Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Sales in 2021 release wave 2
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 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
Important
The 2021 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2021 to March 2022. 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 is centered on the customer relationship. It helps organizations understand customer needs and drives more relevant and authentic engagements, enabling sellers to sell more efficiently.
COVID-19 has accelerated the move to all things digital and changed expectations for how customers want to interact with sellers and companies they do business with. The role of the seller is evolving—customers expect sellers to know them and help them make decisions that will be in their best interest. To achieve this, sellers need to know everything there is to know about the customer, have contextually relevant conversations, and deliver value in every interaction. For this release, we have focused on enabling the seller to do just that. Sellers will be able to harness the power of data and intelligence that will help them before, during, and after each interaction. Sellers will focus on the highest priority activities and will collaborate using Teams from within Dynamics 365 to accelerate their pipeline. Our goal is to help the seller close more deals, faster, while being as productive as possible.
We want your feedback! We encourage you to continue to reach out at Sales Ideas because your feedback is invaluable to us.
The focus areas for the Dynamics 365 Sales release wave 2 updates are:
Be productive from wherever you are with new integrations between Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365
To further enable sellers to be productive from wherever they are, we're adding updates so you can access and update Dynamics 365 records from inside Teams chats and channels, and also providing a new integrated experience inside Microsoft Teams to access critical information about your leads and opportunities right from inside your Teams meetings. Teams chat within Dynamics 365 will also be available, along with enhancements to add stakeholders and send automated chat notifications to Teams users.
Collaborate better with improvements to Microsoft Teams calling with Dynamics 365
More third-party telephony support and critical business insights will be available for any type of call. Embedded Microsoft Teams collaboration and Teams message extensions and actions will be generally available and will include some enhancements to suggested contacts and the overall experience. You'll also be able to access sales records from within Teams meetings and have automated notifications from Dynamics 365 to Teams. Lastly, there will be enhancements to setup and security of the Dynamics 365 app for Teams.
Let Dynamics 365 do the heavy lifting with improved intelligence, productivity tools, and forecasting updates
Account-based Who knows whom will be released in this wave. For forecasting, enhanced capabilities will be available such as sharing and viewing a specific forecast and attribute insights for driving predictive scoring model clarity.
Guided selling gets a boost with Sales Accelerator enhancements and data hygiene
We're enhancing lead generation and nurturing capabilities for improved guided selling. In addition, we'll be making updates to sequences, including LinkedIn actions and preconfigured templates, automated lead routing, and seller and manager KPIs and dashboards.
Enhance the mobile experience for sellers on the go
Enhancements will be made to the mobile experience, so you never miss a detail in your customer engagements, go prepared to customer engagements, find, interact, and create CRM information easily, and log and share information effortlessly.
Updates to Dynamics 365 Sales 2021 release wave 2
Tip
Download the release overview guide and share with your team as you plan to onboard the new capabilities included in this release wave.
* Overview guide available in English version only.
Investment areas
Engagement platform and productivity intelligence
The engagement platform and productivity intelligence enables a smooth integration of Dynamics 365 Sales with different communication providers, so sellers can easily onboard digital-selling capabilities.
Accelerator workspace
The sales accelerator workspace offers a guided selling experience, powered by AI, to enable sellers to close more deals.
For more information, see What is the Sales accelerator?
Digital selling premium showcase
Dynamics 365 digital selling capabilities spearhead the digital transformation of sales organizations and constitute the data and productivity first revolution. Digital selling offerings allow customers with a Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise license to experience the best of these capabilities in production and feel their value.
Forecasting and pipeline analytics
To stay ahead of the market and to meet sales quotas, sales teams are constantly pressured to sell more and sell faster. As a seller, it’s important that you spend time on the top deals, prioritizing prospects that are likely to close, and move quickly through the pipeline. It's also imperative that your team accurately projects anticipated revenues from these deals so that teams can take proactive steps to avoid missing goals.
Forecasting and pipeline analytics provide predictive lead and opportunity scoring that helps uncover top deals and to forecast with confidence. Use intelligent scoring to uncover where best to invest your team’s time, improve resource allocation, and increase productivity, while helping ensure that rigorous quotas can be met efficiently.
In this release, we'll provide sales teams the ability to share their forecasts with other stakeholders. For example, a sales director can delegate the management of the team's forecast to an assistant or another team member by simply sharing a forecast.
Relationship intelligence
Relationship intelligence helps sellers use the information in their selling system across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 to identify, build, and nurture relationships with their customers.
Mobile
Mobile is an essential part of solving one of the biggest challenges faced by sales organizations today—how to help sellers access what they need, when they need it, wherever they are, and make it easy for them to log and share information in real time.
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. |