Client of ours (HVAC manufacturing sales, 70 staff) runs Dynamics 365 Sales. Their contact data is a mess: the same person exists up to three times. When a customer contact changes roles or moves company, a new record gets created instead of the old one being updated. Reps in the field see three entries for one buyer and don't know which number is current. They guess. Sometimes they guess wrong in front of the customer.

Built-in duplicate detection catches exact matches and nothing else. 'Mike Smith at Acme' and 'Michael Smith, Acme Corp' sail right past it.

How do you actually keep contact data clean? Is this a process problem (who owns the record when someone changes jobs), a tooling problem (third-party dedupe/merge), or the eternal CRM tax everyone pays? What's your source of truth for external contacts - the CRM or the M365 directory? Their IT guy and their sales ops guy give different answers and both are very confident.

We are getting close to going Live with D365 and I, as the administrator, do not feel prepared to get the most out of this software. I am looking for training (other than Microsoft Learn) that can help with everything from basic administration to development. The training from the consultant we used can barely even qualify as training so as I said I just do not feel prepared.

I appreciate your suggestions.