2025 Wave 1: Dynamics 365 Sales

It is that exciting time of year again! Last week, Microsoft released the plans for 2025 Wave 1 for Dynamics 365 business applications and the Power Platform. Since the release notes, I’ve been diving into the release notes to get a good understanding of all the new features and enhancements. As I do with every release wave, I am planning to write a series of articles accompanied by videos, to share insights on what’s coming as part of this release. In this first article, I’ll be focusing on the new features in Dynamics 365 Sales. Stay tuned as I break down these exciting updates and explore how they can benefit your business.

When I read the release notes for Dynamics 365 Sales I noticed that most of these features are related to Lead Management in the application and they all evolve around the new Sales Qualification Agent. If you think that you’ve heard of this Sales Qualification Agent before, then you’re correct. When I checked the 2024 wave 2 release notes, there was already mention of this brand new agent, which means this is a feature that has been pushed from the previous wave to this one. The Sales Qualification Agent mentioned in 2024 wave 2 states that this agent is a combination of 3 different agents. I personally don’t think that we will see three different agents, but I believe all these functionalities will be part of the Sales Qualification agent’s skillset. If you haven’t heard of this new agent yet, or you have, but you don’t understand what it will be able to do, let me explain further. The Sales Qualification Agent is a custom autonomous agent (aka Copilot) which will live inside of Dynamics 365 Sales.

Its main purpose is to automate and streamline the sales qualification process and providing sellers with a high quality pipeline, by enriching and prioritizing leads, assisting sellers with personalized email communications, and more. The Sales Qualification Agent provides sellers with a ton of information, like key leads to focus on, the percentage of the total sales goal the seller has accomplished so far, forecasting details including different forecasting buckets, their estimated revenue amounts and the sellers total target amount.

Research

Boosting the pipeline is really about finding the most qualified leads to go after, leads that have the highest potential of turning into a win. This is where the research agent comes in. This agent enriches leads with relevant information. It does that by collecting data from multiple sources like Dynamics 365 Sales, public web sources like websites and industry reports, and data from third parties. The research agent puts together a full profile for each lead, with information about the lead’s finances, strategic priorities and challenges, news articles and more. This is very important because this will give the seller a full 360 picture of each lead in their pipeline. Secondly, having the agent do the research will save sellers a lot of time on this AND on manual data entry, allowing them to focus on selling instead! Other things the agent handles are email address validations and making sure the lead has opted in to receiving emails and phone call communications.

The agent will also give recommendations (if there are any) on who the seller should contact at the lead’s organization. Another very valuable feature of this agent is knowing who at the sellers’ company has an existing relationship with the lead. This is beneficial because it’s always better to get a warm introduction through an existing connection vs a cold introduction.

Prioritization

The prioritization agent will prioritize the leads the seller should engage with. I believe this means that after the research agent is done, the prioritization agent will start to prioritize each lead. It does that by reviewing all the lead data and looking for criteria like BANT (budget, authority, needs, and timeline). This will result in a list of leads that will have the best chance to result in a sale. NOTE: A few examples of why a lead gets flagged as high priority can be because the lead is a decision maker, they were browsing on the sellers’ company website, and/or there could be a history of customer services cases complaining about something relevant to the potential deal.(more about this below)
One of the sentences in the documentation states: Stay on top of triaging high-quality leads as the new UI follows you across lead and opportunity grids, which makes me think that the Agent will not only be visible on the lead views, but also on the opportunity views. I am secretly hoping that we can also configure this qualification agent to also work with opportunities alone, as there are lots of customers who don’t use leads in Dynamics 365 sales. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait to find out!
The Sales Qualification agent will be able to recognize intent from an email. For example, if a seller receives an email that is a request for support, the agent will detect this. On top of that, it can also disqualify leads based on low interest or no interest responses from leads. This will help keep the sellers’ focus on high quality leads only.

Engagement

The third agent that is part of the Sales Qualification agent is the engagement agent. This agent helps with lead communications. It will create personal emails based on data that the research agent collected (and I’m guessing historical communications) as the lead goes through the sales cycle. What I really like here is that the seller can choose for the agent to dynamically respond to lead emails once the first email was sent! The content of the agent’s email will depend on the lead’s response, but if this works the way it’s intended to work then this will be a game changer for sellers! According to the release notes this agent will also be able to detect when a lead sends an out-of-office message. This is important, because we don’t want the agent to keep sending follow-up emails if the lead is not in the office.

You also see on the image above that on the left side of the screen are the outreach steps. I am guessing that these are sequence steps that are part of the outreach, but I could be wrong. Lastly, this agent will save sellers a lot of time by helping leads schedule meetings with the seller autonomously. The agent can propose available timeslots from the sellers’ calendar in real time, making this another time saving experience.

Expand Pipeline with leads from Service Interactions

For organizations that are also using Dynamics 365 Customer Service, this feature is one that is invaluable! This feature will identify leads by looking at customer service data in the application. For example, a customer reached out to customer service and a case was created because their coffee machines are having issues. This could be a potential lead to sell more coffee machines to, or to sell them an upgraded model. I love this feature because in a lot of organizations the customer service department and the sales department are disconnected, meaning that a lot of potential sales are missed. This feature will really help with that. I hope that Microsoft will allow administrators to use connectors to get this type of data from external systems like Service Now, Zendesk, etc.

Configuration

Since no sales organization is the same, the sales qualification agent is configurable, allowing it to be grounded in the sellers’ company data. Admins can provide details about their company by entering one or multiple websites, descriptions of products and services their organization offers and defining the criteria for their ideal customers, which the agent will use to assess the initial fit of leads sellers should engage with. Things like preferred lead industries or company sizes the seller is targeting, job titles, locations are all things that can be configured as criteria and these can be mapped to columns in Dataverse. This will also help fine tune prioritization criteria. I can’t wait to get my hands on this and will add more content once I do! What do you think of the new Sales Qualification Agent? Let me know in the comments! I hope you enjoyed this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!