Tailoring Dynamics 365 to Your Sales Process
Dynamics 365 sales customisation is the process of modifying Microsoft’s CRM platform to align perfectly with your unique business processes. Here’s what you need to know:
- Entity Customisation: Create custom data structures for your specific business needs
- Form & View Customisation: Design intuitive interfaces for different user roles
- Business Process Workflows: Automate sales stages with guided processes
- Business Logic: Implement validation rules and calculations
- UI Customisation: Brand your CRM to match your company’s look and feel
- Mobile & Device Optimisation: Ensure seamless experiences across all devices
Most organisations implement Dynamics 365 sales customisation to drive efficiency, improve data quality, and create a system that truly reflects how their sales team works—rather than forcing teams to adapt to generic software.
The beauty of Dynamics 365 lies in its flexibility. Unlike many CRM platforms that force you to work within rigid constraints, Dynamics 365 gives you powerful customisation capabilities that don’t require writing a single line of code. Using visual designers and editors, you can build a sales system that feels tailor-made for your business.
Many small businesses hesitate to customise their CRM, fearing complexity or high costs. However, with the right approach, customisation becomes an investment that pays dividends through increased adoption, streamlined processes, and better sales outcomes.
I’m Warren Davies, founder of Beyond CRM with over 30 years of experience implementing Dynamics 365 sales customisation solutions for businesses of all sizes across Australia. Our CRM Kickstart programme helps small businesses deploy customised Dynamics 365 solutions in just 4-6 weeks, starting from $10,000.
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Dynamics 365 Sales Customisation: Core Concepts
When diving into Dynamics 365 sales customisation, it helps to understand the building blocks that make the platform so flexible. Think of these components as your personalisation toolkit—each one helping you create a sales environment that feels like it was built just for your team.
Entities
At the heart of your Dynamics 365 system are entities—essentially the database tables where your business information lives. While you’ll get standard entities like Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities straight out of the box, the real magic happens when you create custom entities. For example, an Australian real estate firm might create a “Property Listings” entity, while a maintenance company could build an “Equipment Servicing” entity to track their specific business needs.
Forms
Forms are where your team actually interacts with your data. The beauty of customisation is that you can create different forms for different roles—perhaps a streamlined version for your sales team in Brisbane and a more detailed one for your managers in Sydney. This ensures everyone sees exactly what they need without unnecessary clutter slowing them down.
Views
Views determine how lists of records appear to your users. Custom views like “Hot Leads – Queensland Region” or “Deals Closing This Quarter” help your team focus on what matters most to them. A well-designed view can save your sales team precious minutes every day—and those minutes add up!
Business Process Flows
These guided processes are brilliant for maintaining consistency across your sales team. You might create a custom flow that guides your team from initial qualification through proposal, negotiation and closing stages—ensuring everyone follows your proven sales methodology, whether they’ve been with you for ten days or ten years.
Workflows and Power Automate Flows
This is where Dynamics 365 sales customisation truly shines. Imagine automatically sending follow-up emails, creating tasks or updating related records without anyone lifting a finger. These automations free your team to focus on what humans do best—building relationships and closing deals—while the system handles the routine work.
Plug-ins and Custom Code
For more complex requirements, custom code can extend what’s possible in Dynamics 365. However, at Beyond CRM, we always prioritise out-of-the-box functionality and configuration before turning to custom development. This approach keeps your system more maintainable and reduces costs—particularly important for our small business clients using our CRM Kickstart programme.
UI Customisation
Branding your Dynamics 365 interface with your company colours, logos and terminology might seem like a small touch, but it significantly improves user adoption. When your team opens a system that looks and feels like a natural extension of your business, they’re more likely to accept it as their daily workspace.
Integrations
Connecting Dynamics 365 with your other business systems creates a seamless flow of information across your organisation. Whether it’s your accounting software, marketing tools, or industry-specific applications, these integrations eliminate double-entry and ensure everyone works from a single source of truth.
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Dynamics 365 Sales Customisation vs Configuration
One common source of confusion is the difference between customisation and configuration in Dynamics 365. Understanding this distinction helps you make better decisions about implementing changes to your system.
Configuration involves adjusting settings that are already built into Dynamics 365. This includes creating business units, setting up security roles, defining field-level security, adjusting system settings, and creating simple business rules. Think of configuration as arranging furniture in a room—you’re working with what’s already there.
Customisation, on the other hand, involves making more significant changes to the system’s metadata or adding new functionality. This includes creating custom entities and fields, designing custom forms and views, building complex business process flows, developing plugins, and creating custom reports and dashboards. This is more like renovating the room—adding new features that weren’t there before.
At Beyond CRM, we follow a strategic approach that prioritises simpler solutions first:
- We start by leveraging out-of-the-box functionality with configuration
- Next, we consider previously built functionality that can be configured to meet your needs
- Only when requirements are truly unique do we recommend custom development
This approach delivers the most supportable and future-proof solution while minimising costs—particularly important for small businesses using our CRM Kickstart programme, where we aim to provide maximum value within a fixed budget starting from $10,000.
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Dynamics 365 Sales Customisation Real-World Examples
Let’s look at some practical examples of how Australian businesses have transformed their sales processes through Dynamics 365 sales customisation:
Opportunity Close Form Customisation
The standard opportunity closing process might not capture all the information your business needs. By customising the Opportunity Close form, you can collect valuable data like specific reasons for wins or losses, competitor information when deals are lost, profit margin on won deals, product feedback from customers, and next steps for follow-up opportunities. This additional data becomes invaluable for sales analytics and process improvement.
Custom Sales Pipeline
Every business has a unique sales process. A manufacturing company in Brisbane worked with us to create a custom sales pipeline that included stages for technical assessment, prototype development, and production planning—stages not found in the standard Dynamics 365 sales process but essential to their business.
Sales Accelerator Customisation
The Sales Accelerator feature (included in Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise licences since 2022) can be customised with sequence templates that guide sellers through your specific engagement strategy. Whether that’s a 30-day new customer onboarding process or a 90-day enterprise deal workflow, these customised sequences keep your team on track.
Quote Generator
A wholesale distribution client needed custom quote templates that automatically calculated volume discounts based on customer tier and order quantity. We created a custom quote generation system that incorporated this logic, saving their sales team hours of manual calculations each week and ensuring pricing consistency.
Lead Scoring Model
We’ve implemented custom lead scoring models that go beyond the basics, incorporating industry-specific criteria like property value ranges for real estate clients or fleet size for transportation companies. These custom models help sales teams focus on the leads most likely to convert.
Mobile UI Optimisation
For field sales teams who are constantly on the road visiting clients across Australia, we’ve created streamlined mobile interfaces that highlight the most critical information and actions. These optimised interfaces work brilliantly even with spotty mobile coverage in regional areas.
Custom Entities
A professional services firm needed to track client engagements in a way that standard Dynamics entities couldn’t support. We created custom entities that modelled their unique project methodology, allowing them to track deliverables, resources, and client satisfaction in one system rather than juggling multiple tools.
Preparing Your Environment for Success
Before diving into Dynamics 365 sales customisation, set the stage properly. Think of this preparation as laying a solid foundation for your dream house—skip this step, and your beautiful customisations might not stand the test of time.
Security Roles and Prerequisites
To customise Dynamics 365 Sales, you’ll need the right access levels. It’s like having the proper keys to different rooms in your CRM house:
The System Administrator role gives you full access to all customisation capabilities—the master key that opens every door. Meanwhile, the System Customiser role allows you to create and modify most components, but with some sensible guardrails in place.
At Beyond CRM, we’re big believers in the principle of least privilege. We’ll help you assign just the permissions your team members need for their specific roles—keeping your system secure while ensuring everyone can still do their jobs effectively.
Sandbox Environments
One golden rule we never break: never make customisations directly in your production environment. That’s like remodelling your kitchen while trying to cook dinner!
Instead, use a sandbox—a safe copy of your system where you can experiment without affecting your live data or users. Dynamics 365 offers several types:
Developer sandboxes work brilliantly for individual customisation work. Test environments are perfect for integration testing and getting user feedback. When you need a complete replica of production for final validation, a Full Copy sandbox is your best mate.
For our Brisbane clients, we typically set up a development sandbox for initial work, then promote changes to a test environment for user validation before the final deployment to production. This methodical approach prevents those “oops” moments that can disrupt your business.
Solutions: The Container for Your Customisations
Solutions in Dynamics 365 are like moving boxes—they package up all your customisations so you can easily transport them between environments. Each solution contains all the components of your customisation: entities, forms, views, workflows, and more.
You’ll work with two types of solutions:
Unmanaged Solutions are flexible and editable—perfect during development when you’re still tinkering. Managed Solutions lock down your components to prevent accidental changes, making them ideal for deployment to production.
Using solutions helps keep your changes organised and prevents conflicts when you’re juggling multiple customisation projects. It’s like having neatly labelled containers instead of throwing everything into one big box!
Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)
For more complex projects, we implement proper ALM practices—the professional way to manage your customisations from cradle to grave:
We use version control to track every change to your solution files, CI/CD pipelines to automate testing and deployment, and structured release management to coordinate rollouts with user training and communication.
This approach is particularly valuable for our enterprise clients with complex implementations, but even smaller organisations benefit from having these guardrails in place.
Scientific research on solution portability
Setting Up Security Roles & Permissions
Security in Dynamics 365 is wonderfully granular—you can control exactly what users see and do within the system. When implementing customisations, it’s crucial to consider how they’ll interact with your security model.
The key security roles for customisation work are System Administrator (who can perform all customisations with full access to all records) and System Customiser (who can create and modify customisations but with limited access to certain system settings).
For organisations with strict governance requirements, we often create custom security roles that allow users to customise only specific areas of the system. It’s like giving someone keys to certain rooms in your house, but not others.
When planning your security model, consider who can see which records, who can see and edit specific fields, which forms different users can access, and how data access is organised across your company. At Beyond CRM, we help our clients implement security models that balance usability with data protection requirements, ensuring compliance with both industry regulations and internal policies.
Choosing Managed or Unmanaged Solutions
The choice between managed and unmanaged solutions significantly impacts how you’ll maintain your customisations long-term—it’s a bit like choosing between renting and buying a house.
Unmanaged Solutions give you flexibility—components can be modified directly, making them easier to work with during development. They allow for quick iterations and changes, making them ideal for internal development work.
Managed Solutions provide stability—components are protected from direct modification, support proper versioning and upgrades, and reduce the risk of accidental changes. They’re essential when deploying to client environments or if you’re an ISV.
For most of our Brisbane clients, we recommend developing in unmanaged solutions but converting to managed solutions for deployment to production. This provides the right balance of flexibility during development and stability in production.
When choosing your approach, consider the complexity of your customisations, your team’s Dynamics 365 experience, your long-term maintenance strategy, and whether you need to deploy to multiple environments. Our CRM Kickstart programme for small businesses typically uses managed solutions to ensure stability and supportability as your business grows.
Hands-On Customisation Walkthroughs
Let’s roll up our sleeves and explore some practical Dynamics 365 sales customisation examples. These step-by-step walkthroughs will give you a clear picture of how to implement changes that can truly transform your sales process.
Customising the Opportunity Close Form
The standard Opportunity Close form in Dynamics 365 Sales captures basic information, but it barely scratches the surface of what’s possible. By customising this form, you’ll gather rich insights every time a deal concludes—creating a goldmine of data for improving your sales approach.
Dynamics 365 Sales Customisation Step-by-Step: Opportunity Close
Customising your Opportunity Close form doesn’t require coding expertise. Here’s how to do it:
First, you’ll need to enable the feature by navigating to Sales Hub → App Settings → Overview. Look for “Manage Custom fields on closing form,” toggle it to “Yes,” and save your changes.
Next, create your custom fields by going to Advanced Settings → Customisations → Customise the System. Expand Entities → Opportunity Close → Fields, and click “New” to add fields like “Competitor Name,” “Loss Reason,” or “Follow-up Actions.” These fields will help you understand why deals are won or lost.
Once your fields are created, add them to the form by selecting Forms under Opportunity Close. Open both the Information form and Quick Create form, then drag your new fields into the desired locations. Don’t forget to save and publish your changes!
For a smoother user experience, consider mapping fields for pre-population. This means creating matching fields in both the Opportunity and Opportunity Close entities, then using Power Automate flows to automatically copy values when the close dialog appears.
Finally, test your customisation thoroughly. Open an opportunity in your test environment, click “Close as Won” or “Close as Lost,” and verify that your custom fields appear and function correctly.
This seemingly simple customisation can yield powerful insights. For instance, one of our Brisbane clients finded that 40% of their lost deals were going to the same competitor—leading them to revise their value proposition and win rate.
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Automating Your Sales Pipeline with Business Process Flows
Business Process Flows (BPFs) are like GPS navigation for your sales team—guiding them through each step of your sales process with clarity and consistency.
Creating a custom sales process flow starts with thoughtful planning. Identify the key stages in your sales process (perhaps Qualify, Develop, Propose, Close), define the required fields for each stage, and map out any decision points or branching logic.
With your plan in hand, create the Business Process Flow by going to Advanced Settings → Processes. Click “New,” select “Business Process Flow,” and choose your primary entity (typically Opportunity).
Now comes the fun part—designing your stages. Add stages that match your sales methodology, and for each stage, include the required steps and data fields. If your sales process has different paths based on certain criteria, you can configure branching conditions.
To ensure quality data, set stage completion criteria by defining which fields must be completed before moving to the next stage. You can also add business rules for validation, ensuring your team captures all necessary information.
Once everything looks good, publish your Business Process Flow and assign it to the appropriate security roles or teams.
Device-Friendly UI Tweaks
With sales teams increasingly working on the move, creating mobile-friendly interfaces isn’t just nice to have—it’s essential. Here’s how to make Dynamics 365 shine on smaller screens:
Start by creating dedicated mobile forms that strip away the complexity and focus on what matters most. Design simplified forms specifically for mobile users that prioritise critical fields and actions. Use form tabs to organise information logically, making it easy for field staff to find what they need.
Field layout makes a huge difference on mobile devices. Use single-column layouts that work well on narrow screens, group related fields in logical sections, and place the most frequently used fields at the top where they’re easily accessible.
For sales teams working in areas with spotty internet (we’ve all experienced those black spots in regional Australia!), configure the mobile offline experience. Define which entities and views should be available offline, set data download filters to manage storage usage, and thoroughly test with typical connection scenarios your team might encounter.
Lastly, create mobile-friendly dashboards that provide at-a-glance insights. Design compact dashboards with charts and visualisations that render clearly on smaller screens, focusing on key metrics that drive action in the field.
At Beyond CRM, we’ve seen the impact of these mobile optimisations firsthand. For a Brisbane real estate client, we created a mobile-optimised property inspection form that allowed agents to update property details and upload photos while on site. This simple change eliminated hours of back-office admin work each week, giving agents more time to focus on building relationships and closing deals.
Our CRM Kickstart programme includes mobile optimisation as standard, ensuring your team can work effectively whether they’re at their desk or on the road. After all, a CRM that works everywhere your team works is a CRM that actually gets used.
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Safeguarding Data & Performance
When customising Dynamics 365 Sales, it’s essential to look beyond features alone. Data security, regulatory compliance, and system performance all play a crucial role. A custom CRM should not only fit your sales process, but also keep your information safe and your platform running smoothly.
Data Security and Compliance
Dynamics 365 includes robust security features you should utilise when customising your environment:
Field-Level Security lets you restrict access to sensitive information like credit card details or personal data. This is particularly important for Australian businesses that need to comply with the Privacy Act and Australian Privacy Principles (APPs).
Business Unit Hierarchy allows you to organise data access based on your company structure, ensuring team members only see what’s relevant to their role.
Security Roles help you define precise permissions for different user types—from sales reps who need to create and edit records to managers who require analytical access across the team.
Auditing tracks changes to sensitive data, creating a paper trail that’s invaluable for compliance purposes and troubleshooting.
For our Brisbane clients, we focus on making sure customised CRM systems are both user-friendly and compliant. Your system should only gather essential personal information, keep it secure, clearly explain how data is used, and give individuals the ability to access and update their details when required.
Performance Considerations
Ever waited for a system to respond, only to be left tapping your fingers? Slow performance is a common pain point—so it’s essential to consider how your customisations might impact speed and reliability.
When adding custom fields, consider creating appropriate indexes for those that will be frequently searched or filtered. This can dramatically speed up your system, especially as your data grows.
Keep your queries optimised by configuring views and lookups to fetch only the data you truly need. Retrieving excess information can slow down your system and may also impact API usage limits.
If you’re implementing custom code or plugins, ensure they execute efficiently and don’t create bottlenecks. We’ve seen cases where a single inefficient plugin brought an entire sales process to a crawl!
Be mindful of form load performance by keeping forms streamlined. Just because you can add dozens of fields and scripts doesn’t mean you should. Focus on what users truly need to see and do.
For large operations, implement batch processing to avoid timeouts. This is particularly important when dealing with data migrations or bulk updates.
At Beyond CRM, we always conduct thorough performance testing in a sandbox environment that mirrors your production data volumes. This helps us catch and fix potential issues before they affect your team’s productivity.
Mitigating Customisation Risks
Even carefully planned customisations can sometimes have unexpected consequences. Here’s how we protect your system:
We implement comprehensive testing at multiple levels—from testing individual components in isolation to verifying how customisations work with other system features. We also ensure existing functionality still works after changes (regression testing) and have actual users validate the functionality before go-live.
Always test customisations in a non-production environment first. For complex changes, we recommend a progression through development, testing, and user acceptance sandboxes before deploying to production.
Before deploying significant customisations, we export a backup of your solution, document all changes being made, and prepare a rollback plan in case issues arise. It’s like having an insurance policy for your CRM system.
Because Microsoft rolls out major Dynamics 365 updates twice a year, it’s important to keep your customisations upgrade-ready. Review each release’s notes for changes that might affect your setup, test your customisations in an updated sandbox, and resolve any compatibility issues before applying updates to your live environment.
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Integration & Extensibility Best Practices
Most businesses need their CRM to talk to other systems. When implementing integrations, we follow these best practices:
Whenever possible, we use standard APIs like the Dataverse API for reliable, supported integration rather than creating custom workarounds that might break with updates.
We build robust error handling and notification mechanisms into every integration. When something goes wrong (and eventually, something always does), you’ll know exactly what happened and how to fix it.
We design integrations to handle your expected data volumes efficiently, considering both current needs and future growth. An integration that works perfectly with 100 records might fail spectacularly with 10,000.
We ensure integrations maintain your security model and don’t create backdoors into your system. Security should never be compromised for convenience.
For our Brisbane clients, we commonly implement integrations with:
Office 365 for synchronising emails, calendar, and documents
Financial systems for seamless invoice and payment tracking
Marketing tools like ClickDimensions for integrated campaign management
Industry-specific systems custom to your particular business needs
These integrations create a connected ecosystem where information flows naturally between systems, eliminating double-entry and ensuring everyone works from the same, accurate data.
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Frequently Asked Questions about Customising Dynamics 365 Sales
One of the best things about working with our Brisbane clients is answering their questions about dynamics 365 sales customisation. Let’s tackle some of the most common ones we hear.
What licences and roles do I need to customise Dynamics 365 Sales?
This is often the first question businesses ask us, and it’s an important one. To customise your Dynamics 365 Sales system, you’ll need the right combination of licences and security roles.
For licences, you’ll typically need one of these options:
- Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise
- Dynamics 365 Sales Premium
- Dynamics 365 Sales Professional
Some of the more advanced customisations might require additional Power Platform licensing, but for most businesses, your standard Sales licence covers what you need.
As for security roles, you’ll need either:
- System Administrator role for complete customisation freedom
- System Customiser role for most customisation tasks (with some limitations)
At Beyond CRM, we help determine the most cost-effective licensing approach for your specific needs. For small businesses using our CRM Kickstart programme, we set up all necessary roles as part of your implementation, so you don’t have to worry about the technical details.
How do customisations affect future upgrades?
I understand this concern completely—nobody wants to build a beautiful custom system only to have it break during an upgrade! Here’s the good news: when customisations are done properly, they generally upgrade smoothly.
Supported customisations that use Microsoft’s recommended tools (like the customisation tools in the Power Platform) typically transition through upgrades with minimal issues. It’s the unsupported customisations—like custom code using unofficial APIs or direct database access—that tend to cause headaches during upgrades.
Our approach at Beyond CRM prioritises sustainable customisations that won’t cause problems when it’s time to upgrade. We focus on configuration over code whenever possible and follow Microsoft’s best practices for extending the system.
Before any major upgrade, we always recommend:
- Testing your customisations in a sandbox environment first
- Reviewing Microsoft’s release notes to identify potential impacts
- Having a rollback plan, just in case
Can I undo a customisation if something goes wrong?
Yes, absolutely! The ease of undoing changes depends on how the customisation was implemented.
For solution-based customisations (which is how we implement most changes), you can simply remove or update the solution if something isn’t working as expected. This is one reason we’re so careful about using proper solution management techniques.
For direct customisations made outside of a solution framework, reversing changes can be more challenging—which is why we rarely recommend this approach.
Before implementing significant changes, we always recommend:
- Exporting a backup solution
- Documenting the changes being made
- Testing thoroughly in a sandbox environment
For our Brisbane clients, we implement a structured approach to customisation that includes proper solution management, version control, and testing—significantly reducing the need to roll back changes in the first place.
The statistics don’t lie—proper testing prevents the vast majority of customisation issues, and the results are worth the effort. When Dynamics 365 sales customisation is done right, your team gets a system that truly supports how they work rather than forcing them to adapt to generic software.
Custom CRM, Maximum Impact—Let’s Build Yours Today!
When you implement Dynamics 365 sales customisation, you’re not just tweaking software—you’re changing how your entire sales team operates. At Beyond CRM, we’ve guided countless Brisbane businesses through this journey, helping them achieve remarkable improvements in sales efficiency, data quality, and user adoption.
Our approach to customisation is grounded and purposeful. We begin by getting to know your specific business needs and objectives. Wherever possible, we leverage out-of-the-box features and configuration options first, only suggesting custom development when it truly adds value. This ensures your system stays easy to manage and helps keep costs down.
Many of our clients appreciate how we implement changes in phases, allowing you to see value quickly rather than waiting months for a big-bang launch. And because the best system in the world is useless if no one uses it, we provide comprehensive training and support to ensure your team accepts the customised solution.
For small businesses looking to get started, our CRM Kickstart programme offers a fixed-price, fixed-scope solution that can be deployed in just 4-6 weeks. Starting from $10,000, this provides you with a standardised yet custom CRM solution that has plenty of room to grow as your business evolves. It’s perfect if you need to move quickly but don’t want to compromise on quality.
If you’re a larger organisation with more complex requirements, our enterprise-focused services deliver comprehensive customisation with robust governance, security, and integration capabilities. These implementations typically range from six weeks to six months, depending on scope and complexity.
Dynamics 365 sales customisation isn’t just an expense—it’s an investment that delivers real returns through improved sales processes, better customer insights, and increased revenue. The key is working with a partner who understands both the technical possibilities and your business realities.
I’ve seen how transformative the right CRM can be. One of our Brisbane clients recently told me their sales team now saves nearly 10 hours per week on administrative tasks after we implemented their custom solution. Another reported a 24% increase in lead conversion rates within just three months of deployment.
Ready to transform your sales process with a customised Dynamics 365 solution? Our Brisbane team would love to chat about how we can help you achieve sales success with a CRM system that works exactly the way your business does—not the other way around.
