Exploring the sales process in Dynamics 365 Sales: Starting with Leads

In Dynamics 365 Sales, the Leads entity is a sort of holding place for potential customers. Leads are different and distinct from Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities, yet we can make associations between them. But why do we make a distinction between leads, opportunities, and contacts?

It’s clear that not all leads pan out—not everyone we engage with will end up being our customer. And we need a way within the system to make a distinction between these tentative pursuits and the more qualified, promising potential clients or landed customers. Leads are a simple way to keep your database clean because they are the liminal space, kept separate and distinct from other parts of the system. They are less permanent because we are not sure if they will be your client or not yet; however, with the click of a button, you can tell the system to convert the lead’s information into things like opportunities, contacts, and even accounts, which will remain in the system. All of this requires no additional data entry.

So in this blog, we’ll discuss leads within the system: how we get them there, what we do with them, and also how we move them from a lead into the next step of the sales funnel—an opportunity. In future blogs, we will discuss the sales process beyond this step.

Creating a lead

Leads can come into your business in many ways, and it’s important to make the most of every opportunity that arises. You can manually create leads (for instances such as word-of-mouth referrals) or capture them through other methods like embedding forms on a D365 landing page, marketing emails, and beyond. You can even have the system automatically create leads from external sources, and you can import leads via an Excel file—for both of these options, Syvantis is happy to help you!

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When you import leads or have them created automatically, you identify the required fields that must be present before a lead is created. This may include a contact method, such as email or phone number, and even a name for the lead—whatever you want to include, we can customize in D365. Creating a lead manually is a simple process, too: From the Lead List, select “New” in the top navigation ribbon, and then enter all your data on the lead capture page. Again, this form can be customized to fit your specific needs like the rest of Dynamics. Looking at this out-of-the-box standard one, it includes things like the lead topic, contact information, company information, the timeline, and the business process flow. After whatever mandatory information you establish has been entered, you save and then have your lead created! You’ll always be able to add more data after it is created, but remember you want enough required data to be able to understand the lead’s desires and to contact the lead, without going overboard on data gathering unnecessary bits of info.

Lead record

Let’s dig into the main elements that we will see in a standard out-of-the-box lead record. 

• Topic: The topic should be sufficiently specific to distinguish this lead from others.
• Contact information: First and last name is usually recommended when entering leads. A job title, as shown in the example image, is not required. However, if that information is known, it can be entered to paint a better picture of the
• Company information: Company information like the name, website, industry, etc. may be entered to help the salesperson anticipate or understand the lead’s needs and desires. In the standard out-of-the-box version, the company name is required.
• Lead Source: The Lead Source is helpful to know – this can help us identify where great and not-so-great leads are coming from, and we can potentially funnel resources toward or away from certain lead-gathering methods. Was the lead drawn to us via an advertisement? Word of mouth? Our website? Here’s another reminder that these lead sources, like so much in Dynamics, is customizable to meet your needs. Do you never go to trade shows? That’s fine! We can remove that option from this list so your salespeople don’t see it as an option.
• Rating: How immediate is this lead, and how receptive are they to our immediate contact? After all, when you contact a lead is important – you don’t want to talk to them too early or too late, lest they become annoyed or you miss your chance with them. Are they hot – aka we should get into contact with them right away and things may move quickly toward qualification? Are they warm, indicating that they are mildly interested, but we don’t have to rush to reach out to them? Or are they cold, or relatively uninterested in us?

• Timeline: The timeline acts as a history of interactions between all business stakeholders at your business—from marketers to sales representatives, account managers to customer service teams. Your activities show here, but so do other people’s activities – as you will see in a moment when we check out an example timeline. So you can see all the tracked emails, calls, and other communication that your whole team has engaged in with this lead.

• Business Process Flow: This is a tool in CRM to help guide your salespeople through a process that is tied to your management of records in the system. This is the out-of-the-box Lead to Opportunity Sales Business Process Flow, and it spans the Lead record, the opportunity record (once a lead is qualified), and then into proposals and quoting, and then finally closing a lead. Though it is not right for every business, process flows can be an incredibly useful element in CRM that you can customize to match your unique business processes. You may really benefit from them if you have a tight sales process or policies, have a lot of entry-level salespeople you want to align processes for, you want to standardize the customer experience, or you have processes that span multiple teams who all need to input data into the same records.

Qualifying a lead

When you’ve nurtured your lead and verified that you have a real chance of making a sale with them, or if they are ready to talk pricing quotes, then you’re ready to qualify the lead. In the standard business process flow shown in the example images, the first step of the flow is dedicated to the lead stage of the sales pipeline.

To qualify the lead, your salesperson will want to ensure the required information is present within the lead form and within the business process stage. What is “required” will be determined by your own business, but in this example, this stage requires things like an estimated budget, a timeframe, and identifying the decision maker at the company.

From there, qualifying a lead is as simple as clicking the “Qualify” action in the top navigation ribbon. From there, the system converts the lead into an opportunity, and can also (depending on how you configure the system) create connected contact and account records using that same data. All of this happens without you having to add any additional information to the system.

After qualifying a lead, you will notice several changes to the page without you doing anything else. First, you will be in the Opportunity record. (The Lead record is still in the system—we’ve just moved away from it.) You’ll also notice in the business process flow, you’ve progressed to the next stage, in this case from “Qualify” to “Develop.” In the top right, you’ll see the account it the opportunity is connected to (if applicable), and a contact has been created. These two are actually hyperlinks that send you straight to those records.

Now, Opportunities we will save for another day, but already we can see the value of using these various entities within the system to ease your sales process, keep leads separate from more promising opportunities in the system, and reduce data entry.

Dynamics 365 Sales is a great, well-rounded sales management solution for businesses of all sizes. Connecting, automating, and streamlining your sales pipeline is a simple, yet effective way to make strides toward business growth. And whether you’ve already integrated Dynamics 365 Sales into your sales process, or you’re now thinking about adding it into your business app stack, there are countless ways to make it work for your business needs.

Head over to the next blog in this series, which will continue on to discuss the Opportunities stage of the sales funnel.