New lead qualification experience

When 2024 release wave 2 came out, one of the features in the long list of updates for Dynamics 365 Sales was the new lead qualification experience. This feature was originally part of the first wave of the 2024 release wave, but unfortunately it was pushed to a later date for unknown reasons. When I installed the early access features of 2024 release wave 2 in my environment, I noticed that this feature is now available for us to try out! In this article I will dive into this functionality and explain how this can be configured, options available and what the end result looks like for the sellers who will be qualifying leads in Dynamics 365 Sales.

Enable the feature

Just like with most new features, this is a feature that needs to be enabled and configured by an administrator first before it can be tested in the environment. Obviously, you will need to enable 2024 release wave 2 in your instance first in order to even see the settings to turn this on. Once the installation of 2024 wave 2 is completed, you can access the new lead qualification experience by opening the Sales Hub and navigating to the App Settings area. You’ll find the setting of the new experience under the ‘Lead + Opportunity’ item on the sitemap.

You will notice the new ‘Lead Qualification’ slider and the legacy setting below it. Previously only the legacy setting was available here: ‘Automatically create records for newly qualified leads’ setting, which had a slider that would automatically generate account, contact and opportunity records on qualification on a lead when enabled. If the slider was disabled, a pop-up window would open when a seller would attempt to qualify a lead, allowing them to choose which records they wanted to create from the lead. In order to enable the new experience you need to set the top slider next to ‘Try the new lead qualification experience’ to ‘Yes’. You’ll notice a lot more settings will become available in this new experience after you enable the feature.

Configuration

The first setting allows admins to choose who creates the records (rows) when a lead is qualified. The rows available here are the normal rows you would expect to be created after a lead qualification: account, contact and opportunity. As you can see on the form, you have the option for each record to select if the record is created automatically or created by the seller. This sounds very much like the options we have with the legacy control, but the experience for the seller will be very different, which I will explain below. The ‘Modify Opportunity form’ section allows admins to add columns to the new opportunity form that is part of this feature. The new form is called ‘Opportunity qualify lead form’ and one thing to note here is that for the lead qualification experience to work as intended, you need to make sure to add this form to the Sales hub, or to the custom app your sellers are using, more details on this below. If he checkbox ‘Let seller create up to 5 opportunities from a newly qualified lead’ does exactly that. It allows sellers to generate a total of 5 opportunities (at the same time) as part of the qualification process. Lastly, there is a setting to have Copilot generate a summary with key information on the lead.

Seller Experience: Seller creates records

If the record creation has been configured to let the seller decide, you’ll notice a brand new experience when the seller qualifies a lead! After the qualification button on the lead has been clicked, a new looking quick create form will open on the side of the screen. The seller will see different options depending on how record creation was configured in the new lead qualification process. In my instance I set the configuration for all newly created records (account, contact and opportunity) to the seller, which is why I see record create options for account, contact and opportunities. From here the seller can select to create a new account or contact record, to create none, or they can select an existing account or contact record. If an existing account or contact record is selected, the selected record will automatically be linked to the qualifying lead.

Below the contact creation options you’ll notice options for opportunities. The topic of the lead is automatically mapped over to the opportunity topic, but sellers can edit the value in this column by clicking the pencil icon on the right side of the opportunity name. This will open up a pop-up window with an opportunity form. NOTE: If you haven’t added the new ‘Opportunity qualify lead form’ to the Sales Hub (or whatever app your sellers are using) the default opportunity form will load in this window. The issue with this is that when you click the save button, the opportunity will create a new opportunity record in Dataverse, with no pre-populated values! When the new ‘Opportunity qualify lead form’ is added to the model-driven app your sellers are using, this form will load instead, and the opportunity name (topic) can be changed. More importantly, after clicking the save button, you’ll see the updated topic in the side pane and the opportunity record will not (yet) get created, this will happen after the ‘Qualify’ button on the bottom of the screen is clicked. If you need to add additional opportunities that need to be generated as part of the qualification of this lead, you can add them by clicking the ‘+New Opportunity’ button on the form.
I really like this feature as I believe it will make it a lot easier for sellers to create multiple opportunities quickly without the need to go back and create additional opportunities after a lead has been qualified. It’s good to know that if you have any column mappings configured for the lead – opportunity relationship, these will still be honored here!

If you selected Copilot to summarize the key info for the lead, the seller will see the above screen with the summarization after the lead is qualified. This summarization will be added to the qualified lead, and it will be visible on the timeline. Due to the relationship between the lead and opportunity table, you will also see these posts on the opportunity form. NOTE: If you don’t see the post on the forms, make sure that posts are visible on the timeline.

Seller Experience: Seller creates records

If your admin has configured the new lead qualification experience to set record creation of contact, account and opportunity to automatic, the experience for the seller will be slightly different. When the seller clicks the qualification button of the lead record, they will still see the form open in the side pane, however they will not have the ability to change settings for the account, contact or opportunity generation after the lead is qualified. The form shows that the records will automatically be generated per the org settings of the sales hub. You’ll also notice that sellers are not able to add additional opportunities as part of this lead qualification, nor will there be a Copilot lead summarization available to review. If the lead qualification settings allow the seller to create the opportunity record on lead qualifications, the ability to have Copilot generate a summary and to generate multiple opportunities will become available again. 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!