CRM Concepts: One Opportunity or Many?

If you track your sales in a customer relationship system (CRM) such as Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365, the most important thing to track are arguably sales opportunities. Opportunities happen in the sales cycle when you can match up a person (contact) or organization (account) that may purchase something.

This seems simple so far, but there are some business decisions to make about how to track the opportunities. Being consistent in how you track opportunities will make your reporting more useful later on, especially if you have a sales force who each enter opportunities.

Opportunities all have an account or contact as a buyer, and one or more products or services that the prospective customer is considering. Opportunities have owners, and this ownership may have implications on what records users can see and update, or even affect commission compensation.

When you purchase a new car, this may also create an opportunity for the dealer to provide financing. You could purchase the car and elect to go elsewhere for the financing. In this case the car dealer would win one opportunity and lose the other.

When should you enter a single opportunity? When should you create more than one? Here are some criteria to consider:

Are the opportunities managed by different people in your organization? You may want to create multiple opportunities if a single customer inquiry creates activities by different people in your company and each of the new opportunities can progress in its own way.
Could you win one part of the opportunity but not the other?
Do different people receive sales compensation based on the opportunities that you track?

Your answers to these questions can steer you to the best answer for your organization.

Whichever path you choose, be sure to follow it consistently. Otherwise your reports and queries will be more difficult to understand.

Key Concepts for Microsoft Dynamics 365: Tenant, Instance, App and Solution

Updated 8/15/2022 To understand Microsoft Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics CRM) and Power Apps, you need to learn some new terms and concepts that may be a bit different from what you know from databases and solutions that are hosted on premises. These concepts also apply to Power Apps. The main difference is that with Power Apps you are not starting with a Microsoft app but more of a blank canvas for your custom apps. This post introduces some key terms and how these concepts are important for planning your implementation. While Dynamics 365 is still available on premises, it is most commonly deployed on the Microsoft cloud. This blog post discusses only cloud implementations. Microsoft has multiple clouds such as commercial and government community clouds in several countries. We start with a Microsoft tenant . A tenant is the account you create in the Microsoft Online Services environment (such as Office 365) when you sign up for a subscription. A tenant contains uni

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My Favorite Microsoft Power Apps Bloggers and their Blogs

by James Townsend Updated 7/5/2022 Microsoft Power Apps is one of my favorite subjects, and I enjoy reading blog posts from members of this thriving technical community. Here are some of my favorite bloggers and their blogs: The Official Microsoft Power Apps Blog I have to start with the official Microsoft Power Apps blog. It has many contributors, largely Microsoft program manager, including frequent posters Denise Moran , Greg Lindhorst , Kartik Kanakasabesan , and Adrian Orth . This is the place to go for product announcements, updates and technical how-to for a broad range of Power Apps topics. April Dunnam April Dunnam was formerly focused on SharePoint and now devoting herself to Power Platform. April offers highly understandable explanations of Power Platform, Dataverse and other top Power Apps topics. She joined Microsoft in late 2019 and has a thriving YouTube channel . Carl De Souza Power Apps Blog and eBook This is one of the most extensive and best organized blo

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