2023 Release Wave 1: D365 Sales Release Notes | Part 2
Last week I published part 1 of my series on 2023 Release Wave 1. There are so many features and updates for Dynamics 365 Sales alone, which is why I decided to split the article for D365 Sales into two parts. If you haven’t read the previous article, you can do that here. Last week I dove into the documentation and decided to do read through of all the features to (hopefully) give you a better understanding of what’s coming in this wave. Please note that these notes are a constant work in progress, meaning that some of these features might be changed or removed at some point in time, and others might get added so I would definitely recommend keeping your eyes on them and checking back every now and then. You can access the release notes here. In this article I will discuss the release notes for Dynamics 365 Sales.
According to the release notes, in this version of Dynamics 365 Sales we will be able to Engage with customers using SMS conversation. This is another feature that was originally scheduled to come out in a previous release wave but is now part of 2023 Wave 1. I think this is very important functionality for any sales department, as it will allow sellers to interact with their customers and prospects through SMS. Keep in mind organizations will need an SMS provider in order for this to work. (To start, Microsoft will support Twilio and TeleSign as SMS providers.) The great thing here is that admins will be able to assign specific sms numbers to any user or team in Dynamics 365! This sounds like the entire team would be able to send SMS messages from the same number! AND…these SMS messages will be saved in the timeline just as any other activity!
Empower sellers to adapt sequences to personalize their sales approach. This feature allows sellers to change the order of steps in a sequence, allowing them to complete activities in a different order then they were originally configured. This will be very helpful because we all know that no deal is exactly the same, so some tweaking might be necessary at any point in the sales process. Sellers will also be able to remove or add their own activities.
Visualize key stakeholders and take action with the smart organization chart: This is a brand new looking org chart! The documentation states that sellers can quickly create the org charts to understand the various stakeholders at an account and it looks like we’ll also be able to see the activities regarding these contacts from this view, which is very helpful. As I mentioned before, this release wave is packed with AI enhancements! Another example of that is the ability to Automate the creation of follow-up tasks that is mentioned here. This feature will automatically create these follow-ups based on emails, teams messages and calls. Of course this will work hand-in-hand with the updated ‘Up Next’ widget which I mentioned before, where these activities will be visible as well.
Efficient account-centric selling with multiple sequences for a record. This will allow sellers to attach multiple sequences to a row, which in turn can be assigned to different individuals. This can come in handy when multiple people are working on the same account or opportunity, where each individual has different steps based on their (sales) role. Sellers will be able to see any team members working on that same opportunity (or account, contact lead, etc.) and be able to view the details of the associated sequences to get a good understanding of the steps in each sequence.
Another feature when it comes to sequences is the ability to Streamline sequence creation with looping of repeated steps. As the name already suggests, this feature will allow sellers to configure repeatable steps until certain criteria are met. This can be done by using sub branches, where after the tasks in the sub branch are completed and evaluated, the sub branch merges back into the main branch of the sequence. The criteria to exit the child branch/loop can be configured. The last feature related to sequences is the ability to Streamline sequence creation process with templates. This functionality allows sellers to create their own sequence template from scratch, or use an existing sequence and turn it into a template. It will be easier to create new sequences from a template. Templates can also be shared with other sellers.
Now let’s talk dashboards! Sellers with access can Leverage manager dashboards to coach sellers. This is a brand new conversation intelligence dashboard available for sales managers . It looks like this is an embedded Powerbi report.
Capture crucial details of a sales call: If you’re familiar with the BANT concept (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeline) then you might like this feature. According to the release notes, sellers will be able to view information in all of these four categories on phone call record in D365 Sales. We have some of this functionality already today, where certain information is highlighted in the ‘mentions’ section, like competitors, keywords, etc, so this is expanding on the existing functionality. I’m super excited about this one!
Redact sensitive personal data from customer calls: This is another AI powered feature, which will identify and mask sensitive information such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc. in calls. This is a feature that needs to be enabled by an admin, but once that’s done sellers will notice that sensitive customer information will be removed from the call summary, transcript, notes and action items on a phone call.
Another feature I’m excited about is the ability to Get tips and suggestions while on a call with a customer. This feature uses AI to create real-time suggestions and tips while sellers are on a phone call with a customer or prospect. On the image it looks like the suggestions will show on the bottom of the embedded dialer within Dynamics 365. Besides this being beneficial for seasoned sellers, I can also see how this can help new hires on sales calls or how this can help coach sellers. Microsoft gives the following AI generated suggestion examples: service details and product suggestions, battle cards, brand info, pricing, etc.
Sales Execution and Sales Force Automation
Prevent duplicate record creation to improve data integrity: There is not a lot of information on this feature. When I read the release notes, it says we can configure columns to determine if a row is a duplicate or not. We already have that in the duplicate detection rules, so I am not sure what’s new here. It also talks about being able to see a warning when a duplicate exists while a new record is being created and being able to see the number of duplicate records detected as compared to the number of duplicates merged or deleted. No image on this either, so I am curious to learn more about this.
Provide Intelligent suggestion for improving seller effectiveness: This is an enhancement to the sales accelerator. Don’t worry if your organization doesn’t use the sales accelerator, as you can still take advantage of this feature! The way this works is that the system uses an out of the box AI model to create suggestions for sales managers. The suggestions show up in the sales accelerator and in the ‘Up Next’ widget. So as I mentioned before, if your organization doesn’t use the sales accelerator they can still see the suggestions in the ‘Up Next’ widget on the forms. If a Dynamics 365 customer has their own AI model this can be implemented to replace the out of the box AI model, and lastly if preferred, customers can also use rules to create these suggestions, think about creating these suggestions using power automate flows. Maybe if the score of an opportunity goes down or hits a certain score, we would want to create a suggestion for the sales rep. The rep will notice not just the suggestion or warning, but they will also see information on why the suggestion is showing. Depending on the suggestion, the seller will be able to perform different types of actions. The screenshot shows an example of a suggestion.
Identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities with timely product recommendations. This feature adds on to the suggestions features I discussed above. It also uses AI, but here the model looks at historical data, won opportunities and their associated products to be exact, to show cross-sell and upsell suggestions to sellers. So for example if there are a lot of won opportunities where product A was sold and product B was also included in that sale most of the time, the AI model will recognize that and suggest product B as an upsell/cross-sell opportunity whenever product A is added to an opportunity. There is no minimum number of opportunities that you need to have in the system to train the model, but obviously the more data you have, the more accurate the model gets trained. Another thing to note is that this functionality is different from the ‘suggestions’ functionality we have today, which is visible when adding products to an opportunity. Below is a screenshot of an upsell suggestion.
Get improved user experience with new and enhanced opportunity form: It looks like Microsoft is cleaning up some of the data entry forms in the application. You’ll notice the buttons on the command bar have been rearranged to show the most used buttons first. There are also some widgets that have been added showing ‘Key Details’ and ‘More Info’ type of information. Additional changes to the form are the changed proportion of the out-of-box opportunity form columns , and the account mapping in the header columns.
The last item on the list for Dynamics 365 Sales is to Manage duplicates when importing leads in bulk. There is not a lot of explanation here, it shows that you can view duplicates when you bulk import leads into the system, allowing us to prevent the import of duplicates. (Aren’t we doing this already by using duplicate detection rules?) The notes also read that we can select multiple leads at once and run duplicate detection. I hope you enjoyed reading this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!
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