Home » Dynamics 365 for Sales October Update Releases New Features

Dynamics 365 for Sales October Update Releases New Features

by Samantha Summers
13 minutes read

Microsoft for Dynamics 365 is releasing several new features with the October release. Dynamics 365 for Sales has multiple areas that will enable digital transformation by delivering efficiency at scale and AI-driven analytics. This update will feature modernization for team collaboration through integration across Microsoft by broadening the expansion to the suite allowing organizations to extend their sales processions with meaningful data at the core. Dynamics 365 will now combine crucial business data about sellers, buyers, products, organizations and relationships that were previously separated within the CRM system.

Playbooks

Playbooks is a new feature of the update that will help organizations mechanize sales activities and assist in responding to external events. Now businesses can access information to customize their customer’s journey rather than through the predefined business process. Playbooks will allow more of a reactive and productive process by triggering a play that creates a set of tasks and activities needed to prepare specific situations. Such as a decision maker leaving in the middle of the deal, a new task will then be created to reach out to new stakeholder to better understand their priorities, thus salvaging the deal.

The new capabilities will allow organizations to:

  • Construct Playbooks and outline the set of tasks and activities to mechanize once activated.
  • Pursue and launch Playbooks for specific customer scenarios.
  • Track the status progress of running Playbooks against their outcome, successful or not.

Relationship Analytics with LinkedIn InMail & LinkedIn Insights

This new feature will allow you to build intelligent sales applications and business processes driven by LinkedIn Insights. Through the Dynamics 365 application powered by LinkedIn insights, the information will be enhanced by syndicating the modifying LinkedIn Sales Navigator controls with the power and flexibility of Dynamics 365 Business Process Flows.

Your company will now be able to create and enhance business processes to feature LinkedIn insights about people and companies. This aspect will assist driving sales deals and moving other processes forward to an effective conclusion. The insights include fundamental data about companies, people, icebreakers and conversation starters, defining a path to a warm introduction with connection lists and recommendations for similar target leads.

Relationship Analytics will help salespeople manage the opportunities pipeline by analyzing interactions to create the health of customer relationships. The combination of Dynamics 365, Exchange Online and LinkedIn InMail provides a more accurate view for the relationship analytics by showing the health of a sales deal.

Microsoft Teams Integration

The integration of Microsoft Teams will transform sales team collaboration because salespeople are on twice as many teams compared to several years ago. The modernized sales environment requires decisions to made with more people, more data and within a smaller timeframe. This integration will bring together sales professionals through the abilities they need to collaborate more effectively.

Sales professionals will now be able to connect a Microsoft Teams channel to any Dynamics 365 record, allowing them to communicate more persistently. This ensures no one will miss the latest conversations pertaining to the specific record. Users will be able to share and coauthor sales collateral with their entire team through either Microsoft Teams or Dynamics 365. The files will then be stored to a central location, certifying the entire team has access to the latest updates.

Who Knows Whom & Talking Points

All sales goals are to win more deals or exceed their quarterly quota. This feature can easily detect colleagues within their organization, who can then introduce them to leads and contacts. Warm introductions increase response rate and interest, thus increasing sales performance to improve lead-to-opportunity conversion rates. This usually results in closing the deal. The who knows whom feature will empower sellers to increase sales conversion by influencing their network to get introduced to prospects and transform a cold call to a warm engagement.

Who knows whom will allow talking points to enhance the sales team’s conversations. Salespeople usually interact with many people over a period-of-time, but with this feature it allows them to remember specific details about every person they interact with. Talking Points extracts key details about the customer or contact on topics such as sports, health, family and entertainment. These topics will help with building conversation with customers they have not spoken with recently or met face-to-face.

Quick Actions & Predictive Lead Scoring

Quick Actions feature is a way to be more productive with your customers. It allows you to analyze your interactions with customers and suggests actions to take for the next step. The action could be as little as creating a task to follow up or creating an appointment to meet with them. This feature is simple, but also effective when interacting with customers.

Predictive Lead Scoring will assist in increasing sales conversions for your company. This feature will be a machine learning, model-based mechanism that scores leads on a scale of 1 to 100 based on their likelihood of becoming an opportunity for your business. It will allow sales reps to prioritize their efforts on deals that have a better chance of conversion.

Dynamics 365 AI for Sales

Dynamics 365 AI for Sales app will enhance sales performance and planning by taking the hassle out of sales performance analysis through proactively providing useful insight from sales data. This app assists managers with evaluating and improving the performance of their team on Dynamics 365.

The following are the key capabilities being surfaced in the app:

  • A home page that provides managers with answers to common questions regarding their team’s performance
  • Provides useful insights to quickly allow the sales team to focus on the right deals and activities.
  • A Q&A that allows managers to conversationally ask questions and receive reports from the sales data.
  • Lead prioritization leveraging predictive lead scoring.
  • Opportunity pipeline analysis using the relationship health score powered by exchange data.
  • Sales team performance analysis and individual scorecards.
  • Richer sales activity reports using relationship analytics, bringing valuable data from Exchange and Dynamics 365 graphs.

The Microsoft call center offering will enable smarter coaching to boost sales conversion rates. By connecting the call center telephone recording systems in the app, managers can then generate conversion insights that bring value from the organizations current assets. Dynamics 365 and non-Dynamics organizations will be able to use the Microsoft call intelligence product capability to create call insights and increase the output of their reps.

Key benefits:

  • Coaching driven by collective call statistics on ideas, keyword mentions, and KPIs.
  • Benchmark against conversational KPIs such as talk-to-listen ratio, longest customer monologue, and participant switch ratio that signal whether reps are aligning with conversation best practices.

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