Modern revenue teams are under pressure to do more with less: hit the number, strengthen customer loyalty, and prove the value of activities with defensible data. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE), which includes Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights applications, can help organizations meet those demands by unifying customer data, standardizing sales processes, and surfacing AI-driven insights. This guide breaks down what Dynamics 365 CE is, what it does, and how to implement it with confidence and control.
What Is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement?
Dynamics 365 CE is Microsoft’s modular platform for managing the customer lifecycle from lead to opportunity to renewal and service. It combines core customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities with native integrations to Microsoft 365 (Outlook, Teams) and Power Platform (Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps). By using modular applications that can connect with the tools your team may already be using, your organization can create a connected, extensible environment that can help reduce swivel-chairing, multiple-tabs-open, redundant work, and enable consistency across sales, marketing, and service.
A successful Dynamics 365 CE implementation hinges on clear business objectives, strong executive sponsorship, and user adoption. Key factors include aligning the platform with business processes, investing in change management and training, leveraging out-of-the-box functionality before customizing, and providing ongoing support and governance. A phased rollout with measurable milestones can help you manage complexity and drive long-term value.
Pro Tip: Assign Roles
Roles to Assign During Your CRM Implementation Project
Often, successful CRM programs balance vision, delivery, and adoption. Establish a small, cross-functional team with clear responsibilities: Executive Sponsor (sets vision and key performance indicators), Project Manager (guides scope, timeline, and quality), Implementation Partner (provides system configuration, training, post-launch support), Department Team Leaders (strengthen requirements and advocacy), Pilot Users (deliver real-world testing and feedback), and IT/System Administrators (manage environments, data, and integrations). Right-sizing this team and updating responsibilities as you move from design to pilot to rollout can help sustain buy-in and speed decisions.
Five Pillars of Value in Dynamics 365 CE
Sales Built for Real-World Teams
- Lead & Opportunity Management: Qualify leads, progress opportunities through a defined pipeline, and forecast with consistent stages and criteria.
- Account & Contact Management: Maintain a complete relationship history, including activities, notes, emails, meetings, anchored to accounts and contacts.
- Sales Force Automation: Automate follow-ups, reminders, handoffs, and approvals to help reduce administrative drag and improve seller focus.
Potential Value-Drivers: Improved data integrity, consistent pipeline hygiene, and increased seller productivity, and a pipeline your leadership team can trust.
Advanced Analytics & AI-Powered Insights
- Data-Driven Dashboards: Out-of-the-box reports and Power BI integration offer role-based performance insights—from seller scorecards to executive revenue views.
- AI Guidance: Predictive scoring, next-best actions, and conversation intelligence help prioritize effort and coach teams in real time.
- Real-Time Visibility: Track win rates, cycle times, and pipeline health with drill-through capabilities to quickly identify root causes.
Potential Value-Drivers: Improved visibility for pipeline, forecast, and performance metrics through dashboards so insights can be translated into coaching moments and not siloed in back-office reports.
Integration & Collaboration
- Microsoft 365 Native: Can seamlessly log emails from Outlook, join calls in Teams, and access customer context without tab-hopping.
- Power Platform: Use Power Automate for approvals and notifications; build lightweight Power Apps to streamline unique steps in your sales workflows.
- Familiar User Interface: A consistent application interface with familiar buttons, menus, and controls can help users focus on their actual tasks rather than figuring out how to navigate the software.
Potential Value-Drivers: Reduced manual administration, higher quality customer conversations, accelerated user adoption.
Pro Tip
To measure marketing effectiveness, use the Source Campaign field to connect opportunities and revenue to webinars, events, and nurture programs, helping to improve performance tracking.
Scalability & Customization
- Modular Design: Organizations can start with the Sales application, then add Marketing, Service, or Field Service modules as the need arises.
- Configurable, Not Fragile: Use no/low-code tools to adapt forms, fields, and workflows without introducing brittle (not extensible) custom code.
- Industry Fit: Extend CRM software with vetted solutions or accelerators to align with industry requirements, such as territory planning and equipment tracking for oil and gas or quota gap/competitor share-of-wallet tracking for distribution.
Potential Value-Drivers: Modular design allows for increased flexibility and scalability and potential cost savings.
Pro Tip
Standardize and configure where possible; customize only when necessary. This can help keep upgrades simple and the total cost of ownership manageable.
Security & Compliance
- Role-Based Access Controls: Set up permissions so only authorized users have access to select and role-appropriate datasets.
- Data Protection: Encryption at rest and in transit, audit logs, and environment-level controls.
- Lifecycle Management: Govern change effectively with multiple environments (development/testing/production) and solution layering to help keep teams productive during enhancements.
Potential Value-Drivers: Guardrails for growth, supporting a strong security posture that doesn’t hamper production and business development activities.
Common Pitfalls & How to Avoid Them
Underestimating Change Management
Underestimating change management can lead to significant challenges. It may result in poor adoption rates, as team members may not understand the necessity or potential benefits of the change. This lack of understanding can foster resistance, which may adversely affect productivity.
To help mitigate these risks, create playbooks or standard operating procedures and have project stakeholders and champions share helpful updates. Establish a communication cadence for “up, down, and out” messages, and publish a short, biweekly project newsletter to help reinforce behaviors and highlight wins.
Pro Tip: Have a Communication Plan
Establish a CRM Communication Plan
Communicate up to project sponsors and senior leaders, celebrating milestones and sharing scope and budget status. Communicate down or across to end users and managers with regular updates to surface pain points, debunk misconceptions, and highlight day-to-day benefits. Communicate out to your technology implementation partner to discuss design decisions, risks, and blockers. Before go-live, prime your organization with project kickoff emails. During the project, send a short biweekly project newsletter with training tips and what’s changing. After go-live, keep the momentum with ongoing tips and quick user surveys.
Data Quality Debt
Over time deficient data management practices can lead to data quality debt. Incomplete, incorrect, and duplicative data can erode trust in the system and forecasts.
To help preclude this pitfall, assign CRM champions or data stewards for Accounts, Contacts, and Opportunities. Define reoccurring terms for required fields, formats, and validation rules. It’s also helpful to schedule periodic stale-opportunity sweeps.
Over-Customization Too Early
Some of the risks associated with over-customizing a CRM system may include higher costs due to increased development and maintenance expenses and challenging environments to upgrade that may not be compatible with future updates from the CRM provider.
CRM can be designed to fit your needs. Start by outlining your organization’s specific CRM implementation requirements. Asking the time-tested questions outlined in this article can help your team specify CRM requirements. To build a streamlined, extensible CRM system, focus on core business needs. Then, start with configuration. Only add customizations where they create clear value.
Integration Overreach
Integration overreach happens when fragile or too many applications are connected to your CRM system. While integrations are often necessary, overdoing it can lead to major issues like increased complexity, slower performance, and security risks.
A phased approach to integrations can help organizations avoid these risks. Consider beginning with Microsoft 365 and a small set of high-priority Power Automate automations, for example. Then, expand once core stability is proven.
Unclear Goals
Without clear guidance and goals, time-to-value may appear ambiguous post-implementation.
To help remedy this, define measurable outcomes up front, e.g., +10% opportunity-to-win, −10% cycle time, +15% activity capture. Also, attribute applicable wins to campaigns using the Source Campaign field to link revenue to specific efforts.
Fast-Track Path to Value
Implementing Dynamics 365 CE effectively requires a structured, phased approach that balances speed with strategic objectives. A fast-track method deployed by an experienced technology consulting team can help you identify potential pitfalls early and align with the CRM provider’s guidance. This method can work alongside any project methodology (agile, waterfall, etc.), adding an extra layer of quality control through blueprint and go-live reviews that some traditional implementations might miss. The fast-track approach outlined below is designed to help guide clients from initial assessment through deployment.
Pro Tip: Specify Requirements
Ask These Questions to Specify CRM Requirements
Initiate a rapid requirements workshop using these prompts:
- Which steps in our sales or service motions take too long?
- Which steps do users skip or complain about, and why?
- Which steps don’t add value (remove rather than rebuild)?
- Which processes are too manual and could be automated?
- Which flows are overly complex and can be shortened?
- Which steps don’t make sense and should be redesigned?
- What data do we truly need at each stage to report accurately?
Aim to start simple, then scale. Unnecessary fields and reports may create confusion, errors, and a higher total cost of ownership.
Phase 1: Planning & Discovery (Days 1–30)
In this fast-track approach, the first month centers on understanding your current environment and establishing a plan for delivering desired business outcomes.
Objectives:
- Identify business priorities and desired outcomes.
- Define measurable criteria for success and key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Develop a detailed project plan and confirm stakeholder alignment.
Key Activities:
- Form the project team: Include representatives from departments who will be using the system, as well as a project manager and executive sponsor.
- Facilitate discovery sessions: Engage stakeholders to document pain points, inefficiencies, and long-term goals.
- Conduct gap analysis: Compare current CRM capabilities with Dynamics 365 CE platform features to identify areas for improvement.
- Define the minimum viable product (MVP): Prioritize essential features, such as Sales or Customer Insights, to support early adoption and address immediate business needs.
- Develop a value case: Assess the potential return on investment by projecting benefits such as reduced manual work or improved conversion rates.
- Set up the environment: Prepare a development or sandbox instance for initial configuration.
Phase 2: Design & Configuration (Days 31–60)
This phase translates strategy into action through iterative configuration and early validation.
Objectives:
- Configure the system to support the MVP.
- Migrate essential data for initial use.
- Prepare for user training and acceptance testing.
Key Activities:
- Finalize system design: Define data models, security roles, and user interface elements (forms, views, and dashboards).
- Configure system features:
- Add or modify a select number of fields across core entities.
- Implement formula columns or rollup fields to surface key metrics.
- Configure security roles for primary user groups.
- Set up basic business units.
- Migrate data: Import essential records (accounts, contacts, and open opportunities) for pilot testing.
- Prepare for user acceptance testing (UAT): Develop test scripts and identify super-users for early feedback.
- Create dashboards: Build 30/60/90-day dashboards to track performance metrics.
Phase 3: Deployment & Adoption (Days 61–90)
The final stage focuses on deploying the MVP, supporting user adoption, and measuring initial results.
Objectives:
- Deploy the MVP in the production environment.
- Provide training to support user adoption.
- Measure initial results against defined KPIs.
Key Activities:
- Perform targeted deep dives: Review areas such as data modeling, security, integrations, and performance at key milestones, e.g., after configuring data entities or completing any custom development, to identify and address potential issues early. For instance, a performance and load review may reveal a workflow that could slow the system, allowing the team to adjust it before go-live.
- Facilitate UAT: Gather feedback from super-users and make necessary refinements.
- Prepare for deployment: Complete data migration, perform system checks, and ready the production environment.
- Deliver training: Provide tailored sessions to demonstrate how the system can support daily workflows.
- Go-live: Deploy the solution and offer immediate support, either on-site (preferred) or virtual, to help address any issues.
- Post-launch support: Schedule a post-go-live workshop to confirm the solution is meeting business objectives and highlight any adjustments needed for stabilization or future phases. In addition, initiate regular check-ins and office hours to assist users and maintain momentum.
- Measure and report value: Use dashboards to track key performance metrics and share results with leadership.
- Plan next steps: Use feedback to inform a phased road map for future enhancements and additional module rollouts, confirming each stage builds on previous wins and supports ongoing adoption.
By following this approach, your team can set realistic expectations and navigate CRM projects with confidence.
Start small. Show value in a reasonable timeframe. Scale with confidence.
How Forvis Mazars Can Help
Dynamics 365 CE is a powerful, scalable CRM platform that can help you streamline processes and enhance the customer lifecycle journey. Business Technology Services at Forvis Mazars can assist with a broad array of CRM services, including:
- Assessment and road map: Current-state review, data quality plan, and a fast-track path to value.
- Design and implementation: Dynamics 365 CE applications configured to fit core motions, Power Platform automation, and standard dashboards.
- Governance and enablement: Defined recurring terms, playbooks or standard operating procedures, role clarity, best practices for scheduled updates from the CRM provider, and leadership-led adoption and rollout plans.
- Accelerator programs: Pre-configured solutions to shorten time-to-value while keeping environments upgrade-ready.
- Training and support: Enhancements, training, analytics, and support for continuous improvement with the system.
- Client experience: Engagements with professionals at Forvis Mazars are structured to foster an Unmatched Client Experience® with clear outcomes and accountability.
Do you have specific questions about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement or other CRM applications? As a certified Microsoft Partner, our experienced team of technology consultants can help you assess and enhance your current CRM environment or implement a new CRM system. Connect with us to learn more or request a personalized demo.
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