Ready to up your CRM game? With a jump from Dynamics 365 CE on-premise to online, you're in the perfect spot to make meaningful changes. 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. 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, a ..read more

The sales pipeline: for most Dynamics 365 for Sales users, it consists of a list of accounts, opportunity forms, and maybe a list of standard activities for each phase of the pipeline.   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 we'll take a quick look at a few of the more important solutions (you can see some categories on the nearby image) to ..read more

Do you want to enrich your Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement or Model-Driven Power Apps with custom table images? Many Power App tables use the default puzzle-piece icon that appears less professional and difficult to distinguish from other apps. If you want icons that are clear, fresh, and engaging, I have great news. Read on to discover a free source of icons you can access in just a few minutes to deliver more professional app design to your users! Start with PowerPoint Microsoft provides an extensive library of icons with PowerPoint. Start there to find the right icon. In PowerPoint ..read more

This entry is part of our Feature Review Series. These short, to the point blogs strive to provide a quick snapshot of information to a user looking for a quick overview of a feature, how it's managed or configured, some insight into how a business / organization would use it, and provide links to resources or tutorials for a deeper dive. 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 ..read more

This notice is related to the quality of the metrics you are getting through your Marketing Automation Platform (such as ClickDimensions, Dynamics 365 for Marketing or other similar products).     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 ..read more

This entry is part of our Feature Review Series. These short, to the point blogs strive to provide a quick snapshot of information to a user looking for a quick overview of a feature, how it's managed or configured, some insight into how a business / organization would use it, and provide links to resources or tutorials for a deeper dive. 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 ..read more

Do you want to spice up your Microsoft Team with a professional quality picture? That's a great idea! Not only does it make your Team look better, according to this study, it actually helps your users to more rapidly find your team. Quickly finding an attractive, relevant (and free) Microsoft Teams picture can be a challenge. But, good news, you have an entire library of free icons at your disposal. It takes just a few minutes to set one up. Using the emojis and icons provided by Microsoft as your picture is free and easy. Here's the process. How to Use Free Emojis and Icons as Your Microsoft ..read more

This entry is part of our Feature Review Series. These short, to the point blogs strive to provide a quick snapshot of information to a user looking for a quick overview of a feature, how it's managed or configured, some insight into how a business / organization would use it, and provide links to resources or tutorials for a deeper dive. One of the often overlooked but powerful features of Dynamics 365 is the ability to bulk delete records. This can be particularly useful to clear out unnecessary records that might be increasing your overall storage footprint. Additional storage can become co ..read more

The CRM struggle is real. According to this article in Harvard Business Review, between 18% and 90% of CRM projects fail! The most telling metric: nearly 90% of executives report that the CRM system is not helping their business to grow.     Engaging the c-suite (or being an engaged member of the c-suite) can be a balancing act. Too much pressure on one end of the scale or the other can have a negative influence on the project outcome.    2 Tips for Executives When It Comes to CRM Projects   If you sit in an executive position, or you're trying to engage at the right ..read more

This short blog entry will hopefully help clear up a simple yet odd situation that arose recently on one of our projects. A customer is in the process of moving from their legacy CRM on-premise environment to Dynamics 365 in the cloud. When the new environment was provisioned, the admin user made sure to navigate to the app named "Dynamics 365 — custom" to turn off access for users. To do so, they clicked the ellipses (noted in red in the screenshot above) to expose the options for this environment. Here is where some confusion amongst the team crept in… The option stated "SHOW FOR ALL ROLES ..read more