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Overview of Dynamics 365 Sales Insights 2020 release wave 1

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Important

This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, see Microsoft Dynamics 365 product documentation. For the latest release plans, see Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.

Important

Some of the functionality described in this release plan has not been released. Delivery timelines may change and projected functionality may not be released (see Microsoft policy). Learn more: What's new and planned

Everything we do at work creates data. This data sits at the center of the organization, powering processes, generating archives, and informing decisions. As organizations grow and expand, so does their data footprint, which in turn ignites the need to accelerate processes and enhance decision-making through digital transformation. Organizations that embrace digital transformation show significant improvements to profit margins, increasing revenue while also reducing costs.

For sales organizations, transformation means making sales data go further to help sell smarter and faster as well as to outsmart competition. Deeper customer knowledge and accelerated intelligence can guide organizations to proactively pursue opportunities at the right time and with the right context. Furthermore, coaching and learning can be tailored to each organization, so your business is always moving forward.

Dynamics 365 Sales Insights leverages the power of the Microsoft cloud to bring together sales information via Dynamics 365, communications via Microsoft 365, relationships via LinkedIn, and the power of Microsoft AI to transform selling. Sales organizations gain a 360-degree view of their customer engagements to offer agility, adapting to rapid market changes while adhering to business strategy and accommodating specific business requirements and guidelines.

We do this by democratizing sales intelligence. Dynamics 365 Sales Insights is designed to empower everyone in the sales organization to be more productive, more agile, and more customer focused—ultimately closing more deals, faster:

  • Sales leaders can improve sales team efficiency and impact, manage pipelines more intelligently, and enhance customer relationships with actionable insights and relevant recommendations. Intelligence is drawn from all forms of communication to deliver a coherent and current state of the business.

  • Sellers, whether in the field or at call centers, can spend more time on selling activities, with automation of mundane tasks, and better prioritize pipelines with timely sales guidance, benefiting from relevant insights tailored to meet specific context and individual performance.

  • Sales enablement professionals, who help to operationalize selling, can become more agile with simpler discovery of winning strategies, develop more meaningful guidance with deeper understanding of sales performance, and broadcast the right information at the right time with streamlined dissemination across the sales team. All this, while adhering to and enforcing business strategies with powerful tools that augment sales guidance.

We deliver on this vision by infusing artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and advanced technologies into ongoing sales processes. Powered by data across Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and LinkedIn and built on top of Microsoft Power Platform to easily integrate external data sources, Dynamics 365 Sales Insights offers a wide breadth of actionable insights tailored to meet specific business needs. Altogether, it can empower sales organizations to close more deals, forecast more accurately, and meet sales quotas, while maximizing selling potential through deeper customer relationships.

Our product offering includes:

  • Dynamics 365 Assistant: Dynamics 365 Assistant offers sellers just-in-time intelligence, automating mundane tasks and surfacing the right information, at the right time, in the right context. The assistant aggregates data and insights across multiple systems to offer a frictionless way for sellers to excel.

    In previous releases, the assistant offered relationship insights in Dynamics 365 Sales alongside daily planning and meeting assistance via the Teams mobile app. Now we are bringing all insights together, while enhancing with more actions and context. Furthermore, we are making assistance available wherever selling happens, across new surfaces.

  • Sales Studio for AI guided selling: Sales Studio empowers sales organizations to build AI-driven insights and sales guidance that align with and help to enforce business strategies and best practices, unique to every sales organization. This helps ensure that sellers and sales managers are well-informed and empowered to sell smarter and faster.

    In previous releases, Sales Studio introduced the opportunity to build sales guidance, made available via the Relationship Assistant. Now we are combining all sales guidance under the Dynamics 365 Assistant, so guidance built via the studio will be surfaced to sellers across surfaces. Furthermore, enhanced capabilities and simplified experiences empower sales enablement managers to build actionable insights, with full context, while monitoring engagement to always learn and improve sales guidance.

  • Advanced forecasting and pipeline intelligence: Focusing on the right leads and opportunities helps ensure valuable time is spent on those customers that are most likely to move to the next stage.

    In this release, we will introduce advanced forecasting capabilities powered by cutting-edge machine learning models that empower organizations to more accurately predict their forecasts and more easily identify anomalies across opportunities. Pipeline intelligence is an enhancement to previous releases, introducing significant model improvements to capture more information, across a broader set of dimensions.

  • Relationship analytics and auto capture: Relationship analytics helps form trusted customer relationships that power long-term sales engagements and lead to repeat selling. Objective measures spark attention when needed, so no lead is left behind and no opportunity overlooked. Auto capture ensures consistent information, so models and insights are powered by meaningful data. Combining reliable data with top quality AI models offers accurate and valuable understanding that enhances productivity and provides visibility to inspire alignment across the sales team.

    In this release, we capture a wider set of signals and offer flexibility to adapt models to specific business needs so relationship health understanding is more accurate. At the same time, we incorporated Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify contact information updates and detect action items within captured activities, all while continuing to focus on capturing more sales information with minimal effort and improving the accuracy and consistency of the data captured.

  • Conversation intelligence: Conversation intelligence offers a unique opportunity to monitor all customer conversations and extract valuable insights that can help sales organizations move forward faster and smarter. Sales managers can easily identify the top sellers and their winning strategies, as well as potential gaps, to inform coaching and propagate positive behaviors across the team. Sellers benefit from the opportunity to self-reflect and learn.

    In this release, we introduce quick ways to sift through thousands and millions of customer interactions in order to reach business-critical points of interests in a matter of seconds. Conversation intelligence now allows customers to track mentions of pricing, people, organizations, timing, and other signals; any commitment made during a call is captured as part of the new Action Items tracking. In addition, calls conducted in Chinese, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Portuguese are transcribed in.

Watch the release overview video.

As always, we want to hear from our customers and partners with any ideas or thoughts about Dynamics 365 Sales Insights. To learn more or to offer feedback, go to:

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