Common Customizations on the CRM Opportunity Entity

Every business has a different sales process. But in a Dynamics CRM sense, you can think of two broad categories: sales processes that can make use of “System Calculated” pricing…and ones that don’t. The built-in Dynamics CRM alternative to system calculated pricing is “user provided”. If you need to learn how to customize Dynamics CRM, topics like the one in this article are covered in my one-day live online training class, Customizing Dynamics CRM and the xRM Platform

I’ll review here some of the most common customizations I see for organizations that can make do with user provided pricing, but first, a summary of the major differences:

System Calculated Pricing

For organizations with well-defined products or services that can be put into price lists, this can be a good way to go. In Dynamics CRM it requires some setup: first you build out your product catalog, then create price lists and add products, at a specific price point, to the price lists. Once you’ve got that done, create a new opportunity, select a price list, and bam! Well, almost bam. The way it works is, you add products to the opportunity (”opportunity products” in this context), specify the quantity of each, and the “system calculated” part finds the price of the product in the price list, multiplies it by the quantity, and then bam!   

User Provided Pricing

If your business doesn’t quite — or at all — work like that, you’ll probably want to use user provided pricing. This does NOT mean you can’t use the product catalog — it really just means that you don’t supply ”q” and have the system multiply it by “p”; rather, you supply “p” directly. Lots of businesses fall into this category, and most (but not all) of the customizations I review in the video below are geared towards them.

Here’s the YouTube video, with the newly discovered (by me, anyway, thanks to an assist from my colleague Todd Shelton) High-Definition format:

Enjoy:

March 22, 2010 · Filed under Customization

5 Comments »

  1. Todd Brotzman Said,

    April 5, 2010 @ 12:46 pm

    Hey Richard.. where is the ‘wow’ in CRM 4.0? We are migrating our companies sales team to CRM 4.0, and sales reps currently use a spreadsheet (built by one of the sales support team) that they check-off products (including selection of a package – and it auto-fills products fitting that package). I am suspecting that the avg num of products associated with a package is as high as 25-30. A good number of ‘add on’ items are available as well.

    Is this possible in Workflow without a custom plug-in? I don’t relish the idea of trying to sale the sales reps on using CRM if they have click ‘New Opportunity Product’. If workflow could add the products associated with a selected price-list (Asynchronously), then the Sales Rep could then deselect what is not needed (ctrl-click multiples), before they create a Quote.

    What are your thoughts?

  2. Richard Knudson Said,

    April 13, 2010 @ 12:49 pm

    Hi Todd,

    I think there are lots of WOW places in CRM 4.0 (and CRM Online)…although, depending on your specific requirements, perhaps not in the scenario you described in your note! What you described is NOT possible with the standard CRM 4.0 workflow engine: you can’t create opportunity products (or quote products, etc.) from a workflow. I wish you could but not yet. And yes, adding them one by one would be too tedious a task even for the most diligent of sales reps. But, what you might be able to do is use “kit products”. They’re a standard but little-used feature of the product catalog that let you bundle up a bunch of base products into a larger “kit” product. This isn’t a perfect solution since even though you can “bundle them up” into a kit product, and even though CRM maintains the relationship of kit to individual product behind the scenes…there’s no built-in way to “un-bundle” the kit so (e.g.) you could expose all of the individual products separately on a quote form!

    For now, at least, your best solution will probably be to look at a 3rd-party “configurator” — Experlogix is the best known and my favorite. They presented at a recent meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group. Visit http://www.DynamicsCRMUserGroup.com for information and a link to their site, the recording of their presentation, and I hope this helps!

  3. Don Wiid Said,

    April 14, 2010 @ 2:42 am

    Hi Todd

    An inexpensive product to evaluate is QuoteWerks. They have a solid reputation and have been incrementally improving their product over many years.

    It is a really simple tool (for sales people) that produces a quote with very little fuss, and links the quote in native and PDF formats to MS CRM.

    The interface is a bit retro, but once you get over that it is VERY usable indeed.

    The trial is not time-locked, but rather locked by the number of quotes / products – so you can evaluate at leisure.

  4. Richard Knudson Said,

    April 14, 2010 @ 3:36 am

    Thanks Don — good point. I should have suggested QuoteWerks. For me it isn’t a fit since they don’t yet support Dynamics CRM Online. But Todd, it sounds like you are on-premise, so you might take a look at it.

  5. Todd Brotzman Said,

    April 28, 2010 @ 6:00 am

    Thank you very much for the feedback. I am going to be recommending consideration of a add-on for handling the quote (proposal) generation. Our current tool (built in Excel) is very sophisticated, but I am sure not as sophisticated as others.

    I have implemented use of Kits, but also found a recommendation for using the ‘Get Products’ option with Quotes, and pulling from a ‘master quote’. This can help us define the most common offerings and then the sales rep can tweak it by removing products not needed.

    We are also likely going to transition in stages, and will continue to use our existing MS Excel ‘proposal generator’ tool in the interim.

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