Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016 overview

Now that we've gone through the history of Microsoft Dynamics CRM and how it evolved during the years, let's get an overview of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2016.

Sales module

The Sales module in Dynamics CRM takes care of the entire sales process and the activities involved in sales. The Sales module has entities such as Contacts, Accounts, Leads, and Opportunity. These entities are used to store the information required in the sales process:

• Account: Account stores the information related to your customers, which can be a company or an organization. It can also contain records of stakeholders, vendors, business partners, or other organizations you interact with.
• Contact: This stores the information related to the people or individuals that are generally your customers or contacts of customers. Contacts are mostly related to a customer. Sometimes, a contact is not linked to any customer. In such cases, they are not related to any account.
• Lead: Leads are the potential customers generated from multiple sources, such as entering them manually, from company website, mails, or from other social media. If the lead is qualified, then they are converted to an opportunity.
• Opportunity: When your customer responds or shows some interest, then your Lead is converted to an Opportunity. An Opportunity can be won or lost.

Sales life cycle

Generally, the sales life cycle starts with Lead generation. A lead is your potential customer. When an individual or a company shows any interest in your product/service and provides some details for further communication, then it is considered a lead:

The salesperson either manually enters the details of the lead into the CRM or captures the details through mails, websites, phone calls, campaigns, and so on. It requires a lead name (first name and last name) and a topic that describes the lead.

After lead creation, the salesperson does multiple activities to convert it to a customer. This can be done in form of appointments, phone calls, and emails to gather more information about the customer. If the customer gives a positive response, then Lead is qualified to an Opportunity. A contact and an account record is created after lead qualification. If the lead is disqualified, the sales process ends.

Once the lead is qualified, the salesperson gives quotes to the customer. Quotes can be revised multiple times until the customer agrees. Once the customer agrees with the quote, the opportunity is won; otherwise, the opportunity is lost and the sales process ends.

After winning an opportunity, an order is placed and an invoice is created after the order is delivered to the customer.