Discovery and scoping
Mapping how you sell and serve customers today, agreeing which applications you need now and which can wait, and translating that into a phased plan rather than a wish list.
Dynamics 365 CRM partner
Choosing a Dynamics 365 CRM partner
What good looks like
Microsoft sells the licences. Your partner decides whether the CRM actually works. Here is what a partner does, what to look for and what it costs.
Overview
What a Dynamics 365 CRM partner actually does
A Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM partner is an accredited organisation licensed to sell, implement and support the customer engagement applications: Sales, Customer Service, Field Service and Customer Insights. Microsoft builds the product and sets the licence price, but for small and mid-sized organisations it does not deliver implementations itself, so a partner sits between you and the platform.
In practice that covers far more than switching the software on. The partner shapes your data model, sets up sales stages and security roles that match how you actually sell, migrates and de-duplicates existing customer data, builds the Power Automate flows and Power BI reports around it, trains your people and then supports the system once it is live.
That is why partner choice matters more than platform choice at this point. Two organisations can buy identical licences and end up with completely different outcomes: one with a CRM the sales team opens every morning, one with an expensive contact database nobody updates. The difference is almost always in how the first eight weeks were run.
Scope of work
What a partner is responsible for
Any credible partner should cover all of these. If a proposal is silent on one, ask why.
Licensing advice
Getting the tier and mix right. Full Sales Enterprise seats for everyone is the most common and most expensive mistake, when attach pricing and Team Members licences often cover half the organisation.
Data migration
Moving accounts, contacts, opportunities and activity history out of spreadsheets, Salesforce or a legacy CRM, and de-duplicating on the way in. Dirty data at go-live kills adoption faster than anything else.
Configuration and automation
Sales stages, security roles, forms and dashboards configured to your process, plus Power Automate flows and Power BI reporting built on the same Dataverse foundation.
Training and adoption
Role-based training for sales, service and management, not one generic session. Adoption is the deliverable, not the licence count.
Support after go-live
A named route for issues, agreed response times and a plan for Microsoft's twice-yearly release waves so updates do not arrive as surprises.
Selection criteria
What to look for in a partner
Six signals that separate partners who will deliver from partners who will sell.
Microsoft accreditation that fits
Solutions Partner designations for Business Applications are the baseline. Check the designation covers customer engagement specifically, not only ERP or modern work.
Industry evidence
Ask for two references at your size, in your sector, who went live in the last eighteen months. A partner who has solved your problem before will recognise it in the first meeting.
The delivery team, not the pitch team
Find out who will actually configure the system and run your workshops. If the consultants you meet in the sales process disappear afterwards, that is worth knowing before you sign.
A phased plan
Good partners push back on scope. A recommendation to go live with Sales first and add Customer Service in phase two is a sign of experience, not a lack of ambition.
Clear change control
Requirements always change. Ask how change requests are priced and approved, and what the day rate is, before the first one lands mid-project.
A support model you can live with
Written response times, a named contact and a sensible view on release waves. Support arrangements that are vague in the proposal stay vague afterwards.
Cost
What it costs to work with a partner
There are two separate numbers. Microsoft licences are per user, per month, from around £52.80 for Sales Professional to £76.70 for Sales Enterprise, with additional applications for the same user charged at a reduced attach rate of roughly £15.10 and light Team Members seats at around £6.40. That part is set by Microsoft and does not vary meaningfully between partners.
Partner services are the variable. A focused Sales rollout for a single team, with standard configuration, clean data and role-based training, commonly lands in the low thousands. Multi-application deployments across Sales, Customer Service and Field Service, with years of migrated history, ERP integration and custom Power Platform work, run into tens of thousands and take months rather than weeks.
Be wary of the cheapest quote when it is cheap because discovery has been skipped. The cost that hurts is not the implementation fee, it is a system configured around assumptions nobody checked, rebuilt eighteen months later.
Timeline
How long implementation takes
A single-team Sales rollout with clean data typically goes live in six to ten weeks: two weeks of discovery and design, three to five weeks of configuration and migration, then training and a supported go-live. That timeline assumes decisions get made when they are needed, which is usually the real constraint rather than the technical work.
Adding Customer Service, Field Service or Customer Insights, integrating with an ERP such as Business Central, or migrating a decade of Salesforce history moves this to three to six months. In almost every case, going live with one application and adding the next once the first is embedded delivers value sooner than a single large launch.
Before you speak to anyone, it helps to know roughly what you are buying. Our Dynamics 365 CRM pricing breakdown covers per-user costs and attach pricing, the Customer Engagement guide explains how Sales, Customer Service, Field Service and Customer Insights fit together, and if you are weighing up alternatives, read our Dynamics 365 vs Salesforce comparison. For the platform itself, start with the Dynamics 365 CRM overview.
How we help
Getting matched to the right partner
We work with a network of accredited Microsoft partners across the UK, so the introduction is based on fit rather than who is available.
Accredited partners only
Every partner in the network holds current Microsoft accreditation for business applications and has delivered customer engagement projects, not only ERP.
Matched on sector and size
We match on industry experience and organisation size, because a partner used to twenty-user sales teams works very differently from one geared to enterprise programmes.
No obligation
An introduction and a scoping conversation, not a sales funnel. If Dynamics 365 is not the right answer for you, we would rather say so early.
Get in touch
Find a Dynamics 365 CRM partner
Tell us how many users you have, which applications you are considering and what you are trying to fix. We'll introduce you to an accredited Microsoft partner matched to your industry and size, and there's no obligation to go further.
FAQ
Dynamics 365 CRM partner questions
An accredited organisation licensed to sell, implement and support the Dynamics 365 customer engagement applications: Sales, Customer Service, Field Service and Customer Insights. Microsoft rarely implements directly for small and mid-sized organisations, so the partner handles licensing, configuration, data migration, Power Platform automation, training and ongoing support.
You can buy licences directly from Microsoft, but very few organisations implement well without help. The platform is highly configurable, so the decisions made in the first few weeks about data model, sales stages and security roles determine whether people use it. A partner brings pattern recognition from projects like yours.
Licences are Microsoft's price, from roughly £52.80 per user per month for Sales Professional to £76.70 for Sales Enterprise. Partner services are separate and cover implementation, migration, customisation, training and support. A focused single-team rollout is typically a few thousand pounds of services; a multi-application deployment with integrations is considerably more.
Ask for two references at your size and in your sector from the last eighteen months, who exactly will deliver the work rather than who is in the pitch, how change requests are priced and approved, what support looks like after go-live including response times, and how they will migrate and de-duplicate your existing customer data.
A single-team Sales rollout with clean data commonly goes live in six to ten weeks. Adding Customer Service, Field Service or Customer Insights, integrating with an ERP, or migrating years of history typically extends that to three to six months. Phasing is almost always faster to value than one large launch.
Many can, and there are real advantages when customer and finance data need to join up, since Dynamics 365 CRM and Business Central sit on the same vendor stack. Check that their customer engagement experience is as strong as their ERP experience rather than assuming it, as many partners are considerably deeper in one than the other.
Changing partner mid-life is common and far less disruptive than people expect, because your data and configuration stay in your own Microsoft tenant. A new partner can take over support and remediation without a rebuild, provided the existing setup is documented well enough to hand over.