Smarter Sales Process in Dynamics CRM 2015 - Part 3: Pipeline Development
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This document discusses customizing Dynamics CRM to track sales pipeline development over time without code. It proposes: 1) Creating a "Process Stage" entity to represent sales stages and use rollup fields to collect open opportunity counts and values for each stage. 2) Creating a "Snapshot" entity to store historical snapshots of the rollup field values using a scheduled workflow to update snapshots weekly. 3) Configuring the scheduled workflow to query Process Stage records and create new Snapshots to track the pipeline trend over time. Charts can then visualize the pipeline development data stored in Snapshots.
Smarter Sales Process in Dynamics CRM 2015 - Part 3: Pipeline Development
- 1. A Non-Developer's Guide to Smarter Sales Processes in Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2015 - Part 3: Pipeline Development Jukka Niiranen 2015-05-06
- 2. About This Presentation • These are the slides from a live webcast on MSDynamicsWorld.com, presented on May 6th 2015 • The webcast recording is available on YouTube: http://bit.ly/crm15salesprocess • The topics are covered in more detail in blog posts at http://survivingcrm.com/
- 3. About Me • Dynamics CRM consultant from Helsinki • Working at Digital Illustrated Finland • Dynamics CRM addict since 2005 • Frequent blogger & #MSDYNCRM evangelist on social media – Blog: survivingcrm.com – @jukkan on Twitter • Microsoft MVP since 2013 • Focused on improving CRM solution usability & information work efficiency Jukka Niiranen @jukkan Consultant @ Digital Illustrated Microsoft Dynamics CRM MVP
- 4. Customizing Dynamics CRM as a Non-Developer • Point & click configuration/customization tools of Dynamics CRM have come a long way • The ratio of custom code vs. configuration in typical CRM solutions is decreasing • Solution delivery often requires the creative combination of several CRM configuration options • The goal of this article series is to demonstrate a few scenarios where such combinations are used for delivering new functionality for the CRM sales process
- 5. Part 3 Customization Scenarios Explored in This Series 1. Lead qualification • Streamline data entry for leads on existing accounts & contacts • Convert leads to influencers instead of new opportunities 2. Opportunity revenue estimation • Replace opportunity product lines with predefined cost estimate fields • Calculate opportunity total value from day & rate fields 3. Pipeline development • Capture opportunity count and revenue per sales stage • Schedule data snapshots of historical pipeline size
- 7. The Problem • CRM gives an up-to-date status of the current sales pipeline by opportunity sales stage • Won or lost opportunities create a permanent record of when the deals were closed • This is however not sufficient data to project what the size of the pipeline was at a previous point in time • Therefore, it’s not possible to see the development trend of the open opportunity pipeline from the standard CRM data model
- 8. Current Pipeline View ”Hmm, I wonder if our sales pipeline is healthier now than it was last month? Wish I would have taken a screenshot...”
- 9. The Solution • Create a custom entity ”Process Stage” to represent each stage in the opportunity business process flow • Use Rollup Fields (new in CRM 2015) to collect information about open opportunity count and value in each stage onto this new entity • Create a custom entity ”Snapshot” to store historical data of the Rollup Field values • Schedule a recurring workflow process to create new Snapshots once a week
- 10. Pipeline Snapshots: Solution Architecture Process Stage Opportunity Snapshot Snapshot Snapshot 1. Rollup Fields automatically collect the metrics from open opportunities 2. Recurring workflow creates historical snapshots of these metrics 3. Snapshots are visualized via charts to show weekly pipeline trend
- 11. Two Custom Entities Process Stage will be used as a lookup field on the opportunity records, to enable counting the Rollup Field values from related opportunities Snapshot will be used for capturing copies of the Rollup Fields values from Process Stage entity
- 12. Two Rollup Fields on Process Stage Entity Create Rollup Fields that retrieve data from the open child opportunities related to each process stage Use one Rollup Field to sum up the total estimated revenue ...And the other for counting the number of opportunities
- 13. Linking Opportunities to Process Stages via Workflow Whenever the Opportunity’s BPF stage changes, run a workflow process... ...Which updates the custom Process Stage field with a value that matches the BPF stage
- 14. Process Stage with Related Opportunity data Use the standard Stage Category option set field to group data Related opportunity values roll up to the Process Stage form Related opportunities shown in subgrid for quick reference
- 15. Solution: “Scheduled Recurring Workflows” • Open source solution from Lucas Alexander • Contains one custom workflow activity that allows you to run a specific workflow process weekly/daily/hourly on specific records Download from: http://bit.ly/crmschedwf When this date is reached... Query for these records... ...And start a workflow process instance for each result
- 16. Configuring the Scheduled Process Which workfow process do we want to schedule? When should the process be executed? What’s the (FetchXML) search crieria for records to run it on?
- 17. Before Scheduling the Process • We’ll need the Fetch XML query criteria for the records the scheduled process will be searching for – In our case, all active Process Stage records • Then we’ll need the workflow process that we want to apply to all these records – A workflow process to create a Snapshot record with the current pipeline values per each Process Stage
- 18. Grabbing the Query Criteria from Advanced Find Select the Process Stage entity Select ”Download Fetch XML”
- 19. Process Stage Snapshot Creation Workflow Workflow is created agains the Process Stage entity, run as on-demand process Creates a new Snapshot record with values copied from the current Process Stage Rollup Fields
- 20. Snapshots Created The scheduled process will create new Snapshots for each Process Stage once a week
- 21. Pipeline overview dashboard Charts & dashboards can be used for summarizing the pipeline development trends
- 22. Final Notes
- 23. Next Steps • Read more articles on Microsoft Dynamics CRM customization best practices at http://survivingcrm.com/ • Follow @jukkan on Twitter for the latest #MSDynCRM related news and tips • Check out the Dynamics CRM webcasts series at http://msdynamicsworld.com/webcasts • Thanks for viewing these slides & enjoy customizing your Dynamics CRM environment!