Smart Org Chart (preview)

Most people who have worked with Dynamics 365 Sales before probably know about the org chart capabilities in the application. If you’re not familiar, the name already explains it. We can show the organizational structure of an organization as an org chart, by moving the related account contacts around which visualizes the hierarchy of all the people related to an account in Dynamics 365. The smart org chart feature completely revamps the existing org chart functionality! Not only is it much simpler to build org charts, but there will be a lot more information visible to the sellers, regarding the organizational contacts! Keep in mind this feature is in preview today, which means you can enable it today to get a better idea of how it works and what the new org chart looks like!

Enable smart org charts

As I mentioned, this is a public preview feature that is available to try out today, but that does mean that you will need to enable this feature first. You can do this by opening the ‘Sales Hub’ app and navigating to the ‘App Settings’ area. You’ll notice ‘Org charts’ on the sitemap below the ‘general settings’ section, right below the ‘LinkedIn Integration’. This will bring you to a window with a slider that you can set to ‘yes’ to enable the new org chart.

Accessing the smart org chart

Once you enable the functionality make sure to clear your browser cache and cookies and you’ll notice the new org chart show up. Sellers can access the new org chart either by selecting an account row from a view (they’ll notice the org chart button show on the command bar) or they can open an account row and open the org chart from within the account form, by clicking the ‘Org chart’ button on the command bar of the account form. A new way to access the org chart is from a contact row. This can be done by clicking on a contact from a view, or by opening a contact row and clicking the ‘Org chart’ button on the command bar. The first thing sellers will see is an introduction window highlighting some of the new features of the smart org chart. They can click through it or skip it entirely by clicking the ‘skip’ button on the bottom left. If an org chart was previously created, this data will still be available, but sellers will notice the new experience.

Using the smart org chart

In order to start building out the org chart for an account, the seller will need to click on the ‘Edit chart’ button on the top right side of the chart. The seller will see all account contacts on the left side of the screen. Sellers can drag and drop contacts from the list onto the org chart canvas. They can also search for contacts using the search box above the contacts. I was also able to search by job title, which will make the creation of these org charts a lot easier! In order to start building out the org chart, I dragged the first contact on the canvas and dropped it at the top of the org chart. I continued building out the org chart by dropping contacts on the person they report to, on the org chart. When sellers are dropping contacts on the canvas, the contact cards will automatically show on the screen. These contact cards show high level information on each contact. The drag and drop functionality is pretty similar to the legacy org chart, but the nice thing here is that we can see the list of contacts that belong to the account, AND a list showing which contacts have been added to the org chart. On top of that we can decide to leave certain folks off the org chart if needed!

However, those are not the only new features of the smart org chart! As sellers start to build out the org chart, they will notice some additional functionality. For example, the ability to mark a contact as a primary contact or to show an individual as an (executive) assistant. Adding a contact as primary adds the ‘Primary’ tag to the contact on the org chart and allows sellers to easily identify the primary contact. Being able to set someone as an assistant moves that assistant to the right side of the person who they report to, again making the assistants stand out on the org chart.

Tags

Another thing that sellers might notice is the tag icon on a contact card in the org chart. This functionality allows sellers to add a tag to contacts, which allows them to indicate key players and decision makers at the organization. When the chart is being edited, sellers can click the tag icon to associate a tag with a contact. Current out of the box tags are:

• Decision Maker
• Influencer
• Blocker
• Unknown

Each tag has a color associated with it. If there are additional tags your organization wants to use, there is good news! These tags can be configured, so you can rename the existing tags, or you can add additional tags to the system. You can do this by adding values to the Decision influence labels column, which is a choice field (system name is ‘msdyn_decisioninfluencetag’). Just to be clear, this field lives in the contact table.

View and add notes and contact details

Other things we can do in the new smart org chart, is add and/or view any notes associated with contacts. Again, keep in mind in order to access the notes the seller will need to click ‘edit chart’ first, sellers will notice the ‘notes’ icon on the contact card is grayed out if the org chart is not in edit mode. When clicking on the note icon, limited information loads in a side pane on the right side of the screen. Here they can view contact details like email, job title, manager, direct reports and relationship heath information. Below the contact details are the contact notes. Sellers can add a note from here as well. If LinkedIn Sales Navigator is integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales, they can access that from the side pane as well.

Lastly, if your organization has relationship analytics enabled, sellers will be able to view the relationship health by reviewing the colored circle on the contact image. Sellers can hover their mouse over the colored circle to see the health and status of the relationship with the contact.

Access

Sellers that need access to the new smart org chart feature will need to have create, write, read and delete access on an organization level, to the custom table called ‘Microsoft Orgchart node entity’. I hope you enjoyed reading this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!