Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Sales in 2023 release wave 1
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to Overview of Dynamics 365 Sales. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry release plans.
Important
The 2023 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2023 to September 2023. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Sales.
Overview
Dynamics 365 Sales is the market-leading sales application that empowers every organization to sell more by understanding their customers and the way they want to buy—powered by data, intelligence, and experiences that people love. Dynamics 365 Sales brings the power of business data everywhere the seller is working—across their favorite productivity tools like Office 365 and Teams. By focusing on the most relevant and authentic engagements, sellers can quickly get to the heart of in-the-moment customer needs and sell more efficiently.
The world’s way of working has transformed dramatically in the last decade and even more so within the last couple of years. The role of the seller is evolving, too. Buyers expect a blend of digital and personalized experiences throughout their journey. The seller evolution requires a need for several shifts in their current experience: prioritization of their work, intelligent digital communication tools, better collaboration to improve productivity, and spending more time becoming trusted advisors to their customers. To do this, sellers can't be overwhelmed trying to make sense of too much data and information; rather, they need the data to work for them by providing value in every customer interaction.
For 2023 release wave 1, we continue to use data and AI to help sellers prioritize their engagement and personalize their execution to be more efficient and effective in their customer interactions - spending more time selling.
Do you have a new feature idea or some feedback? We encourage you to connect with us at Sales Ideas.
Updates to Dynamics 365 Sales 2023 release wave 1
Investment areas
Sales engagement
The sales engagement capabilities (formerly known as Sales accelerator) in Dynamics 365 Sales allow your sellers to engage with their customers in the smartest way possible, through AI-driven insights about their customer relationship and conversations, and through tools that help accelerate and standardize the selling process. These tools help sellers to maintain a healthy relationship with their customers and have an impactful conversation with them.
The following sales engagement capabilities are planned for this release wave:
- Engage a bot for the initial customer outreach so that only good-quality leads reach the sellers at the right time, thus saving precious time for the sellers.
- While you’re on a call with a customer, get insights and tips based on past interactions with the customer and communicate effectively based on the suggestions.
- With conversation intelligence support extended for third-party telephony providers, you get seamless insights irrespective of the call provider you’re using.
- Prepopulate emails based on the content you frequently use while drafting emails, such as self-introduction and product details, thus reducing the time spent preparing emails.
- A host of enhancements around sequences, including sequence step visibility, sequence performance, custom templates, step loops, multiple sequences assignment, personalization, automated replies, and more.
- Improvements to sales accelerator through enhanced worklist items, up next widgets, and better performance, personalization, and ease-of-use capabilities.
- Send and receive customer communication through SMS and get real-time notifications for incoming SMS.
Revenue intelligence
The revenue intelligence capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales allow your sales team to manage revenue by setting up pricing and discounts for products, defining targets, forecasting sales, visualizing deals, and managing their top line proactively and efficiently.
The following capability is planned for this release wave to enhance revenue intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales:
- A new and enhanced opportunity management experience that helps you visualize your sales funnel and track your deals while being able to edit opportunities on the fly.
- Ability to create forecasts with yearly and weekly recurrence.
- Support for adjusting forecast values at the drill-down level.
- Ability to configure forecasts for each business unit in your organization.
Copilot
Sellers spend much time managing complex customer relationships, and many sales teams need help to scale seller experiences. Seller productivity in terms of time management and efficiency is critical to success. Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales experiences focus on enhancing seller productivity and effectiveness in their flow of work by enabling them to automate the sales process and augment seller actions and decisions with AI-powered insights and actions. Copilot features help sellers save time, boost productivity, lighten workloads, and stay focused on connecting with customers and closing deals.
Sales execution and sales force automation
The sales execution and sales force automation capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales allow sellers to be more productive and efficient in their core area of work—selling. These capabilities help sellers initiate a campaign, generate leads, assign leads to sellers, convert those leads to opportunities, manage accounts and contacts, and manage all activities around leads and opportunities until the deal is closed.
The following capabilities are planned for this release wave to enhance sales execution and sales force automation:
- Prevent duplicate leads from entering the system either through manual creation or bulk import.
- Get follow-up tasks created automatically based on information from various Office applications like emails, Teams messages, and Teams call transcripts, and get friendly reminders to help you complete those tasks.
- Create opportunities with ease by using the new version of input forms that declutter information with an enhanced visual layout.
- Use the AI-powered solution to get account-based suggestions for targeted selling and precise workflows to leverage.
- Create a customer org chart so that sellers know the roles of contacts in the organization and view the relationship map.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Sales below:
For application administrators
User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.
Get the most out of Sales
| Helpful links | Description |
|---|---|
| Release plan | View all capabilities included in the release. |
| Product updates | Stay up to date on latest product updates. |
| Release calendar | Know important release milestones. |
| Licensing | Improve your understanding of how to license Sales. |
| Product documentation | Find documentation for Sales. |
| User community | Engage with Sales experts and peers in the community. |
| Upcoming events | Find and register for in-person and online events. |
| Product trials | Get started with Sales. |