D365 Sales Accelerator: Adaptive Sequences

In the month of June another feature was added to the Sales Accelerator in Dynamics 365. For those of you who are not aware the Sales Accelerator is a tool that you get when you purchase the Sales Insights add-on license for Dynamics 365 Sales. I wrote a few articles on the Sales Accelerator that you might want to review before reading the rest of this article, in April of 2020 I wrote about the Sales Accelerator when it came out in preview and more recently in May of 2021 I wrote about the new functionality that has been added since, which you can access here.
In this article I will discuss adaptive sequences, which has was added this month. Adaptive sequences give sequence creators a few more options when it comes to creating conditions in sequences. Conditions allow admins to configure what will happen in a sequence when a condition is true or false. Yes we were able to create conditions prior to this feature but with adaptive sequences we have some additional options available.

Prior to this update we could only set branching logic based on (limited) activity related data. The conditions available would depend on the activity that was selected in the step. For example if there was a phone call step you could enter a condition that would be related to the status reason field alone. If that phone call was marked as ‘Made’ the sequence would follow one path, and if it had a status of ‘Received’ it would follow a different path. Similarly for email steps you could pick which path to follow based on any of the email engagement conditions: after the email was sent you could configure conditions on an ’email open’, a ‘recipient reply’ or a ‘link click’. This didn’t give us a lot to work with, which is why I am so excited to report that the conditions have been expanded to include more options. The interesting thing about this new feature is that we can now use conditions that are based on the lead or opportunity itself, and not the activity that is defined in the step, which opens up a whole lot of other configuration options. For example, the sequence could go to the next step if a field on the lead or opportunity changed and would no longer be dependent on the activity in the step, or it could trigger the next step based on a business process’ stage change!

Prerequisites

In order to start using adaptive sequences in your environment you’ll need to enable the ‘Adaptive Sequence Timeout Flow’ in Power Automate. You can do this by navigating to https://flow.microsoft.com and make sure you have the correct environment selected. Click on ‘Solutions’ on the sitemap (left) and find the ‘Sequence’ solution. Open the solution and find the ‘Adaptive Sequence Timeout Flow’ and click on the ‘Turn on’ button on the top ribbon of the power automate flow. When you see the button’s name change in ‘Turn off’ you’ll know the power automate flow has been enabled successfully.

Other Conditions

Regardless of the activity type that you select as a step, you’ll now see that as part of this feature there is a new ‘Other conditions’ section when you click on the ‘conditions’ tab below the step. (Click the + icon under the step to see the Steps and Conditions window.) Under the ‘Other Conditions’ section you’ll notice the additional configuration options for the sequence. We can configure branching based on a field (data column) and there’s an option to configure branching based on a business process stage! Obviously the ‘Field Value’ option looks at all of the columns of the related table (lead or opportunity) that was selected in the ‘record type’ field at the time the sequence was created.

Field Value Condition

When you click the ‘Field Value’ option, the ‘Advance to Yes path’ window will show, where you can select the field that you want to use for your logic. Just to be clear, these fields are related to the lead or opportunity table, THESE ARE NOT FIELDS RELATED TO ANY OF THE ACTIVITY TABLES (phone calls, emails, etc).
You would think that you can only add one field here to create your query, but that is not the case! When you click on ‘Advanced’ this will take you to a screen where you can configure additional conditions for this path. You can add multiple fields from the lead table here and you can even add related tables as well to filter the data. At first glance it looked like I could only configure ‘And‘ conditions (which means all of the conditions need to be true) but if you click on ‘+Add group’ you have the ability to configure ‘Or’ conditions as well. I also noticed I didn’t see an option for some fields to use the ‘contains data’ statement. I didn’t test all the field types, but I noticed this was true for date fields.

Business Process Stage Condition

The second option under ‘other conditions’ is the ‘business process stage’ condition. This allows you to select a business process flow and a stage from that business process flow as a condition. When using this setup, the path of the sequence will be triggered by the business process flow’s stage. In order to be able to use business processes flow stages as conditions for sequences you have to make sure you have an active business process flow in your Dynamics 365 instance. As you can see in the Business process stage step, the sequence will take the ‘yes’ path if the stage that is selected in the step has been accessed. One thing that’s missing here is not to be able to rename the step so that you can see what you’ve configured… You have to be a bit careful with this as this doesn’t work the same way as a workflow, where a trigger is needed for the logic to run. This condition does one thing when the business process flow is in one stage (when it meets the condition), and another thing when the business process doesn’t meet that condition. It’s not like a workflow where it will be triggered when a condition is met. I would definitely recommend putting wait conditions between the steps. For example send an email, wait 2 days and then have the business process flow stage condition. That way if the lead or opportunity didn’t move in the sales process, another activity can be created.

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