Dynamics 365 Sales harnesses the power of your company’s data and uses it to enhance your customer interactions across their suite of productivity tools like Teams and Office 365.
Powered by data, intelligence, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales is the industry-leading sales tool that enables any company to sell more by understanding its customers and the way they want to buy. Using Dynamics 365 Sales, Salespeople become more efficient because they can immediately identify and address customers’ current requirements and focus on the opportunities most likely to convert.
Over the past ten years, but especially in the last two, the world of work, and the salesperson’s role has transformed dramatically. Throughout their buying journey, customers want a mix of digital and personalised interactions.
Your salespeople shouldn’t be overwhelmed by trying to make sense of too much data. Instead, they can use Dynamics’ intelligent digital communication and collaboration tools to spend their time becoming trusted advisors to your customers.
For 2023 release wave 2, Microsoft has continued to use data and AI to help the sales team prioritise their engagement. The introduction of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales helps salespeople reduce admin and speed up the sales process by providing recommendations, summarising data, quickly retrieving information, and performing actions in context and within the flow of work.
Release Wave Schedule
Microsoft currently releases new capabilities, performance improvements and other updates to Dynamics 365 applications over two six-month periods per year, known as “release waves”. Microsoft’s 2023 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionality for Dynamics 365 planned to be delivered to market from October 2023 to March 2024. In this article, we’ll focus on what’s new and planned for Dynamics 365 Sales.
Note: The features mentioned in this article are planned to be released from October 2023 to March 2024. Because these features have not been released yet, delivery times may change and projected functionality may not be released. We will update our customers should these delivery times change in the future.
Sales Updates
- Prevent duplicate leads from entering the system either through manual creation or bulk import.
- Automatic creation of follow up tasks based on information from products in the Office suite; Outlook, Teams chat messages, Teams call transcripts.
- Create opportunities with ease using the new layout.
- Create a customer org chart so that sellers know the roles of contacts in the organisation and can view in a visual diagram.
Sales Engagement* Updates
*Formerly Sales Accelerator. Note: Some of these features will require a Premium license
- Receive insights and tips based on past interactions whilst on a call with the customer
- Conversation Intelligence now available for third-party telephony providers
- Emails can be pre-populated based on the content you frequently use while drafting emails. This include self-introduction and product information, reducing time spent preparing emails.
- Improvements to Sequences
- Improvements to Sales Engagement
- Send and receive customer communication through SMS and get real-time notifications for incoming SMS.
Further details of new and updated features can be found below:
Navigate records faster with Sales Engagement form load updates
Expected Release Date: October 2023
When accessing the Sales Engagement worklist items, improvements have been made to the overall application performance to allow movement through the items to be much quicker.
Guide salespeople to work simultaneously using multiple sequences
Expected Release Date: TBC
Often multiple salespeople will work together on the same Account or Opportunity, each following a different set of actions to win the deal. It is vital the salespeople know which other team members are working on the same Account or Opportunity as them, and the actions they are performing.
The enhancements will enable multiple sequences to be added to an Account or Opportunity enabling salespeople to:
- View team members who are also using sequence on a record.
- Attach additional sequences to a record that already has sequences attached.
- View details of a sequence and find a list of completed and upcoming activities.
Modern and refreshed user experience with updated styling and controls
Expected Release Date: October 2023
Updated styling will be available, including drop shadows and brighter background colours, enhancing the look and usability of the system. Feature details include:
- New styling with drop shadows and brighter background colours for a more visually appealing experience.
- Field controls such as text input, action input, lookup, and check box controls built and designed using fluent components for a more modern look and feel.
- New fluent-based controls in forms, business process flows, and dialogs for a modern and consistent experience across the platform.
- Command bar with consistent spacing, rounded corners, and elevation for a more intuitive and familiar experience.
- Refreshed headers, tabs, sections, and business process flows in form pages for easier navigation and improved user experience.
- Refreshed input and error message styling.
Empower seller to proactively pick next prioritised record
Expected Release Date: November 2023
Automatically assigning Leads and Opportunities when the seller is available is crucial for business success. This new feature will empower the Sales team to pick a new Lead or Opportunity when they are ready giving them the most important Leads and Opportunities based on rules defined by the manager.
As a Sales Manager you can:
- Set up and maintain assignment rules to queue up Leads and Opportunities
- Prioritise items in the queue for self-assignment
As a seller you will be able to request to assign several Leads and Opportunities to yourself, and the system will allocate the top priority Leads and Opportunities as defined in the Business Rule.
Match email to Lead entity
Expected Release Date: December 2023
A lead traditionally refers to a contact, individual or organisation that has expressed and interest in your goods or services and is a critical step in the sales conversion process.
Co-pilot allows incoming and outgoing emails in to be matched with Leads in the CRM system, providing more context to the relationship. The key features of this include:
- Sellers can match an email to leads the same way the product does for contacts.
- Sellers can schedule a meeting and match it to a lead.
- Sellers can create new leads from external emails they receive from leads that are not already tracked in their CRM.
- Sellers can make edits to fields in the lead entity from Viva Sales.
- Admins have the ability to disable support for the lead entity.
Want more information on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales 2023 Release Wave 2?
Synergy Technology is an official partner of Microsoft and we can offer Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales & Customer Service solutions across the UK. To learn more about anything in this news article, or to book a call with one of our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales specialists, please contact the Synergy team today. You can call us on 0345 456 0050 or send us an email via our contact page at any time and we will be delighted to assist you.
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