Dynamics 365 Sales release wave 1: Simplifying the things that matter

Selling isn’t easy. If you were to take five minutes to ask a salesperson what makes selling so challenging, you’d quickly find that you don’t have nearly enough time to cover it all.

One thing is constant for sellers—time is in short supply. In a day, sellers are managing leads, tracking performance metrics, and collaborating with team members scattered far and wide, while at the same, delivering a blend of digital and personalized experiences to customers throughout their journey. Consequently, sellers need their data to work for them and ensure they can focus on their highest priorities.

That’s why for the Dynamics 365 Sales 2022 release wave 1, we are focused on streamlining the seller experience by elevating collaboration tools even more and expanding intelligence capabilities so that every seller can make faster use of their data, reclaim their time, and be more productive with customers.

Our approach targets three areas to improve the sales team’s experiences and empower them to achieve even more than before:

• Guide sellers with intelligence
• Make collaboration even easier
• Thrive with more productive tools

Let’s take a closer look at what’s in store for sellers in the weeks and months ahead.

Guide sellers with intelligence

What if we told you that sellers could take some of the guesswork out of their day-to-day workflows? With this release wave, we’re rolling out updates to guide sellers to connect with the right customers, capture interactions to help sellers focus on winning deals, and provide comprehensive insights into their pipelines and improve the predictability of revenue forecasts.

Guide sellers with predictive analytics and automation. Over the coming months, features for Sales Accelerator will become available thereby enabling sellers (using sales enterprise or premium) to have a single workspace to help them close more deals. New capabilities include enhanced worklist features to prioritize your work, new AI-based models to improve data quality, streamlined sequences creation, and activity management, including sequence templates based on industry best practices. These features will help guide sellers on how to prioritize and connect with the right customer, assist them on executing consistently though out the customer journey, and give them the ability to choose the right engagement plan for their prospects and customers.

Capture every interaction with Conversation Intelligence. Get the right insight, at the right time and at the right place with Conversation Intelligence. Sellers will now be able to capture every customer interaction and get real-time business insights on the platform or channel of their choice. They will get real-time content suggestions while on calls and insights to learn how call performance affects call outcomes. These capabilities are in preview now and will be released to general availability in September 2022.

Predictive pipeline scoring. Available now in general availability, sellers can now assign scoring attributes per sales stage and see the number of days since the deal has moved, and quickly understand how the stagnation impacts the score of the deal. This helps sellers determine the right next step to take to move the deal forward.

Enhanced forecasting. Provide sales teams with predictability to their revenue forecasts, and a workspace that provides comprehensive views and insights into their sales pipeline. Now in general availability, sales teams can streamline forecasting workflows by setting the default view. Now teams can quickly access sales projections, freeing up time to focus on customers.

Make collaboration even easier

Let’s face it—these days to sell well you need a hyperconnected team. From customer relationship management (CRM) to email to messaging apps, sales teams rely on a lot of tools to get their jobs done. That’s why we focused on enhancing the connection between Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Teams to ensure teams can collaborate more easily and be more productive.

Tighter Teams experience. Sales teams will now be able to easily associate Teams meetings with Dynamics 365 Sales records allowing for even more productive meetings. Sales teams can capture notes and tasks, as well as quickly access and update records, right within the Teams interface. This feature will become generally available beginning in September.

Embedded Teams chat in Dynamics 365. Now sellers can stay within their CRM workflow while collaborating with their stakeholders with the Teams-embedded chat experience to ensure context remains front and center.

Thrive with more productive tools

Finally, sellers are now enabled to better keep their finger on the pulse of customer relationships and introduce automation into their sales processes that didn’t exist before.

Rich messaging with Dynamics data. Not all sales conversations initiate from Dynamics. Users need a way to bring business context into conversations when and where they are initiated. We now enable sellers to share and interact with Dynamics 365 Sales records directly in the Teams message.

Discover hidden accounts and contacts. With predictive relationship intelligence, sales teams can query their entire network based on interactions gleaned from Dynamics 365 Sales and Exchange to uncover hidden relationships, obtain introductions, and accelerate opportunities.

Simplify day-to-day sales activities. With the built-in Sales Hub app, sellers can get their ideal selling experience. Sales Hub is designed to simplify your day-to-day sales activities providing sellers vital information in one place, unblocking them to focus on key activities and tasks that require attention.

Learn more

These are just a few features we’re rolling out for Dynamics 365 release wave 1. To go deeper into our newest features for Dynamics 365 Sales, click on the links to these online documentation and video resources.

• Dynamics 365 Sales Release Wave documentation
• Activate Digital Sales Selling video overview
• Digital selling capabilities in Dynamics 365 Enterprise documentation

If you are not yet a Dynamics 365 Sales customer, check out our Dynamics 365 Sales webpage where you can take a guided tour or get a free 30-day trial.