Account Teams

In the previous step, you learned about competitors and that competition does not only come from other companies but from other factors as well. In this step, you will look at account teams.

Sales processes rarely occur in isolation. Every account, contact, lead, opportunity, and other records related to the sales have an owner, typically a user.

However, the processes of qualifying a lead, closing an opportunity, winning a sale, and so on, often result from a team’s work.

For every record in the app, it’s helpful to be able to identify people within the organisation linked or related to that record. Dynamics 365 for Sales includes some capabilities to relate records using connections. For example, the opportunity entity includes the capability to connect the record to the users thus identifying the sales team.

Connections in Dynamics 365 are very flexible and useful in many scenarios – they allow connecting users to access opportunities including the role of the user in relation to the opportunity. However, connections do not convey security concepts such as record ownership or access privileges. Adding a user to the sales team does not guarantee that this user will be able to access the opportunity record. This is where access teams play an important role.

Consider a secure sales environment where opportunities are only accessible by sales users who own them. Often there is a need to grant access to that opportunity to someone else (for example, an industry expert, regional manager or product specialist).

Users would need to share this record. Record sharing with individual users is difficult to manage; it cannot be easily visualised and over time, and with many records shared, may introduce performance issues.

Instead, of sharing individually, consider using access teams. Access teams provide an easy way to share business objects and let you collaborate with other people across business units.

Dynamics 365 for Sales app includes the Opportunity Sales Team Template that has Read, Write, Append and Append To privileges.

When a user is added to the opportunity sales team using connections, the app will automatically add that user to the access team for that opportunity, thus granting this user access rights on that opportunity only. If the connection is removed, the user is removed from the access team and their privileges are revoked.

Note that a user may have access to that record via their security role or membership in other teams – these access rights are not affected by the team members.

In the next step, you will have an opportunity to check your knowledge in the second Knowledge Check.