Dynamics 365: Playbooks

What are Playbooks?

Playbooks, introduced to Dynamics 365 for Sales in October 2018, is a feature aimed at guiding Sales users through the various Sales processes defined by their organisation. Playbooks are essentially a collection of one or more tasks, phone calls and appointments. Each should be completed as part of the Sales process represented by the Playbook. As a Dynamics 365 for Sales feature, Playbooks can only be associated with one or more of the following entity types:

• Account
• Contact
• Opportunity
• Lead
• Quote
• Order
• Invoice

It is also possible for progress to be tracked against individual Playbooks, providing management with another means of reporting on the productivity of their Sales representatives.

Read more about Microsoft Dynamics with what is a workflow in Dynamics 365?

How Are Playbooks Defined?

Within the Sales Hub, the following must be defined to configure a Playbook:

• Playbook Category: Used to group together one or more Playbook Templates – a Playbook Category must be specified for each Playbook Template.

• Playbook Template: A playbook template is made up of one or more playbook activities, each defining a task, phone call or appointment which should be completed as part of any Playbook generated from the template. As mentioned above, Playbook’s can be associated with one or more Sales related entities (including the Account and Contact entities), each of which should be specified as part of the playbook template. Once defined, the playbook template should be published to make it available for use – this can be done via the Publish ribbon button from within the playbook template record.

How Do I Launch a Playbook?

Once a playbook template has successfully been published, you’ll notice a new Launch Playbook ribbon button within each of the entities specified as part of the template:

Clicking on this ribbon button will result in a list of published playbook templates currently available for the current entity:

Selecting a Playbook and clicking Launch will result in the creation of a new Playbook based on the defined template:

Within the Playbook:

• The number of totals and completed activities is tracked (i.e. Tasks, Phone Calls and Appointments).
• A list of activities associated with the Playbook is presented (top right corner), along with their current activity status.

The completion of each Playbook activity will be reflected within the Playbook record, as demonstrated below:

While this section describes the process of manually launching a Playbook, it should be noted that Playbooks can be generated automatically, for example, via a workflow.

Read more about Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales