Welcome back to our blog series on my favourite Sales Pro CRM tips and tricks. Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM improves how you interact and do business with your customers. But are you using the system to its fullest potential? I’ve got you covered with another handy trick to make your day-to-day use of the system easier!
Jennifer Davison, Dynamics 365 Consultant, Bam Boom Cloud
Tip #5: Standardising Views
Views are a fantastic way to display key records and information within Sales Professional. However, swapping and changing between different views often means looking at different formats of the views.
When standardising views, uniformity is key. When switching between one view to another, we often only want the results to change, not the whole layout of that view. If the appearance of the view is frequently changing, it can start to get confusing.
So, what can we do about this?
Firstly, when creating a new view, have a look to see if there is an existing view that already has the required columns of data displayed.
Next, click on the ‘Advanced Find’ button on the top toolbar:
You will now have the option to create a new view:
This is where we now have the option to use an existing view as our template. Click into ‘Use Saved Views’ and find the view from earlier, which has all the required formatting:
Two things will now happen; the search criteria will be copied over, as will the columns of data that are displayed within the view:
…and…
Now, all you need to do is to amend the search criteria. Upon saving the new view, it will have the same layout and appearance as the original view, hopefully making it easier to digest:
Tip #6: Removing Unused Views
Now that we know how to create standardised views, we need to ensure we only keep views that continue to be relevant.
Over time, you may find that you have too many views, some that are no longer needed and perhaps even a duplicate or two.
If the view list is too long, it can make it harder to find the view you need, leading to a decrease in productivity. To ensure you continue to have quick access to your views, it is important to remove the views that are no longer needed.
But how do we do that?
There are two options available. The first is to delete the view. The second option is to deactivate it.
When a view is deleted, it is completely removed from the system. To action this, click on the ‘Advanced Find’ option:
In the new window, change the ‘Look for’ option field to select the entity that the view is to be removed (for example, Accounts, Contacts, Leads, Opportunities). Then click on the ‘Saved Views’ option:
Select the view that is to be deleted and click on ‘Delete Saved View’:
Alternatively, instead of deleting a view, the view can be deactivated. This will remove the view from your active view list. Deactivating a view will provide two outcomes: ensure you only see the relevant views listed in your active list and allow you to re-activate the view at a later time if needed.
To deactivate a view, follow the above steps, but instead of choosing to delete the view, choose the option to ‘Deactivate’:
Should a deactivated view be needed again in the future, follow the same steps as above, but choose to ‘Activate’ the view:
Happy view housekeeping!
Those were some of my favourite CRM tricks. There’re some really exciting things you can do to make your day-to-day use of the system easier, so hopefully you have taken your CRM use to the next level!
Want to find out more about CRM? Dynamics 365 offers 3 options for CRM software so check out our CRM comparison guide here.
