In today’s fast-paced sales landscape, prioritizing core selling activities over low-value tasks is crucial. Time spent on tasks that don’t directly contribute to sales represents missed opportunities to connect with prospects and close deals. With Dynamics 365 Sales, we’re committed to using AI to support sellers in focusing their time on what truly matters: forging meaningful connections, establishing trust, and nurturing long-term relationships to increase their sales productivity. Copilot empowers sellers to achieve greater results with less effort, enhancing your sales organization’s effectiveness. We’re happy to share that the following features are releasing this month.

Copilot chat Q&A in Dynamics 365 Sales

Copilot chat with Q&A transforms how sellers access data in your customer relationship management (CRM) system. Instead of building complicated queries or manually searching for information, sellers can ask questions using natural language. They can access vital information immediately, allowing them to focus on high-value activities like engaging customers and closing deals. The result is more time for meaningful interactions, potentially leading to higher conversion rates and increased revenue.

Natural-language Q&A is particularly valuable in fast-paced sales environments, ensuring quick, informed actions. This feature elevates customer interactions, positioning teams for higher sales productivity. Its impact extends beyond convenience, shaping the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire sales process.

Sales-specific chat experience  

One of the key features of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales is that the chat experience is specific to the sales process. Sellers can use common sales terms and phrases to ask questions and get answers from the CRM system, without having to navigate through complex menus or screens. This saves time and effort for sellers, allowing them to focus on their customers and prospects.

Some of the sales terms that Copilot understands are conversion rate, deal cycle, pipeline, deal size, win rate, and deal value. Sellers and managers can use these terms to query various aspects of the sales process, like the performance of individual sellers, teams, or regions, the progress of opportunities, and the trends and forecasts of sales outcomes. Copilot can also handle complex queries with multiple terms, filters, and aggregations.

For example, you can ask Copilot:

• “Show the opportunity conversion rate for the last 4 quarters by quarter.”
• “What’s the win rate for Kenny Smith?”
• “What is the average deal size for successful opportunities?”

These examples illustrate how Copilot can help sellers access relevant information from your CRM system in a natural and intuitive way, using sales-specific terms in a chat experience. Copilot chat Q&A enhances your sales team’s productivity and efficiency and their ability to meaningfully engage with customers and prospects.

Your CRM data is always secure

Copilot respects the security and user access privilege settings of your CRM system. This means that if a seller doesn’t have permission to view or edit certain records, those records aren’t included in Copilot’s responses. For example, if you ask Copilot about the pipeline value for a region that you aren’t assigned to, Copilot informs you that you don’t have sufficient privileges to view the requested data. This ensures that Copilot maintains the integrity and confidentiality of your CRM data while providing insights and recommendations. 

Immersive Copilot workspace

We are also launching the public preview of a new immersive Copilot experience in Dynamics 365 Sales. An expanded workspace enhances focus on productive conversations with Copilot, while real-time insights and effortless natural language chat functionality help sellers efficiently manage sales activities, nurture customer relationships, and drive sales success. Seamless access to insights from CRM data simplifies prioritizing actions and smarter decision-making. 

The immersive experience works in sync with the Copilot chat pane. Start a conversation in the immersive workspace, select a record, and continue the conversation in the Copilot chat. The coherent experience makes it easy to navigate in the app without losing context. 

Use the immersive workspace

The immersive experience is in preview so that we can make improvements based on your valuable feedback. To use the immersive experience in your environment, you’ll need to turn on preview features for Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales. In the Sales Hub app, Copilot is automatically added to the site map under My Work. If you use a custom app, add the Copilot page to your app’s site map. To enter the immersive workspace, select My Work > Copilot.

Transform your sales processes with Copilot

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales helps your sellers save time and stay focused on the things that really matter. They get the information they need faster with less context switching, making their day-to-day activities more efficient and boosting your team’s overall sales productivity.

Next steps

Learn more about Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales

Turn on and set up Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales 

Not yet a Dynamics 365 Sales user? Sign up for a free trial today.

The post Transform seller effectiveness with Dynamics 365 Sales Copilot appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Busy sales account managers prioritize their activities by mining information from their accounts. But manually making sense of all that unstructured data takes time and can lead to inaccurate assumptions. They can end up focusing on the wrong activities, which results in a lower impact on business outcomes. The most productive and successful account managers are the ones who focus on the right customers with the right priority. Dynamics 365 Sales account-based seller insights can help.

Account-based seller insights help drive priorities

Account-based seller insights help you set priorities and formulate the best engagement plan for your customers. These are automated, actionable insights that are derived from multiple sources of unstructured data and presented to you in the right context. For instance, you might be shown an upsell insight for an account based on past won opportunities for similar accounts, along with guidance on the next best action to take. Seller insights help you proactively manage the customer journey, from the first engagement to the final sale. 

Behind the scenes with seller insights

Account-based seller insights can be generated in three ways:

• Bring your own model. Use your own AI model, trained on your data, to generate insights, and work with them in the Dynamics 365 sales accelerator.
• Use out-of-the-box models. The account-based seller insights solution comes with its own models, which mine the data in Dynamics 365 Sales to generate insights.
• Build a back-end rule framework. You can build your own rule framework that uses Power Automate flows to generate insights when certain conditions are met. 

How seller insights boost productivity

How can seller insights help you be a more effective sales account manager? Let’s look.

Insight list and actions

First, you get curated insights for all your accounts:  

• You only see insights that are relevant to you, not your team members. 
• The insights have expiration dates so that you know the information is fresh and relevant. 
• You can see the reasons an insight appears in the list. 

And after you acknowledge an insight, you’re guided through the next best steps to act on it, optimizing the sales workflow for better results. You can also collaborate with team members while you’re working on your insights. 

Insight assignment and distribution

Second, although your insights are curated, that doesn’t mean they’re siloed. Insights are assigned to the account owner. If the owner of an entity is a team, an insight can be automatically assigned to the appropriate salesperson on the team, based on role, through the flexible rule framework. Ownership can be transferred from one seller to another, and multiple sellers can work on a single insight. 

Insight action history

Finally, you can find all the insights that have been generated for an account on the account’s Insights tab. The list includes status, type, due date, and other helpful information. Filter and sort it to focus on what’s most important. You can easily identify all seller activities for the insights on the timeline view of the account.

By helping you identify your most important and profitable accounts, understand their needs and preferences, tailor your messages and offers, and nurture long-term relationships with them, account-based seller insights can lead to higher revenues, shorter sales cycles, and better customer satisfaction.

Next steps

To get started with seller insights:

• If you’re a sales account manager or seller, read the user documentation.
• If you’re a Dynamics 365 Sales admin, read the administrator documentation.

Not a Dynamics 365 Sales customer yet? Take a guided tour and sign up for a free trial. 

The post Account-based seller insights improve sales account manager effectiveness  appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Data is one of the key resources to making informed, contextual decisions. Without data, without being able to measure telemetry and usage, it’s challenging to identify areas of improvement. But it’s not just the data itself that matters, it’s that this data is actionable, helping users understand not only the what, but also the how and why. With Dynamics 365 Sales product usage reports, we’re happy to offer administrators and sales managers the ability to get data at their fingertips.

The new feature allows sales managers and sales administrators to track the usage of Contacts, Opportunities, Leads and Accounts (COLA entities) by their sellers. With this information, they will be able to make critical decisions about the work processes within their teams. For example, they will be able to see which teams use the COLA entities less than others, and double-down on expanding CRM usage best practices to those teams. In another example, managers, with the help of product usage reports, will be able to easily identify the top performing sellers in terms of using the application, for rewarding or benchmark purposes.

Understand seller performance with product usage reports.

The Dynamics 365 Sales product usage insights are Power BI embedded dashboards, that allow sales managers, sales administrators and other users to view the usage of COLA entities within the application. They can easily understand and assess the performance of sellers with respect to various transactional sales entities.

Sales managers can easily access the dashboards with a simple enable switch. Sales administrators or managers can also provide permissions to access these dashboards further to other users, based on configuration.

At this stage, we are releasing the following dashboards:

• Opportunity usage
• Lead usage
• Account usage
• Contact usage

Each dashboard can be divided into three broad sections.

• Filters – Slice and dice the data to have different views. Filtering parameters include data range, business unit, roles, manager name etc.
• KPI charts – Summarize KPIs for the specified date and the percentage change during the period. This view includes a trend to show how the KPI is doing in the selected timeframe compared with the previous timeframe. A green upward triangle indicates an improvement in the score, and a red downward triangle indicates a decline in the score.
• Metric charts – A detailed view of the individual values of records. For example, created date, status, and who created and converted the record.

Gain insights on how sellers work

On top of the benefits of the Dynamics sales usage reports to sales managers mentioned above, there are also benefits for sales administrators.

Sales administrators can analyze the Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations that sellers perform on their COLA entities. To help this analysis, the usage report dashboards have the following charts:

• CRUD operations over a period – To help the admin user to understand the usage of COLA entities by the sellers.
• Users contributing to the CRUD operations – To allow the admin user to easily find the usage of leads and opportunities by sellers or groups of sellers.
• Top users contributing to CRUD operations – To help the admin user to identify the top performing sellers in terms of using the sales entities.
• Leads & Opportunity overtime chart – To help understand the qualification/win rate of the entities over a period of time.

Next steps

Learn more about the sales usage reports: View and understand sales usage reports | Microsoft Learn

Enable reports by following the instructions: Enable sales usage reports for sales managers | Microsoft Learn

The post Optimize Dynamics 365 Sales product usage with new reports! appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Sellers rely on email to reach out to contacts when working on deals. The new email address validation feature in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales flags email addresses in your customer relationship management (CRM) system that are in the wrong format or have an expired or fictitious domain. That lets your sellers connect with subscribers and boost their conversion rates without wasting time and energy trying to communicate with uninterested or non-existent customers.

Improve lead quality with email address validation

Email address validation in Dynamics 365 Sales finds and removes non-working email addresses in your CRM. This lets your sellers prioritize leads that have a valid email address for lower email bounce rates, improved engagement, and a better return on their time.

Email address validation looks for the following errors:

• Incorrect syntax: An address that does not have both a username and an email domain
• Disposable domain: An address that has a known disposable or temporary email domain
• Test or spam address: An address that has known indicators of a test or spam address in the email header or metadata, IP address, HTML code, and email content and formatting
• Expired address: An email account that has expired and can no longer receive or send email
• Address with unregistered domain: A domain that does not appear in the domain registry

You can view flagged email addresses on primary entity and sales insights forms as well as on the Up next widget and work list items.

If you try to send an email to a flagged address, a notification gives you the reason the system marked the address as not valid.

• If you know the email address is correct, select Mark valid. The system marks the address as valid and removes the alert.
• If you don’t know the email address is correct but you still want to send the email, select Compose anyway.

More data hygiene improvements in Dynamics 365 Sales

In addition to email address validation, we have also implemented duplicate detection for leads. Dynamics 365 Sales uses AI and “fuzzy” matching algorithms to detect duplicate leads. By “fuzzy,” we mean that the system identifies as duplicates not only records that have exactly matching field values, but also records that have approximately matching field values. This helps sellers focus on the records that truly matter and clears out any “noise” that they would otherwise have to spend time manually reducing.

On top of that, we are continuously working on even more improvements to data hygiene in Dynamics 365 Sales to help your sellers be more focused and productive. 

Next steps

Increasing your sales team’s productivity could be as simple as eliminating leads with incomplete, non-working, or spam email addresses—and Dynamics 365 Sales makes it easy.

To get started with email address validation, read the documentation:

• For admins: Enable email validation (preview) | Microsoft Learn 
• For sellers: Work with invalid email addresses (preview) | Microsoft Learn

Not a Dynamics 365 Sales customer yet? Take a guided tour and sign up for a free trial at Dynamics 365 Sales overview.

The post Email address validation improves seller conversion rates appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

To be effective, your sales team has to trust that the leads they’re getting are of good quality and that someone else isn’t working on them. If your sellers are calling leads that are assigned to another salesperson—or that aren’t real—they’re wasting time. Better data hygiene is the answer, of course. But who has time to manually weed out duplicate leads? Certainly not your sales team. Luckily, they don’t have to. Duplicate lead detection in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales automatically identifies potential duplicates and makes merging or deleting them as easy as clicking a button.

Duplicate lead detection is available for all Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Sales Premium customers. To get started, a sales admin must enable duplicate detection in the Sales Hub app settings.

AI-based duplicate lead detection improves data hygiene and sales productivity

Dynamics 365 Sales uses AI and fuzzy matching algorithms to detect duplicate leads. By “fuzzy,” we mean that not only records that have exactly matching field values, but also records that have approximately matching field values, are identified as possible duplicates.

For example, Philip, Phillip, Phil, and Filip are all variations of the same name. Searching for an exact match would miss the indication that they’re the same lead with misspelled names. But with fuzzy logic, the similarity in names flags the records as possible duplicates.

Duplicate records are identified in real-time, based on the following criteria:

• Same email address
• Same business phone number
• Similar name and company name
• Similar name and same email domain

The first two conditions look for an exact match. The last two conditions use fuzzy matching algorithms.

Empower sellers to resolve duplicate leads with just a click

An intuitive UI makes it easy for sellers to review potential duplicates and decide what to do with them.

• For easy discoverability, a notification banner appears in both the main lead form and the leads grid view.
• The field values that triggered the identification are highly visible.
• To simplify the view, sellers can hide the fields that contain similar values.
• With one click, sellers can easily fill empty fields in the primary record with data from the duplicate, or even change which version of the record is the primary.

Sellers can delete duplicate records, mark them as not duplicate by “detaching” them from the primary record, or merge them. Sellers can merge up to four records into one primary record at the same time.

As with all data in Dynamics 365, user permissions apply to duplicate lead detection. Sellers can see only records their account permissions allow them to.

Even more duplicate detection is on the way

We’re not done with duplicate detection yet. Here’s what you can expect in coming release waves:

• Proactive detection of inauthentic email addresses
• Detection and management of duplicate contacts, similar to duplicate lead detection
• Detection of duplicate leads based on fields you select

Next steps

Increasing your sales team’s productivity could be as simple as eliminating duplicates from your lead database—and Dynamics 365 Sales makes it easy.

To start taking advantage of duplicate lead detection, read the documentation and watch a brief video overview:

• Enable the detection of duplicate leads | Microsoft Docs
• Trust lead data with advanced duplicate detection (video) | Microsoft Dynamics 365

Not a Dynamics 365 Sales customer yet? Take a guided tour and sign up for a free trial at Dynamics 365 Sales overview.

The post Duplicate lead detection increases sellers’ productivity appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

When sellers follow a predefined set of activities from day to day, they will usually be more productive. Sales managers and other experienced sellers define these best practices, or sequences, to guide sellers and ensure they follow business processes. However, these sequences must constantly evolve, and the best way to make improvements is to understand their effectiveness. Dynamics 365 Sales Premium recently announced a preview of the reporting capability for sequences.

Sales acceleration reporting (preview) offers a performance dashboard for sequences that provides sales managers with the right information to measure the efficacy of the defined sequences. The dashboard helps them compare the success rate of each sequence and analyze the effectiveness of the related activities. Key data points embedded within the metric charts help managers manage seller activities.

The administrator can enable these embedded Microsoft Power BI reports and they are available at no additional cost for customers with Dynamics 365 Sales Premium licenses.

Improve the sales process

Sequences help sales managers implement a standardized sales process. Even though each sequence reflects years of experience and input, it is necessary to constantly revise and optimize the sales processes by monitoring performance. The dashboard provides the success rates of the sequences, aligned to the business KPIs. The dashboard also helps the manager compare sequences. They can also identify poorly performing sequences through the reports. Standard filters let the manager drill into specific data.

The dashboard reports offer the following key features:

• Check the conversion success rates of the leads and opportunities associated with sequences
• Compare sequences and check the number of associated leads and opportunities
• Monitor the time taken to complete the guided sales activities

A sales manager can view the leads related to a particular sequence to monitor a seller’s activities and ensure adherence to the standardized sales processes.

The sequence stats page offers a grid view for sequences that helps managers compare different sequences and brainstorm ways that a sales process can be more productive.

Ensure high completion rates of seller activities

Sales managers can monitor seller activities with charts in the dashboard. They can filter activities using the following parameters: 

• Date range
• Entity type, such as lead or opportunity
• Sequence name and owner
• Seller
• Territory

By using these metric charts, the manager can identify the channels that are working well and see where improvements can be made. With the help of the activity status charts, the manager can easily recognize the completion rate of activities and decide where to focus to meet expectations. The chart for email engagement tracks the effectiveness of that activity.

Sales managers can find the following key insights with the reporting page:

• Identify the channels that are most used in the sales process
• Track the completion of sales process activities
• Measure the effectiveness of email engagement

Next steps

• To enable sequences in your environment, you need Dynamics 365 Sales Premium or the Sales Insights Add-in for Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Learn more about how to set up and run sales acceleration reporting in the documentation.
• Read this blog post about the value of creating a sales cadence and how to use sequence designer to implement it.

The post Use a performance dashboard to optimize seller activities appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The assignment rule capability in Dynamics 365 Sales automates the distribution of incoming leads and opportunities to sellers and teams, ensuring that the leads, or records, are consistently assigned based on repeatable rules and configurations defined by your organization. Automated lead and opportunity routing creates process efficiencies, so the right prospect reaches the right salesperson at the right time, eliminating errors from manual routing, and creating a balanced workload for global sales teams.

Dynamics 365 Sales lead and opportunity routing is based on an easily configurable, rule-based assignment engine that automatically distributes records using various commonly used parameters, strung together in a simple rule framework.

Shorten sales cycles and improve conversion rates

Customers are looking for quick solutions. In this digital age, they are aware of their needs, and know how to fulfill them. If customers don’t get a quick and satisfactory response to their query, they can easily reach out to a competitor.

It is critical not only to assign the correct seller to a lead but also to ensure that leads are assigned immediately. Assignment rules in Dynamics 365 Sales assign this record to the seller as soon as a lead or opportunity is either created or updated. The system detects a change, and if it fulfills the rules conditions, then the record gets assigned to the seller. The assignment is also expedited with the use of target segments within the rules, which helps in improving the lead or opportunity conversion rate.

The right people for the right job

Sellers have different skills and competencies, they speak different languages, they’re located in different geographies, and they have different levels of selling experience. Assignment of incoming leads should be based on these characteristics, to make sellers more effective in their engagements and improve the overall customer experience, resulting in overall higher conversion rates.

Assignment rules in Dynamics 365 Sales can be configured using detailed seller attributes and business rule configurations. The assignment rules provide the flexibility to support the simplest of matching to complex ones, based on business needs.

Assignment rules support:

• Direct matching of attributes between seller and record; for example, the geographic location of the lead matches where the seller is located.
• Indirect matching of attributes between seller and record; for example, the lead’s parent account territory matches the seller’s territory.

Seller attributes used in a rule can come from two different sources:

• General seller attributes, which come from within the master data form in Dynamics 365.
• Specific seller attributes, which are used only for assignment rules.

Here are a few common ways seller attributes can be used:

• Territory and geography (country, state, district, pin code)
• Specialization
• Availability and/or capacity of seller
• Product of interest
• Lead score

Automation keeps focus on strategic activities

Kitchen automation tools were invented to help cooks focus on critical cooking activities and bring relief from mundane tasks. The cooks’ focus was directed toward making a delectable dish and efficiencies were gained to be able to serve more dining guests within a limited amount of time.

Similarly, assignment rule features can help those responsible for lead assignments focus on strategic and mission critical activities and bring relief from time-consuming lead assignment and distribution. The Dynamics 365 Sales lead routing is flexible and easy to construct.

The distribution can happen in the following ways:

• Round robin
• Load balancing

Lead distribution can take into consideration seller capacity and availability. Capacity can be set for each seller and availability is maintained by the seller in the availability calendar.

The assignment rule capability is a critical factor in sales success. Accurate and timely distribution of leads can significantly impact the top line of the organization. Assignment rules in Dynamics 365 Sales provide an automated, rule-based routing process.

Next steps

Learn more about assignment rules in the Administrator guide, and try out the capability in Dynamics 365 Sales.

The post Automated lead and opportunity routing: Right salesperson, right time, more sales appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.