Accelerate your Sales with Dynamics 365 - 2021 Wave-2

 Dynamics 365 has introduced many new and updated functionality in its 2021 Wave-2 release. This blog is part-1 of a series of blogs on the Dynamics 365 wave-2 release. This blog will focus on the updates on the new Sales accelerator (Sales - Customer Engagement app). 

The Sales accelerator focus is on empowering the Sales workforce to better collaborate (Teams), improve their productivity (intelligent worklist) and achieve better sales outcomes (smart sequences). The figure below shows the Sales Insights with conversational intelligence (in preview)

Sales insights with intelligence

Another exciting new functionality (which was lacking in Dynamics 365) is the ability to do a round robin assignment of leads. This will be only available in the Feb-2022 timeframe so I will write about it once the public preview is available.

1. Teams integration - The teams integration with Dynamics 365 was available earlier. There is new enhancements to the integration that allows the user to do the following (public preview starts in Dec 2021/Feb 2022 so will be able to get more details and post later). This is very useful if you are already using teams as a communication and collaboration tool within the organization.

    a.    Edit a D365 record from within a teams conversation

    b.    Ability to add a note or task to a D365 record from teams chat with the required security access

    c.    Share D365 records with other users in a teams chat as a interactable card

    d.    Create and join team meetings from D365 record. Access Sales records and add notes from meetings. 

    e.    Ability to @mention a user in D365 record timeline and the Sales bot will post a message to teams

    f.    Get notification of updates to D365 Sales records that you follow from within teams

Enhanced Teams integration

In addition to the above you can also add Conversation Intelligence to the teams call (in preview). This will provide the capability to analyze the call recordings and get insights on the customer interactions.

2. Worklist & Sequencing - Worklist allows the manager to setup a view of items that are assigned or created that the sales rep should be focusing on. The sales rep can than search, filter, sort the items on the worklist. The work list detail view shows the up next priority item that the seller needs to work upon based upon the sequencing as set-up by the manager.

Sales accelerator - Worklist 

3. Smart sequences - can be set-up to have the seller follow a guided particular sequence of to-do events or activities for working on a lead or opportunity. The below figure shows a new lead nurturing sequence steps. 

New lead nurturing sequence

This sequence can be configured and setup by sales managers and can automatically creates activities for the seller to complete as per the steps in the sequence.

The sequence needs to be assigned to the records (leads or opportunities) so that the sellers can follow the same while working on the sales records. The sequence assignment is shown below.

Assign sequence to lead records

I hope the above helps to accelerate your sales and help the sellers to better convert leads and close more opportunities with the wave-2 release of Dynamics 365 - Sales app. Please let me know if you would like to know more about the new Sales accelerator enhancements.

Thanks for reading.

@mihircrm

365WithoutCode