Building a successful sales team starts with collaboration and insights. To boost performance across the sales journey, business development professionals must be empowered to engage across internal teams to better connect with customers and easily interact with data and insights. Like any organizational transformation, adapting teams to a new way of selling requires coordination between people, process, and technology—a challenging effort for any organization.

So, how does one of the largest professional services organizations in the world—with almost 400,000 people across 700 offices in 150 countries—transform and connect a sales organization that spans nearly every corner of the globe?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales

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For Ernst & Young LLP (EY), one of the largest professional services member firms worldwide, its sales transformation journey included Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. EY began its extensive rollout of Dynamics 365 Sales with the simple mission to deliver exceptional client service. By equipping more than 100,000 EY member firm professionals across the globe with an intuitive customer relationship management (CRM) system that is integrated across marketing, sales, delivery, and insights, EY can help its clients and itself maintain a competitive edge across markets.

The sales system also sets the stage for enhanced seller productivity with Microsoft 365, including the ability to access and collaborate on customer opportunities within the flow of work from Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams. And Microsoft Copilot capabilities are expected to help sellers work more efficiently and improve customer experiences with email assistance, personalized sales content creation, AI-generated insights, and recommendations for next steps.

Breaking down barriers for a globally-connected team

To help their clients solve their most complex problems, EY needed a digital sales foundation that helped enable sellers to be connected, proactive, and insightful with a deeper understanding of account and opportunity data. A collaborative sales system can empower teams to help deliver consistently exceptional client services and continuously adapt to rapid changes across each client organization, industries, and entire markets.

That’s why EY turned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and the latest advancements in AI to both unify and transform sales processes with a goal to improve cross-team collaboration and deepen connections with clients.

Led by a need for a more integrated approach to client relationship building focused on client value, EY identified the people who would gain the most from a global sales transformation. For example, EY pursuit leaders, who are dedicated to leading complex client relationships, could benefit from deeper insights into client and industry issues to deliver the right set of solutions when pursuing opportunities. Client-serving teams could also benefit from a system that provided targeted, meaningful information and insights, helping them to create winning proposals in less time.

In 2022, EY and Microsoft got to work on an architecture design and implementation plan for a sales platform that bridged both existing solutions and a modern, future-proof platform for insights, automation, collaboration, productivity, and reporting. These transformative solutions build on a years-long commitment to power growth and innovation of EY on Microsoft technologies such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft Power Platform, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Dynamics 365.

A new way to power a global organization

EY client-serving teams around the world are standardizing sales processes on a single, unified customer relationship management and productivity system. On this new, flexible platform, with the ability to integrate third-party applications and adapt new technologies, teams can leverage both tools they currently depend on and leverage the latest in Dynamics 365 and AI enhancements.

For example, teams will continue to manage engagements in SAP ECC, but the integration with Dynamics 365 Sales will help ensure a more seamless handoff of crucial information to delivery. This allows EY to take advantage of Microsoft capabilities, such as Microsoft Power BI data visualizations, Outlook, and Teams for enhanced collaboration and AI and automation features to streamline processes.

“We’ve brought the opportunity management process closer to where we spend our time—in Outlook, in Teams, and on the go while on mobile.”

Kris Kuty, Global Product Manager, Ernst & Young LLP

Early signs of success

Only months after deployment, EY reports that the new sales platform is making a real impact on the way they do business. Some of the results include:

• An enhanced CRM solution that has connected marketing, sales, and service processes for better collaboration between teams.
• Greater access to intelligence and insights, enabling client-serving teams, financial forecasters, and business planners to be more efficient and knowledgeable, equipped to make better decisions faster, and, ultimately, make deeper connections with clients.
• Standardized sales processes and unified views across accounts, using a globally consistent and streamlined system that includes a mobile Power App, Outlook, and Teams, with integrations to key EY systems for master data, risk management, and enterprise reporting. EY sales, service, and finance teams can access the information they need when they need it, right in the flow of work.
• Improved pipeline visibility, giving EY client-serving teams a clear view of client pursuits across their broad services, supported by contextual insights into each sales contact and activity.
• Tighter team collaboration, leading to more connected peer conversations and better outcomes for their clients’ most complex challenges.

Moving forward, the EY sales excellence journey will include AI and Copilot. To reinforce Dynamics 365 Sales as a key enabler for client serving individuals they expect to:

• Provide AI-based recommendations for client communications and next best topics utilizing historical interactions as well as industry insights and trends.
• Analyze seller behavior to recommend new ways of working.
• Provide AI-driven recommendations for deal scoring and lead prioritization.

“We are extremely excited about what is coming and what is possible. We’ve already kicked off with Copilot and the possibilities with AI are extremely attractive as we aim to serve our clients even better. We have our integrated platform in place, with Dynamics 365 Sales at the center. Now we can build on this and continue the transformation.”

Jeremy Hallett, Global Markets Enablement Leader, Ernst & Young LLP

Better positioned to design and deliver transformative cloud solutions to organizations worldwide

The EY transformation story showcases how Dynamics 365 Sales can help complex, regulated, multi-national organizations inspire a unified, customer-focused global sales operation—empowered to move business forward with a shared vision and digital toolkit. And, as one of Microsoft’s top systems integrators, EY is well positioned to help deliver that value to organizations everywhere.

“Putting Dynamics 365 and Copilot in the hands of more than 100,000 EY member firm professionals showcases how modern architectures and the latest advancements in AI create competitive advantage. Part of embarking down this journey was to demonstrate for our clients that it can be done for even the most complex global enterprises. The time is now to create new ways of working with AI-powered transformations.”

Jim Little, Global Microsoft Alliance Leader, Ernst & Young LLP

The EY organization can help complex organizations find their own path to differentiate with Dynamics 365 and AI and surface the right data for personalized customer experiences, critical business insights, and operational agility. Applying direct learnings from their global implementation of Dynamics 365 Sales, as well as day-to-day experiences using the technology, will bring a wealth of additional perspective, insights, and guidance to every engagement.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales, as well as the EY Microsoft Alliance. 

The post Ernst & Young reinvents sales globally with Microsoft Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

This April at Hannover Messe, the world’s leading industrial trade fair, organizations across engineering, digital technologies, energy, and more will gather to demonstrate solutions for high-performance, sustainable industries. Microsoft is honored to attend this year’s event to showcase how Microsoft Dynamics 365 helps manufacturers: 

• Modernize service operations with AI to close work orders faster.
• Deliver end-to-end personalization to customers and improve efficiency.
• Increase visibility into your product genealogy across steps in the supply chain.

Modernize service operations with Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365 Field Service  

New Copilot capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Field Service enhance data insights, boost productivity and deliver more customization for field service managers. These capabilities are generally available today.

Managers can now interact with Copilot to find pertinent information about work orders, prompting Copilot using natural language for details and insights, right from the Dynamics 365 Field Service web app. By simplifying data retrieval and minimizing time spent searching for information, managers can boost the efficiency of work order processes.

In addition, Copilot can provide work order summaries, reducing time spent reading through lengthy work orders to quickly get an overview and understanding of key points of the work to be done. Organizations now have more control to include specific data in the summaries for their users, which can lead to more useful and actionable summaries.

To help ensure smooth communication flows when using the Dynamics 365 Field Service Outlook add-in, field service managers can ask Copilot to compose clear and concise email content recapping details of scheduled work orders, which can then be edited or further customized before sending. And with the Dynamics 365 Field Service plugin for Copilot, field service managers and technicians can find key information about work orders and Dataverse records from within a Microsoft Teams chat using natural language. Starting today, technicians can also ask Copilot to search through lengthy product manuals to find answers to help resolve product issues faster. 

Also starting today, technicians can easily launch a Dynamics 365 Remote Assist call natively within Microsoft Teams mobile to increase first-time fix rates. Access to Dynamics 365 Remote Assist is available with Dynamics 365 Field Service, at no additional cost, and licensed customers can try out the mixed reality tools available in preview starting today within their Teams mobile app for iOS. 

Dynamics 365 Field Service users with the Field Service app in Teams can now share links to work orders that automatically expand to provide key details. This link unfurling capability eliminates the need for technicians to switch between apps. Visit Modernize Service Operations with AI booth at the Hannover Messe expo, Hall 17, Stand G06 to discover new ways to transform your service operations with generative AI and mixed reality.

Deliver end-to-end personalization to customers and improve efficiency 

At Hannover Messe, we’ll highlight the end-to-end customer experience for manufacturing teams. At our booth and across multiple sessions, we’ll showcase how manufacturing teams across sales, service, and marketing can leverage the power of Copilot and Dynamics 365 to enhance their customer interactions and deliver personalization at scale by refining internal workflows.

Harnessing the end-to-end, unified platform of Dynamics 365 across the teams enables better visibility and deeper personalization. A prime example is Sonepar, a leading global electrical distributor. They’re now leveraging Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to deliver exceptional experiences to their customers.

“With this platform, we are able to transfer data regarding customer needs and requests between teams, measure the service provided to our customers and the time taken to resolve problems”.

Denis Ravel, CRM Director, Sonepar

Learn more about their recent transformation and see how Dynamics 365 helped to empower a new standard of excellence at Sonepar.  

Improve visibility into product genealogy with traceability 

Today, we’re announcing the upcoming preview of traceability for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. Traceability allows you to increase visibility into product genealogy through the different steps of the supply chain. You can track events and attributes throughout supply chain processes, and query and analyze the data with an intuitive interface. This capability supports you in meeting industry-specific regulatory requirements, tracking the achievement of sustainability and ethical supply chain goals, and gaining deeper insights into how supply chain events impact product quality and customer satisfaction.  

Traceability is designed to work seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, using the data already tracked in Dynamics 365. This removes the need to purchase or integrate a separate traceability solution, which can be costly and complex. Now, you can benefit from the simplicity and performance of using the built-in capabilities. Check out traceability at Demo L in the Microsoft booth at Hannover Messe.  

Join us at Hannover Messe 

Visit us at the Hannover Messe expo, Hall 17, Stand G06, to explore demos of new capabilities announced today, and learn about our end-to-end, AI-powered solutions for manufacturers across industries.

Hannover Messe 2024

Join is at the world’s leading industrial trade fair.

Visit us at the expo

The post Microsoft unveils AI features for manufacturers at Hannover Messe 2024 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today, we’re announcing the first pricing update for Microsoft Dynamics 365 in more than five years. Since our last pricing update, Dynamics 365 has transformed customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes with connected applications across lines of business—from marketing, sales, customer and field service, to finance, operations, and supply chain—and each year, we release hundreds of new features and enhancements designed to help people work smarter, reclaim time, and collaborate seamlessly. You can read the official Dynamics 365 blog post here.

Below is the list of products for which prices are being updated with effect from October 1, 2024¹:

Prices for Dynamics 365 on-premises customer engagement and operations products will increase by the same percentage as the respective cloud versions. Pricing for cloud products not listed above, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, will remain unchanged.

These increases will apply globally to new and existing customers (upon renewal as of October 1, 2024), and the products will be priced comparably in other currencies. To comply with local regulations, US government list prices for the same products will increase by 10% effective October 1, 2024, followed by another smaller increase effective October 1, 2025, to bring parity with commercial pricing outlined above.

Be sure to explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 to see the many capabilities recently released, and the Dynamics 365 release planner to check out those that are planned for release in upcoming months.

Notes:

¹ All prices are per user per month (or per device per month where noted). 
² Prices shown are for informational purposes only and may not be reflective of actual list price due to currency, country, region, and variant factors. Contact a Microsoft sales representative for additional information on pricing. 
³ Pricing per user per month will increase by $15 in all tiers in Microsoft Relationship Sales. Only 10-99 user tier shown for simplicity.

The post New pricing for Microsoft Dynamics 365 effective October 2024 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Today, we’re announcing the first pricing update for Microsoft Dynamics 365 in more than five years. Since our last pricing update, Dynamics 365 has transformed customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) processes with connected applications across lines of business—from marketing, sales, customer and field service, to finance, operations, and supply chain—and each year, we release hundreds of new features and enhancements designed to help people work smarter, reclaim time, and collaborate seamlessly.   

While a lot has changed in the world in the last five years, our vision has stayed true: ensuring the Dynamics 365 experience helps organizations adapt to change and proactively transform their business. We have delivered on this through innovations that have helped organizations supercharge customer experiences with AI-powered, real-time customer insights for marketers, sellers, and service agents; as well as by optimizing operations and mission-critical processes with data insights, supply chain visibility, and end-to-end automation of financial processes. And today, we are seeing organizations of all sizes across industries benefit from Microsoft Copilot in Dynamics 365.

As we look ahead, our commitment to our customers is to continue to offer the most value and highest return on your investment in business applications, helping to fuel digital transformation.

The price changes will be effective October 1, 2024, and the products will be priced comparably across different currencies. The full list of Dynamics 365 products for which prices are being updated can be found here. Cloud pricing for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central will remain unchanged.

Be sure to explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 to see the many capabilities recently released, and the Dynamics 365 release planner to check out those that are planned for release in upcoming months.

The post New pricing for Microsoft Dynamics 365 effective October 2024 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Sellers, service agents, and supply chain professionals share a common goal: delivering quality goods and services to customers on time, every time. Today, we are announcing new experiences for Microsoft Dynamics 365 that help professionals across business functions to collaboratively solve challenges, streamline workflows, and focus on what matters most—key factors for transformative customer experiences. These new products and capabilities join hundreds of other features launching between April and September as part of the 2024 release wave 1.

Innovations announced include:

• New AI demand planning capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium, a new product offering that’s now available.
• New AI-powered insights and actionable recommendations to improve operational processes and deliver exceptional customer experiences, from sales to service.
• Updates to Microsoft Copilot for Sales and Microsoft Copilot for Service, extending Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 with role-specific insights and actions that integrate with your existing contact center, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and productivity apps.

New AI capabilities with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium

In October 2023, we announced the public preview of new demand planning capabilities for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. These capabilities are available today in a new product offering, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management Premium. The new demand planning capabilities create a more flexible, simplified, and intuitive user experience. By combining insights with streamlined collaboration, planners can have an increased level of trust for a more reliable forecast. Customers like Poloplast, an Austrian pipe manufacturer, is using Dynamics 365 to enhance its demand planning and forecasting.      

“The storage space allocation of our goods has improved because it is now based on statistical methods surfaced in Dynamics 365 … . We have seen a measurable reduction in external storage costs as a result, significantly less than what we used to require.”

Holger Kreisel: Head of Enterprise Resource Planning, Poloplast

With general availability, we are also adding several new capabilities that significantly enhance demand planning. Users can engage with Copilot-provided data insights that bring a new level of intelligence and automation to demand forecasting, and allowing for more accurate and data-driven decision-making. The new product phase-in-phase-out process helps support smoother transitions in product life cycles, minimizing disruptions and optimizing inventory levels. The introduction of row-level security enhances data protection, allowing for granular access control and safeguarding of sensitive information. Moreover, the new cell-level commenting feature complements the existing plan-level commenting, providing users with the flexibility to annotate specific data points. This fosters a more detailed and collaborative planning process, where insights and context can be shared directly within the demand planning workspace.

New AI capabilities help boost seller productivity and close deals faster

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales continues to bring new capabilities that extend customer insights and boost sales through intelligence, collaborative selling, and Copilot-enhanced sales processes. A new proposal summary feature recaps important details within lengthy customer proposals associated with a specific contact, opportunity, lead, or account. The summary briefs sellers on the budget, authority (decision maker), need and timeline gleaned from the proposal or agreement documents, and recommends next best steps.

Additionally, sellers can access enhanced AI-powered insights and actionable recommendations in the flow of work, including in the immersive Copilot homepage, helping them stay on top of active customer email conversations and post-meeting actions to move deals forward faster.

New lead qualification enhancements enable sellers to assign opportunities to the right seller, view an AI-generated lead qualification summary, and create multiple opportunities from a single lead. These features will be available in public preview in mid-May 2024.

Microsoft Copilot for Sales introduces new generative AI capabilities that enable sellers to access sales-specific skills, data, and actions from within Microsoft 365 applications like Outlook and Microsoft Teams. With the new conversation intelligence platform, managers can measure and guide their sellers’ activities without physically shadowing them. Sales managers can use this dashboard to coach sellers to improve their sales interactions, understand customers and analyze market trends, and get insights which will help you build a sales strategy. You can download the public preview here, available since March 15.

Activity orchestration across various accounts and activities is one of the biggest challenges for sellers. When sellers work in a collaboration space in Teams, Copilot will monitor conversations and suggest tasks based on the selling team’s activities. Once accepted, the tasks are automatically generated with assigned owners. Sellers can add a tab in the collaboration space to access and view the status of tasks assigned to team members. This capability will be generally available in mid-April 2024.

New AI innovations continue to boost agent productivity and deliver personalized experiences

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service continues to deliver innovations that empower agents to accelerate case resolution and provide exceptional customer experiences. Agents can now get a succinct overview of the most recent and significant updates related to any record in the Dynamics 365 timeline, and swiftly catch up in just a single click. Copilot generates the streamlined timeline highlights, summarizing key developments from various activities, such as those in emails, notes, and conversations, enhancing agent productivity by minimizing unnecessary clicks and lengthy scrolling. This helps agents to have faster and clearer interactions with customers to meet their expectations.

Agents can also conveniently use Copilot inline right within the email editor, in addition to the side panel, to generate contextual draft email responses. They can refine their existing drafts with follow-up custom prompts and single-clicks, using Copilot without requiring any knowledge articles. Together, these enhancements make navigation in the workspace more flexible and deliver an easier email authoring experience. The capabilities will be generally available in North America this month with a subsequent planned rollout for other regions.

In addition to currently supported knowledge sources such as Microsoft SharePoint, Copilot can now be extended to access customer, product or case data in Microsoft Dataverse, with prompt plug-in support. Agents can get a unified experience using these plug-ins, as they no longer need to switch to other tabs and tools to connect to information residing in Microsoft Dataverse. Agents save time as well, as Copilot can automatically identify the right prompt plug-in needed, based on the question being asked and through a deep understanding of the intent implied by the question. Available in public preview later this month, support for prompt plug-ins created in Microsoft Copilot Studio helps agents deliver faster resolution and increased customer satisfaction.

AI innovations in Dynamics 365 Customer Service omnichannel capabilities also significantly uplevel self-service automation, redirecting more cases that would be typically escalated to an agent. Customers can engage with a robust conversational AI driven experience, with IVR enhancements that now include fine-tuning speech for optimized authoring, improved speech recognition accuracy, and an overall better customer experience when dealing with interrupts, latencies, and information collection.

Additionally, Copilot for Service features previously available in preview status will reach general availability later this month. These include the ability to use Copilot in Outlook and Teams to summarize and draft emails, access case summaries, browse and update CRM records, and more. Download the Copilot for Service app to experience Copilot for Service in Teams and Outlook.

In May, we will introduce in preview the ability for agents to ask Copilot for answers to questions about CRM data—such as case, contact, or knowledge details, as well as use Copilot to summarize case details.  

Be sure to explore the detailed release plans for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform and keep track of what’s new and upcoming, as well as create a personalized release plan, in the release planner.

Business Applications Launch Event

Learn about new features and capabilities for Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform.

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Watch the virtual Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event

Tune in to the Business Applications Launch Event this Wednesday, April 10, at 9 AM Pacific Time for more details and demos of new capabilities across Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform. In addition, you can explore several special topic presentations covering the evolution of generative AI, including small language models and AI experiences to help transform strategic, cross-domain business problems.

The post New Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Copilot innovations for supply chain, sales, and service join the 2024 release wave 1 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.