For the 2021 Dynamics 365-second release, Dynamics 365 Sales powerpacks cool new updates. It launches the general availability of Deal Manager (a new, modern workspace for managing your pipeline), and enhancements to the integration between Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Teams, including added collaboration tools and calling capabilities.
Likewise, seller productivity investments include improvement in lead quality with data hygiene, forecasting updates, and guided selling improvements with Sales Accelerator. Several unique capabilities are also coming to the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile application, now available in the iOS and Android app stores.
Here’s our top upcoming Dynamics 365 Sales features from the latest release:
1. Close deals faster with ‘Deal manager workspace’ which is now generally available
The deal manager workspace offers a new experience that is intuitive and modern. Since it’s optimised for sellers, your sales managers can quickly find the right deals and act as it streamlines everything into a single workplace to maximize efficiency. What’s more? You can also personalise your experience and manage your pipeline effectively by choosing a variety of pre-built interactive charts and drill down into records using a side panel.
2. Improve lead quality with ‘data hygiene’
Losing time engaging with the wrong leads?
Grappling with a busy pipeline with irrelevant records?
Unable to find the leads that are more likely to close?
This new feature ‘Improving leads quality with data hygiene’– uses automated process based on an AI engine- and ensures that only quality leads are being assigned to sellers, with correct data that enables personalised interactions, which will save sellers valuable time and allow them to close more business opportunities. This feature will hit public preview on November 2021.
3. Level up your CX and keep selling on the go with ‘Mobility improvements’
One of the most interesting features of our watch is the enhancements in mobile applications.
Quite a lot of improvements happening here, each of them might seem small but will likely increase adoption of mobile Dynamics 365. Sales representatives can find, interact, and create CRM information more easily, wherever they are, and in real time. They can scan handwritten notes in addition to business cards. Activity records from recent calls, Teams calls, and online meetings can also be automated.
Each of these small improvements can really lead to a huge increase in mobility user adoption and empower your salespeople to never miss any detail in your customer engagements. These mobility features will hit public preview in December 2021 or January 2022.
4. Streamline forecasting and increase forecast accuracy with ‘Forecasting and pipeline analytics’
Forecasting and pipeline intelligence with predictive scoring assists the sales team to tap the best deals and forecasts with confidence.
- Improve predictive scoring by enabling intelligent field augmentation
Organisations collect a vast amount of CRM data as part of their regular course of business. This data becomes a powerful source of insight when used to train an AI predictive scoring model. Certain attributes may have key values that, when recognised by the model, can further its efficacy, and exclude confusing data points.
Using field augmentation, you can find the fields and key values for training the AI model.
Field augmentation could include- whether a customer is new or returning, whether an email is legitimate or fake, recent activity, phone number length, private or public email domain, and contact ID.
- Extend visibility of your forecast with an annual view and weekly/yearly periods
It is important to ensure that sellers can view the data in a way that makes the most sense to them. With this new update, as a seller, you can: get an annual or year-to-date view of the forecast at period lengths that are relevant to your organisation. Easily visualise period-over-period progress, and view forecasts for weekly and yearly periods.
5. Collaborate seamlessly and gain visibility into the right data with ‘Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Teams integration’
This is also a feature to watch for this new release which will avoid switching time between two apps to speed up overall productivity.
Out of the several improvements, the ability to capture notes whilst having a meeting with a customer and to have those notes automatically saved against the underlying Dynamics 365 record, such as a Lead, a Contact, or an Opportunity, is the most impressive. This feature is smashing down the boundaries between your collaboration tools and your database to ensure the quality of data in your CRM system is high while reducing the administration required from your sales team.
What’s Next?
We’ve summarised the key enhancements across the different modules here- Highlights from the 2021 Second Release for Microsoft Dynamics 365 & Power Platform
Want to find out how you can benefit from the latest Dynamics 365 updates?
Contact us today for a no-obligation consultation on 01296 328 689 or info@dogmagroup.co.uk.
