Dynamics 365 Sales
The sales half of the Microsoft estate — pipeline, accounts and activity — usually already holding the identity of everyone who needs to ask it questions.
The sales half of the Microsoft estate — pipeline, accounts and activity — usually already holding the identity of everyone who needs to ask it questions.
What Dynamics 365 Sales holds, and why that matters here
Dynamics 365 Sales holds accounts, opportunities and the activity history against them. Its advantage in a Microsoft-centred organisation is that identity already exists alongside it, so an assistant can recognise a signed-in employee and answer within their existing permissions without a second access model.
The contact it generates is almost entirely internal. Managers asking about pipeline, colleagues asking who owns an account, and salespeople asking what was last discussed before a meeting. Service cases, field work and finance sit in other Dynamics 365 apps and are covered on the Dynamics 365 page; this one is about the Sales app alone.
- Accounts and contacts — the customer record and who works there.
- Opportunities — stage, value, close date and next step.
- Activities — calls, meetings and emails logged against the account.
- Products and quotes — what was offered and on what terms.
- Forecasts — where the pipeline is expected to land.
Sales questions Elbi can answer from Dynamics 365 Sales
What stage is this deal at?
Stage, value and next step without opening the CRM.
Who owns this account?
Ownership and team, the most-asked internal question in any sales organisation.
What was last discussed?
Recent activity before a meeting, for someone who is about to walk in.
What is in the pipeline this quarter?
Summary by stage for a manager who would otherwise ask each person.
What did we quote?
The quote on record, which settles most internal disputes immediately.
Log this activity
Writing a note or a follow-up back to the record where you enable it.
How Elbi reads the Sales app
- The records live in DataverseDynamics 365 Sales keeps accounts, contacts, leads, opportunities, quotes and activities as Dataverse tables, reached through the Dataverse Web API. There is no separate sales database to connect; the connection is to the environment the Sales app runs in.
- Access begins with an Entra ID app registrationYour administrator registers the assistant as an application in Entra ID and adds it to the Sales environment as an application user. The secret or certificate is issued, and held, on your side.
- A read-only sales role, built for the purposeThe application user gets a custom security role with read privileges on the sales tables the questions need — not a copy of the Salesperson or Sales Manager role, which carry create and write rights it has no use for.
- Answers follow the seller's own viewStaff are recognised from their existing Microsoft sign-in, and answers stay inside their access. A salesperson sees the opportunities they own or share through an access team; a manager, where hierarchy security is switched on, sees their team's as well.
- Deal questions are answered from the opportunity itself"Where are we with this opportunity?" becomes a read of its business process stage, estimated revenue, estimated close date and most recent activity, returned in the language the seller asked in, with internal option codes turned into the stage names your team uses.
- Activity logging is the useful writeWhere enabled, the assistant logs a phone call or task against the opportunity, or adds a note after a conversation — each needing the create privilege on that activity table, and optionally a person's confirmation. Changing stages and closing deals are best left with the seller.
Sales security roles and control
| Direction of access | Read by default. Logging a phone call, task or note is switched on per activity type and can wait for confirmation. Qualifying leads, moving stages and closing opportunities are sales decisions and belong with the seller. |
|---|---|
| Tables and columns | Defined by the custom role on the application user. Column security can hide fields such as discount approvals or commission notes even on tables that are otherwise in scope. |
| Which deals a seller sees | Ownership, business units, access teams on opportunities and hierarchy security decide what each seller sees in Sales, and the same rules bound what they see through the assistant. |
| Credentials | The app registration and its secret or certificate belong to your tenant; the application user belongs to your environment. Revoking either is done by your administrators, not by us. |
| Where data goes | Opportunity and account details fetched for a question are used for that reply and are not kept in a second copy. Message content is erased within 24 hours — usually the moment the conversation ends — and no outside AI service is involved. |
| Audit | Each lookup can be logged with its question and conversation. Your own Entra ID sign-in logs show when the app registration authenticated, independently of anything we record. |
| If it is unavailable | If the environment cannot be reached, the assistant says so and suggests checking the opportunity directly or asking its owner, rather than quoting a figure from earlier in the day. |
What this replaces
Sales organisations lose a surprising amount of time to internal lookup. Managers ask salespeople for status that already exists in the system; salespeople ask colleagues who owns an account; everyone asks what was last discussed. All of it is one query and all of it interrupts someone.
The Microsoft identity advantage matters here. Because the assistant can recognise the signed-in employee, it answers within that person's existing permissions rather than needing a parallel access model — which removes both a security concern and a maintenance burden.
Write-back is genuinely useful in sales and worth treating carefully. Capturing a note or a follow-up from a conversation keeps the record current; an assistant writing indiscriminately produces a CRM full of noise, which is worse than one with gaps.
Which sales roles lean on it
Field sales
Account summaries on a phone before a meeting.
Sales management
Pipeline questions without a round of individual chasing.
Inside sales
Quote and activity history mid-conversation.
Marketing
Attribution and account context for campaign work.
Where Dynamics 365 Sales pays back first
Start with the questions sellers and managers ask each other most: who owns this account, where is this opportunity, and what was last discussed with the customer. Each is a read of one or two tables, and each currently costs a colleague an interruption.
Pre-meeting briefs come next. A seller on the way to a customer asks for the account's open opportunities, active quotes and latest activities, and gets them as a short paragraph they can read before walking in — in Arabic if that is how they asked. It is a question that often goes unasked today, because opening the CRM on a phone in a car park is nobody's idea of preparation.
A manager's quick view of pipeline by stage works well too. The committed forecast figure itself belongs in the forecasting grid, so the number reported upwards comes from the same place every time, not from a conversation.
Connecting Dynamics 365 Sales, in order
- List the sales questions and their tablesOwnership needs account and its owner; deal status needs opportunity with stage, estimated close date and revenue; "what did we quote?" needs quote and quote lines. The list sets the role, and nothing outside it is granted.
- Register the app, add the application userYour Entra ID administrator registers the app; a Power Platform administrator adds it to the Sales environment as an application user. Both steps happen in your tenant, and both can be undone there.
- Build the read-only role from emptyA custom security role with read privileges on the listed tables, at the access level the use needs. Starting from an empty role is quicker to review than trimming a standard sales role down.
- Map your sales processCustom stages in your business process flow, custom opportunity fields, local product names and Arabic option labels are mapped, so the assistant describes a deal the way your team does.
- Test with real sellers in a sandboxA few sellers and a manager try their usual questions against a sandbox copy: an opportunity shared through an access team, an account that changed owner, a lead not yet qualified, a quote still in draft.
- Roll out one sales team at a timeOpen it to one team, read a month of what they ask, then widen the role and the audience together. Each widening is a role change you make, and can reverse.
Sales records and personal data under the PDPL
Sales data is personal data more often than it looks. Contacts at customer companies are named individuals with mobile numbers and email addresses, and activity notes often record what someone said in a meeting. Under the Saudi Personal Data Protection Law that use needs a purpose, a basis and a limit, even when it never leaves the building.
Two settings keep the review short. The custom role reads only the tables and columns on the question list, so personal fields no question needs are simply outside it. On Elbi's side, conversation text does not outlive the day — it is destroyed within 24 hours, typically when the chat closes — while the Sales environment stays the record, with its own retention and deletion handling.
Because this use is mostly internal, the notice that matters is to staff: tell sellers what the assistant can read on their behalf, and that their questions are logged for review.
What organisations typically see
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, and where Elbi fits
Microsoft builds Copilot into Dynamics 365 Sales itself. Sellers can ask it to summarise an opportunity or an account, catch up on recent changes, and prepare for a meeting without leaving the Sales app. For licensed sellers who spend the day inside Microsoft tools, that is a natural fit, and it is administered alongside everything else in the environment.
The difference with Elbi is mostly about who is asking and in which language. Copilot in Sales works inside the app, so it serves people with Sales access; Elbi also answers colleagues who never open it — finance checking a deal before invoicing, service checking who owns an account — and treats Arabic and English as equal first languages. Conversation processing stays inside the Kingdom on infrastructure you control, with no external AI service in the path. For Microsoft's own features, where processing happens for your tenant is a question to confirm with Microsoft.
Where both are in place they rarely compete: Copilot for the seller inside a record, Elbi for the question that arrives by chat from someone who does not use Sales. The mistake to avoid with either is letting an assistant change stages and close dates by itself, which fills the forecast with numbers nobody chose.
Common questions
Yes. Answers are bounded by the permissions of the person asking, established through your existing sign-in.
Where you enable it, and scoped to specific actions with optional confirmation. Reading is the default.
Normal. They are mapped during deployment.
This page is about the Sales app alone — leads, opportunities, quotes, forecasts and sales activity, asked about mostly by your own staff. If you also need case status, field service appointments or finance data, the Dynamics 365 page covers the wider suite. The app registration approach is the same for both.
Yes, within what you allow. They are recognised from their Microsoft sign-in, and you decide which sales facts — owner, stage, last contact — are open to people outside the sales team.
Where your environment already has Arabic labels for stages and choices, those are used when the question is in Arabic. Where it does not, the Arabic wording is agreed during mapping, so sellers hear the terms they already use.
Connect Elbi to Dynamics 365 Sales
A working assistant on your own pipeline, accounts and quotes, in Arabic and English.