The best performers relentlessly analyse every win and loss to understand what works (and doesn’t).
Dynamics 365 Sales now supports customisable opportunity close forms, which can be used to capture more details about these outcomes.
Provide enhanced insights to Sales Managers
By customising the default opportunity close form, sellers are prompted to track additional details. These insights inform sales managers to enhance strategic decision-making and help improve overall sales performance.
This feature enables additional fields to be created on the opportunity form. For opportunities that are won, we might want to know:
- What factors convinced the customer to go with our solution? These insights will help us understand the most compelling parts of our value proposition.
- What was our profit margin?
- Were there any obstacles or objections that had to be overcome? Tracking how we dealt with these can help us understand what tactics are effective so we can replicate these in the future.
- Who were the decision makers and influencers? This could help a team better understand the key people involved in buying committees to nurture relationships with them for repeat business.
When a deal is lost, the opportunity close form could be customised to track details such as:
- What was the main reason we lost? Was it price, features, or competitors, or were we ghosted? Understanding these gaps can help sales leaders prioritise development.
- What did the customer evaluation and decision-making process look like? Were there unexpected steps or people involved?
- Who made the final call? Even lost deals give us a chance to build relationships for the future.
By consistently capturing additional details at the point of deal closure, teams will be better informed with insights to help increase win rates by evolving their sales strategy.
Enabling Customisable Opportunity Close Forms
This feature is available with all Dynamics 365 Sales licences and must be enabled by a system administrator.
In the Sales App settings, admins must set the toggle to enable customisation.
The next step will be to navigate to the admin Advanced Settings to add the relevant fields. Select Customisation under settings, then ‘Customise the system’.
In the search box, type ‘opportunity close’ and navigate to ‘forms’.
To add new fields to the opportunity close form, select the ‘New Table Column’ at the top left of the screen.
Numerous data types are supported for these fields, including text, numbers, look-ups, currency and more.
You can also choose to make these additional fields mandatory for sellers to complete before they can close an opportunity. Additionally, a recommended option enables these fields to be searchable in Microsoft Dataverse.
For our example, we will add a new field to capture ‘Reasons Won’.
This field will list common reasons for a successful outcome and prompt sellers to select one. In our example, we have defined four options, but more can easily be added.
Once saved, the new field can be added to the form by selecting ‘save and publish’.
Field changes on the opportunity close form must be replicated on any additional forms. This includes the main form to ensure users can access this data on the read-only forms once opportunities are closed.
Once complete, upon closing an opportunity as won, sales team members can now capture the reasons using this additional field.
This detail will be applied to the record, enabling sellers and sales leaders to view the additional information from the closed opportunity in the timeline.
This is just one example to demonstrate how this feature can be used. You can experiment with fields that will be helpful to better inform your sales performance reporting.
With the capability of many data field types and calculations, you can use the fields without restriction using standard Dataverse functionality.
Please get in touch if you want to learn more about how to enable this feature in your Dynamics environment.
