This post applies to Realtime Marketing (although Outbound Marketing also provides the possibility to create Leads from Customer Journeys). The feature is available from release 1.1.30993.107 (September 2023), which should already be available to you. If not, you can manually update your Customer Insights – Journeys installation by going to Settings > Versions.

Because of the recent naming and licensing change, I will (try to) refer to Dynamics 365 Marketing (old name) as Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys (new name).

This feature provides the possibility to create Leads or Opportunities from within Journeys. This might come in handy for recurring events such as contracts which are about to expire, or generating a Lead which showed engagement during the Journey. Of course there are many other examples in which case you would like to create a Lead or an Opportunity.

In this case we are going to create an Opportunity for contacts linked to a Contract that is set to expire in two months time. To do this, we need the following:

• A Segment containing the query to collect all Contacts with a Contract that is about to expire in two months
• (Optional) An Email which will be sent to the contact, to let the contact know the Contract is about to expire and your company will be following up within the next two weeks
• The Journey which uses the Segment as a trigger, followed by the creation of an Opportunity

Creating the Segment

First, let’s create the Segment. Go to your Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys environment and go to Audience > Segments and create a new Segment.

We want to collect all Contacts related to a Contract which is set to expire in two months. So we create the following query. Of course this query can be modified to your own preferences, for example if you use a custom table for your Contracts or want to include additional conditions.

When the query is defined, click on Ready to use. We can now go to the next step, which is creating the Journey.

Creating the Email

Creating the Email is optional, but you might want to send out an Email to a Contact announcing that you will contact them soon about an expiring Contract, instead of just cold calling them.

Obviously you can set up the email to your styling/content, but the example below is what we’re using for this scenario.

Creating the Journey

Now that the Segment and the Email are both defined, we can create a Journey. Go to Engagement > Journeys and create a new Segment-based Journey. It is important to set it as a recurring Journey, since Contacts should be able to go through the Journey more than once (Contacts can have multiple Contracts).

In the Journey designer, if we click the + button we can now see that there are two extra options:

• Create an opportunity
• Create a lead

In this case we want to create an Opportunity, but you can also choose to create the Lead. The only difference will be which type of record is going to be created. Think about which option best fits your sales process.

After selecting the ‘Create an opportunity’ action, you can define the properties of the Opportunity on the right side of the screen:

• Topic
• Owner (this can be set to three different options)
  • Contact owner
  • Parent account owner
  • A specific user or team
• Notes to assignee

Once the fields are populated, we can publish the Journey.

Now the Segment will query all Contacts with an expiring Contract in two months. All Contacts who meet this requirement will receive an email followed by an Opportunity which will be created for this Contact, which will be assigned to the Contact owner. The salesperson can then go to work with the newly created Opportunity.

That’s it! Please let me know if you have any comments or feedback regarding this post!