Business processes: The basics - Dynamics 365 Tutorial

- [Instructor] Business processes allow us to capture best practices and to standardize those practices so that we're doing them the same way, sale after sale, client after client, year after year. A business process is not an ad hoc set of information that we glean by asking someone hey, how do you do your job? Rather, business processes in Dynamics 365 are organized and documented business processes. Once we have our best practices standardized, organized, and documented, we can then automate them with a tool like Dynamics 365. Nothing I say here should make you assume that business processes are carved in stone. As a matter of fact, one of the things that we learn by having standardized practices is we learn whether our practices are effective or whether we should change them. But when our best practices change, it's important to document them again. In this course, we're going to focus on the business process in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. I believe there may be as many different diagrams of sales processes as there are sales organizations. For example, here's a sales process that has five stages. Each of these stages will, of course, have some activities. The stages include Identifying the Opportunity, Qualify Needs, Develop, Propose, and Close. This one has five as well, a different organization with different names: Begin, Submit, Review, Approve, and Close. This one, only four: Prospect, Quality, Quote, and Close. Organizations can customize Dynamics to use whatever their process is and make it work for them. But if you were to use Dynamics 365 for Sales as it comes out of the box, this is what the process would look like: Qualify, in which we will qualify a lead, Develop, Propose, and then Close. And in each of these four stages, there are specific activities that need to be done before we can go to the next stage. We need to finish the required activities under Qualify, for example, before we can go on to Develop. The majority of the organizations that use Dynamics use it so that they can customize the processes to match their own best practices. So it's almost certain that, when you use Dynamics, you will see different terms or even different activities, those items that match up with your organization's method of making a sale. Working the process means that you are going to enter data about activities so that you can complete a stage, and then move that lead or record on to the next stage. And when you open a lead, the business process is right in front of you all the time. Here we can tell that we are in the middle of the Qualify stage, and there are specific activities. Is there an existing contact, an existing account? A purchase time frame, an estimated budget? A purchase process, have we identified who the decision maker is? And have we captured some kind of a summary? For all of these, we can fill in more information. And then, when we have the required fields entered, we can go on to the next stage. At any point, I can click on a future stage, like Propose, which then lists activities like Identify Sales Team, Develop Proposal, Complete Internal Review, and Present Proposal. Well, I'm not allowed to edit this stage, 'cause we're not there yet, we're still back in Qualify. I can view the activities that are necessary. But if I return to Qualify, and I make sure that I've selected a Purchase Timeframe, which I now know to be next quarter, is this an Existing Account, and Peters with Tailspin Toys. No records found, so I would still need to create a new record, but after I have created the records for a contact and an account, I could then click Next Stage and move on to the next stage in my business process. Regardless of which of the specific Dynamics apps you're using, you'll have a combination of data and specific record types, as well as a business process like this to guide your activities.