Dynamics 365 Business Central: CRM Part 7- Sales Cycles

Dynamics 365 Business Central: CRM Part 7 - Sales Cycles

Hey, everyone, we're going to talk about sales cycles in this video. Sales cycles are like the driver of opportunities. An opportunity will contain a sales cycle. You have to find the sales cycle according to how you're going to progress in closing the deal.

It's very important when you start an opportunity you select the proper sales cycle because that will indicate the steps or the tasks that you actually need to go through in order to close the opportunity and turn the lead into a customer. It has other things like calculating the – calculation of value, probability of success, statistical measurements, etc, and it drives tasks like we did see in previous videos. Let's take a quick look at the sales cycle.

Okay, let's talk a little bit about sales cycle. We go into Sales Cycle. Like I said before, this is really critical to managing your sales process. We're going to go ahead and create a new sales cycle. I'm going to say this is new-small, so it's a small customer and new sales cycle, small new customer.

Here, the Probability Calculation actually is telling you how likely it is that we will close this account. As it's moving in the sales cycle, you can set up how much the chances go up. First sales cycle could be 10%, and the next one could be 30%, and then it's just multiplying up the likelihoods, or it could be adding it up, or you could just say that it's a fixed value, the chances of success, or how much you have completed of the sales cycles. I'm going to just say Chances of Success as my calculation for probability.

Then I go in here and I want to create two stages. I'll do stage Number One, which is going to be a qualification, qualify. Let's say it's 10%. Our Chances of Success is going to be 10%. Now, here is where we actually connect this to an activity. I could set up activities that go in here for qualification.

I'm going to do that. I'll just create a new one just to show how we actually do that. We'll call it qualify. The type of activity here could be a meeting or phone call. I'm just going to set it up as phone call, call leads to qualify.

Priority, we'll just put that as Normal. We'll give ourselves three days to finish this. Actually, I'm just going to have this as the activity for the sales cycles. I'm not going to create it for a second one because I think you get the picture.

For the second one, we'll just say send quote if the person, yeah, I want to go ahead and buy this. Let's say, you send out a mailer and you follow up with a phone call. This is qualify. If by qualification they say, yeah, we're interested, you send the quote to them. Then let's say that's 35% Chances of Success.

Actually, let's create an activity log for this as well, why not, quote. You can tie this to a quote in the system. I'm going to do that next, but for right now, we're just going to have Type, nothing, send quote, so it's just a task. Priority is still normal. That should just be immediate, one day.

Finally, we have the third, we have quote accepted. We don't need to have the third stage in here. I think after this, you would just go ahead and say won or lost. I'm going to skip that just to qualify and send quote. Let's go ahead and just delete that, yeah.

Alright, I have my sales cycles for this lead. Also, I can allow to skip. I'm going to allow to skip the qualify let's say if they call us. We don't have to qualify them; they're already qualified. Then I just go straight to two and I send the quote.

Alright, I close this out and get out of here. Let me go ahead and go into Salesperson people and into Peter Saddow. I'm going to go ahead and, let me see, go into Opportunities. Here are all my opportunities from before. I'm going to create a new one.

I just Enter to get a new one and let's say a small lead. I pick the contact. It's going to be let's go ahead and pick Toby. Here I can go ahead and select the sales cycle I'm going to change the Sales Cycle to New Small right here. The salesperson obviously is going to be Peter Saddow.

This is not connected to a campaign; this is just an opportunity that got created on the fly. Now, I can go ahead and, let me just see, close these out. Pass on notifications, that's fine. It asks me, “Do you want to activate the first stage for this opportunity,” Yes. Now, go ahead and do that.

Now, I have here small lead. It's not started. I was expecting it – okay, it goes into Current Sales Cycle One, which is great. I can just go ahead and open this up and see where it's at. We have 10% probability of closing this. It's in Sales Cycle One. Everything is as expected.

If I take a look at the tasks, I see I have a phone call to qualify this task. I can go ahead and close that out and keep going. It just updated to the next step and then close it out as won or lost. That's how you can use the sales cycles to connect them to opportunities and actually move your sale along.