How the sales process works in Dynamics Sales
Microsoft have designed the sales system in Dynamics to follow the traditional sales process from lead to invoice.
There is flexibility and you can join the process mid-way or omit stages. You can also integrate 3rd party sales or finance systems in to the system.
Creating Quotes in Dynamics
A quote outlines the price a seller is willing to charge a buyer for goods or services. It serves as a formal offer, allowing the buyer to understand the costs involved before deciding whether to proceed with the purchase.
Creating a quote from an opportunity in Dynamics
First open the opportunity you wish to create an order from
Click New Quote and you’ll open a quote page with the details completed
If you added any products to the opportunity, these will be added to the quote
Creating a quote without using an opportunity
In the Quotes section of Dynamics Sales, choose +New and complete the customer and product details
Adding products to quotes
Manually
Select +Add Product from the Products subgrid in your quote and
- Choose a product
- Add a unit
- Add the quantity
From an opportunity
The products from your opportunity will be added automatically. If you need to add the products from the opportunity to the quote again, open the Opportunity and select Get Products. You can also use this button to add products from other opportunities – just click the button and choose the opportunity you wish to copy its products from.
Enhanced
This method shows your products in an easy to search grid which allows you to search and select products much faster. You’ll need to enable the enhanced experience to use this method
Click +Add Product as before, but now you’ll see a new look product grid. All on one screen you can
- Search for a product
- Choose a unit
- Specify a quantity
- Add the product to the quote
- All this without moving between screens
AMS Grid
Our AMS Grid product takes the functionality of the enhanced grid further. The AMS grid is a fast-to-use grid which can be customised for all types of data types including products. It’s a proven way of quickly searching for and editing thousands of records with no performance loss.
Sending a Quote
When your quote is finished, you’ll want to send it to your potential customer. Before you can send it, you must change its status from Draft to Active. To activate a quote, just click the Activate Quote button from the command bar
Make a Word document of a quote
From the command bar, select Word Templates, then choose an appropriate template
Make a PDF of a Quote
From the command bar, select Export to PDF
From this new window, choose the template you wish to use, check the preview. The PDF is now ready to be used. You can
- Save to Dynamics
- Or download the PDF of the quote
Create a sophisticated quotes using a third party plugin
For many of our customers we recommend mscrm-addons’ DocumentsCorePack. This plugin enhances the built in quote document templates and features. It improves on the standard functionality
- More flexible editing and layout
- Electronic signatures
- Integration with Sharepoint
- A greater choice of related fields to add to your quote
- Flexible post-generation automation options
- If you want to see it in action, ask us and we’ll show you a demo
How to revise a quote in Dynamics
To change any details in a quote, it’s not as simple as opening the quote and editing it. You cannot edit an active quote.
To edit a quote you must create a revision, not edit the original. This is intentional design from Microsoft, so that changes are tracked using version numbers so you and your customer agree on the contents of each quote in time.
Press the Revise button in the command bar to create a new draft version of the quote. You’ll see a new Revision ID, showing that a new version has been created and giving it an incremented version number.
Creating Orders in Dynamics
When you and your customer are agreed, it’s time to create an order. The order is the agreement to fulfil the goods or services described in the quote.
There’s two ways of creating an order in Dynamics
Create an order from a quote
From the version of the active quote you have agreed on, click Create Order in the command bar
You can add a note and close the corresponding opportunity if you like.
When you create an order, the corresponding quote cannot be modified
If the quote was lost, it’s good practice to close it, so that you have a record for your business intelligence reports in the future.
Create an order without a quote
Some customers will know what they want and have pre-agreed the price with you. You can set up an order directly
- Go to the Orders section of Dynamics
- Click New
- Complete your order details
- Because you haven’t got the details from the opportunity or the quote, you’ll have to enter all the customer details in the order.
- You can enter the shipping and billing addresses manually or you can select Look Up Address from the command bar to choose one of the company’s addresses
Next steps with orders
- You can create a Word document of the order. Select Word Templates from the command bar
- You can cancel the order, if the customer wishes. Click Cancel Order from the command bar.
- To mark the order as fulfilled, click Fulfill Order from the command bar.
Can you undo a cancelled order?
Once an order is marked as Cancelled, the order becomes read only and can’t be amended or reinstated by a user. To undo a cancelled order in Dynamics, you’ll need to change the status from Canceled to Pending. You can’t make this change with any of the out of the box features, so you’ll need to create a workflow to change the status from Canceled to Pending.
Invoices
You can create an invoice from an order, either when it has been fulfilled or when it was first created
- To create the invoice, click Create Invoice when you’re viewing the sales order. The customer and product details from the order are added to a new invoice.
- You can add or remove items from the invoice at this point
- When your customer pays the invoice, you can mark it as either completed or partially paid. To do this, click the Invoice Paid button in the command bar
- Many customers like to use a separate accounts package like Xero to manage invoices and other financial data. You can integrate Dynamics and Xero with this plugin
Can I modify the sales process?
Many users create Business Process Flows in each section of the system. These flows control the stages which users go through to complete data for each section. For instance, a Business Process Flow could split the lead creation process into 4 areas, each of which must be completed before user can move to the next area and move the lead to an opportunity.
