Keep up to date with Microsoft’s latest release plan for Dynamics 365 Sales 

Dynamics 365 Sales is Microsoft’s leading CRM solution. It is a flexible, cloud-based solution that helps organisations manage their sales processes and customer data. Dynamics 365 Sales provides a range of features, including lead and opportunity management, customer insights, sales forecasting and sales collaboration.  

Microsoft has shared the exciting new features that will benefit Dynamics 365 Sales users in the first release plan of 2023 – here are some of the highlights… 

Out-of-the-box relationship insights 

Dynamics 365 Sales previously held functionalities that allow sellers to view relationship KPIs and Who knows Whom information, however, this had to be enabled by the Dynamics 365 administrator. With the latest release, sellers can access this information out of the box without having to wait for admin enablement, driving more efficient access to: 

• Relationship activities 
• Ratio of sent and received emails 
• The most contacted customers  
• Email engagement statistics. 

All in one view

Another exciting new feature is the new opportunity view, which provides a bird’s-eye view of seller pipelines and streamlines everything into a single workspace to help sellers prioritise their deals better. 

Figure 1: New opportunity view

Intelligent forecasting 

For companies with multiple business units, defining and tracking multiple forecasts can be difficult. This is why Microsoft has introduced functionality to configure forecasts for multiple business units, allowing administrators to split forecasts up by business unit and track each one separately, as well as limiting the forecasts only to the sellers aligned to each business unit. Sellers can benefit from this by using the business unit forecast to aid decision-making to meet or exceed quotas. This allows them to gain a micro and macro level of the business unit forecast and how their individual forecast is contributing.  

To further enhance forecasting capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can now track sales objectives at different levels through weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly forecasts – the latter showing the annual progress and projections.  

Enhanced email content creation 

Personalised customer email creation can be time-consuming, and blanket automation can come across as generic – driving customers away in a time when personalisation is key. To solve this problem, Dynamics 365 Sales now enables sellers to improve productivity by using email snippets. These are AI-based, and automatically interpret customer email intent and prepopulate content for the response – all while using information from previous emails between the seller and customer. These email snippets can be saved for future use, saving time spent on writing emails and improving the quality of these discussions.  

Level up your sales calls  

Similarly, AI-driven insights available in this release plan mean that sellers can receive real-time suggestions and tips during customer calls, without them having to manually search for information such as product and service deals, brand information, pricing and more.  

As sales organisations tend to use a multitude of call technologies for customer interactions, they may not always benefit from the sales conversation intelligence that Microsoft Teams can offer. Soon, Teams can be extended to calls made via third-party telephone providers to provide sellers with business insights, post-call reporting and conversation intelligence – connecting important sales data across different call technologies. 

With customer data comes strict privacy regulations; rest assured, Dynamics 365 Sales’ release details a thorough personal data redaction process where AI identifies and masks sensitive information gathered during customer calls. This means all sensitive information is redacted from call summaries, transcripts, notes and action items, helping organisations build trust with their customers. 

Prioritise leads based on intent 

Microsoft’s upcoming AI-based intent detection feature can use customer emails to determine intent, making the lead qualification process more efficient and helping sellers to prioritise the right time to act on leads.  

 

Figure 2: Lead scoring functionality to indicate customer intent 

Focus on what’s important 

Sick and tired of jumping between multiple windows to accomplish tasks? Dynamics 365 Sales’ latest release plan includes the sales accelerator worklist feature, which gives a holistic view of the tasks that sellers are working on while offering AI-based recommendations to improve sales outcomes. This has been designed to give sellers an enhanced user experience while driving quicker, more focused task completion and customer engagement activities. 

With focus in mind, the release plan also details the new focus mode functionality in Dynamics 365 Sales. This view helps sellers navigate throughout sales records and activities without having to switch windows constantly. By switching to focus mode, sellers can move through records quickly and carry out actions like record updates, action management and prospecting calls.  

Adapt to a digital world 

In a digital, ‘always-on’ world, customers want to interact through their preferred contact channels. SMS conversation functionality will soon be available for sellers using Dynamics 365 Sales, allowing them to provide quick updates, respond to customer queries or send reminders. This feature drives an ongoing conversation between the customer and seller where they will receive quick responses, building stronger relationships.  

Sales leaders can also leverage manager insights dashboards to understand the success of different sales strategies and tactics on customer interactions, and which seller behaviours have been most effective. This looks at how customer sentiment correlates with use of keywords and mention of competitors, as well as the tone and conversation style’s impact on deal outcomes, among other conversational KPIs and sales-oriented filters. This is a tool that will help sales leaders to better coach their teams and improve selling strategies using conversation intelligence. 

Figure 3: Manager insights dashboards 

Engage with the right stakeholders 

A common challenge faced by sellers is finding the right stakeholder to reach out to. Dynamics 365 Sales’ new organisational management feature provides the capabilities to create a customer organisational chart to map out key stakeholders, as well as maintaining a relationship map to understand and engage with customer contacts. The maps give an activity view of these contacts to benefit this. 

Figure 4: Map out key stakeholders 

Once sellers have engaged with the correct stakeholders, they often face issues in getting responses to emails and will require multiple follow-ups as a result. With the upcoming sequence feature, sellers can create a series of repeated steps, setting up a criteria for when the contact has taken the desired action (e.g. responded to their emails) and can exit the series.  

Moving forward 

Telefónica Tech can help your organisation meet your sales objectives and build exceptional customer relationships in the process using Dynamics 365 Sales. Get in touch with our team of Dynamics experts today for more information.