As a sales representative, you will most likely be using the Sales application from your Microsoft Dynamics 365 homepage. The sales activity dashboard is just one of many dashboards available, but it provides you with the most useful tools for your day-to-day operations.

The default sales activity dashboard comes with many practical tabs that help you visualize your data. Those include:

• Sales Pipeline: Shows a summary of open sales opportunities based on sales stage and expected value.
• Relationship Assistant: Shows various tiles or cards of activities or announcements that are recommended by the system.
• View of open opportunities: Quick overview of the topic, the account that it pertains to, and expected close rate.

Today we will focus on one section of the dashboard, Leads by Rating. This is particularly helpful when converting leads into potential opportunities and provides a pie graph organized on whether leads are hot, warm, or cold.

In fact, you can open up the pie graph to get a more detailed view of the included records. This will show you leads that have the potential to be future customers.

By clicking on the pieces of the graph you can filter leads by hot, cold, and warm. This makes it easier to focus on specific leads.

Next, clicking directly on a lead name gives you access to the lead view screen. This includes in-depth information based on a specific lead. The lead screen also shows all the information you have collected about the individual as they interact with your marketing process.

You can include or show the lead opportunity sales process, which begins with Qualification. Once a lead is qualified, you have the option to easily show that by clicking on the Qualify Button.

This will then update the lead in several other CRM records systems into an opportunity. An account and a contact will also be automatically created for the person that you qualified. Here you can fill in all the relevant information related to the lead such as the, estimated revenue, and estimated close date.

Next, you will see the 4 stages of the sales process that an opportunity will typically go through. Additional information can be added as the lead to opportunity sales process progresses.

In the Qualify tab you can enter the customer needs, proposed solutions, identify stakeholders, identify competitor and enter any other relevant information.

When you are ready to move to the next stages, all you must do is click on the next stage button in the bottom right of the process and continue to update the information as you move through the sales process. Once you return to your default sales dashboard page, refresh the page and your new opportunity will now appear throughout the dashboard.

This is just one example of the many ways in which Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help your business streamline administrative processes in the sales division. Utilizing all the tools in Dynamics 365 will help you better understand your data as you capture and analyze at each stage. To help you get started, our Microsoft Dynamics Demo shows you how you can visualize your data through a day-to-day sales scenario.