Great post, Pedro! Inspired by it, I wrote down some of my thoughts around BYOD onto my own blog: http://niiranen.eu/jukka/2014/01/bring-your-own-x...

Looks like this change in the Potential Customer handling in CRM 2013 is indeed blocking the usage of the new Account & Contact lookups on CRM Online organizations that are upgraded from Polaris to Orion. If you try to use the new opportunity form, you'll get an error "You must provide a value for Potential Customer" when saving the record. You can build a Business Rule to populate the field with the value from the Account field and make it possible to save the opportunity, but this workaround kind of defeats the purpose of introducing the new customer selection logic.

You're exactly right. I think it's really a problem that the effort required in setting up a usable sales process with stages in Dynamics CRM requires understanding so many moving parts, which is why each consultant tends to have a different approach. Of course there are no "right" answers or one-size-fits-all processes in real life, but having some kind of a template to help both the end-user organizations as well as the system customizers to more easily approach the subject can certainly improve time-to-value, compared to starting from a blank slate.

What an excellent tutorial! Thanks for all the effort you put into describing the detailed steps. For anyone who's not familiar with the various assumptions and limitations related to Dynamics CRM sales process tools and configuration, this will surely be a very valuable resource.