While you don't need to panic, you should begin now reviewing and mitigating anything using /xrmservices/2011/organizationdata.svc. Places to look are JavaScript, PowerShell, Power BI, Excel Data Sources, plugins and plugin steps.  

To check customizations within CRM or to export them and check locally, there is a tool called solution checker that makes checking code much faster, with the added benefit of checking for a variety of other possible issues that could range from Low to Critical. 

To run it within a power app solution, go to the Power Apps Portal, create a solution and add all the web resources, plugins and plugin steps from your environment. Then on the solution list, click the ellipses for your newly created solution, choose Solution checker and Run. Once it is complete, you can go to the same location to download the results in an Excel spreadsheet. 

This contains the raw data and a pivot table with the findings grouped by issue severity. The one specific to the ODATA v2 removal is web-avoid-crm2011-service-odata. For web resources, the raw data will direct you to which one needs to be updated and even the line where the issue is located. And for all issues, regardless of severity the raw data also includes mitigation step recommendations. 

Consider adding running the solution checker to your regular solution management process. 

Why a Sales Process?

Without a consistent and reliable sales process, businesses cannot grow and scale. A sales process is a systematic approach to selling a product or service. It involves identifying prospects, qualifying leads, understanding customer needs, addressing objections, and closing deals. A well-defined sales process can help a business streamline its operations, increase efficiency, and drive revenue growth.

In the words of sales expert Jill Konrath, "A well-defined sales process is crucial to driving predictable and repeatable revenue". Similarly, sales strategist Marc Wayshak asserts that "a well-designed sales process ensures that all team members are working in the same direction and increases overall efficiency".

Simply put: if every member of a sales team is free to follow their own process, then your organization cannot improve the process and is not running efficiently.

How to Develop and Manage a Sales Process

Diving Deeper Into Sales Process

There is a large body of knowledge about sales process development. Here are a few resources from C5 Insight to help you along on your journey to a better sales process:

• Video: Rapid Sales Process Design
• Download Sales Process Workbook to accompany the above video
• Book: Revenue Engineering

And, as always, Contact Us at C5 Insight for support in developing an effective sales process include our Rapid CRM-Ready Sales Process Development service.

In fact, employers not offering and requiring use of a CRM solution limit their sales employees’ career options.

Why Is CRM Important?

A CRM solution is an essential tool for any sales representative. It helps to organize and track leads, customer interactions, and sales data, making it easier for reps to close deals and hit their targets.

CRM solution experience on your resume shows potential employers you’re up to date on the latest sales technologies. As a result, many employers view it as a minimum requirement for sales positions, and those without it may struggle to secure a job in this field.

3 Limitations of Not Having a CRM Solution

Consider the limitations – to yourself and your employer – of not using a CRM solution.

1. You lack visibility into customer interactions

A CRM allows reps to see the entire history of interactions with a customer, including emails, calls, and meetings. Without this information, reps may miss important details or inadvertently repeat information, harming customer relationships.

2. It's impossible to track performance and progress

A CRM provides real-time data and analytics, which can help reps identify patterns and trends in their sales. Without this data, reps may have difficulty understanding what's working and not, making it difficult to improve their performance.

3. It's harder to collaborate with your team

A CRM allows reps to share information and insights with their colleagues, which can help to increase overall productivity and performance. Without a CRM, reps may find it difficult to share information and collaborate effectively, leading to siloed teams and a lack of accountability.

Sales reps can quickly become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of data they need to keep track of, resulting in lost opportunities and a decline in performance without the help of a CRM.

Don’t Get Left Behind: Implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

The ability to work with a customer relationship management solution is quickly becoming a job requirement for all but entry-level sales personnel.

Employers who don’t provide their sales reps with a CRM solution risk hurting their employees' careers and the sales team's overall performance.

Looking for more news trends and business advice? Read more of our blogs here.

1. Faster Time-to-Value

When businesses implement modern ERP and CRM systems, they often discover new opportunities for operational efficiency, improved customer experience, and more. That's good news. The bad news is that these and other delays can cause these projects to take months or years longer than anticipated. Delays in ERP can result in the front-end of your business - those that are generating marketing leads, building pipeline, closing deals, and keeping customers happy - without a modern solution for years. A parallel plan can bridge the time-to-benefit gap, enabling businesses to modernize their people, processes, and technology rapidly.

2. Business Transformation: Prioritizing the Customer Experience

In the quest for business transformation, leaders must consider whether to prioritize the back-end (accounting, finance, invoicing, supply chain, operations) or the front-end (customers, prospects, sales, marketing, service). Those that start with the back-end consistently make decision about automating front-end processes using their back-end technology - which consistently results in inefficiencies, steep learning curves, and poor customer experiences. In today's fast-changing business landscape, businesses that prioritize the customer experience and align better to meet their demands are the ones that thrive, adding customers, improving margins, and growing despite disruptive technologies.

3. Improved Data Integration

4. Better Alignment of Business Processes

Here’s where it gets exciting—do you migrate everything (lift-and-shift) or aim higher by conducting an audit and then rebuilding configurations?

We've done plenty of projects using both approaches, but some benefits make the higher cost of a rebuild worth considering. Let's take a look at those together.

6 Benefits of Rebuilding Dynamics 365 Instead of Migrating

1. Cleaner Data

Lift-and-shift means everything comes over as-is, no matter the data's shape.

Clean data is essential to a successful implementation, and taking the time to evaluate and clean up data saves considerable time (and user headaches) down the line!

In one case, we invested more time ironing out data issues after going live than it would have required to address them during the migration process.

Some issues lingered months later and negatively impacted the user experience—all avoidable had they been resolved before going live.

2. Missed Opportunity for Innovation

Strong adoption can result in lower innovation if you don't pause to evaluate new capabilities.

Some teams we’ve worked with are heavy users of CRM, and while that’s great, they tend to look for “as we do it today” functionality because they can't imagine another way.

A rebuild with a regular cadence of “build—check—tweak—check—rollout” maintains what's working while allowing C5 Insight (C5) and the client to pressure test new, innovative processes to support business flow.

3. Close Knowledge Gaps

Every team user has different experience levels with CRM, and some user experience changes can be subtle but critical.

That said, it pressures those tasked with training others to know their users, the product, and the differences between the old and new processes!

It’s easy to miss critical features with assumptions based on misunderstood functions and changes regarding user workflow or experience.

To ensure faster onboarding times and better productivity among team members, make sure you plan ahead thoroughly while keeping an eye out for differences in learning levels across your trainees.

4. Ready. Fire. Aim. Fail.

After an initial lift-and-shift project, most organizations want to move into adding new features.

They may build this on top of data or configurations that don't fully support the new capabilities, or plan quickly (like they moved through the migration) and miss important details.

This forces these organizations to create workarounds for subtle unknown process details until users test the new features.

Using the "ready, fire, aim" approach doesn't work well when it results in users consistently struggling through functionality that is overly complex, doesn't align with their process, or fails to work because of back-end issues.

5. Low-Code, No-Code, Missing-Code!

Dynamics 365 CE is an excellent solution by allowing you to add great features with little or no code. However, almost every instance requires some code to provide a specific function unique to each business.

Unless you follow code management best practices, you may have lost track of the exact code function and its impact on customer database records. Some things may have been around so long that users think it’s out-of-the-box functionality.

The more customizations you have (tables, JavaScript, plugins, etc.), the more challenging it can be to catalog and fully understand them. You may successfully lift-and-shift, but as soon as you start to make changes, you may experience issues you could never anticipate.

6. Corrupt Infrastructure

One client approached us with an already-completed migration; unfortunately, while they were on-premise, some unsupported changes were made.

When these changes were migrated to the cloud, they caused issues that even Microsoft's engineers couldn't resolve.

The solution? They had to rebuild their configuration and re-migrate again, doubling its time and cost and causing headaches for the user and IT teams.

We've also run into well-known third-party solution add-ons that are nearly impossible to uninstall completely.

Migration is an ideal time to re-create your environment without these so you can start with fresh and more easily maintained Dynamics 365 apps.

C5 Insight's Recommended Dynamics 365 Cloud Migration Strategy

Rebuilding your CRM customizations during migration isn't always necessary, but a thorough planning process is a must.

Take the time to audit your existing CRM, evaluate the data, understand the configurations, and determine how these will change in the online version. Then decide lift-and-shift vs. rebuild-then-migrate data only.

This is also an excellent opportunity to re-imagine your CRM. Take the time to build a roadmap for the next 18-36 months and take advantage of new features without forcing a steep learning curve on your users.

Call 704-895-2500 or reach out through our contact page. We'd love to discuss your plans and share our expertise with you!

But there are literally dozens of technologies to aid sales managers, reps and marketers with generating better leads, improving win rates, accelerating deals and expanding margins. If you're not using them, then you're like a carpenter that isn't using power tools.

In this article, you'll learn about some of the more important solutions to further automate your selling process.

Lists, Research, and Sales Intelligence

Finding and qualifying leads is critical for any sales process. Options for building lists and enhancing them with data include:

• LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which now integrates with many CRM solutions. Today, LinkedIn is much more than a social network of business contacts.
• Proven generalists, such as Demandbase, which integrates with most CRM solutions.
• Emerging AI solutions, like Microsoft's Viva Sales, capture contacts and notes during conversations, adding them to your CRM solution for you.

On top of these, there are numerous industry specific databases ranging from new construction starts, to restaurants, hospitals, and government projects going out to bid. Whatever your industry is, there's at least one custom database that you should be exploring and integrating into your CRM. And don’t overlook other public sources such as local business lists, press releases, and more.

Fully leveraging these might require an individual dedicated to data analysis to enter, research, and clean data. If you don't have one on your team, make sure you partner with someone who does.

Record Import Solutions

Got a list of leads from one of the above sources or from a recent trade show? The next step is to get it imported into CRM. 

The problem is that the native import features either import everything (including duplicate records) or nothing (duplicates are blocked, but they may contain additional important information). Import solutions include:

• ClickDimensions: If you're already using ClickDimensions, you have a powerful data import solution that can import and enrich data.
• KingswaySoft, Tibco Scribe: If you regularly need to import or sync data, you should consider an integration solution such as these.

Lead Generation

The leads that convert at the highest rates are the ones who are looking for your services. To find them, you need a great content marketing strategy (blogs, social posts, webinars, events and public speaking, etc.), an outstanding website, search engine optimization, referrals, partners, pay per click campaigns, and great networking processes.

• At the heart of all of this is a marketing automation platform (MAP). ClickDimensions and Dynamics 365 for Marketing are both excellent choices, but tend to appeal to different sizes of company.
• Companies often overlook their employees as a source of referrals, or they tend to make it difficult to track them. A simple solution built with a Microsoft Form integrated with Dynamics 365 for Sales can be all it takes to accelerate your referral engine.
• If you sell through partners and you don't have a partner portal, you're missing an enormous opportunity to expand your pipeline. Using Power Pages you can quickly create a lead-sharing portal.

Marketing Qualification

Most marketing departments generate far more leads than the sales team can possibly follow-up. And sales teams want to focus their time on the leads that will deliver the greatest bang-for-the buck.

• Marketing qualification starts with good data. Remember to do a good job with the items under Lists, Research, and Sales Intelligence to capture good data.
• Then, expand on this data with all the data you capture through your MAP (in the Lead Generation section), including: email opens, clicks, page visits, download requests, and more.
• Qualifying leads can be a matter of simple rules-based triggers (i.e., "if a lead requests a call from a rep, qualify it" or "if a dormant lead downloads a new white paper, qualify it"), which can be managed with Power Automate.
• More sophisticated statistical scoring can be used for large lead lists. ClickDimensions includes lead scoring, as does Dynamics 365 for Sales (be sure you have the right version).

Sales Qualification and Pipeline

Now those precious leads are in the hands of the sales team. But they need further qualification and nurturing to get them through the pipeline. Sales skills are critical, but they're not enough in today's world.

• Reps will want to know who in the organization already knows the contacts they are reaching out to. The Who Knows Whom functionality can be a huge boost to early stage relationships.
• Your marketing team is creating great collateral. It should be stored in SharePoint and made available on user desktops via OneDrive Sync.
• The opportunity form should be carefully configured, including one or more business process flows to prompt sales reps through a simple but thorough revenue engineering process.
• Remember when we talked about lead scoring earlier in this article? Well, if you have a large pipeline of opportunities, it works for them too and can help your sales team with prioritizing their work. You can further enhance this with Relationship Analytics to understand the health of every opportunity in the pipeline.
• A sales cadencing solution is a great way to reduce the administrative workload on your sales team, and maximize their time talking to prospects and customers. The Sales Accelerator (part of Dynamics 365 for Sales) is a good option. Third party cadencing solutions exist, but none of them (that I am aware of) integrate well with Dynamics 365 at this time.
• And when you combine Dynamics 365 with telephony, such as what is available in Microsoft Teams, you can use Conversation Intelligence throughout the sales lifecycle to capture important information and provide real-time coaching to reps.

All of this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you can do with the Microsoft product line and third party applications.

Get Help By Partnering With C5 Insight

Where is best place to start? Great question, and the answer depends on which parts of the process are the biggest gaps for you. The correct answer is never, "turn them all on and see how it goes." Be strategic. Evaluate your processes and gaps. Choose a single area and start a cadence where you will introduce new approaches on a quarterly or bi-annual basis.

Want to dive deeper and ask questions in an open forum? Join us on on Sep 14 at 1pm EDT for a webinar (or signup to get a link to the recording). 

Want some help with prioritizing and planning sales process automation tools? Contact C5 Insight today.

Although still in preview mode (meaning the feature may be changed at any given time as the Dynamics 365 [D365] team refines its functionality), this feature is worth mentioning early!

Power BI data visualizations provide a quick and easy way to get powerful insights from your D365 data directly within D365 itself.

This feature needs to be enabled within the Settings area of an app, which can be a bit tricky to navigate. To find it, launch the 'maker' (make.powerapps.com) and identify the app you wish to enable the feature within.

Click the vertical ellipses and then hover the word Edit to expose the Edit in Preview button – click that to launch the new editing experience.

Next, click Settings at the top, then click the Features tab and locate the Enable Power BI quick report visualization on a table (preview).

Once enabled, click Save in the bottom right of the window. The feature has now been enabled!

Now, navigate to the app you turned the features on within, and navigate to a table (example: Opportunities).

When the table loads, you will now find the Visualize this View icon in the ribbon of the view.

This feature allows end users to visualize the table data in Power BI quick reports. Any user can leverage this feature. However, it's important to note that in order for the user to gain enhanced Power BI functionality, they must possess Power BI licensing. You can find details on Power BI licensing here.

Note that a user must have a Power BI Free license to be able to view data this way. This can either be added by a Microsoft 365 administrator, or the user can click the Get a free license option the first time they attempt to open the visualization.

Upon clicking the Get a free license icon, a new browser will open asking the user to fill in some basic information. Once the user inputs the information and clicks Get Started, the system will append a license to their account and launch the Power BI web-application. The user can close this window for now and return to D365 and click Visualize this view again to launch the visualization.

The first time a view is visualized using this feature, it may take a few minutes to load. Future visits to the view should be more efficient.

Power BI takes the columns and filters in the current view and renders them as Power BI visuals. The user can view the columns and filters that are applied in the flyout on the right, and can adapt the visual by adding or removing filters as they see fit. Note, however, that these modifications are not saved.

This feature is a fabulous addition to Dynamics 365 and yet another example of how products within the Microsoft stack work better, together.

Do you have questions about Dynamics 365, Power BI, or any of the Microsoft Business applications? Contact C5 Insight today!

What's Happening?

C5 Insight has recently learned that some organizations (generally larger organizations) are using bots to pre-screen incoming emails by clicking on all links prior to allowing users to have access to them. This appears to be resulting in a boost in the total clicks that emails appear to be getting - these additional clicks can be considered to be "false positives" because they are not a human that is clicking.

What Can be Done Now?

There is no immediate remedy to this issue. You can size the problem as it relates to your organization in a couple of ways:

• If your emails seem to have had a sudden boost in the number of clicks, it is likely due to this. You may wish to discount your total click statistics based on this. Unfortunately, there is not a scientific way to adjust your numbers yet.
• This problem seems to mostly be related to large organizational email accounts that are deploying advanced threat and spam detection processes. The more your marketing efforts focus on large organizations, the more this issue will likely impact you.

What's the Long-Term Plan?

C5 Insight has brought this issue up with Marketing Automation Platform providers and we assume they are working on it internally (we do not have validation, but because this directly impacts their platforms, it is reasonable to expect that they are highly motivated to develop a solution).

C5 Insight is working with some clients who are looking for a short-term fix and may have some options available to discuss in the coming weeks. If you would like to discuss options, please contact us at:

• 704-895-2500
• luck@c5insight.com
• Contact Us Web Form

Data integrity is the cornerstone of an effective CRM system. A common challenge can be that a system contains a number of duplicates of a record type - Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Opportunities, or any other type of record in the system. When duplicates exist, data integrity suffers.

Dynamics 365 has a feature to help combat this issue - Duplicate Detection.

What Is Duplicate Detection in Dynamics 365?

"Duplicate Detection" is exactly what it sounds like—the ability for the system to detect duplicate records. Duplicate Detection rules can be created to help identify when a potential duplicate record is being created.

Duplicate Detection rules are given parameters to look for on the creation of a record. If those parameters are met, the duplicate detection rule will trigger and the user is presented with a duplicate detection warning. We'll show what that looks like a little later in this article.

How to Create Duplicate Detection Rules

To create a new Duplicate Detection rule, an administrator will proceed to the Duplicate Detection rules area in the admin area of the system. At time of writing this entry, the Duplicate Detection Rule link can be found via the Admin portal (admin.powerplatform.com), however, it will push the user to the legacy interface.

As Microsoft continues sunset the legacy experience, it's likely that this entire experience will exist only in the admin portal at some point in the future. At that time the process may change, in which case we'll provide an updated entry outlining this new experience.

Once within the Duplicate Detection area, the user will find a listing of all existing duplicate detection rules.

To create a new rule, click +New to launch the creation wizard.

The form contains several areas to fill out.

First, name the duplicate detection rule. Give the name something logical so that it will make sense when looking at it in the future.

Next, select the tables you wish to compare. Note that you can select different tables. For example, if your company uses the Leads table only for new customer leads, you could set a duplicate detection rule to flag if a lead shares the same email address as an existing Contact.

After selecting the tables, the user can then identify the attributes of the records. There can be one, or several, and the user can specify the level of granularity at which the matching should occur - Exact Match, Same First Characters, Same Last Characters.

Once the user has identified the relevant parameters of the detection rule, the rule must be published.

Now, as users enter records that meet the definition of the duplicate detection rule created, they will receive a notification of a duplicate record. The user can then determine if they want to proceed with what they are doing, or stop and leverage the existing record instead.

The Duplicate Detection feature helps prevent duplicates in the system which tend to cause user frustration and challenges with keeping up to date on recent interactions with the customer. Avoiding duplicate data entries helps maintain a clean and orderly system which contributes to increased data integrity and productive users!