Understanding Leads in Dynamics 365 Sales

Leads are designed to act as a holding area for potential customers. Not every prospect will ultimately become a customer, so keeping prospects as leads helps keep your CRM database organized. Once you decide that a lead represents a genuine sales opportunity, you can qualify it and carry its information forward into the next stages of your sales process. When a lead is qualified, its information can be used to create related account and contact records without requiring you to reenter the same data. Qualification therefore represents an intentional step from identifying and nurturing a potential customer toward pursuing a more concrete sale.

Creating Leads

Leads can enter your business in many different ways. A prospect might find your website, come through a word-of-mouth referral, or be identified through another source. Dynamics 365 Sales gives you several options for getting those prospects into CRM. Leads can be:

• Created manually
• Captured through embedded forms on Dynamics 365 landing pages
• Captured through marketing emails
• Created automatically from external sources through additional configuration
• Imported from an Excel file

When creating a lead manually, you can enter standard information such as the topic, contact details, and company information. A descriptive topic can make different leads easier to identify and manage. Entering complete contact information also becomes valuable later because that information can carry forward when the lead is qualified.

Tracking and Nurturing Leads

A lead record gives your sales team a central place to manage the work involved in nurturing a potential customer. The timeline can capture tracked emails, appointments, and phone calls, and you can add notes manually. This keeps correspondence and other lead-nurturing activities together instead of scattered across different systems or locations. Dynamics 365 can also use a business process flow to guide users through the sales process. This helps teams follow a more consistent approach while working with leads. Like other areas of Dynamics 365, the lead form can be customized for your organization's process. You can change the layout, remove unnecessary columns, or create custom columns to capture information that matters to your business.

Assigning Leads

Dynamics 365 Sales offers additional tools for organizations that want to automate lead assignment. Lead routing is a Sales Insights feature that can automatically route new leads to available salespeople. Organizations can establish conditions sellers must meet to receive leads and route leads to particular sellers or teams. Assignment can also take seller capacity into consideration and use round-robin or load-balancing rules. Leads can still be manually reassigned when needed. Lead routing is associated with Sales Premium or can be available as an add-on for Sales Enterprise licensing.

Qualifying a Lead

Qualification represents an important transition in the sales process. A lead is typically ready to move forward when there is a real chance of making a sale and the conversation is ready to progress toward products, pricing, or a quote. Once the work of nurturing the prospect and establishing trust is complete, you can qualify the lead and continue into the opportunity stage of the sales process. If a lead does not progress, it can instead be closed or disqualified. Closed leads can also be reopened if circumstances change.

Using Field Mapping

Dynamics 365 can carry information between related records through field mapping. This reduces unnecessary data entry and helps preserve important information as a prospect moves through the sales process. Field mapping can also be customized. For example, if your organization creates a custom field that is important to its sales process, an administrator can configure how that information maps to the opportunity. Attribute mappings can be created between tables that have relationships, including records such as contacts, accounts, and cases.

Building a Sales Process That Fits Your Business

Dynamics 365 Sales provides tools for connecting, automating, and streamlining the sales pipeline. Lead forms, business process flows, field mappings, assignment options, and related tools can all help organizations adapt lead management to their specific sales process. By keeping potential customers organized as leads, tracking the activities used to nurture them, and deliberately qualifying the prospects that are ready to move forward, sales teams can maintain cleaner data while creating a smoother transition into opportunities and the rest of the sales process.