Digital selling and customer engagement with Dynamics 365 Sales

On Oct 5, 2020

Selling is unpredictable and challenging. Sellers often lack visibility into the customer journey since buyers increasingly prefer to conduct self-service evaluation before engaging sellers. Sellers must juggle even more buyersdispersed across roles, teams, and locations. And COVID-19 is upending traditional buying, with B2B buyers now overwhelmingly preferring digital buying experiences, a trend that is expected to become permanent after COVID-19.

Adoption of digital experiences has accelerated more in the last few months than in the last few years. This isn’t just a temporary shift. According to a recent survey conducted by McKinsey & Company, 80 percent of enterprises expect a sustained shift to digital buying and selling where sellers guide and collaborate with customers remotely using intuitive, reliable, and secure tools.

With the 2020 release wave 2 of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, we aim to streamline the work of sellers and deepen their engagement with customers. Below are the focus areas for the 2020 release wave 2.

Accelerate your proactive digital selling

Sales accelerator: Help inside sellers to further accelerate their sales rhythm, manage their interactive workday by prioritizing activities related to leads or opportunities, and engage directly with customers through integrated emails and phone dialer. In this release, we’ll support automatic leads routing based on sales and marketing automation, streamline the sequences experience, and encourage sellers to reach their goals.
Advanced forecasting and pipeline intelligence: Organizations need to accurately focorecast sales targets to truly understand business health and to make accurately informed strategic decisions. In this release, we’ve expanded support for more complex sales forecasting requirements with custom entity support, drilldowns, multi-currency views, opportunity splits, opportunity overlays, forecasting by product, and daily-snapshots. Predictive forecasting and pipeline intelligence with predictive lead scoring and predictive opportunity scoring helps sales teams uncover top deals. Intelligent scores offer sellers guidance on where best to invest their time, improving resource allocation and increasing productivity. In this release, we’ve enhanced the prediction insights on both predictive scores and predictive forecasting.

Leverage a better understanding of your customer

Conversation intelligence: By automatically transcribing calls and analyzing content, sentiment, and behavioral style, conversation intelligence provides meaningful insights. Sellers can effectively guide buyers toward a purchase by using proven conversation techniques. In this release, we’ll introduce the ability to generate Teams calls right from within the sellers’ workflows, inside their CRM, with conversational KPIs and advanced business insights surfaced on top of those calls.

Relationship intelligence: Help sellers identify, build, and nurture relationships with their customers. This release includes a premium version of auto capture to make data capture simple and faster for sellers, so that they can have more focus on revenue-generating activities.
New and planned features for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Voice: Gather and track the customer metrics that matter to your business based on survey data, then rapidly act as insights surface, all with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. In this release, Dynamics 365 Customer Voice lets sales managers and sellers measure sentiment and NPS metrics to better hear and act on customer concerns around sales processes, products, and experiences. With tight integration with Dynamics 365 Sales, you can track and measure customer sentiment directly within Dynamics 365 for a better experience. A few of the new features now available in Dynamics 365 Customer Voice to improve the feedback capabilities within Dynamics 365 Sales include short URL support, email template enhancements, 5 million responses per survey (up from 500,000), real-time follow up management, automatic survey reminders, and better question branching. Learn more about how Dynamics 365 Customer Voice connects you with your customers.

Streamline your team’s productivity and collaboration

A new Dynamics 365 Sales mobile experience: As part of our commitment to simplify CRM experiences and help sellers focus on selling, we’re introducing an intuitive mobile experience to offer quick access to customer information and make it easy to keep this information current. This new mobile experience will help sellers start their day with easy access to upcoming customer meetings and recent records, ability to add notes with the touch of a button as you walk out of meetings and quickly find and update accounts and opportunities, and access account or opportunity details in secondswherever you are.

Usability enhancements: We’re continually introducing usability enhancements within the application that reduces friction and makes features easier to use. This release delivers improved data management capabilities, enhanced email capabilities, an optimized PDF generation and sharing experience for standard and custom entities, and an improved search experience which provides search suggestions, search as you type, and a helpful search result grouping.

Explore all of the release wave 2 updates for Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Insights

As our world deals with a global pandemic, the demand for services provided by nonprofits globally has never been greater. To support these organizations we are offering the Fundraising and Engagement solution for Dynamics 365 Sales to facilitate processes common to every nonprofit: attracting new donors and funding sources, strengthening existing supporter relationships via personalized engagement, and fundraising efficiently by automating operations. This new Microsoft solution built with MISSION CRM and is applicable to all fundraising scenarios for nonprofits, hospitals, research institutions, and even schools.

This is an extraordinary time and organizations must adapt to continuously changing conditions while delivering consistent results. We are here to help. Our mission is to empower every organization to sell more by understanding their customers and the way they want to buypowered by data, intelligence, and experiences that people love.

With these new capabilities offered in the 2020 release wave 2, we continue to bring together sales information via Dynamics 365, communications via Microsoft 365, relationships via LinkedIn, collaboration via Microsoft Teams, and transform selling via the power of AI and Power Platform to empower your sales organizations to achieve more.

In addition to the highlighted features, we invite you to explore the full rundown of updates in the 2020 release wave 2 plan for Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Insights. To learn more about how Dynamics 365 Sales can empower your sellers to lead in the buying journey.

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