Dynamics 365 Business Central: CRM Part 8 - Contact To A Customer

Dynamics 365 Business Central: CRM Part 8 - Contact to a Customer

Now that we looked at sales cycles, I'm going to dive a little bit deeper into those and see how we can create a quote straight from the sales cycle and link that to the opportunity. As we close the quote, we close the opportunity. Even at the same time, we can convert a contact into a customer. There's a nice synergy there between going all the way from the sales cycles with the contact into a sale where a quote goes into an order and contact goes into a customer. Let's take a look.

Okay, so now we want to go through how the contact can become a customer with a pretty straightforward setup. If I go here into Contacts – and this is a prelude to the opportunities. I'm going to start with just showing you how this works on a quote. I'm going to create a new contact, right here. We'll call it Lots of Mugs, Incorporated. It's a company. I'm just going to fill this out, nothing else. I got the contact in place.

I'll just go out of here, find my contact, Lots of Mugs. It should be right here. Click on that. Go to New and create a sales quote. I can go ahead – and I just have to select a customer template, I'll just pick one of those. That's basically how – it's a format of how you're going to convert the contact to a customer if that happens. I hit OK here.

Then we have a sales quote. I can go ahead and put an item on the sales quote to say I'm going to ship to the main location. Let's say it's going to be 1000 pieces of the coffee mug. Notice here there is no customer number on the quote. There is just a contact with a customer template. This is not a customer yet. I can go ahead then and print this quote and send it over to the prospect. It's a prospect at this moment, not a customer. It has not entered the customer file.

Now, let's say that the prospect says, "Okay, go ahead. I want this order. Ship the coffee mugs to me." I can then go in here, hit Process, Make Order. I make order from the sales quote. It asks me if I want to do that. I say, yes. Then it says, hey, wait a minute, we don't have a customer on this order or this sales quote. Do you want to make the customer? I will go ahead and say, yes.

Right now, it creates a customer, and it converts the sales order – I mean, the sales quote to a sales order. I can go ahead and take a look at that. Now, I see I have – I hit, Show More, here. I have a customer number for Lots of Mugs. That contact just moved over to being a customer.