If you are Dynamics 365 Developer or Customer and have used Leads and Opportunity records, most of the time we associate activities with these records to provide a consistent guided path for Sales Person. To achieve this task, people have been using Plugins or Workflows to create and associate activities with Leads and Opportunity.
Microsoft has introduced a new feature in Dynamics 365 Sales, called Playbooks, to guide team members on how to respond to certain events in typical Sales scenarios. They can also help to streamline and automate recurring tasks such as call customer, book an appointment for a site visit and so on.
Playbooks feature is only available for Unified Interface.
Typical Use Cases
We can use Playbooks in the traditional sales scenario such as Lead Qualification, Coordinating with Customer for an Opportunity or Dispatch of an Order and many more.
You can create a set of Playbook activities which should be followed to ensure the best outcome out of your deals.
As long as you are using Lead, Opportunity, Quote, Order and Invoice entities, try to use Playbooks first to see if they can help you to fulfil your requirements.
Prerequisites
To use Playbook, Dynamics 365 provides two security roles, Playbook Manager & Playbook User.
Playbook Manager role allows the creation of Playbook Categories to classify the playbook, and then playbook manager also creates Playbook Templates that define a set of best practices based on past experiences and their organization’s standards.
Playbook User role allows Sales Persons to choose one of the available Playbook templates while working on their records.
We can use Playbook Manager & Playbook User roles or we can update other security roles with equivalent permissions.
We can add Playbook Manager permissions to Sales Manager security role and Playbook User permissions to Sales Person security role.
Create Playbook Category
- Navigate to Dynamics 365 for Sales Hub App.
- Navigate to App Settings and select Playbook Categories under Playbook Management Section.
- Create a new Playbook Category. This is just to categorise your Playbook Templates.
Create Playbook Template
- Under Playbook management section, select Playbook Templates.
- Create a new Playbook Template with Category, Name, Track Progress and Estimated Duration in Days.
- Select Record type to which this template applies to and then add Playbook activities that should be applicable in this scenario.
- Don’t forget to Publish the template as only published templates can be used by users.
If the playbook template used for the playbook has its Track progress field set to Yes, the activities are created under a playbook record that is under the calling record. If the Track progress field is set to No, the activities are created directly under the calling record.
While grouping all Playbook activities to a template could be beneficial for reporting, choosing not to track progress will be more helpful to end users.
Playbook Activities
These activities are slightly different than Traditional activities in Dynamics 365. These are related to Playbook and are scheduled for a date relative to the launch date of a Playbook.
For instance, one Playbook Activity within a series could be set with a due date 1 day after the Playbook is launched while another activity within the same template could be scheduled 5 days later.
Apply Playbook
Now finally, its time to apply playbook to relative records. Open a record like a Lead and click on Launch playbook to open a pop-up window and select one of the available Playbook Templates.
Once it’s applied, you will see a notification as “Playbook launched successfully.”
Once applied, you can navigate to playbook by clicking on Related Tab. Then you can launch the associated Playbook.
You can complete the Playbook by clicking on Complete As menu on the command bar.
You can’t close a playbook that has open activities.
I hope this will help you understand about Playbook and encourage you to use them as much possible in your next project.
Till then Cheers 😉…
