Sharing contacts, leads and customer data with the sales team

  • Article

Recently a customer asked:

"How can I share CONTACTS, LEADS, AND CUSTOMER DATA with other sales people? I 'd like to keep all customer contact data in sync and accessible by all of my employees."

This is kind of a big, conceptual question and it is related directly to choices made when implementing Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0. How it is implemented depends on your business model. But I’ll give it a go.

For a high level explanation of the purpose and capabilities of Microsoft CRM see the online help topic Introduction to Microsoft CRM.

Typically CRM is implemented with specific business goals such as: Increase Sales effectiveness, Improve Customer Satisfaction, and so on. This often means increasing visibility of customer information – and that seems to be the root of the question.

First I’ll provide some high level conceptual information about security, then I’ll provide a few tips I hope will help:

Conceptual information about Security:

Typically a user shouldn’t have to be aware of these concepts when starting out, but I may refer back to them in the tips.

See the online help topics “Establishing the Organizational Structure” and Setting Security Roles, Privileges, and Access Levels for more information. I’ll just summarize here.

Visibility of information in Microsoft CRM is defined within the business units and security roles defined in your implementation. By default – all security roles provide read access to every record in the system. This is a very common strategy because it provides just those benefits needed to accomplish the task. All the data is kept in sync because it is maintained on a centralized server rather than on each employee’s computer.

However, it is possible to modify the accessibility of information by configuring security to restrict access to records. If your business model involves highly confidential information – like many financial, legal or government organizations require – Microsoft CRM security can be configured to limit access across business units.

All customer records and records related to customer interactions (like Opportunities) are owned by a specific user. Changing ownership is referred to as assigning records.

Each user is associated with a business unit – a group within a company that works together. Each business unit has it’s own set of security roles. Each user is assigned one or more security roles.

Security is defined in two ways:

1. By the actions you can perform (also known as privileges). These include Read, Write, Delete, Append, Assign, and Share.

2. By your level of access. There are 5 levels of access:

None: You can’t perform an action on this type of record.

User: You can perform actions on record you own.

Business Unit: As a user, you are associated with a business unit. With this level of access anyone in your group can perform an action.

Parent:Child Business Units: Because Business units can be organized hierarchal – anyone in your business unit or higher in the hierarchy can perform an action.

Organization: Anyone in the organization can perform an action.

These security settings are defined at the business unit level with a specific role. For example:

The default Salesperson security role provides these privileges/access level combinations for the Contact record type:

  • Create: User
  • Read: Organization
  • Write: Organization
  • Delete: User
  • Append: Organization
  • Append to: Organization
  • Assign: User
  • Share: Organization

In this example this means that by default only you are able to:

  • Create records for yourself
  • Delete your records
  • Assign your records to another

Tips

If your sales people aren’t able to view the information needed, I recommend escalating this concern to the people responsible for implementing Microsoft CRM at your organization. However, there are a few tips I can recommend that may address some of the concerns you have raised.

    1. Change your views

    2. Share records or ask that records be shared with you

Change your views

The View filter is in the upper right hand corner when a particular record type is clicked. By default, the Microsoft CRM views will show “My <record type>”; like My Active Contacts or My Active Opportunities.

If a sales person doesn’t have any records assigned  - they won’t see any records in the list under that Record type.

For Contacts – change the view to “Active Contacts” to see all the records your sales people have privileges and access rights to.

Share records or ask that records be shared with you

In Microsoft CRM the default security settings allow you to override the ways access security is defined for records you own. This is called sharing. Sharing allows you to override the access level for particular records.

There is an on-line help topic called “Share, unshare or assign a record” that includes the following information about sharing records. I’ve paraphrased the steps below:

Starting from an open record…

4. On the Actions toolbar, click More Actions, and then click Sharing.

5. In the Who would you like to share the selected account with dialog box, under Common Tasks, click Add User/Team.

6. In the Look Up Records dialog box, in the Look for list, select the type of record you want to find.

7. In the Look for box, type the first few letters of the name of the record to narrow your search, and then click Find.

8. In the list of available records, click a user or team to select it, and then click >> to add the user or team to the Selected Records list.

9. Repeat step 8 to add more users or teams.

10. Click OK.

11. In the Who would you like to share the selected account with dialog box, select the type of share access that you want. The available permissions are: Read, Write, Delete, Append, Assign, or Share.

12. Click OK.

If your business has security configured very tightly  - you may need to rely more on cooperating with your colleagues to share records that you are working together with.