Different businesses may find themselves in a situation where they are planning to deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 for their Sales Team. In this case, they would have to make the decision of which license to get between the two Dynamics 365 Sales App: Sales Professional and Sales Enterprise.
Throughout this article I will guide you through the features and differences between the two options, so that you can have a more clear idea of what best fits your business model needs.
Similarities between Sales Enterprise and Sales Professional
First, I think it would be suitable to have a quick view of what are the features that you can find in both applications.
- No limits for number of users.
- Dashboards.
- Clients of both licenses can create and customize all the Dynamics 365 out of the box entities listed here: Accounts, Contacts, Activities, Leads, Opportunities, Quotes, Orders, Products, Price Lists, Campaigns, Marketing Lists; as well as the Custom entities.
- In their latest sprint update (Spring 18) Microsoft also included in both Sales apps the Case Management entities, so clients now can have better tools in their disposition for their Customer Service. Although, the advanced case management functions (like SLA and Entitlement Entities) remain exclusive to Dynamics 365 for the Customer Service license.
- The availability to connect your Dynamics 365 with Power BI, Outlook and Excel is available from both Sales apps.
Differences between Sales Enterprise and Sales Professional
Now, let’s have a closer look at what the Sales Professional App is missing:
- Access to a Portal which can be used for customer self-service to help reduce costs and improve customer-client interaction.
- Access to a Development instance (Sandbox) is not included. This can be very useful for testing new functionality and training purposes to upskill staff without affecting real data.
Note: Each of these can be purchased for an add-on cost.
- Powerapps is not included
- Customization – there are some restrictions to these options with a Professional license.
Below I will list the Sales Professional customisation limits:
- Forms– Up to 2 per entity.
- Custom Entities– 15
- Guided Business Process Flows– 5
- Custom Workflows– 15
- Reporting customizations– 5
Note: The good news is that the use of third party solutions that are added from App Source will provide greater flexibility with the above limits for customer entities, business process flows or customer workflows. However, the Professional license will only allow 10 third party applications to be installed to its instance (be those from App Source or elsewhere
The Enterprise license on the other hand allows you to virtually tailor every aspect of the system to your needs, providing unlimited usage rights.
But, this is not the only advantage you can have purchasing the Enterprise App. In order to justify that extra $20 per user per month, Microsoft has included a series of functions and services available only to the Enterprise licensed users.
Let me list them below for you :
- Sales embedded insights (formerly Relationship Insights)
- Sales Goals
- Territory Management
- Hierarchies
- Relationships
- Voice of the Customer surveys
- Microsoft Social Engagement
- Mobile Offline Sync
- Gamification
As you can see, these are all very important features which can help an organisation custom tailor the system in order to meet its complex requirements and better achieve certain pre-defined KPI-s.
These features are explicitly designed by Microsoft in order to shorten the sales cycle, boost productivity and reduce costs. They are meant to derive meaningful intelligence from the massive amounts of data a company has to deal with on daily basis. This complex data is transformed into simple understandable insights that will make it easier for the business to focus on the right priorities. Also, certain features (like Gamification) will help an organisation meet its objectives and achieve its goals by motivating and energizing the entire team of people.
Let me bullet point below what you and your organisation have to earn with the Sales Enterprise APP:
- Sell smarter with embedded intelligence
- Optimise email engagement with embedded intelligence
- Keep a pulse on social trends finding out what buyers are really thinking
- Engage buyers with social media
- Provide intelligent guidance
- Gain visibility and insights
- Simplify sales execution
- Modern mobile apps that do not require connectivity at any time but work in offline mode and allow synchronization afterwards.
Finally, I’ll describe both options with a sentence, which I think captures the essence of each:
Sales Professional includes core CRM sales functions at a reduced rate for businesses with basic sales force needs, while Sales Enterprise offers a vast range of capabilities designed to meet complex requirements.
Conclusion
In the making of this difficult decision, please bear in mind that the missing bits of the Sales Professional license could soon prove to be crucial for your business needs. It is not unusual that organisation which work with Dynamics CRM depend on several workflows and business process flows to manage their everyday automated processes, so the limitation of only using 15 and 5 of each could bring a serious problem ahead. Same thing with the custom entities, forms and reporting customizations.
Anyway, despite the obvious benefits of the Sales Enterprise App we discussed above, not all businesses can afford to introduce it into their company, due to timescales and implementation costs. However, Dynamics 365 for Sales Professional, still remains a great choice (and affordable one) for businesses who just want to focus on the sales features of Dynamics 365 and do not require all the functionality that the Enterprise Suite offers yet.
The good news for these businesses is that Dynamics 365 for Sales Professional shares the same platform as the Enterprise license, so should you find that your CRM requirements grow, you can migrate to the Enterprise licenses at a later date.
