Marketing metrics are values marketers can monitor to measure the performance of their campaigns. Two common ones are lead conversion rates and cost per lead. For leads to be converted it takes the combined efforts of both sales and marketing teams. Handing over a good lead to the sales team at the right time is key in achieving high lead conversion rates and lowered cost per lead. Knowing when a prospect needs further enrichment is also equally important to ensure the marketing team can act and nurture prospects into leads. Wouldn’t it be good if we could automate activities and notifications as part of our real-time marketing journeys to help make delightful marketing metrics happen?

This post will focus on creating a phone call but this can be any other kind of activity or record you might use such as a task, email notification, note etc. Native Dynamics 365 Marketing functionality to create sales activities such as tasks and phone calls from within real-time journey is expected in preview February 2023, general availability is yet to be announced. Also, since we are delving into the world of ‘custom triggers’ some further reading around Testing & Deploying Custom Triggers will be handy for you to check out.

TLDR: Activate a custom trigger to call a flow that creates the sales activity from within a marketing journey

Create the trigger

As with all good things in Dynamics 365 Marketing, it all starts with a Custom Trigger

Create the trigger ensuring you select ‘When a customer interacts with a website/app’ (3), then add the attributes to the trigger (5). We will use these attributes later to drive the logic of how we create and assign the phone call activity. Bear in mind that all attributes must be populated (with a dynamic of static value) before a trigger can be used in a journey and there is not currently a way to provide a list of options for the input so choose wisely on how you assign the attributes data type.

Assign to Lead Owner - True or false
Assign to User or Team Name - Text
Day Until Due Date - Number
Phone Call Description - Text
Phone Call Subject - Text

Select Next for ’Step 2: Integrate the code’ (7), then select ‘Ready to use’ (8)

Create the activity when the trigger is triggered

Now we need to make the trigger do magic things when it is triggered from marketing to creates the sales activity, in this case the phone call activity (full end to end screenshot of the power automate flow can be found at the end of this post if needed).

Set the lead as the recipient ‘To’ of the phone call

This ‘ActivityPartyArray’ may look a bit scary but I promise it is magic. It allows us to set up who the phone call is ‘To’ and ‘From’ in this case, but the same format is used across all Activity tables such as Email, Task and Appointment. Linn Zaw Win has done a very detailed blog post about this step by step so definitely check that out too.

Action: Initialize variable (Variable)
Name: ActivityPartyArray
Type: Array
Value:
[
{
"participationtypemask": 2,
"partyid@odata.bind": "leads/@{triggerOutputs()?['body/InputParameters/msdynmkt_signaluserauthid']}"

  }
]

Assign to Lead Owner?

How we assign the phone call owner depends upon whether the ‘Assign to Lead Owner’ attribute was Yes or No. If this is Yes we don’t need to do anything ele on the wonership front, we already sorted it out in the step above where we set the PhoneCallOwner.

Action: Conditon (Control)
Name: AssignToLeadOwner
Value:
@triggerOutputs()?['body/InputParameters/msdynmkt_assigntoleadowner']
is equal to
true

Search for the User

If ‘Assign to Lead Owner’ was now, then we need to go search for the specific user or team under ‘Assign to User or Team Name’. The attribute asks for a user or team name, so this could indeed be either. Rather than adding an additional attribute that the user has to specify if it’s a user or a team, we remove some complexity from the user experience in marketing and therefore handle it within the flow instead

Action: List Rows (Dataverse)
Name: FindUser
Select columns: systemuserid
Table name: Users
Filter rows: fullname eq '@{triggerOutputs()?['body/InputParameters/msdynmkt_assigntouserorteamname']}' and isdisabled eq false

User found?

We need to check if the ‘FindUser’ action from above found a user, if it did we can use that to update the PhoneCallOwner variable

Action: Conditon (Control)
Name: UserFound
Value:
@empty(body('FindUser')?['value'])
is equal to
false

Action: Set variable (Variable)
Action Name: Set PhoneCallOwner Team User
Name: PhoneCallOwner
Value: systemusers/@{first(outputs('FindUser')?['body/value'])?['systemuserid']}

Search for the Team

If the user was not found in the step above, then we need to search for the team instead

Action: List Rows (Dataverse)
Name: FindTeam
Select columns: teamid
Table name: Teams
Filter rows: name eq '@{triggerOutputs()?['body/InputParameters/msdynmkt_assigntouserorteamname']}'

User found?

We need to check if the ‘FindTeam’ action from above found a Team, if it did we can use that to update the PhoneCallOwner variable. If no result was found (maybe the name was typed incorrectly, or the user has been disabled), we have already set the fall-back option as the lead owner so the phone call will be correctly created but maybe not correctly assigned. This is the final step of the ‘AssignToLeadOwner’ condition

Action: Conditon (Control)
Name: TeamFound
Value:
@empty(body('FindTeam')?['value'])
is equal to
false

Action: Set variable (Variable)
Action Name: Set PhoneCallOwner Team
Name: PhoneCallOwner
Value: teams/@{first(outputs('FindTeam')?['body/value'])?['teamid']}

Is the phone call owner owner a user?

Now that the above steps are complete the PhoneCallOwner field will be populated with either the Lead Owner, the specified User Name or the specified Team name. Below the ‘AssignToLeadOwner’ condition action we have another condition to work out if the owner is a user or a team. If the owner is a User we can also set the same user as the person who the phone call is ‘From’, otherwise we leave it blank as the ‘From’ cannot be a Team.

Action: Conditon (Control)
Name: AppendCallFrom
Value:
@substring(variables('PhoneCallOwner'),0,4)
is equal to
syst

Action: Append to array variable (Variable)
Action Name: AppendCallFromUserToActivityPartyArray
Name: ActivityPartyArray
Value:
{
"participationtypemask": 1,
"partyid@odata.bind": @{variables('PhoneCallOwner')}
}

Create the phone call

Now we have everything we need to create the phone call, assigned to the correct user, linked to the correct lead, with the required due date and the appropriate subject/description as defined from the marketing journey

Action: Add a new row (Dataverse)
Name: CreatePhoneCall
Table name: Leads
Subject: @{triggerOutputs()?['body/InputParameters/msdynmkt_subject']}
Description: @{triggerOutputs()?['body/InputParameters/msdynmkt_description']}
Direction: Yes
Due: @{addDays(utcNow(),int(triggerOutputs()?['body/InputParameters/msdynmkt_dayuntilduedate']))}
Owner (Owners): @{variables('PhoneCallOwner')}
Regarding (Leads): leads/@{triggerOutputs()?['body/InputParameters/msdynmkt_signaluserauthid']}
Activity Parties: @variables('ActivityPartyArray')

Now is an excellent time to Test your Custom Trigger.

Use the trigger within a journey

I’m not going to go too detailed on this part as Megan V Walker has already written a lovely blog post on how to activate custom triggers within journeys but some key thing to consider specific to my example (and the reason this ended dup being built) are as follows:

Sit back and watch the magic happen

The final step, when you are ready, is to set the journey live and let the automation do the work for you from here.

PS. Testing & Deploying Custom Triggers might be handy for you to check out as further reading