Though it is true that every business handles its sales funnel a little differently, in broad strokes, an opportunity will be nurtured until it is either lost (if the prospect decides not to buy) or until they are ready to see a quote. Within CRM, the quote is both an extension of the Opportunity stage and a new record itself. So first we’ll talk about creating a quote from an opportunity, making a quote from scratch if you don’t have an associated opportunity, revising the quote, and then converting it into an order (if you handle orders in your CRM).

Dynamics 365 Sales offers duplicate detection for your account and contact records. Duplicate detection works by flagging fields with identical unique values (last names, email addresses, phone numbers, company names, etc.—info that is unlikely to be common) across several records. From there, you can decide how to handle these overlaps.

Until recently, though, only account and contact records had duplicate detection. But no longer! Now you can create custom duplicate detection rules for other record types. And the first place we ran to implement these rules was for leads, which, as all sales and marketing individuals know, is perhaps the messiest entity in a CRM, due to their impermanent nature. After all, they are potential customers at the beginning of the sales funnel. Some of them work out, and lots don’t.

This is part 2 of a series exploring the tools and records that guide you along the sales process within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales CRM system. In part 1, we covered Leads and their role in the sales process and within the system. If you haven’t read that part yet, you can catch up here: Exploring the sales process in Dynamics 365 Sales: Starting with Leads.