In the area of product and pricing policy, questions such as “What products do I want to sell?”, “What target group are my products intended for?”, “At what price do I want to sell my products to which target group?”, “What packages do I want to offer?”, “What offers do I want to offer to my customers?”, “What currency should my prices have?” and many other questions must be clarified. As soon as a product and pricing strategy has been defined on the basis of such questions and a product range with corresponding prices has been agreed, this information can be archived in the form of documents with Microsoft Dynamics Price Management. With “sales literature”, product and price lists, brochures, marketing campaigns and many other documents can be uploaded and published, providing the sales and marketing team with useful materials that they can use to inform customers about new products or prices, for example. Go to Sales à Sales Literature and click on “new” to create and edit a new document using Microsoft Dynamics CRM . The “Sales Literature” form contains information about the document type, title and author. The “Sales literature” entity can contain several “Sales Attachments”, i.e. an article can contain brochures, product information and product presentations, for example. Competitors and products can also be added. For example, within the “Sales Literature” form, the user can see which competitors offer similar products or which products are part of a catalog at what prices.
Use Microsoft Dynamics CRM to create product catalogs that contain product, price, and offer lists, as well as unit groups. The latter defines the units of measure in which products can be purchased. Furthermore, different currencies can be managed within the product catalog. This is particularly important for internationally oriented companies. Follow these six steps to create a product catalog:
- Create a discount list (optional).
- Define units of measurement or quantities in which your products are available.
- Create products and map them to packages and product families.
- Use price lists and price elements to define the price calculation of your products.
- Assign a price list and price list item to each product.
- Define standard price lists for your products.
Product and price lists can be used to create offers, take orders and issue invoices. This is an extremely useful feature because it pulls the information needed to create the documents from the price and product lists, saving employees the hassle of typing in this data. This works in Microsoft Dynamics as follows: If an opportunity arises to sell products, you can create a so-called “opportunity”. Price and product lists can be attached to the “opportunity” form, as well as information on demand (quantity of products). Simply scroll down to the “Poduct Line Items” section to define products and prices, as well as product quantities. When creating an offer, an order form or an invoice based on the “Opportunity”, all information contained in the “Opportunity” form, including the product and price information, will be adopted. The prerequisite for this is that the entity “Opportunity” has gone through the validation process and the process has ended in the potential customer receiving an offer or taking an order. In this case, the “opportunity” would be marked as “won”. Then you have the option to convert the “Opportunity” entity to a quote, an order form, or an invoice. To do this, templates must be created for the respective documents. The “opportunity” form also contains information about the revenue that could be generated should the customer purchase products or services. When the “system calculated” function is activated, the turnover is automatically calculated on the basis of the attached product and price lists, as well as quantities. You can activate this function within the opportunity form under “Product Line Items”.
If you want to add products that have not yet been included in the product catalog or other costs, such as travel expenses, you can do this with so-called “write in products”. This feature allows the user to manually add products or costs. “Write in products” can be added to the “Opportunity”. Click on “+” in the “Product Line Items” area. Then an option set will appear where you can select the “write in products” option. In summary, Microsoft Dynamics CRM allows you to publish and manage important documents on prices and products in a central location, so that sales and marketing employees always have up-to-date product and price information and can use it when creating offers and invoices, as well as when estimating possible sales. However, product and price management is only one of the many areas of application of the CRM system. To learn more about Microsoft Dynamics, click here or browse our blog.
