Set up business segments to reflect your organization
Applies To: Dynamics Marketing
Important
Microsoft Dynamics Marketing has been discontinued and is no longer available. All customer data related to this product has been permanently deleted from all Microsoft servers and is no longer available for extraction. This documentation is being provided for historical purposes only.
Generally speaking, a business segment is a part of an organization that is identified by the specific set of products, services, and/or geographical locations that it serves. Each business segment typically distinguishes itself from other segments by its unique collection of customers, products, and marketplaces. The concept is somewhat similar to departments and divisions in that you can use them to divide an organization along logical lines for purposes of management, budgeting, reporting, and other practical concerns. (See also Set up divisions and departments to reflect your organization.) However, unlike departments or divisions, Microsoft Dynamics Marketing allows multiple business segments to be assigned to a single entity.
Business segments are not hierarchical, so they don't belong to a specific company, division, or department, and they can be assigned across these organizational lines. And unlike divisions or belongs-to company assignments, business segments can be changed at any time and do not add any restrictions to how or where you can use the entities assigned to them. Nearly all entities that accept business segment assignments also accept department and division assignments.
Prerequisites
To manage the set of business segments available on your site, you need Edit/View Categories privileges. To assign available business segments to the various entities that accept them, you need the usual privileges to access the relevant entities. More information: Work with user accounts and staff contacts
Manage the business segments available on your site
For improved ease of use, and to help ensure data integrity, users must choose from a selection of site-wide business segments when assigning them to various marketing entities. As with other types of custom drop-down values, administrators establish the set of segments available by using the Categories settings. No business segments are provided by default.
Go to Settings > Business Administration > Categories.
Choose Business Segment from the Category Type drop-down list.
Use the controls here to add, describe, remove, and translate your business segments as needed. More information: Create custom drop-down values and folders
Assign business segments to entities
When you assign business segments to various entities, you can sort, group, and analyze your marketing results and other data along segment lines.
The following entities accept business segment assignments:
Approvals (and Approval Templates)
Budget Workbooks
Budget Worksheets
Campaigns
Components
Component Requests
Events
Event Attendance
Event Equipment Inventory
Event Equipment Requests
Event Registration Setup Items
Event Registrations
Event Staffing
Event Venues
Event Venue Facilities
Jobs (and Job Templates)
Job Request Templates
Media Outlets
Media Plans
Media Orders
Media Expenses
Media Expense Items
Programs
Project Requests
Tasks
The maintenance page for each entity includes a multi-select field called Business Segments. These fields provide type-ahead assistance. They also accept multiple values so you can associate any supported entity with any number of business segments, as required.
Important
The Business Segments fields are either hidden or shown as unavailable (grayed out) until you have defined at least one business segment category, as described in the previous section.
See Also
Set up your site-company data and marketing structure
Create custom drop-down values and folders
Set up divisions and departments to reflect your organization