Somewhere in your Dynamics 365 pipeline right now there is a quote that went out three weeks ago and hasn’t been touched since. Ask the rep why and the honest answer is usually some version of: I meant to.
The standard response is a reminder, a weekly pipeline review, a rule that every open quote gets a call. It holds for about a month. Then the quotes go cold again, and everyone quietly concludes the team isn’t disciplined about follow-up. In our experience that conclusion is almost always wrong.
Count the steps
Sit next to a rep and count what it actually takes to follow up on one quote in your system - not what the process document says, what their hands do. At a manufacturer we work with, the count was seven: open the task, make the call, log a note on the task, log a second note on the quote so management could see it, close the task, create the next follow-up task, then go hunting for the same customer’s other open quotes because the system didn’t show them together.
Now compare that to the cost of not following up: nothing. No alert, no flag, no visible consequence until the deal is gone. When the CRM makes doing the job seven times more expensive than skipping it, the CRM has made the decision. The reps are just living with it.
The tell
There is a reliable sign that this is a system problem rather than a people problem. Look at the sales probability and estimated close date on your open quotes. If most still show the default probability and a close date in the past, your team isn’t skipping follow-up because they don’t care. Every touch costs them a detour through fields they don’t have time to update. A forecast built on defaults isn’t a forecast; it’s a list.
What fixed it
At P2 Automation we replaced the process with a single screen built around the rep’s day rather than the CRM’s data model: every contact with an open quote, sorted so the most neglected one is first, with phone, email, quote, probability and close date all editable without leaving the screen. Following up went from seven steps to one motion. The probability and dates get updated as a side effect, and management has a forecast it can stand behind - not because anyone became more disciplined, but because the system stopped charging them for it.
The lesson applies to any Dynamics 365 team: when a routine job isn’t getting done, count the clicks before you blame the people. A screen built for the role usually beats a rule enforced on it.
Read the full case study, with screenshots:
See more about how P2 Automation works with Dynamics 365 teams:
Or tell us the process your team hates most - twenty minutes is usually enough to know whether a My Day view would fix it, and if it wouldn’t: