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Handy CRM Views and Graphs for Government Contractors (GovCon)



If you use a customer relationship management (CRM) system for tracking government contracts, you will find yourself using some views, reports and graphs more frequently than others.

Here are some favorites from my experience and from users of the InfoStrat GovCon CRM solution.

The most fundamental chart is the sales pipeline funnel.  This is broken into the sales stages of your business process flow, such as unqualified, qualified, RFI, RFP, proposed and others.

Sales pipeline


The view that I use most often is Open Opportunities by Owner.  This is the view that helps coordinate sales meetings when you are reviewing open opportunities with your business development team.  Adding the Opportunity Owner to the standard Open Opportunities view makes it easier to sort the opportunities during the course of the discussion.  I like keeping the opportunity owner as the rightmost field in the view.

Using the Opportunities with Proposals Due view helps you focus on outstanding proposals.  The filter criteria are: proposal due contains data and proposal submitted date = blank.

The Quarterly Sales History makes a great bar graph.  Monthly can be helpful as well, but if you go too far back the labels for the months can get busy.  Government sales tend to be larger deals with a slower sales process, so quarterly summaries can help smooth the artificial monthly variations of when a deal slips a few days from the forecast.

Largest open opportunities or top 10 opportunities are good views for a quick look at the largest opportunities.   Executives may appreciate these views rather than seeing a large number of small opportunities. You can show this view on the right side of the Opportunities view.

Top customers graph from opportunities view. 


Sales by Opportunity Owner is another bar graph or view that lets you sort your sales leaders.

One of the advantages of Dynamics 365 is that you can easily create your own views, reports, graphs, and dashboards based on your business requirements.  Advanced Find is the first Dynamics tool that end users should master for their reporting and visualization needs.

For more posts on CRM (Dynamics 365) for government contracting, see:

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