Topic 2, Contoso Ltd Case Study
Background: Contoso Ltd. is a global technology distributor headquartered in Redmond, Washington. The company sells networking equipment, cloud infrastructure, and managed services to enterprise customers across North America and Europe.
Contoso Ltd. currently manages its sales operations by using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and plans to enable Sales Insights in the future.
The leadership team wants to modernize the sales organization by introducing capabilities that help sellers prioritize leads, analyze opportunities, and accelerate deal closure.
The company has approximately 150 field sellers, 40 insider sellers, 20 sales managers, and a central IT team responsible for configuring the sales platform. Contoso Ltd. ‘ s executive leadership has defined the following goals for the new sales platform implementation:
* Improve seller productivity by reducing manual research and data entry.
* Use Al insights to prioritize leads and opportunities.
* Provide automated recommendations to sales representatives throughout the deal lifecycle.
* Improve collaboration between sellers and sales managers. Current Environment:
Sales platform
Contoso Ltd. uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales integrated with Microsoft 365 services.
The following components are currently deployed:

Data and lead management
Leads are important for driving new business at Contoso Ltd. They are generated from multiple sources including:
* Marketing automation campaigns
* Website registrations
* Partner referrals
* Trade show contact imports
Marketing teams import lead lists weekly into Dynamics 365 Sales by using spreadsheet imports. Sellers currently evaluate leads manually.
Sales managers report that this process results in inconsistent prioritization across regions.
Opportunity management
Opportunities are tracked in Dynamics 365 Sales through a defined qualification-to-opportunity lifecycle to ensure accurate reporting.
Sales leadership has requested the Contoso Ltd. IT team to evaluate the following capabilities:
* AI-generated summaries of opportunity records.
* AI-driven research for customer organizations.
* Automated recommendations for closing deals.
Business Requirement: Contoso Ltd. ‘ s executives have defined the following business requirements:
Lead management
* Inside sellers must use a seller engagement workspace that prioritizes leads automatically based on predicted likelihood to convert.
* All sellers are guided through a consistent set of qualification steps aligned to Contoso Ltd. ‘ s sales strategy.
* Leads cannot be advanced to the development stage until a decision maker has been confirmed.
* Sales leadership requires flexibility in how leads are converted. Inside sales need automatic opportunity creation. Field sellers need the option to manually decide whether an opportunity should be created when a lead is qualified.
* Lead scoring must be implemented to help sellers identify high potential leads automatically.
* Lead scoring must continuously improve based on historical sales outcomes.
Opportunity development
The opportunity flow must be improved by using Al-driven research and automated insights.
* Field sellers must be able to access contextual research about customers and competitors while working on opportunities.
* Opportunity records must display Al-generated summaries to reduce the time required to review historical activities.
* Field sellers must use the Opportunity pipeline view to visualize, prioritize, and manage opportunities.
* All opportunity revenue must be calculated using opportunity line items based on selected Contoso Ltd.
‘ s products and standard pricing.
* Sales managers must receive an external quarterly competitive intelligence brief to help with their research. This should be delivered as a PDF document.
Sales performance
Sales managers require improved pipeline and revenue forecasting capabilities. The managers need to report on their business performance and use insights, visuals, and recommended next actions.
The new solution must provide the following:
* Allow sales managers to configure forecasts for opportunity pipelines.
* Notify the seller ‘ s manager when a draft quote is created and requires approval.
* Allow leadership to track performance against revenue goals.
* Ask questions about Dynamics 365 Sales data to support executive analysis and decision making.
* Support data definitions used at Contoso Ltd. when reporting.
Technical Requirement:
Contoso Ltd. ‘ s IT department defines the following priorities for the sales platform.
AI capabilities
The platform must support the following Al features:
* Lead scoring to guide sellers to priority items.
* Opportunity research insights to prepare deal analysis.
* Copilot-generated summaries of sales records to help with decision making.
* AI-powered research and analytics to aid leadership reporting.
* When performing sales research, sales managers must be able to save their favorite prompts.
Automation
* Automation must be implemented to guide sellers through recommended next steps during the sales cycle.
* Any approvals must use the Power Automate Approvals connector.
* Field sellers use the existing Lead to Opportunity Business Process Flow to manage their leads.
* A Power Automate desktop flow is used to process orders into a partner ordering application that completes fulfillment.
Collaboration
All sellers must be able to collaborate by using Teams and store related sales documents in SharePoint.
AI-driven insights
The company is deploying the Sales accelerator to guide seller activities.
The Sales Research Agent
Sales managers will use the Sales Research Agent to gather intelligence about customer organizations.
The sales managers have the following requirements:
* Must be able to reuse visualizations after they are created; they don ‘ t want to recreate them.
* Must have a consistent method to quickly return to a blueprint that they frequently use.
* Must be able to retain a library of questions to receive consistent responses based on definitions approved by the company.
* Should have Bing search enabled on the environment for generative Al feature settings.
Platform extensions
The IT department plan to extend the platform by doing the following:
* Create Power Automate flows to automate seller tasks.
* Embed Power Apps components inside model-driven forms.
* Embed Power BI reports for sales analytics.
Testing
* The IT department is testing predictive lead scoring with a small group of sellers.
* The IT department edits the existing lead scoring model by adding new fields.
Issues:
Users have reported the following issues:
* Field sellers spend a significant amount of time researching customers before engaging with prospects.
* Sales managers cannot easily identify the most promising opportunities across regions.
* Lead prioritization varies significantly between sales teams.
* Testers report they cannot access the field changes in the lead score.
* A sales manager generated a blueprint but forgot the competitive intelligence brief.