Well regarded, Microsoft Dynamics 365 partners are capacity organizations. For most of these partners, selling time is the core of their business. And just like hotels have with rooms and airlines with seats, a consultancy day that is not sold will never return.

So it makes sense to analyze how and where you lose your precious capacity - especially in these times of high market demand.

Here’s my personal top-5, in random order:

1. Inefficient customer acquisition process
   Most D365 partners have (far) too high Customer Acquisition Cost due to long sales cycles (no methodology, no formal process, no KPI’s), due to long pipelines without focus and due to a bad timing of the lead hand-over from marketing to sales.
   
   
2. Poor lead-to-order conversion rate
   In general, D365 partners are optimistic people. Their glasses are always half full. So they often participate in sales cycles where the best result they can achieve is the silver medal. That results in a direct loss of scarce sales and pre-sales capacity. Do you master the word no?
   
   
3. Fixed price projects based on inaccurate assumptions
   Often due to winning deals on unknown territories or knowledge domains, D365 partners offer fixed price projects based on incorrect assumptions. As a result, they are spending parts of their valuable and scarce capacity without getting paid! Isn’t that a pity?
   
   
4. Delivering inefficient upgrades
   Over the years, upgrade services have grown into a real specialization area. However, the average D365 partner still delivers upgrades without methodology, with a lack of sophisticated automation tools and not rarely with unmotivated consultants who prefer to implement new technologies at net new customers.
   
   
5. Hiring specialists without enough projects
   Microsoft’s constant stream of innovation creates a dilemma. Naturally, it’s great to hire a specialist in IoT or Machine Learning. But you will lose both valuable capacity and money if you don’t have enough projects for this new employee. After all, having your talented and expensive people waiting on the bench is not really attractive, right?

Locating the places and processes where you lose capacity unnecessarily provides you with the opportunity to create extra capacity. And that's probably cheaper than hiring new people! ;-9

Are you aware of the areas where you're losing your scarce capacity?