The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Enterprise Sales application is a best-in-class application for managing the sales process for small to enterprise-level organizations. At $95/user/month, the Enterprise Sales app is competitively priced in comparison with other best-in-class solutions. However, $95/user/month can be a challenge for smaller organizations or organizations with limited sales CRM needs. In 2018, Microsoft introduced the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Sales Professional license at $65/user/month with the intent of lowering the Dynamics 365 Sales barrier-to-entry.
At first glance, the Sales Professional license would appear to be a compelling alternative to the Enterprise Sales license. However, Sales Professional and Sales Enterprise can’t coexist in the same instance. Plus, Sales Enterprise includes some sales functionality and extensibility that is missing in Sales Professional.
Are there important differences?
The point of this blog is to focus just on the differences between the two license types, the delta in functionality, so someone can look down the list of what a Sales Professional license does or doesn’t do and say — “OK, I can live with that” or “Let’s go with Sales Enterprise”.
The information in the table below comes from the Dynamics 365 May 2023 Licensing Guide.
Please Note: This table doesn’t show everything Sales Professional does, just the areas where it differs from Sales Enterprise.
One of my roles at Dyn365Pros is helping prospective Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement users evaluate the overall platform and translating their business use cases into the right combination of software and services. I’m having conversations with businesses every day about where they are today with sales/marketing/service automation and where they want to go. Reviewing the table above, I look at some of the holes in the Sales Professional app and think, “Eh, no biggie”. Or, “I don’t like it, but I can think of a reasonable workaround”. However, there are some Sales Professional characteristics that are showstoppers for me and many businesses. These are:
- You can’t combine Sales Professional and Sales Enterprise in the same instance.
- There are limits on Forms, Views, Reports, Charts and Dashboards.
- If you upgrade from Sales Professional to Sales Enterprise, you’re working with the same data, which is good. But the configuration you’ve done to forms, views, and dashboards is lost and will need to be reconfigured.
- Power Apps and Customer Voices licenses are extra.
- Sales Professional doesn’t include Sales Copilot.
Sales Professional is appropriate for businesses with basic CRM needs that don’t expect to outgrow them. Dynamics 365 Enterprise Sales license is right for organizations that need access to all current Dynamics 365 Sales features and unlimited room to grow.
By Mark Abes, Vice President Sales and Marketing, Dyn365Pros, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner, San Diego, Southern California
