Every deal in the Sales Process chapter starts life as a Lead. But Leads don't appear out of nowhere — most are the end result of a marketing campaign. This chapter covers, at a conceptual level, how the Marketing app in Dynamics 365 CE turns a list of raw contacts into the Leads that Sales then works.
- A Segment is a targeted group of contacts, built from criteria like industry or past purchases
- A Customer Journey is a structured, often multi-step outreach sequence sent to a Segment
- A contact who engages enough becomes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
- An MQL hands off to Sales as a Lead, continuing the pipeline from Chapter 1
A window display, not a sales pitch
Think of a storefront. A shop doesn't walk up to every person on the sidewalk and pitch them one by one. It builds a window display and drops flyers around the neighborhood, aimed at the kind of people likely to be interested. Most passersby glance and keep walking — window-shoppers. A few stop, read the flyer, and walk in to ask a question.
Dynamics 365 CE Marketing works the same way. It doesn't hand Sales a random name off the street. It designs campaigns aimed at the right audience, and hands Sales only the contacts who engaged enough to look worth a phone call — the equivalent of walking in and asking a question.
Segments: choosing who to target
A Segment is a defined group of contacts a campaign is aimed at, built from criteria such as:
- Industry or company size
- Past purchases or product interest
- Geographic region
- Whether they've engaged with previous campaigns
Instead of blasting one message at every contact in the database, a Segment narrows the audience to people a specific campaign is actually relevant to — the marketing equivalent of choosing which neighborhood to drop flyers in.
Customer Journeys: the outreach sequence
A Customer Journey is a structured sequence of outreach steps sent to a Segment, usually spread out over time and branching based on how a contact responds. A simple Journey might look like:
- Send an introductory email
- Wait three days
- If the email was opened, send a follow-up with more detail
- If it wasn't opened, send a reminder with a different subject line
Journeys can get far more elaborate — webinars, follow-up calls, multiple branches — but the idea stays the same: a planned sequence, not a single one-off blast, guiding a contact from casual awareness toward genuine interest.
| Concept | What it is | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Segment | A targeted group of contacts | Manufacturing companies with 50–500 employees |
| Customer Journey | A structured, multi-step outreach sequence | Intro email → wait 3 days → conditional follow-up |
| Marketing Qualified Lead | A contact whose engagement crosses a defined threshold | Opened 3 emails and registered for a webinar |
From engagement to Marketing Qualified Lead
As a contact moves through a Journey, Dynamics 365 CE Marketing tracks their engagement — opens, clicks, form fills, webinar registrations — often rolling it up into a lead score. Once a contact's engagement crosses a defined threshold, they become a Marketing Qualified Lead, or MQL.
An MQL isn't a guaranteed sale. It's a signal: this contact has shown enough real interest to be worth a sales rep's time, rather than a cold call to a stranger. That's the equivalent of the window-shopper who stopped, read the flyer, and walked in to ask a question.
Once a contact is marked as an MQL, Dynamics 365 CE hands it to Sales as a Lead — the exact starting point covered in the previous chapter. From there, it's back in familiar territory: a rep qualifies the Lead, and it becomes an Account, a Contact, and an Opportunity.
Where this fits in the bigger picture
This course isn't a deep dive into the Marketing app — entire courses could be built around Segments, Journeys, and lead scoring alone. The point here is narrower: the Lead a rep works in Chapter 1 usually didn't start as a cold contact. It started as one name inside a Segment, moved through a Customer Journey, and earned its way to Sales by becoming an MQL.