Here’s our run down of Microsoft’s wave 2 updates to Dynamics 365 Sales. They’re set to be released between September & March 2023
Seller dashboards
The new seller dashboard lets salespeople see activities and progress on their work all in one place. The dashboard is easy to access and is clearer, with more visual appeal than the Dynamics out of the box reports.
Available March 2023
Managers and admins can view aggregated data across teams and roles on a new sales product use insights page
Sales Accelerator improvements
Dynamics 365 Sales Premium or Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise licences only
SMS
This feature lets salespeople communicate with leads and contacts via SMS. SMSs can also be added as part of any sequence to send reminders or updates about key events.
The feature includes:
- Add a SMS task or automated SMS as a step in a sequence
- Add SMS templates as part of a sequence
- Send a SMS from the Sales Accelerator
- View past SMS interactions in context in leads and contact records
Sequences
Sequences let organisations develop a standard, automated process for handling leads.
The sequence designer will look familiar to users of Dynamics 365 Marketing.
For example, a follow-up sequence can contain phone calls, manual or automated emails, tasks and wait times.
Conditions that can be used to trigger events include email opens, link clicks, replies and attachment downloads. Field values and business process stages progress can be used as triggers.
AvB testing
Sales managers can now test the effectiveness of different strategies, with AvB testing. This means in a sequence, you can, for example, create 2 versions of an email as a test. Some leads will receive email A and some will get B. As the statistics build up you can learn which email worked best and make improvements on future emails.
Available October 2022
Email validation
This feature will alert salespeople about invalid or low-quality email addresses, such as
- Incorrect address (missing at @ for example)
- Testing or spam addresses
- Disposable addresses
- Expired addresses
- Bounced emails
Available March 2023
Viva Sales
Dynamics 365 Sales Premium or Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise licences only
Viva Sales lets salespeople automatically capture data into Dynamics 365 Sales from Office 365 and Microsoft Teams, eliminating manual data entry. Due Q4 2022.
- Add customers easily from Outlook and view CRM data in Outlook and Teams. No need to access your CRM
- Lead insights – discover which co-workers know your lead and access LinkedIn profiles in one click
- Share lead records via Teams with a simple @ mention
- Real time conversation insights
- Viva takes notes during your call and summarises them at the end
- Viva lists action points and makes it easy to add to CRM
- See how the buyer’s sentiment changed during the call
- Conversation stats to help the seller improve their conversation style
Find out more about Microsoft Viva Sales
Available October 2022
