Keep your team proactive!

Mail call! This month, our CRM mailbag is full of common Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM automation questions. 

I love this stuff. Let’s take a look:

Q: We currently have a homegrown customer service CRM application that we are hoping to get rid of once we get Dynamics 365. In our current system, we have a lot of automatic emails that go out to customers at certain stages of interaction. We really like that. However, these have historically taken a lot of time to develop and cost a lot of money. We don’t want to end up in the same position again having to rely completely on outside help.
– OhMercyMe

No need to worry. One of the exciting things about Dynamics 365 is that a lot of the administrative functions are easy to use without much technical knowledge or experience.

Setting up an email to automatically trigger is pretty simple and does not require any code. In fact, you can task another user with making sure the template looks good and you can reference that template in your workflow rule to ‘send email when customer purchases product.’

Give it a shot. We’re here if you need help or have a specific follow up question.

We’re in the insurance industry and have to deal with a lot of renewal dates and want our salespeople to start working on these different kinds of renewals 30, 60, and 90 days prior to the end. Is this possible to manage with Dynamics 365 or would we need to get an insurance- or contract-specific solution? 
– FraudFighter75

We’ve seen a lot of this type of automation put in place, and these kinds of automations can be really powerful.

You can have the system automatically schedule tasks and phone calls for your sales people based on the contract type 30/60/90 days ahead of time.

You may also want to consider pairing up some contract renewal dashboards for your sales team so that they see that information in real time in CRM as well as via their calendar.

And even if you aren’t in a contract business, if you have repeat orders at regular times, you might want to set up reminders so your sales team can stay on top of those things.

This helps your team use CRM as a proactive tool and stay out in front of opportunities.

We are a tire distribution company in the midwest and we deal with not only end users, but a lot of storefronts that are national chains. Each quarter we have accounting run a report for us totalling the dollars sold to each chain and then have them return this to us. All of the information is in CRM, is there any way to see this total dollar value just by looking at a headquarters or parent record? There’s gotta be a way to do it. 
– BurningRubberRob

It definitely seems inefficient to be waiting for the accounting department every time you need some totals done for you.

Luckily, one of the best things about CRM—especially if you have it integrated with accounting or other systems—is that it streamlines your ability to get information like this.

You can accomplish what you want several ways in CRM:

1. On a dashboard
2. On a report
3. (this one’s my favorite) is to create what’s called a Roll-Up field and take the values of opportunities and ‘roll them up’ to the account level within a Headquarters Total field.

Give us a shout if you need help with this!

That’s it for this CRM mailbag. Thanks for joining us, and hopefully we’ll see you next month for some more CRM questions and answers.

If you have questions, please send them to us. We’re always happy to help out, and we might even feature your question in a future episode!

High-value, low-cost, low-effort automation

CRM is most valuable when using automation tools that keep your sales, service, accounting, and management teams informed and proactive.

If you aren’t using Microsoft Dynamics 365 to automate any of your business processes or set reminders for your team, you aren’t maximizing the value of your CRM investment!

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Productivity Bundles by Azamba include add-ons, automations, customizations, and solutions designed to augment and enhance your Dynamics 365 system. Your CRM will be more powerful and more efficient—and so will your team!

Our selection of add-ons and bundles is constantly growing, and we build them based on customer feedback and requests. If we don’t have something yet, we’ll build it for you!