Spend more time on sales; New sales features in the 2023 release 1 wave
The role of the seller is evolving. Buyers expect a mix of digital and personalized experiences throughout their journey. To achieve this, sellers need to be efficient and effective, prioritize who to interact with, determine how and when to connect, and spend more time being their customers’ trusted advisors. Sellers cannot be overwhelmed by trying to make sense of so much data and information; instead, they need data to work for them, providing value in every customer interaction.
With Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers can increase their sales by prioritizing their best bets, instantly collaborating with their sales teams with built-in Microsoft Teams, knowing when they need to engage with prospects, and seeing how sales are going after they’re done. Call. Sellers are gifted with time and intelligence so they can close more deals faster than before.
For years, customer relationship management (CRM) systems have asked vendors to input data so that sales managers can forecast revenue and evaluate vendor performance. With Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Viva Sales, whether you’re selling from Dynamics 365 Sales or Microsoft 365 productivity tools, we’ve run apps for you using AI to simplify data capture and suggest instant interactions. Starting today, we’ll start rolling out new features for Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales that use the power of artificial intelligence to help sellers:
- Prioritize your work to get more deals done faster.
- Stay productive and collaborate in the workflow with Viva Sales.
Let’s take a closer look at what awaits sellers in the coming weeks and months.
Prioritize your business to get more deals done faster
The sales accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales helps sellers to sell on purpose by creating a prioritized backlog and revealing automated activity suggestions to speed up the sales process. Sequences allow sales organizations to automate these processes, tailoring them to their unique sales approaches and best practices. Sequences are powered by our shared customer journey orchestration engine in Dynamics 365 apps. We leverage queue capabilities to support account-centric selling with multiple queues to a record, increase efficiency with actionable AI-powered recommendations, and analyze performance using queue insights.
Time spent with customers is valuable, so every sales interaction counts. Conversation intelligence helps sellers get the most out of their sales conversations by transcribing the dialogue to make sure no follow-up is missed, and using artificial intelligence to detect emotions, questions and actions. In this release, we’ve enabled text messaging as an additional channel for merchants to interact with customers and added additional AI features to extract sensitive personally identifiable information (PII) data from phone calls and provide instant recommendations to guide sales calls.
Sellers routinely manage many deals at once. As sales deals progress and vendors learn more about their customers, they need to adjust and review this data regularly as well as monitor their performance. With the new org chart feature, vendors can easily protect various stakeholders for an account, identify and analyze the activities of key decision makers, and enable them to stay on top of performance and update their pipelines with a new opportunity management experience. The new opportunity experience removes many of the things sellers would normally do and streamlines everything in one workspace.
Stay productive and collaborate in workflow
Not all vendors spend all their time in a CRM system. Many spend most of their time with productivity tools, emailing, calling, and collaborating with colleagues and customers. In October 2022, we started the Microsoft Viva Sales. We empower salespeople with AI-driven insights and data automation right in the workflow—the productivity and collaboration tools millions already use every day—Microsoft 365 and Teams.
Selling is a team sport. Ensuring that sales team members collaborate effectively with each other with the right tools is key to their success. Collaboration spaces bring together the right users, contextual insights, and productivity apps to increase vendor collaboration in Teams. Collaboration spaces take internal and external collaboration center stage. Sellers can use sales templates to create a collaboration space. Speeds up structured team/channel creation with sales templates, predefined channels, pre-fixed apps, and integrated access to CRM data.
For sales teams, the adage “time is money” is more relevant than ever. Sellers are busy individuals who find it difficult to balance their other responsibilities with the time and effort required to respond to customer emails. Pain points include:
- Pulling data from a CRM system is time consuming due to complex navigation and menus.
- Customer opportunities and history are difficult to track and increase for merchants managing large numbers of accounts.
- Replying to a large number of emails can be overwhelming and cause the seller to miss important details.
With the help of Copilot at Viva Sales, besides the context of the email or meeting and CRM data, we will now create suggested email content for various scenarios (like answering a query, creating a proposal or summarizing action items) from meetings. Viva Sales brings together Microsoft 365 data and CRM data to help vendors quickly create answers using the power of Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service.
Organizations take pride in customizing their CRM systems, considering it critical to their business success. These customized experiences allow vendors to effectively collect and capture customer data in their CRM systems. In October, we launched Viva Sales, which allows vendors to use Microsoft 365 and Teams to automatically pull data into any CRM system, eliminating manual data entry and providing more time to focus on sales.
In February, we launched the ability for CRM administrators to customize CRM forms, fields, and behaviors in Viva Sales for accounts, contacts, and opportunities. With this release, we will add the ability to configure additional out-of-box and custom entities using queries defined in the CRM system. CRM administrators will be able to add or remove related custom and out-of-box entities from Viva Sales forms and control the filtering and sorting behavior of lists using CRM-defined queries. Sellers will be able to see private and ready-to-use assets in the Outlook side pane in Viva Sales, share private assets with colleagues in Teams, search for private assets in the Teams messaging extension, and connect to Outlook email and meeting events. to private or ready-to-use assets.
Learn more about 2023 release wave 1 for Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales
These are just a few of the new features we’re rolling out to vendors in the 2023 version 1 wave. Click on the links below to learn more about these new features in Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales.
- Dynamics 365 Sales ve Viva Sales, Publishes wave documentation in Learn.
- Copilot in Viva Sales watch the demo.
