It’s been a surreal and busy 6 months since we wrote our article about the Dynamics 365 2020 Release Wave 1 for Customer Engagement. The way organizations operate has changed significantly across the world and Microsoft has worked tirelessly to deliver ongoing improvements to the Dynamics 365 product line to ensure small and medium sized businesses continue to thrive.
On October 1st, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 2020 Release Wave 2 was made generally available to the public and with it came some exciting new features. In this article, we’re going to focus on Dynamics 365 Sales and Insights because we feel that the improvements to this application will have the biggest impact on end-users and organizations. For those of you that aren’t overly familiar with Dynamics 365 Sales, it’s a Microsoft solution centered on the customer relationship. It provides out-of-the-box capabilities that help organizations understand customer needs and improves selling efficiencies. Insights gives customers a real competitive advantage with AI capabilities that empower sales teams to accelerate the sales process and automate tasks.
Let’s dive straight in and look at our top 4 favorite new features from this fall’s release.
1. Mobile Enhancements
Your sales team aren’t always going to be able to access their laptop or desktop computer. Sometimes they will need access to information when on the road. October’s release brings enhancements to the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile experience that assist sellers with data entry and helps them find relevant information on their mobile device. Your sales team can quickly add notes, update account and customer information, and find opportunity and contact information in a seamless mobile experience.
2. Enhanced PDF Capabilities
Would it make your sales process simpler and less error prone if you could generate non-editable contracts? Now you can! Enhanced PDF capabilities allow users to send word templates straight to a PDF. This new feature empowers your team to send PDF documents through automated workflows and users can simply download the PDF, send it to an email or save it directly in SharePoint:
To enable this functionality, you need to go to App Settings >> Productivity tools > Enable on the entity:
3. Sales Accelerator Sequences
Running a sales team doesn’t come without its challenges, especially if you have a large growing team. Making sure you have a structured sales processes in place helps ensure your salespeople are taking the necessary steps to close new business. It’s especially important when you onboard new team members as they often require additional guidance and training on how to approach the sales process at your organization.
Sales Accelerator Sequences has been developed to empower inside sales reps to better manage their day-to-day tasks. Inside sales reps are often managing a large number of leads and opportunities all at once and need to sift through huge amounts of relevant information to decide who is the next best prospect to prioritize. Sales Accelerator helps salespeople manage items in their work list and empowers sales managers to enforce best practices by giving them the ability to build sequences for their team to follow. This new feature allows you to script tasks for your salespeople that will lead to the most positive outcome for sales activities.
You can configure sequences from the Sales Insights App settings area in the Sales Hub:
Create new sequence and add your steps:
4. Relationship Insights
It can be difficult to turn sales interactions into positive outcomes when contacting prospects for the first time. To help make things easier, Dynamics 365 Sales now provides a new feature called Who Knows Whom that connects to Microsoft Exchange to extract insights. This feature provides a user with details such as full name, email address and the colleague within your organization that knows or has interacted with the lead. It then allows you to reach out to your colleagues to ask for an introduction.
The Who Knows Whom relationships are calculated based off interactions users have had in Microsoft Exchange. It not only shows you if someone within your organization has corresponded with a contact, it also gauges the strength of the relationship based on email insights.
Get introduced:
You can turn on Who knows Whom in the Sales Insight setting area:
We hope that you’re as excited about these new features as we are. This release shows that Microsoft has made great strides when it comes to simplifying the user experience and enhancing customer insights through the integration of AI.
If you’re new to Dynamics 365 Sales and require training for your team, or you’re considering making the move then you can contact us with any questions you might have about the solution.
Want pricing for Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement? You can get a customized quote in a few simple clicks with our subscription builder.
