As you may or may not know, Microsoft has recently announced what new & improved features will be coming to Dynamics 365 as part of the Wave 1 2023 update for April.
We’ve covered specifically some of the new & improved features that will be coming to Business Central in our previous blog.
In this blog article, we will turn our attention to showcasing some of the highlights for Dynamics 365 /CRM.
Dynamics 365 Sales
Revenue Intelligence
Manage opportunities more effectively using the new pipeline view
This new and improved opportunity view within Dynamics 365 Sales will make it much easier for you to have a comprehensive overview of both your pipeline and the ability to manage your opportunities much easier and more intuitively than ever before.
To go into this in more detail as a seller you will be able to:
- Manage opportunities in whichever way suits you.
- Create personalised views.
- Add new information fast through the use of an editable grid and side-panel.
- Add new notes and tasks and much, much more.
- Easily review aggregations for pipeline value, number of pipeline deals.
If you are an admin, you will be able to do the following:
- Customise the record side panel forms with custom attributes.
- Add support for business rules.
- Configure the charts.
Configure forecasts for multiple business units
As many of us already know, companies with several business units (BU) have to define different forecasts for all BUs to track, monitor as well as to provide targeted help. Businesses have to be able to easily track forecasts at department level to gain a comprehensive understanding of how each department is performing & to enable them to develop data-driven strategies.
To go into this in more detail as an admin or forecast manager, you will be able to:
- Adjust forecasts for specific business units which will enable your sales team to regularly review and keep an eye on the progress of each business unit separately.
- Restrict the forecast only to the sales team in that specific business unit.
If you are a seller, you will be able to:
- See the forecast of your business unit and allow informed decisions to either meet or exceed your quotas.
- Get a macro and micro view by monitoring your Business Unit forecast and from there you can dive deeper into your forecast to find out how you’re making a difference to the Business Unit forecast.
Improve forecast accuracy with both yearly and weekly forecasts
Businesses track their sales objectives at different points and would love the ability to be able to forecast where appropriate. Sellers will now be able to add to their quarterly and monthly forecasts with a yearly one too that surfaces the process and projections for the whole year. As well as this, weekly recurrences can be easily adjusted for sales teams with short sales cycles to easily measure weekly sales goal progress.
If you are an admin or forecast manager, you will be able to:
- Adjust forecasts with a yearly or weekly recurrence.
If you are a seller or sales manager, you will be able to:
- Track your yearly and weekly forecasts.
Sales execution and sales force automation
Stop duplicate record creation to improve data integrity
You will notice that sales teams need extra help when it comes to identifying duplicates and those that need to be resolved. As well as this, there is more of a need to stop the creation of such records in the first place to improve the overall accuracy of the data. You will find that with this new feature, certain users such as sales operations will have greater visibility into the health of the sales data and the sellers will get warned when a duplicate record has been created.
If you are an admin, you will be able to:
- Adjust the fields that determine whether a record is a duplicate or not.
If you are either a seller or a manager, you will be able to see:
- A warning when you create a record if there are suggestions that a duplicate record is currently in the system.
- The number of duplicate records detected when compared to the number of duplicate records merged or deleted.
Visualise key stakeholders and take action through the smart organisation chart
Being able to put together the right kind of engagement plan is vital to be able to reach out to the right stakeholders. It is often the case where account team members need to be helped to highlight the right stakeholders in a business for their deals. Sellers on the whole are likely to engage with a small percentage of the buying committee which could result in missed upsell/cross-sell opportunities.
There is a requirement that needs buyers' roles to be captured easily as well as a requirement to see a snapshot of the contact’s activity levels with your business to see if that specific stakeholder needs more engagement. You will find that with the new org management feature, you have the ability to build and visualise your customer organisation to enable you to maintain a healthy business relationship.
This will mean that you will now have the following capabilities:
- Sellers/account managers will be able to easily build their customer org chart to gain a full understanding of the different stakeholders for an account.
- Maintain a relationship map to identify, engage and build your network of customer contacts.
- An activity view of the contacts/stakeholders which will allow you to understand your customers much better.
Automate the creation of follow-up tasks
If you work in sales, you will notice that you are reminded about follow-up tasks via all kinds of channels such as calls, messages as well as emails. Manually creating these reminders is painful and can be missed and follow-up tasks should not become a chore.
You will find that with this new AI feature, you will be able to easily automate the creation of follow-up tasks, giving you extra time to prioritise more important tasks to stop things falling by the wayside. Better still, the system will automatically capture follow-up tasks from other Microsoft 365 applications then gently remind you which will help you to work towards completing them.
If you are a seller, you will notice that:
- Follow-up tasks are automatically created based on emails, Teams message as well as by calls.
- Follow-up tasks are easily available to be reviewed by going to the Up Next widget which will save you valuable time.
Sales Engagement
Recommendations for cross-sell and upsell opportunities
Through this feature, you will find that AI-based product recommendations will use historical data to suggest the right product that considers historically successful deals for upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
- As an admin, you will have the ability to both enable as well as set up product recommendations.
- As a seller, you will be able to view product recommendations whilst at the same time add products to an opportunity.
Next action suggestions
The ‘up next’ form widget will display upcoming actions for the record on accounts, opportunities, and other sales records in addition to scheduled activities which have yet to be completed. This will also highlight AI-based suggestions that are surfaced from recent emails and call summaries.
Some of the suggestions could be as follows:
- Help in creating emails.
- Automatic follow-up tasks.
- Suggestions on product recommendations.
SMS conversations
New capabilities in the latest update will enable sellers to engage with contacts via SMS and receive real-time notifications for incoming replies. Once released, administrators can allocate specific numbers to teams or individual users for SMS.
Next Steps?
If you are a business that needs help with upgrading to the latest version of Dynamics 365 or are looking to implement Dynamics 365/CRM for the very first time through one of our Quick Start CRM packages then feel free to reach out to one of our team.
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