Microsoft published the Dynamics 365 Sales (D365) Wave 1 2022 updates back in April 2022. This comprises of around 40 separate upgrades and modifications. We’ve chosen our top four features that we believe most organisations and sales teams would enjoy utilising.
1 – Outlook & Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Integration to Avoid Double Booking
Scheduled meetings, whether online or in-person, are still an important part of the sales team’s operations. To discourage double-booking, Microsoft is adopting a minor but significant quality of life enhancement.
Sales Accelerator and Outlook are now integrated. This aids in a handful of crucial steps:
- The Outlook calendar is used to plan sequenced tasks, ensuring that current calendar items are considered and avoided.
- To eliminate multiple bookings through automated activities, process automation also checks against the Outlook calendar.
The Sales Accelerator in Dynamics 365 provides a tailored experience for sellers by minimising the time they spend on their search for the best next customer to reach out to. The Sales Accelerator gathers information from multiple sources and lets sellers focus on how to best approach their customers. It helps sellers to sell smartly, by building a strong and prioritised pipeline, offering context, and surfacing automated recommendations throughout a sales sequence that helps to speed the sales process. By using the Sales Accelerator, companies understand their customers’ motivations and engage with them from a single location across many channels. Now, this functionality will be activated by default for all premium or enterprise users.
2 – Quick Activity Updates in Sequences
Sequences enable sales managers to design activities that will appear in the “up next” widget in Sales Accelerator automatically. This encourages users to provide information in their activity timelines at key stages, ensuring that such insightful data is not overlooked. This includes the following:
- Allows users to add notes whilst completing an “up next” activity
- Automatically update the activity description from the sequence step description
- Open activity details with a single click from the “up next” widget
- Better timeline control in Sales Insight, to match up activity with the “up next” widget
3 – Modify D365 Records from Teams & Outlook
Sharing D365 records in Teams and Outlook is one of the most prevalent ways for a team to share data. The Teams and Outlook applications now display editable snippets from URL-shared records.
Simply input a URL to a D365 record into either app, and your colleagues will receive an interactive preview of the record, complete with critical data and information they may require.
This minor feature assists to enhance workflows by decreasing the steps required to access and change information when working with colleagues.
4 – Better Sales Insights with Conversation Intelligence
The previous several years have demonstrated the need of adaptability and flexibility, with many sales teams operating in hybrid setups. With sales teams working in the office, at home, and on the road, clarity and openness amongst colleagues is more crucial than ever.
Microsoft will make substantial improvements to the Conversation Intelligence inside D365 Sales beginning in August/September 2022.
The first major upgrade will allow Conversation Intelligence to collect all consumer interactions in order to deliver comprehensive insights. These automatic connections will bring calls and interactions from your sales teams straight into D365 Sales, allowing you to enhance productivity, decrease human input, and focus on increasing conversions and sales. Among these integrations are:
- Teams calls – Calls, whether made or received, will be completely incorporated into Conversation Intelligence.
- Teams meetings – In the event you would prefer video conversations via Teams meetings, or if you’re pitching to a new customer, all Teams meetings can be loaded into D365 for the sales team on the call, and their support colleagues as well.
- Third party integrations – If you use a different VOIP or video system, it can interact with Conversation Intelligence via a set of API calls to give the same outstanding real-time integrations.
- Other Azure & D365 apps – Many more Microsoft stack products will give first-party integrations to provide insights to your sales teams.
There will be many more new features in Wave 2 of the 2022 release plan for D365 that will come from September. If you would like to find out more about the latest features and how your organisation could use them don’t hesitate to contact our sales team.