Microsoft CRM 4.0 Part - IV

Contact:
"Contacts" are records of individual customers; they can be related to another account or customer as well. A contact can optionally have a parent customer; this parent customer can be either Account or Contact

Account:
"Accounts" are records of company customers; Account can optionally have parent account and primary contact separately,

Leads:
"Leads" are potential customers or contacts, these are contacts which are not our customer but have potential to be a one in future. Marketing team works on these potential customers by running campaigns to introduce their product or company them.
1. If qualify lead can be converted into Account, Contact and Opportunity
2. If don’t qualify lead is either Lost, Cannot contact, No longer interested or Canceled, this is disqualified status

Opportunity:
As per SDK "This entity represents a potential revenue-generating event, or sale to an account, that has to be tracked through a sales process to completion."
Each opportunity belongs to a contact or account, this is a potential sale which can occur, a customer is expected to buy these products, we call it an sales opportunity

We can create quote, order or invoice direct from opportunity

Email, fax, phone call, letter and appointment activities can be converted to opportunities by providing customer (Account or Contact) and source campaign; optionally we can record a campaign response during this conversion.

Campaign:
Campaign is a collection of marketing activities which target list of accounts, leads and contacts. These lists are marketing lists and are available in marketing section of CRM. Purpose of a campaign is to market business or product of the company, to who we market our product or business? The answer comes from marketing lists; before we can execute our campaign we need marketing lists or target persons.

Marketing List:
These are list of accounts, contacts or leads which are used for campaigns and marketing. Marketing lists are added campaigns,

Marketing List Members:
Following entities can be member of marketing list; these are Lead, Contact and Account. Marketing list can have only one type of member either lead, contact or account

Campaign Planning Tasks:
These are set of notes or information which will be needed to run a campaign, set of instructions or high level planned words of senior marketing team, these are maintained to direct marketing team in running a campaign successfully, obviously these are planned prior to launching a campaign.

Campaign Activities:
Campaign activity also follows the abstract of activity model; a campaign activity can be email, phone, appointment, letter, etc. These are executing points of a campaign, another term used with them is "Distributed" or "Undistributed", means the activity has been executed or not. Each campaign activity can have marketing lists from the campaign only, we can add these lists manually or automatically when adding marketing list to campaign, a dialog usually asks whether to add this to undistributed activities.

Campaign Responses:
These are response of campaign received from customers (Accounts or Contacts), this can be a interest shown by customer or not interested response, when a response is received it will have to be recorded into the system by opening the response activity which can be a email, fax, etc and convert that to opportunity, opportunities are what we get in response to a campaign.

Campaign Target Products:
List of products which are being marketed, existing products can be added

Campaign Target Marketing Lists:
Already created/existing marketing lists can be added as target marketing list into a campaign; this list of members is than used for campaign activities like email of advertisement, etc

Campaign Related Campaigns:
List of campaigns related to each other, we can one campaign as related campaign into another campaign

Quick Campaigns:
Quick campaigns can be created on Leads, Accounts and Contacts.

1. Simply go to Accounts screen and select a set of accounts
2. Now click Create Quick Campaign and select "For selected records", this start a wizard to create a quick campaign for selected accounts
3. Enter name for quick campaign
4. Select type of campaign activity to create, quick campaign can have only one type of activity, it can be email, letter, fax, etc
5. Select owner for these newly created activities, we can take ownership our self or the owners of the records included in the quick campaign or assign to another user or queue
6. Next a template will provided to fill out, this template will depend on the type of activity you selected, I selected email therefore an email sending form is shown, fill in the fields
7. When done click next, final step is to create the activities from this quick campaign, click Create. This will create activities of Draft status; we can now see these activities in our work place.
8. We can relocate our quick campaign from Sales or Marketing section and see its status; it will show total members, number of success, number of failures, and status reason.


Microsoft Dynamics CRM Concepts, Terminology and Navigation:
Reference: https://www.microsoftelearning.com/samples/mbscrm1/framework/index.htm

General:
· Accounts: Manage accounts, which are companies that your organization does business with.
· Contacts: Manage contacts, which represent the customer, potential customer, or individuals related to an account.
· Notes: Track details and attach files to record types. A single record can have one or more notes attached to it.
· Activities: Track all interactions regarding a record in the system. Activities track e-mails, phone calls, appointments, tasks, and more

Sales:
· Leads: Manage possible customers who must be qualified or disqualified as sales opportunities. If a lead is qualified, it can be converted to an opportunity, account, and/or contact for additional tracking.
· Opportunities: Manage potential sales to a customer and track them through the sales process.
· Quotes: Manage the formal offers for products or services, proposed at specific prices and the related payment term. Quotes can be sent to an opportunity, account, or contact.
· Orders: Manage confirmed requests for the delivery of goods or services based on specified terms. An order is a quote that has been accepted by a customer.
· Invoices: Manage invoices orders that have been billed. Invoices record a sale to a customer, including details about the products or services purchased.

Marketing:
· Campaigns: Allows you to create marketing programs that use communication vehicles (such as e-mail, advertisements and direct mail) to accomplish specific results in a specific timeframe, such as introducing new products.
· Marketing Lists: Allows you to create lists of accounts, contacts, or leads that match specific set of criteria. You can use marketing lists for marketing campaigns or to do target sales work.
· Competitors: Allows you to track competitors, which are other businesses or entities that might compete with your organization for sales opportunities.
· Sales Literature: Allows you to store sales literature such as brochures and collateral in the system.
· Products: Allows you to manage your catalog of available products, the items or services that the organization sells or provides. Products can be linked to other records, such as quotes, campaigns, and cases.

Service:
· Contracts: Allows you to manage contracts, which are agreements to provide support during specified coverage dates or for a specified number of cases or for a specified length of time.
· Services: Allows you to manage services, which are work performed for a customer by one or more resources. Microsoft Dynamics CRM facilitates the scheduling of services and the resources required.
· Cases: Allows you to track cases, which are customer service issues or problems reported by a customer. Cases track the activities that customer service representatives use to resolve the issue.
· Knowledge Base: Allows you to manage and work with the Knowledge Base, which is a repository of articles of importance to your personnel and customers. The Knowledge Base lets you draft, submit, review, and publish articles such as FAQ's, trouble-shooting information, and so on.


Other reference material:
http://crm.dynamics.com/crm_training_and_support/microsoft_crm_training/index.html
http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/rc/regcont/en_us/onlinedefault.aspx

11 Things to know about customization
http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/rc/regcont/en_us/Live/articles/thingstoknowaboutcustomization.aspx

Workflow customization
http://rc.crm.dynamics.com/rc/regcont/en_us/Live/articles/8-workflowcustomization.aspx