At KTL Solutions, we perform demos for one of the dynamics products every now and then. As a team, we each have our strengths for specific Dynamics products. My specialty is Dynamics CRM. I have been working with Dynamics CRM since version 3.0 and have had a chance to work with Dynamics GP as well. In today’s post, I’ll discuss demo prep and strategy for Dynamics 365 CE (Customer Engagement, formerly CRM).
Microsoft has made the process to provision a Dynamics 365 CE instance very easy. In order to set up a trial, you can navigate to https://trials.dynamics.com. Here you can explore trials for Dynamics Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Project Service Automation, Marketing, Finance & Operations, Business Central or Talent. All of these applications are within Dynamics customer engagement and the Dynamics 365 ecosystem.
The trial setup is easy enough as it can link to your existing Office 365 tenant. From there, your Microsoft partner can set them up for you. The only gripe I have with these trials is that they are limited to 5 users. In the case of Field Service, you may need more users to properly demo the features and functionality.
Dynamics Sales
A good demo for Dynamics Sales would also involve integration with all other Office 365 applications available with Dynamics 365 sales. In this case, you can set up the trial so that it connects to your existing Office 365 tenant. On the other hand, you could create a whole new onMicrosoft trial tenant and also add Office 365 services as a free 30-day trial. The onMicrosoft trial tenant can be more work so I prefer to add the trial instance to my existing Office 365 tenant. Once the initial trial is set up, it can be managed at here. The trial setup is also very easy, as it takes you through a simple selection to provision the necessary resources.
During the trail setup, you can select an application within the Customer Engagement solution. Behind the scenes it provisions all these apps and based on your selection it defaults the application in the trial.
Integrating Office 365 Services and Dynamics 365
You can connect SharePoint, OneDrive, OneNote from Settings->Document Management. As a Microsoft partner, you can set up a dedicated SharePoint site for the Dynamics 365 demo and keep connecting to the same site for each of the Dynamics 365 CE demos. The same would apply for OneNote and OneDrive. The next integration would be Email integration using server-side sync.
Since the Dynamics 365 tenant is provisioned within the same Office 365 tenant, the email configuration becomes easy. You need to approve the mailbox and remember to check the box to sync exchange with the Dynamics 365 organization, the exchange integration can be setup under Settings-> Email Configuration. The email configuration step is necessary to be completed so that you can perform the next step of adding the outlook app to your Office 365 outlook.
The above setup gets your demo ready for complete presentation of features, including the functionality of Dynamics 365 along with Office 365 integration.
Intelligence Configuration
You can go to the next step by setting up Relationship Analytics and Sales Insights, the pre-requisite for which is the email configuration. You can navigate to Settings->Intelligence Configuration. You can demo the embedded intelligence features which are only available with the Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise license ($95/per user/per month). The embedded intelligence features are not available under the Sales Professional license ($65/per user/per month). You can read more about the embedded intelligence feature at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customer-engagement/sales-enterprise/embedded-intelligence.
If you decide to demo the relationship intelligence features, then be sure to set up your demo environment a few days in advance of the actual demo day. The relationship assistant and sales insight add-on does take 24 hours to sync up with Exchange online and start to deliver the analytics. Also, in order to perform a relevant demo, work with your prospect or someone from your organization to set up emails back and forth to track in CRM and generate the automatic insights based on your email exchange.
Installing InsideView Insights
Now to really jazz up your demo, I would recommend that you install the InsideView Insights solution from the app source (or Versium predict based on your audience). Both these solutions offer list building and provide good scenarios for making marketing lists. It also provides a great data collection tool which is available to Dynamics 365 users free with their subscription. Versium offers building lead scoring models but I have found that this would only be helpful when you are doing a demo for a very sales-centric organization which has the need for lead scoring and building sales models for prospects.
Until now I would only demo the InsideView Insights solution in the web interface, but the recent updates have made it available to demo the same within the Unified Client interface. The list building and discover tools are not automatically added to the unified interface so you may have to modify the ‘Sales Hub’ app to include them in the sitemap. Once the above functionality is activated within the demo, then you to decide whether do the sales demo using the new Unified Interface or the traditional web interface. I would stay away from using both as it can be confusing and takes too much time to explain in a demo. The Unified interface is still missing a lot of the features like data imports, advanced find, excel editing features and more. For now, I stick to the web interface for any demo. There may be use cases to demo the unified client when it would come to scenarios in the PSA or Field Service but we’ll discuss that in another blog post.
Demonstrating Dynamics 365 Sales
Last but not the least is to demo the PowerBI and also the Dynamics 365 sales app as the mobile app. For demo purposes, I would recommend the ‘Sales Analytics for Dynamics 365’ service content pack instead of the ‘Dynamics 365 Sales Analytics’ which is based on the Azure SQL database. The ‘Sales Analytics for Dynamics 365’ content pack uses the Dynamics 365 API to collect the data into PowerBI and build the dashboard which is less time consuming to set up versus the Azure SQL & data export service.
A successful demo is not just made up of the above but also the presentation, preparation and adaptability as based on the live feedback during the demonstration.
KTL Solutions has been demonstrating free Microsoft trials for over 20 years. As a certified Microsoft partner, we have the expertise needed to guide you through all your software demonstrations. If you need our help, give us a call today.
