Category Archives: CRM
3 Sources for Restaurant Relief for Those Hit With Coronavirus Shutdowns
[unable to retrieve full-text content]
Posted by Mike E. Smith, Restaurant & Hospitality Industry PrincipalThe week of March 16 took an unprecedented toll on restaurants. For the first time in modern history, many state governments ordered restaurants to close their dining rooms in an effort to promote social distancing due to the coronavirus.While some restaurant groups have gotten very creative in continuing to service their customers, others have decided to temporarily stop operations altogether.
Best Of the April 2020 Power Apps And Dynamics 365 Update Webinar
DYNAMICS 365 JUST KEEPS GETTING BETTER
Microsoft’s dedication to making Dynamics 365 better is evident in the 2020 April Update. Microsoft has listened to users’ input and improved Dynamics 365 with a goal of increasing productivity. Early access for most features started in February 2020 and will be generally available in April 2020. Remember, not all features are released at once. They will be released from April 2020 through September 2020. In our Dynamics 365 Update Webinar, we highlight some of the new features to be excited about!
BEST OF THE APRIL 2020 POWER APPS AND DYNAMICS 365 UPDATE WEBINAR
Brian Begley, owner of enCloud9 and Dynamics365support.com, began our monthly webinar by giving some general highlights of the April 2020 release. Brian discussed some activity timeline and general improvements to Dynamics 365. Some of the things we will see here are:
- Better filtering in timelines.
- Enhanced email function in Dynamics 365.
- Rich text notes.
One of the biggest non-user experience change is Team Member license enforcement. These licenses, while restricted on paper, had no real security mechanism behind them to enforce the restriction. Well with the April Update, its time to review your licenses, make sure that you are compliant, because come June 2020, you don’t want to be in for a big surprise. To learn more, .
Brian then gave a couple specific sales improvements that he is excited about. One of these improvements is Kanban boards. Kanban boards allows opportunities and activities to be viewed in a grid-like view. You can easily move opportunities to different stages in the sales process by simply dragging and dropping. We will also see some enhancements to sales forecasting. Brian demonstrated some of these enhancements as showed us the sample sales forecast he built. A basic sales forecast can be built in approximately 10 minutes.
Brian then discussed some specific customer service improvements we will experience. We will see an improved knowledgebase search and creation, as well as the ability to customize the close case forms. We will also see better queue management, as is will take fewer clicks to see details.
Brian then showed us how easy it is to update your environment. He stressed that once you’ve updated, you can’t go back. Brian recommended testing your customizations first in your sandbox environment before putting them into production. Some great resources from were given. These resources are included in our
WANT TO LEARN MORE?
In addition to our April 2020 Dynamics 365 Update Webinar, you might want to check out a few blogs that we’ve written recently – , , , and For more great resources, .
Join our April webinar as we take a deep dive into one of the upcoming updates coming to Dynamics 365: Sales Forecasting. We’ll be discussing creating forecasts, how forecasts differ from goals, and reporting tools available for forecasting. Don’t miss April 2020 New Feature Deep Dive: Sales Forecasting. Register for our April Webinar below.
HOW CAN WE HELP?
If you have any questions on the new features in Dynamics 365 or if we can help you with any of your Dynamics 365 needs, don’t hesitate to Dynamics365support.com is a recognized expert in helping organizations like yours to get the most out of their Dynamics 365 system.
Visit for more informative webinars. Visit our to access past webinars.
Dynamics 365 Now More Than Ever!
Last week one of my favorite clients gave me a call. He told me that it wasn’t until this week that he truly appreciated how Dynamics 365 keeps his business running. “My sales team of 40 went from working out of 5 offices to the entire team working from home. I can still keep an eye on my team, make sure that opportunities are moving forward and customer relationships are maintained” His business is a vital part of the construction industry, one of the few sectors of the economy that has not been highly affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. His customers still need his products and he needs to keep his business running to support them.
With the sudden shift to remote working, you might wonder how to make that happen effectively. How do you make sure everyone in your company has access to the information and insights they need to keep doing their job? You need software that can be accessed from any geographical location at any given time, that encourages collaboration and communication amongst team members. You also need a toolset that handles sales, customer service, and marketing.
How Microsoft Dynamics 365 enables remote work
Dynamics 365’s Unified interface means that your users can be trained once and use Dynamics 365 from any platform – mobile, desktop or tablet. Integration with other Microsoft tools, including Outlook, Word, Excel and Teams means your team can easily analyze data, keep in touch with clients all from an integrated environment.
As a cloud-based application, all of the data gathered in Dynamics 365 is accessible by everyone in your organization. Many companies deal with sensitive information and the high security inherent in Dynamics 365 allows users to remotely access data on phones, on desktop PCs or notebooks without fear. Another benefit is heightened security of your data. Microsoft is respected for its commitment to the security of customer data. Because of the cloud-based infrastructure of Dynamics 365, there is no need to worry about physical storage and server maintenance.
What about collaboration and communication?
So, with Dynamics 365, I can rest assured that my employees have access to the data they need to do their job, but what about collaboration and communication? Working remotely can make collaboration a challenge. Here at enCloud9, we have been working remotely since our founding in 2008. We use Microsoft Teams to keep in contact with coworkers and collaborate on projects. takes collaboration to a whole new level, but it is so much more than just another group chat application. Collaborate remotely with ease with such functions as chatting, video or audio conferencing, or sharing your screen. With more and more companies implementing work-from-home policies with spread of the COVID-19 virus, . Microsoft hopes that by making Teams available to all for free for six months, that they can “support public health and safety by making remote work even easier.” Use the guidance in this article provided by Microsoft to help you We recently wrote a blog about our switch to Microsoft Teams and We have included this short video on how Microsoft Teams enables you to work efficiently from home.
Additional Resources
Since we have been working from home since our founding in 2008, we consider ourselves experts in working from home. Recently we have written a We have also created an to enhance the content in the blog.
In addition, we present a monthly webinar discussing various topics and current events surrounding Dynamics 365. Our April webinar is scheduled for Friday, April 17. Join us as our topic is Sales Forecasting, one of the upcoming new features included in the April 2020 Release. Register below.
Digital Marketing Best Practices for Insurance Companies
Disruption within the once-staid insurance industry is creating a major buzz. The activity has been labeled, among other things, as a digital transformation and the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Regardless of what you call it, disruption is occurring because consumers gravitate toward customer experiences that are on par with Amazon, Uber, and Netflix.
After all, our population is skewing toward digital natives. Roughly 71 million millennials are in the market for automotive, homeowners, and renters insurance — among other types of coverage.
Gen-Z, the generation right behind millennials, represents 61 million people who mostly started using digital while they were still infants. No doubt the eldest among this group, in their early 20s, are shopping for insurance right now.
Entrepreneurs, including quite a few millennials, are responding to opportunities created by legacy insurance providers without solid digital marketing strategies. This has led to a rise in insurtech start-ups that garnered about $ 2.2 billion from investors in the first half of 2019 alone — easily outpacting the total $ 2.6 billion invested in all of 2018.
What’s more, only 35 percent of insurance customers say they’re satisfied with current providers, which translates to a book of business of about $ 1.5 trillion up for grabs globally.
Word of mouth and a landline (sales and marketing approaches based on closing a single sale that worked for insurers decades ago) aren’t how current generations purchase insurance coverage.
Legacy agencies must craft a carefully considered holistic digital marketing plan that’s radically different from what would pass just a few short years ago. They need coordinated and orchestrated campaigns across digital channels that provide a comprehensive view of the customer journey.
Marketing automation platforms hit all of these points by consolidating and automating marketing activities — such as email campaigns with conditional logic, web-based content creation and management, and digital advertising. These platforms enable lifecycle marketing that gives a transparent view into the entire journey of each individual prospect and policyholder.
Because marketing automation brings so many functions under one umbrella, it’s a powerful engine for capturing and presenting data about audiences and specific customers. In fact, it’s the ultimate catalyst for growth marketing (sometimes referred to as “growth hacking”).
Growth hacking is enabling companies to achieve impressive revenue in relatively short timeframes based on identifying the most lucrative and efficient areas for growth. Ultimately, it employs marketing tactics that enable companies to garner more leads, convert at higher rates, and nurture customer connections for the long term.
Marketing automation platforms typically offer functions known to be universal tactics for hacking growth and fueling revenue.
We’ve captured the highlights on some of the top tactics for insurance marketers who want to dive right in with growth marketing (and how marketing automation platforms like Act-On can help them execute these strategies).
Top Digital Marketing Tactics for Insurance Companies
Current buyer personas. Your marketing strategy should start with at least an outline of several types of buyers for your insurance offerings. With the aging out of baby boomers and the influx of digital natives, it’s more important than ever to make sure your marketing resonates with your ideal customers.
If you don’t already have up-to-date personas defining your audiences, this post will guide you in creating buyer personas, mapping the journey for each, and identifying relevant content. This is a great place to start because it provides the basis for executing the most important digital marketing tactics.
A top-notch website. Your site must be attuned to the customer journey, meaning it must provide a user experience that accounts for your audience’s understanding of your insurance products. The user experience should start at beginner-level prospective policyholders who have little-to-no understanding of what their end goal should be as far as your products and services.
Information that’s most prominent should be highly accessible for the beginner, navigation should be intuitive, and finding information that enables your visitor to advance along the purchasing path should be easy.
Connecting with an actual person who can offer high-touch customer service also should be easy — whether via email, telephone, or on-site chatting. It goes without saying that audiences expect pages to load at lightning-fast speeds and sites that are optimized for mobile.
Offer high-quality content. Modern audiences are researching heavily before they buy, as well as seeking recommendations and comparisons. In fact, 78% of consumers say that relevant content increases their purchase intent for a brand’s products and services.
Tracking analytics to determine which content gets the highest traffic is the key to consistently producing high-quality content. We break it down here with seven questions you should answer as you develop your own quality content.
As always, it comes down to putting your customers’ needs first. Ask yourself which content is going to be most useful for your customers and how can you deliver it in ways that make the most sense for them?
Create irresistible offers for gated content. Creating great content that your audience needs is a key step in attracting prospective policyholders and generating digital leads. Everything from whitepapers and eBooks to webinars and online learning courses provide the opportunity to capture data from your audience by motivating visitors to input their personal information via a conversion form.
By collecting this data, you capture information about high-intent insurance purchasers. From there, you can add these people to your marketing lists to nurture them through the buyer journey. This post about content distribution provides greater detail about gating content.
Execute a thoughtful email campaign. Using a surgical approach with your email campaigns increases the chance that your audience is going to engage. Your personas will help guide you in your email messaging, as will data collected via gated content.
In the course of building your email distribution lists and reviewing the data, you’ll learn so much more about your audience and their behaviors. This opens avenues for highly targeted and personalized email campaigns.
Once you start building intelligence on your audience, the possibilities are endless. Learn how by reading this post and going deeper with strategies for B2C campaigns here.
Invest in learning and implementing SEO basics. The value of time spent on SEO cannot be understated.
71 percent of consumers surveyed said they did digital research before buying insurance.
Search engines are the most common starting point. Twenty-six percent of U.S. car insurance buyers and 35% of U.S. life insurance buyers use search results to inform their purchases. So optimizing your site to attract more prospective policyholders is well worth the time and effort.
While some insurance brokerages choose to employ search engine optimization (SEO) experts full-time, simply sticking to SEO basics can have a big impact on your bottom line.
Most insurance providers are likely performing many of these tactics. However, very few have a marketing plan marrying this work with a powerful marketing automation platform.
Marketing automation software simplifies and streamlines these initiatives for an approach that is cohesive, unified, and backed by data to drive sales growth.
Act-On Has Everything Insurance Marketers Need to Grow Their Brokerage
These tactics are just the beginning of how insurance providers can use marketing automation to grow their digital presence, achieve significant gains, and succeed in this disruptive era. Everyday, our insurance customers find new and fruitful ways to use the Act-On platform.
Read more about marketing automation for insurance brokerages by downloading our free eBook, “5 Marketing Challenges Facing Insurance Brokerages.” It’s packed full of great information about what marketing automation is, how it helps insurers improve marketing processes and results, and why it’s the perfect fit for your insurance agency.
Lastly, if you’re ready to learn more about Act-On’s marketing automation solution, our team of experts would love to speak with you about your current situation and how our software can help you take your brokerage to the next level. Simply click here to request a demo with a marketing automation specialist.
Use Power Automate to build an email recipient list and sending in Outlook vs Dynamics connector
Have you been wondering how you can build a dynamic list of email addresses that can be used to generate a new email? Below, we will take a look at how to build this list using Power Automate. We will also look at how to send this list using the Outlook connector and will then compare this with sending an email directly from Dynamics using the Common Data Service(Current Environment) connector.
Let’s get started.
First, choose whichever trigger is necessary for generating the email recipient list. For this walk-through, I am simply using a recurrence trigger so that I can trigger it manually.
Once you have your trigger specified, you want to choose the Initialize Variable action for your recipients list, which will be built as an array
You can get your list of recipients from any data source available, but in this case, I am building a list of the top 5 Contacts that have an email address for demonstration purposes. This is using the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector. To keep this simple, I am returning the top 5 Contacts where the Email Address field is NOT NULL.
You will need to iterate through each Contact record by choosing the Apply to Each action. Within the Apply to Each action, add the Append to array variable action to add the email address value to the array. In this case, I pull in the emailaddress1 using dynamics values from the returned Contact records.
Outside of the Apply to each loop, you need to join all of the array values with a semicolon. Select the Join variable action. Specify the outputs of the array values and enter a semicolon to join the values.
You can run the current configuration to test your results. When you look at the results of Join, you will see the following
You will see the inputs of the array and the outputs into a string of email addresses.
To send this using the Outlook connector, select Send an email (v2) action. Specify the Output of the Join function in the recipients line
After you send, you will see the recipients listed and sent successfully.
Now, if you want to achieve the same thing, but send directly from Dynamics, you will run into some complications. Dynamically building a list of recipients and adding to an email like we did in the Outlook connector, is not yet possible. Let’s take a look.
Below, I have selected Create a new record using the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector. For the entity name, select Email Messages.
As you can see below, you must individually specify each recipient value. Meaning, you would need to know the entity type and number of recipients. It requires the format as /entitylogicalname(recordid) in the Activity Party Attribute field. Unfortunately, you cannot specify multiple values in a string like we do with Outlook. There is a product enhancement suggestion to vote on here. Ability to dynamically build recipient list for Create Email Message in CDS (current environment) action
Stay tuned for the next post on creating and sending an Email from Dynamics using Power Automate.
Aaron Richards
Voice Search Is the Future of SEO
Achieving top search position for dozens of keywords is the ultimate goal for many content marketers, but Google keeps throwing curveballs our way to make that quest even more difficult. One of these recent updates that is shaking up how we optimize our websites for SEO is voice search.
So what is voice search? Voice search makes it just a bit easier for us to find the resources and answers we need to make purchasing decisions by allowing us to input our searches audibly instead of typing them up. And because of this added layer of convenience, this won’t be going away any time soon. Organizations will have to consider this factor when optimizing their websites and webpages for SEO.
Voice search is still new, so many of us marketers are still trying to wrap our head around how it works and its vast potential. The good news is that getting ahead of the game now will put you one step ahead of your competitors. Optimizing your website for this new search medium will give your SEO a huge boost and provide a more enjoyable customer journey and user experience. Most importantly, your sales and revenue could potentially skyrocket.
What Is Voice Search?
Voice Search enables users to use voice commands instead of typing to search for what they need. Users can search by opening their browser, clicking on the microphone icon to the right of the search bar, and recording whatever phrase they would type otherwise. These search terms can be as simple as “coffee shops” or “coffee shops in northwest Portland open Monday at 7 AM.”
With this feature being available on both desktop and mobile, the voice search option is quickly increasing in popularity.
Here are three best practices for optimizing your keyword strategy for voice search.
Consider How People Talk When Developing Your Content
Very few of us talk the same way we write, and we should expect to see that difference reflected in the way our target audience looks for information via voice search.
For example, while you might type in “Los Angeles restaurants” and then proceed to narrow down your search, you might voice search “What are some good restaurants near the Los Angeles Arts District?” Again, individuals who voice search are using this method because it’s convenient and probably don’t want to spend the additional time scrolling and narrowing down their search.
You can optimize your content for voice search by including:
- Questions: Incorporate “Who, What, Where, When, and Why” language into your content. Think of the information your target audience is looking for and how they’ll voice that question when speaking instead of typing. This practice will also drastically improve your chance of earning a featured snippet, which we’ll cover in the next section.
- Location: Try to be as narrow and descriptive as possible when it comes to describing your location. Make sure to mention the neighborhood you’re in and nearby attractions in your content (whenever it makes sense to do so; don’t force it).
- Related Products or Services: Is there a related product or service that your audience is constantly searching for? If so, you probably want to mention them in your content to ensure they can find you more easily. For example, marketing automation users often want to know if our platform integrates with the CRM they are using, so we make sure to include phrases such as “Does Act-On integrate with Microsoft Dynamics?” or “What are the benefits of integrating SugarCRM with Act-On?” throughout our website.
- Highlight Your Competitive Advantages: The last thing you want is for your target customer to voice search “What is the best [insert product or service here]?” and have your company not appear in the search results. To prevent this from happening, make sure to mention what makes you stand out from the competition and feature plenty of positive customer reviews throughout your website.
Focus on Earning Featured Snippets
You’ve probably scrolled through your search results and noticed that, many times, there’s a featured preview with the answer to the question you were looking for. And, as a marketer, you might be wondering how this company managed to get a bit more than just their website name and meta description featured in search results.
These highlighted posts are called featured snippets, and companies can earn them by offering what Google deems a thorough answer to commonly asked questions. As we previously mentioned, the introduction of voice search means that more individuals will be searching for more specific questions instead of generic terms. So you can kill two birds with one stone by structuring your content to answer frequently asked questions — you’ll improve your ranking in search results and increase your chances of earning that featured snippet spot.
Securing a featured snippet can help you do more than get your content front and center in search results. Better search positioning means better web traffic and more customers. And since securing this spot establishes your company as a thought leader, a featured snippet can also help you build trust and credibility with your audience early on in the sales process — providing added leverage over the competition.
If you’d like to learn more about how to earn a featured snippet on Google, check out this blog post we wrote on the topic not too long ago.
Sticking to SEO Basics Can Go a Long Way
You have to learn how to walk before you can run, and that same concept applies if you want to optimize your website for voice search. In other words, the two tactics we mentioned will go further if you have a solid SEO foundation to start with — and that means having good keywords, meta descriptions, and little-to-no errors. And by errors, I don’t mean just looking out for typos; you should ensure that your page is indexed, the meta description is the correct length, you are using the correct headings (H1, H2) with the proper keywords, and that your page doesn’t take too long to load.
If you’re completely new to SEO, it can be a very difficult concept to grasp — and you might not know where to start to make sure you’re on the right track. Thankfully, there’s a wide array of tools available to ensure your webpages are optimized. Act-On’s SEO audit tool, for example, checks your web and landing pages to verify that you’re following best practices with effective keywords and zero errors.
Guide Customers Through a Targeted and Effective Customer Journey With Act-On
As any good marketer knows, SEO is only one part of the lead generation and growth marketing process. There’s so much more to creating an awesome holistic strategy!
If you’re ready to learn about the digital tools you can use to enhance your marketing strategy, please schedule a demo with one of our marketing automation experts.
If you’re not quite there yet, please download the eBook below to learn how to optimize your funnel!
Announcing the deprecation of the Dynamics 365 for Outlook COM add-in
Today, Microsoft released an announcement regarding the Future of Outlook integration for Dynamics 365 and Power Apps customers. See the original blog post HERE
The key takeaway:
Deprecation of the Dynamics 365 for Outlook COM add-in for Dynamics 365 Online organizations
Note: We recommend our on-premise customers also take advantage of the benefits of Dynamics 365 App for Outlook and upgrade from the Outlook COM Add-in at the earliest.
When?
The recommendation is to start the migration as soon as possible to the App for Outlook and complete the migration by October 1st, 2020.
Why?
With the many feature additions and enhancements within the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, it has reached a level of maturity and parity that allows for the deprecation of the legacy client, which also aligns to the deprecation of the legacy web client and transition to Unified Interface. Below are some of the benefits of moving to the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook:
- Unified Interface. Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is built on the Unified Interface framework, which uses responsive web design principles to provide an optimal viewing and interaction experience for any screen size, device, or orientation. Much of Dynamics 365 functionality is now included.
- Global search or multi-entity search. Use global search to search for a keyword in multiple entities at the same time. Global search uses the quick find view for the various entities to search for records.
- Forms. View and edit forms the same as what you see in the mobile experience.
- Dashboards. View and edit dashboards the same as what you see in the mobile experience.
- Cross platform. Dynamics 365 App for Outlook is built using the modern Office add-ins, and supports Windows, Mac desktop clients, iOS and Android phones, and Outlook web access.
- Deployment. Centralized deployment and distribution by configuring users to the app, makes it easy to onboard users to App for Outlook.
What next?
To begin planning your transition, please take a look at the Dynamics 365 for Outlook playbook HERE.
For additional technical information on the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, take a look at this 10-part blog series HERE.
Thanks for reading!
Aaron Richards
Zoho’s Noble Endeavor
I am always fascinated by edge conditions and the change they drive. Some people use the word “margin” because it’s at the margin that things change. A situation or condition exists more or less in equilibrium with the rest of its environment until in one way or another the stresses of the situation become so great that change happens.
We have lots of metaphors, like “tipping point,” “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” and many others that describe such situations.
Right now, we live in one or more edge conditions — personal, business and economic — and much blurring. Certainly, the pressures of trying to contain the coronavirus are stressing all of us, and in a broader sense I wonder if capitalism is in an edge condition.
Certainly, many younger people seem to have embraced political messages that at least question capitalism’s viability because of its fixation on growth. How we respond as a civilization will have much impact on how people view our dominant economic model.
Kindler, Gentler Capitalism
I am not one of those alarmists who arrive on the scene pointing out the one thing, or small handful of things, that will need to change overnight. I recently wrote that the most logical consequences will be the most affordable ones.
So, for instance, don’t look for massive changes in our transportation infrastructure or office layouts; those cost fortunes to change. At the same time, watch for improvements in virus screening and vaccine development to prevent a reprise of the pandemic we are living through.
In line with this, perhaps a kinder and gentler form of capitalism is in the offing. Companies are beginning to circle back to their customers to offer products to help customers weather the viral storm, either free or at greatly reduced prices. My interest at the moment is watching how Zoho, a CRM supplier, is dealing with the crisis.
Easing the Transition
A couple of weeks ago, Zoho launched
Remotely, a virtual productivity platform comprising 11 collaboration applications. It is providing the solution to all size businesses for free. It’s doing that to help ease the transition to remote work for companies in any location around the world.
In just two weeks, more than 5,000 new companies are running on the platform, and that number is increasing every day. For instance, Zoho is witnessing 500 percent growth in use of its collaboration apps and 1,000 percent growth in daily new users of Zoho Meeting.
Today, Zoho went further when CEO Sridhar Vembu announced the small business Emergency Subscription Assistance Program (ESAP) to assist Zoho’s small business customers. Like Remotely, it’s free for a limited time.
In discussions with Zoho executives, I was surprised the first time one of them told me that the company didn’t care if it left money on the table and that the most important thing it could do was to make a happy customer. That’s in line with a famous maxim from the late business guru Peter Drucker: “The purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” I suppose happy goes without saying.
Salvation and Loyalty
Now as a practical matter, it’s doubtful that all 50 million Zoho customers will line up for the free service. There will be enough paying businesses to support keeping the lights on and the disk drives spinning for the cloud software provider. So Zoho might not lose money on this, though it certainly will forgo revenue — but in the service of keeping its global business customers afloat. It’s a noble endeavor, and that’s precisely what’s most interesting.
In times of crisis, often the official channels become clogged and quit working. That’s when the small and indirect channels can spring into action and make a substantial difference.
Governments around the world are trying to formulate rescue packages for their whole economies to help them weather the storm. These are big picture things, though, and they’ll likely miss the detailed needs of companies, such as paying for subscription services.
So good on Zoho for thinking of this and for reaching out. The company is leaving money on the table intentionally, because it knows that a dead customer pays nothing and a saved customer might end up being extremely loyal.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ECT News Network.
Denis Pombriant is a well-known CRM industry analyst, strategist, writer and speaker. His new book, You Can’t Buy Customer Loyalty, But You Can Earn It, is now available on Amazon. His 2015 book, Solve for the Customer, is also available there.
Email Denis.
Creating and Sending an Email from Dynamics 365 using Power Automate
Earlier, we looked at building out a dynamics recipient list for a new Email and how you can use that in the Outlook connector vs the challenges with doing the same thing in the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector. You can see that post here.
If we know the entity type and number of recipients at the time of building the Flow, we can use the bound actions to actually send the email using Power Automate. This will only be possible in the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector. If you use the standard Common Data Service connector, you will only be able to create an Email Message in Draft state.
Choose whichever trigger is necessary to create and send the email. In this case, I am simply using a Recurrence trigger for testing.
Below, I return the top 5 Contacts that have an email address for demonstration purposes. This is using the Common Data Service (Current Environment) connector.
We need to loop through each Contact returned, using the Apply to each action
When building the Email Message, the format is /entitylogicalname(recordid). Below, I populate the /contacts() and input the Contact GUID from the list returned from above
Once the recipient is populated, I click on Show Advanced Options. You will need to, at minimum, specify the following fields.
- Description
- Direction (Yes=outgoing, No=incoming)
One thing you will notice with the Description field (body), is that is currently does not support Rich Text formatting. There is a product suggestion here, that I would recommend voting on: Allow Rich Text Editor for email message entity
- Status Reason- Select Draft
- Subject
Once you have completed populating the data here, you need to actually send the Email, as it currently sits in Draft state.
Select Perform a bound action
When you specify the entity type, it will display a list of actions that are bound to the entity type. In this case, we select SendEmail
Next, specify the unique ID of the Email Message created in the prior step
Finally, specify the IssueSend as Yes
Click Test
Select I’ll perform the trigger action, Test and Run Flow
Once complete, you will see the emails as Sent in Dynamics:
Thanks for reading!
Aaron Richards
Territory Management within Dynamics 365 CRM on Maps – Align territories to balance workload among sales and service reps!
In our previous, blog we have seen how with the help of creating territories sales managers can distribute workload amongst the sales team. With the distribution of work load every sales person has a clear picture of what prospects they need to chase and what strategy they need to follow to generate maximum sales. This also gives the managers a clear picture of how each sales person is performing.
However, in some cases the sales manager might distribute Dynamics 365 CRM leads to the sales persons unevenly due to imbalance in size of territories. Therefore, one sales person might have to chase more leads than other in order to meet their target. This obviously leads to a lag in performance. In this scenario, with the help of Maplytics, territories can be easily balanced in order to provide equal workload to all the reps.
For instance there is a Sales Manager Becca, she has two territories assigned to the sales reps Jacob and Serena. Serena plots the territories on map to visualize how both the territories are distributed. Upon plotting the territories Becca realizes one territory covers greater region than the other.
To avoid the imbalance in the distribution of workload, Becca decides to balance the territory using alignment tool. With the help of alignment tool Becca moves one region from second territory to first.
After moving the geography one Territory 2 to territory 1 now Becca has balanced territories with which workload is distributed between both the territories evenly.
Therefore, you have seen how with the help of Territory Alignment managers can quickly distribute the workload among the reps evenly. Both Sales and Service teams can leverage this feature of Maplytics to balance workload and create motivation amongst team members.
Let’s delve into the benefits of territory management:
- Even work distribution: With the help of territory management teams can distribute the work evenly amongst the team members and weigh their performance. With even work distribution the top performing employees can be sorted out and training program for other reps can be launched.
- Territory Alignment: By aligning territories equal opportunities can be created for all the team members to showcase the best of their performance. They can pursue leads and clients of their territories and make the best of their opportunities.
- Territory Distribution: With territory distribution all the areas, leads and clients in the client/lead base is covered and maximum benefit is acquired from the business.
- High ROI: Since reps are allotted territories evenly, there is a balanced work allotment therefore improving the chance of acquiring clients. Therefore, the overall ROI is high and maximum business is generated.
Thus, you have seen how with the help of territory management you can take your business to another level. In order to acquire maximum leads and clients with the help of Maplytics drop a mail at crm@inogic.com.
To explore the solution for a free trial of 15 days download the app from our or
Happy Mapping!