For Dynamics 365 sales enterprise and premium licensed users, Microsoft ships the first party app Sales Hub. This app is configured with several core sales and premium features to help customers get started quickly.
Customers have the flexibility of configuring the first party Sales Hub app and the option to create custom apps. The goal of this post is to offer guidance for a healthy application strategy by highlighting the benefits of the Sales Hub app, addressing the historical concerns of using first party components and by offering nuanced recommendations.
What does Sales Hub offer?
Sales Hub app has a modern and interactive interface, designed to simplify day-to-day sales activities. It shows all the vital information in one place and its focus is on the key activities that require attention. Sales Hub is based on the Unified Interface framework, which is adaptable and accessible and renders content according to the device it runs on. By using the app, customers get value quickly.
The app focuses on enabling sales professionals to harness the power of data and intelligence which will help them to forecast, compare annual projections, and measure performance using predictive scoring. Sellers can collaborate using Teams from within Dynamics 365 to accelerate their pipeline, while managers can track team performance and provide coaching to increase customer satisfaction.
Sales Hub app is delivered with settings modules that allow administrators to configure the application and also to configure the behavior of custom model driven apps using sales entities or functionality. e.g., configuring lead qualification, configuring opportunity closing, configuring products and forecasts. With Sales Hub app settings, sales managers, sequence managers and can light up and configure the desired premium features - sales enterprise customers have access to premium features at limited capacity starting with Jan 2022.
To ensure all customers can benefit from the new and innovative Dynamics 365 Sales capabilities including premium features, Sales Hub will be available and preinstalled in all existing and new environments for sales enterprise and premium licensed customers with 2022 release wave 1. If the app is already installed, there will be no changes, if not, the app will be installed and set to be available only to users with specific security roles. Please see the release notes for more details.
Releases and first-party components from Microsoft
Through feedback from customers and partners we have understood one of the primary concerns when using Sales Hub app and first-party components is the risk of having customizations overwritten by Microsoft weekly updates.
Microsoft ship updates to the service weekly including bug fixes, performance improvements and even new features (subject to Admin enablement). Our model is to not ship UI disruptive updates that are changing the application behavior in weekly updates. If an update changing the application behavior significantly is shipped, it sits behind a flag that an administrator can enable for an instance.
For Release waves this is different. During the early access period, customers should expect their application behavior and interface to be enhanced with new features that will allow them to innovate and transform their business. Therefore, it’s important for all customers to test and validate their applications and core use cases on the new build. With the hundreds of new features delivered with the release waves the platform evolves and grows, thus allowing customers to develop and differentiate their business from the competition.
Weekly updates from Microsoft overriding customer layering and customizations should be seen as exceptional. It is not the strategy nor the model.
We recommend that our customers and partners base their strategy according to our model, no exceptions.
Advantages of Sales Hub app vs custom apps
Before choosing to implement custom apps exclusively, it is important to evaluate the key differences between the two. Most of the Sales Hub advantages apply to any first party app.
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OOB Sales Hub
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Custom App
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Advantages
- Faster Time to value classic sales roles based on our evaluation and market best practices on how a typical salesperson operates
- Head start in terms of navigation, entities, forms and views.
- Maintained by Microsoft, OOB application available as the default UI/UX experience when purchasing Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise.
- Broad customization capabilities.
- Benefit from faster adoption of new features.
- Benefit from the functional and performance testing Microsoft is running for first party apps.
- Native site map integration with Sales related features such as Sales Insights, Sales Accelerator, Forecasting and App Settings.
Disadvantages
Might include elements the customer will not use -customization required to hide these
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Advantages
- Full control of the navigation and UX
- For unique and specific needs, it can be quicker to create a new app versus customizing the Sales Hub
Disadvantages
Implement app from scratch, slower start.
Customer is solely responsible for maintaining the app.
Responsible for performance testing, not seeing the benefit from Microsoft’s own functional and performance testing.
Some of the newer features are not available to be included in a custom app straightaway – they could become available with the next waves.
Additional effort might be needed to implement and adopt new features and controls.
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Configuration capabilities of Sales Hub
As an administrator or customizer, you can create a custom look and feel (a theme), easily customize entities, dashboards, forms, views, charts, and business processes included in the Sales Hub application by using the app designer and thus without having to write any code. You can embed custom pages, Power Components Framework (PCF) controls or Power BI dashboards to further enhance and deliver on your specific requirements.
Sales Hub can be tailored to different sales personas by using security mechanisms to control access to data and to configure various miscellaneous tasks and areas of the system. With security roles, access can be controlled for many components such as entities, columns, forms, dashboards, email templates and business process flows, and tasks such as access to audit, override quote or opportunity pricing, export to Excel or generate documents and more. e.g., if the current user’s security role only has access to leads, accounts, and contacts then these are the only entities that the app will display for this user.
By using the configuration and security available tools, Sales Hub app can cater to multiple sales personas without the need to create a custom app.
When it is recommended to create a custom app instead of configuring Sales Hub
Every sales implementation has unique aspects and considerations that will influence the application strategy.
In general, for sales uses cases where we would require accounts, contacts or lead to quote processes or digital selling or managing forecasts, the recommendation is to leverage the readily available Sales Hub app, and configure it as needed.
When analyzing the business requirements for an app, it is important to evaluate the roles of future application users. For traditional sales roles, the recommendation is to leverage the Sales Hub app, while for non-traditional sales roles such as an app for executives which contains a Power BI dashboard and a handful of entities, or an app for an audit supervisor who only needs to see the won opportunities, a custom app is the recommended approach.
When there are requirements to combine specific components and processes from two or more first party apps such as Sales Hub and Customer Service Hub, it is important to assess which application has more ‘weight’ and to consider the different types of personas it should cater:
- For a salesperson who needs to access all the sales module components and the customer assets entity from customer service module, it is recommended to configure Sales Hub app to include this entity
- For a customer service manager who needs to have access to the case management module and to the opportunities pipeline, it is recommended to configure the Customer Service Hub app to include the opportunity
- For a very customized sales process where the OOB sales module is not used, many custom entities are created and the customer wants to remove all or many of the OOB components, a custom app is recommended
Also, when customers need to build an XRM solution that is neither sales nor customer service and there is a need to keep the application lean without many of the OOB first party components, a custom app is recommended as well.
Closing remarks
When defining your application strategy, it is important to consider:
- Time to value for traditional seller roles
- Personas for which we are building the application
- Sales Hub is configurable - a customized Sales Hub app could cater to multiple sales use cases while more lean and smaller scoped custom apps can be created to deliver on very specific needs e.g., a pixel perfect canvas app needed for top executives.
- We can combine first party apps such as Sales Hub with custom model driven apps, canvas apps or custom pages.
- Overall effort in creating and maintaining the app(s) and balancing effort with the benefits of the selected strategy.
- Some OOB features might not be readily available to leverage in a custom app.
Finally, our recommendation is to use the first party app Sales Hub for the bulk of your sales enterprise use cases to fully benefit from your investment. We would like to hear from the community about what we can improve for customers to adopt a Sales Hub configuration model more broadly. Don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments!
Author
- Corina Balan (Senior Program Manager)
