re going to see that it’s going to combine things. In this case, you have salespeople and purchasers together, but we’re mostly interested in the salespeople.

For a particular salesperson, like Peter Saddow, I can go in there, and I have more options here that are CRM related. It’s not really obvious, but if I go into, for example, Navigate here and into Contacts, I can see all of the sales accounts or the customer accounts that the salesperson has. Actually, from the salesperson, I can see this list, and this would be the beginning of a CRM system. I come from the salesperson angle, and I’m looking at my customers. That would be here in this list.

Also, I can go in and see, for example, tasks that I have. In this case, I don’t have any tasks. Again, we can probably get into that as we get into opportunities and stuff, but you could create tasks for the salesperson here or the salesperson can do that themselves and then be checking those off. Everything is going to congregate into the salesperson cart. There is more things as campaigns, opportunities, interactions, etc., which is definitely going to be important. We also have teams, so we can create a salesperson team and start monitoring things from a team level.

As you’re looking at Business Central, in the beginning, you don’t really think that there is so much in here. Definitely, if you start coming into the salesperson cart and from the salesperson cart into other things, then you’re going to realize that it is actually a pretty deep CRM system inside Business Central, and we will continue the journey as we go on in more videos.