Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales is a powerful CRM offering a multitude of capabilities to consolidate customer information, optimize collaboration with other teams, and effectively manage existing and new opportunities. However, many Microsoft Dynamics users face challenges when creating custom sales quotes.
Although Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales does come with some quoting capabilities, it lacks advanced features to support complex pricing and custom product configurations, leading many users to rely on inefficient manual processes to generate quotes and proposals.
To overcome these limitations and elevate the quoting process, integrating a CPQ solution with Dynamics 365 unlocks powerful capabilities that streamline workflows, enhance pricing precision, and improve the buyer experience.
Benefits of using CPQ to generate quotes in Dynamics 365 for Sales
Integrating a CPQ solution like DealHub CPQ with Dynamics 365 enhances quoting capabilities by enabling:
- Guided selling to recommend products and configurations
- Automated pricing and discounting logic, placing guardrails on pricing and discounting
- Approval workflows based on custom thresholds
- Real-time syncing of CRM, ERP, and pricing data
- One-click quote generation with branded templates
- Deal insights and analytics to track quote performance, pricing trends, and win rates
These features reduce configuration and pricing errors and accelerate the sales cycle, highlighting just how inefficient and error-prone traditional quoting methods in Dynamics 365 can be without CPQ support.
Manual sales processes lead to errors, time wasted, and money left on the table
Efficiently creating reliable price quotes is crucial to accelerating sales cycles, impacting business growth, and creating a satisfactory customer experience. However, the process can involve numerous parameters and become complex and time-consuming. This is especially true when the sales quote involves an ensemble of components and variables whose costs depend on multiple considerations, such as features, options, location, and discounts.
As a result, salespeople often find themselves manually computing prices and then using tools such as Excel or Word to issue a sales proposal. This not only makes the process tedious, but also leads to calculation errors, discrepancies in pricing and legal policies, inconsistency in how the organization’s brand is represented, and wasted time and effort on generating customized quotations.
In fact, according to Aberdeen Group, only 38% of companies are sending accurate price quotes, leaving significant revenue on the table.
So how can organizations simplify the process and increase their speed and efficiency when generating quotes in Microsoft Dynamics 365?
3 ways to streamline the quoting process and increase sales efficiency
Implement playbooks and guided selling
If you are reading this, you are probably using Excel or other manual templates to calculate and create your company’s price quotes. Sales playbooks are intuitive and configurable wizards that use “guided selling” to walk salespeople step-by-step through each customer engagement and content generation activity. These guided flows can be customized to every type of sales scenario, enabling salespeople to create personalized quotes within minutes effortlessly.
Employ digital proposals instead of Word, Excel, or manual templates
Digital proposals release sales teams from time-consuming manual entry when creating business proposals. The whole deal cycle can be managed and nurtured from one point of interaction instead of sending and tracking numerous files. This not only saves time and minimizes errors, it enables prospects to share proposals with their internal stakeholders with just a couple of clicks.
Use insights to optimize every stage of the deal
Getting real-time alerts on customer engagement allows salespeople to quickly identify buyer intent, track progress, and see which content is resonating. They can pinpoint friction areas, and quickly make changes to optimize the experience for customers and guide the deal forward quickly and more efficiently.
As organizations grow, the manual processes and templates that served them when they were small become difficult to scale, unmanageable, and time-consuming. I have worked with dozens of Sales Operations professionals, IT managers, and other Sales related capacities and one of the things that almost always surprises them is how easy it is to implement tools within Microsoft Dynamics 365 that automate processes and make quoting simple, easy and fast, leaving salespeople time for what they do best, sell.
Considering implementing CPQ? Follow these best practices
A successful CPQ implementation is a strategic initiative that affects teams, processes, and your customer experience. Here are our recommendations for some do’s and don’ts to guide you as you transform your sales process:
Do align CPQ with business goals
Make sure your CPQ initiative directly supports your company’s broader sales and growth objectives. Alignment ensures stakeholder buy-in and measurable ROI.
Do involve cross-functional stakeholders
Include sales, finance, marketing, and IT early in the process. Their insights will shape a more holistic solution and ensure a unified customer experience.
Do prioritize data quality and integration
Clean, reliable data is critical. Seamlessly integrate your CPQ with CRM, ERP, and pricing databases to drive accurate quotes and streamlined workflows.
Do empower teams with training
Provide ongoing training and a clear change management plan to help sales teams confidently adopt new tools and processes.
Do stay customer-centric and agile
Use customer feedback to continuously improve. Offer flexible, personalized pricing and be ready to adapt your strategies as market conditions evolve.
Don’t rush implementation
A rushed rollout can lead to poor adoption and missed functionality. Take time to plan, test, and iterate for long-term success.
Don’t overcomplicate pricing models
Complexity creates confusion. Keep pricing structures clear and easy to configure—both for your reps and your buyers.
Don’t neglect training and user adoption
Even the best tools fail without proper training. Avoid underutilization by investing in education and user support from day one.
Don’t ignore data hygiene or security
Outdated or inaccurate data leads to quoting errors. And without strong data security, you risk customer trust and compliance violations.
Don’t silo departments or disregard compliance
Collaboration is essential. Break down silos between departments and ensure your pricing processes meet all relevant legal and regulatory requirements.
When thoughtfully implemented, CPQ can dramatically improve sales efficiency, pricing accuracy, and customer satisfaction. Use these best practices to guide your journey and build a scalable, future-proof quoting strategy within Microsoft Dynamics 365.
DealHub CPQ helps MSD 365 users close bigger deals faster
Automated quoting with DealHub CPQ enables Microsoft Dynamics 365 users to eliminate sales process inefficiencies and close larger deals. This is illustrated by the success Zensai is experiencing using DealHub. For this company, we enabled quick and efficient multi-product quoting with guided selling, reducing quote creation time from hours to minutes. DealHub helped Zensai accelerate order processing by streamlining and automating deal approvals and ensuring quotes and invoices are aligned.
The native integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 ensures real-time synchronization of customer data between the CPQ and the CRM. As sales reps progress through the sales playbook, quotes are automatically generated with customer data, accurate pricing, and valid product configurations, reducing manual input. Additionally, DealHub CPQ allows for zero-coding backend changes, enabling easy modifications to product configuration and pricing rules without the reliance on coding by operations teams. Eliminating bottlenecks and simplifying implementation and maintenance has improved the scalability of Zensai’s sales operations.
Deliver one fluid sales motion with a CPQ for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for sales
Every business application manager shares a common goal: to create one cohesive sales motion that streamlines the buying and selling experience. Yet too often, sales teams are forced to juggle disconnected tools, manual processes, and inconsistent data, barriers that slow down deal velocity and frustrate both sellers and buyers.
To avoid this, start by listening. Have open conversations with your sales team to understand their day-to-day challenges. Then, equip them with technology that not only addresses their pain points but also integrates seamlessly with your existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment.
DealHub’s scalable CPQ solution is built for Dynamics 365, enabling your team to manage even the most complex deals with ease, without hopping between systems or relying on outdated workflows.
Time is one of your sales team’s most valuable assets. Don’t let it be wasted on inefficient quoting processes or repetitive administrative work. Empower your reps with the tools they need to generate accurate quotes faster and deliver a more personalized, responsive experience to customers.
