Automated Proposal Generation with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0

Megan Walsh, 12 August 2010

The first full time job I had was as a receptionist for a recruitment agency in Sydney, Australia. One of the most important lessons I took away from that job is that ‘we are all in sales’. Sales drives success in any business and recently we have been approached by several organisations who are looking to make their sales process easier and more efficient. The ‘out of the box’ sales module of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 is a fantastic place to start with built in features such as Lead and Opportunity tracking and quote, order and invoice management.

However, the key challenge for any sales rep is closing the sale. In a lot of industries and sectors a key artefact used to close the sale is a proposal document which outlines the key benefits your company can provide to your customers, your terms of engagement as well as details specific to your customer’s needs. For a lot of businesses their organisation profile or their company ‘sell sheet’ does not change from proposal to proposal; nor do their terms of engagement. In fact when we looked at their proposal documents closely, we could see that most of the information was static, with customer specific data being updated for each new proposal.

To make the proposal generation process quick and easy we used custom aspx to pull information from entities in Dynamics CRM through to populate a Word proposal template. The way one of our customers implemented this solution was to have their users enter sales details into the Opportunity entity, including Product information, preamble and special terms, and then click a button to automatically generate the proposal in Word.

This process for generating sales proposals means that:

• Proposals are quick and easy to generate

• Proposals are date stamped and automatically addressed to the correct customer

• The opportunity specific information is easily readable by sales reps in CRM

• Opening the document in Word allows users to make any final changes before sending

• The proposal can also be generated as a PDF to avoid tampering with T&Cs

For some customers we take the efficiency further by automatically creating a Quote record when a proposal is generated, or adding an option to automatically email the proposal as a PDF.

When we’re all in sales we have to be constantly improving and streamlining the way we make and close sales. By extending the built in sales functionality of Dynamics CRM to include automatic proposal generation we have been able to help our customers become more efficient at generating proposals and close more sales.