Dynamics 365 Sales: New Updates for 2022 Release Wave 1

Microsoft has recently announced the 2022 release wave 1 plans for Microsoft Dynamics 365 with a number of new capabilities that are to be released between April and September of this year.

In this blog, we will be sharing updates for Dynamics 365 Sales, which is an application that has empowered every organisation with data, intelligence and great experience. It also helps organisations to get to the core of the customer’s needs and refines focus to most relevant and authentic engagements to sell.

The 2022 release 1 wave updates will include:

Conversation Intelligence

• Discoverability
  • Increasing conversation intelligence discoverability in Dynamics 365 and bringing up relevant and valuable tools and insights at the right time in the organisation’s workflow.
  • In-app notifications and emails will be introduced to ensure sellers and managers do not miss any valuable insights and can easily follow up.
• Break the silos
  • Bringing valuable strategy and coaching dashboards from Sales Insights into Dynamics 365 to introduce value where sellers and managers spend their days.
• Collaboration
  • Comments, mentions and sharing of conversation intelligence artifacts will be abled to make an integral part of the seller’s and manager’s day to day work and to enforce a more collaborative culture.
• Powerful search
  • The new powerful search and filter toolsets can help sellers and managers to receive more valuable insights out of conversation intelligence’s call recordings and insights.

Facilitating Digital Selling

• Experience sales accelerator, conversation intelligence, and predictive scoring with the Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise license.
  • Organisations can showcase the value of conversation intelligence, sales accelerator and predictive scoring for lead and opportunity use AI to help sellers prioritise their worklist, provide real-time analysis during calls, automate action notifications and programmatically generate meeting summaries.
  • Sellers will gain an advantage with these offerings by gaining detailed insight, reducing manual efforts and improving data quality.
• Sales Hub is now preinstalled on all environments
  • To ensure that customer’s are making the best of the new Dynamics 365 Sales capabilities, the Sales Hub is available and preinstalled for all existing and new environments.
  • Sales Hub is designed and configured to create an ideal seller experience. The app comes configured with several core sales and sales insights features to help organisations get started quickly. With a modern and interactive interface designed to simplify daily sales activities, it makes things easier for sellers through showing all the vital information in one place and focuses on the key activities that require attention.

Forecasting and Pipeline Intelligence

• Assign attributes per sales stage to improve predictive score accuracy
  • Users can view statistics on how the attributes impact the model at every stage of the sales lifecycle. This will help administrators in assigning the attributes to the correct sales stages.
• Compare annual projections with actual progress over multiple periods
  • Sellers will be able to select a view of their projections that spans multiple periods. This provides a high-level view to ensure annual projections meet the company’s sales objectives and to determine if the progress is nearing expectations.
• Measure the performance of predictive scoring model with accuracy reports
  • Users will gain more confidence for the accuracy of AI-driven insights which will help convey and convince the leadership team and sellers to adopt the model and motivate them to use the AI model’s insights more often for improved business outcomes.
• Streamline your forecasting workflow with default experiences
  • Administrators can now set default selections that sellers would see on the forecast page that they can quickly access to view their sales projections and opportunities.
  • This will help streamline the experience and free up time for sellers to spend meeting with customers and closing sales.
• Update quotas quickly with inline editing and quota rollups
  • With the ability to edit quotes and simple columns inline, users can now seamlessly update forecasts in seconds.
  • Furthermore, instead of manually entering team quotas, these can be set as rollups for auto-calculating.
  • The new capability to roll up a simple column will allow managers to see constantly updated views of their quotes.

Mobile

• Capture mobile phone contacts and recent calls
  • Sellers can streamline data captured by integrating contacts and recent calls so that staff who call customers directly from their phone can get the information logged into Dynamics 365 Sales.
  • By allowing sellers to create contacts based on their contacts list and logging recent calls with customers, they can reduce friction between the sales team’s actions and capture the data while increasing the completeness and value of the information stored in Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Effortlessly log information using the mobile phone camera
  • This feature will help improve experience for capturing business cards with better models, more languages and better user experience.
  • Users can scan handwritten notes using the phone camera and get digitized text into Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Outlook deep-link integration with templates, autofill and emails to meeting participants
  • The Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app will be improved to provide deep-link integration with Outlook and make it context-aware to help reduce the amount of manual work and the switch between apps that users have to do when emailing customers.
  • The features included are email template support when composing emails and autofill relevant information from the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app in Outlook.

Relationship Intelligence

• Discover accounts and contacts from email interactions
  • Sellers can query for accounts that their colleagues have interacted with over email and uncover all known contacts at those accounts or who have connections with those accounts.
  • Users can also view an interaction score that tells how well an organisation is connected to an account or contact or how strong the relationship is between an external contact or colleague.
  • They can also access a summary of the relationship between an organisation and other organisations or individual contacts.

Sales accelerator and process automation

• Choose the right engagement plan for your customers
  • Sellers have the ability to define their own sequence based on their personal preference.
  • They can also view and choose from the list of available sequences to suit specific business needs.
  • This will allow sellers to feel more empowered to drive tailored experiences that emulate their style best.
• Move sequences between environments seamlessly to enable sellers to start quickly
  • This feature provides an easy way for users to select sequences and related entities and move them between environments.
• Personalise the prioritised worklist using advanced filtering
  • Users will be able to easily filter information based on standard as well as custom fields.
  • This function can be enabled from the settings where SEMs can define filters relevant for business scenarios.
• Enable Outlook integration to avoid double booking
  • The outlook integration will ensure that sequence tasks are scheduled honoring the Outlook calendar of the seller.
  • If the user pauses a task, the sales accelerator takes into account the working days in the Outlook calendar.
• Easier setup experience
  • This feature will include a number of functionalities including: redesign of the sales accelerator configuration page for quick setup, streamline configuration for sales accelerator features, making the process easy and intuitive, template sequences, auto-connect sequences.
• Worklist cards
  • Worklist cards will be enhanced and will have more relevant information for each scenario.
  • There will also be customizable worklist cards for different entity types so that sellers can get contextual information on work items.
  • Businesses can configure these cards to suit their requirements.

The following list of features that are being updated may change and delivery timelines may vary.  Please refer to the Dynamics 365 website for the most updated changes.

If you would like to learn more about these updates or Dynamics 365 Sales,  get in touch with us today here.