Microsoft’s 2020 release wave 2 plan is here and brings with it some noteworthy and exciting updates to Dynamics 365 Sales.

Dynamics 365 Sales stands out amongst other CRM applications and Microsoft is working continuously to keep the lead position by introducing more enhancements and improving the end-user experience.

This article focuses on the noteworthy updates for Dynamics 365 Sales release wave 2.

New Dynamics 365 Sales mobile experience

As part of their commitment to simplify CRM experiences and help sales leaders focus on selling, Microsoft has introduced an intuitive mobile experience to offer quick access to customer information and make it easy to keep this information current.

The new Dynamics 365 Sales mobile experience brings a dedicated app to sales leaders, tailored to their needs to help them to save time and focus on sales. The new app enables sales leaders to:

  • Quickly sign-in using only their email address
  • Use improved search experience that includes search suggestions, search as you type, and grouping of search results
  • Easily complete everyday tasks on the go. Add notes with the touch of a button, quickly access and update accounts and opportunities, find contacts information and take action like easily made calls
  • Undertake bulk actions using more responsive lists
  • Use mobile-optimised forms with scrollable tabs with enhanced navigation with gesture support for iOS and Android devices.

These new enhancements come as an out-of-the-box solution and will significantly improve the experience for all mobile app users, especially sales leaders who work remotely.

Forecasting

The wave 1 2020 release for Dynamics 365 Sales, introduced improvements to the forecasting functionality of Dynamics 365 Sales. Microsoft continues to enhance the forecasting capability to configure forecasts to support more complex requirements, such as:

  • Use of custom entities for forecast roll-up and forecast hierarchy entities
  • Support for forecasting by product or quantity
  • Use of multicurrency supporting organisations operating worldwide
  • Ability to adjust calculated columns.
  • Admin capability to enable/disable underlying grid columns
  • Write back to DataFlex Pro (formerly Common Data Service) to allow forecasts dashboard reporting
  • Ability to surface proactive assistant cards to help the sales team with their quotas (by using Power Automate)
  • Capability to load the latest forecast and the most recently used underlying records
  • Ability to hide managers from their own forecast.

Usability enhancements

Improvements to the user interface for any application is as important as adding new features to it. Microsoft recognises that usability enhancements increase the end-user experience. Wave 2 includes usability enhancements, such as:

  • Improved data management experience
  • Simplification of document workflows with enhanced PDF capabilities
  • Enhanced email experience.

Improved data management experience

From SMEs to large enterprises, data quality plays a vital role in ensuring adequate business performance. Dynamics 365 Sales includes duplicate detection and merge capabilities and wave 2 brings enhancements to these already powerful features, allowing users to:

  • View more information contextually – that will help to determine why records are being flagged as duplicate
  • Merge records using enhanced Merge dialogue box from the Duplicate warning prompt
  • View and identify matched account and contact records when qualifying a lead, with an improved cross-entity duplicate detection dialogue box.

Simplification of document workflows with enhanced PDF capabilities

The wave 1 2020 release for Dynamics 365 Sales brought long-awaited out-of-the-box functionality for generating documents in PDF format. Wave 2 brings further enhancements, including:

  • Ability to save and share standardised PDF files for custom entities
  • Use of simplified navigation and easy document template selection
  • Ability to preview PDF with an intuitive PDF export and email options
  • Automation using workflows to generate standardised PDF files programmatically using APIs
  • Ability to manage entities for enabling/disabling PDF document generation.

Enhanced email experience

Wave 2 introduces an enhanced email experience that will allow actions like view, update, and reply from the Timeline section. As a result, users will be able to respond and view emails without closing the main record and losing its context. Also, the file attachment experience will become more intuitive and will allow users to select and manage multiple attached files and enable quick preview for files.

Summary

There are more features for Dynamics 365 Sales included in the 2020 release wave 2. All of these updates along with several other enhancements across Dynamics 365 will be released between October 2020 and March 2021. To get more information on the latest Dynamics 365 features which are relevant to your organisation contact us.