Why Business Central CRM is a real CRM

It has always surprise me how Dynamics NAV features are minimized and now Business Central saying that it is an SMB (Small Medium Business) product.

For example, it is said that there are CRMs and that the one with NAV / BC is a light version of a full-fledged CRM.

According to a Microsoft definition, a CRM must do the following:

1. Centralize customer information
2. Automate marketing interactions
3. Provide business intelligence
4. Facilitate communications
5. Track sales opportunities
6. Allow analyze data
7. Allow a responsive customer service

Let's start with the capabilities of the product:

Contact management - Allows you to manage business or person contacts for clients, suppliers or banks.

Segments - It allows to segment the contacts by means of specific criteria based on the profiles, charges, types of company, etc. and once the segments are created, start the sales efforts.

Interactions - Allows you to interact with contacts through email, letters, fax, telephone, meetings, etc. registering all these interactions in the system.

Campaigns - Create campaigns to identify, attract or retain customers. Each campaign consists of several activities that must be carried out by vendors or teams within the system.

Opportunities - You can manage sales opportunities by giving them a weight and associating them with sellers, so you can follow up through cycles or stages of sale.

Now let's see a bit how the CRM is defined in Business Central.

Initially they must be defined:

• Territories

• Salespersons

• Languages
• Types of correspondence
• Salutations

• Business relations

• Industry groups

• Job Responsibilities

• Organization Level

• Profile Questionnaires

As can be seen, there are several topics to deal with the consultant in order to start with the configuration of the module.

With this initial configuration, we can move on to make decisions regarding:

• Interactions
• The respective interaction templates
• Segments
• Sales cycles

• Stages of sales cycles

Now let's start with the idea

To use the system, we must establish a sales cycle, let's analyze one of the ones that come by default. First contact Large accounts

The sales cycle is divided into 7 steps, which are detailed in the previous image. We can see that it has an opportunity advance indicator which allows creating the sales pipeline, the activity codes that allow defining which documentation or tasks must be performed for each stage

If it is possible to skip a stage and the formula of days to be controlling the advances by time

How can someone use sales?

Normally, the sales area has a lack of information in sales processes since they do not have a strategy to follow or a methodology that allows them to know where they are standing when attacking a prospect. With sales cycles, the seller must follow said methodology and this information will be registered in the system allowing his boss to validate and evaluate his performance.

This also allows to establish different cycles for different types of businesses, in the demo data it establishes first contact or already existing and if it is large or small, nevertheless, we can create specialized sales cycles in the business line such as recurrent, periodic sales, launch of new products, sale of balances, etc.

For each step of the sales cycles we can add documentation and tasks, request that quotes be generated or skip steps if necessary.

Now the next step that we will review, the campaigns

The campaigns allow generating sales efforts aimed at a certain market or fixed goal, in demo data we have several examples

Each campaign can have prices and / or discounts assigned, a temporality and most important of all, one or several segments.

What is a segment?

Any sales person knows that when designing a sales effort, you must have a target market. In Business Central you have the possibility of controlling contacts (prospects) that may or may not belong to companies

And each of these contacts may have assigned one or several questionnaires

As well as business relationships or industry types.

A segment must be generated for the campaigns which will allow us to add contacts that can be recipients of the tasks defined in the sales cycles for the selected campaign

Example of a criteria used to segment contacts

A questionnaire to segment allows defining questions or values ??that can be answered or qualified to be able to qualify a prospect based on measurable issues defined in a standard manner for the entire company.

Once the segments in the campaigns have been defined, the next step would be to initiate communication with said prospects to offer them the desired good or service through written communication via email or print.

If the contact gives a positive answer, we can start an opportunity

At each opportunity, a contact is defined, the vendor is assigned, the value of the opportunity or sale, the probability of closure is reached, and the stages of the sales cycles are activated.

With this, we can start the works like send a quote or create an interaction with the prospect

These interactions are assigned to a salesperson or sales team to be performed at a defined date and time. The tracking can be carried out within Business Central or through integration with Outlook.

A sale quote can be created by a single click on the application

We add the products, quantities and prices

With the campaign and opportunity data

With this, we can see the sales pipeline