In this extraordinary age of AI, we find ourselves on the brink of a profound revolution. Companies are looking for generative AI to solve longstanding problems around customer connection, loyalty, and seller productivity. Businesses are on a journey to become a digital-first business, not only to connect with customers, but to benefit from the advances in AI. 

Both winning and retaining customers requires a unified customer understanding and ability to orchestrate experiences across sales, marketing, and service. To deliver exceptional experiences, businesses need a solution that breaks down data silos between applications and departments so sellers, marketers, and service agents can get the right information in the right interface at the right time.

Dynamics 365 2024 release wave 1

Release wave 1 brings new innovations and capabilities to transform your business. 

Learn more

Imagine if your sellers could effortlessly collaborate with contributing stakeholders and had the exact right information at the exact right time to make a persuasive sales pitch that speaks to the needs and wants of each individual customer to cement the sale.

Imagine if your marketing team could create the perfect end-to-end campaign, one that aligns input across departments, that pulls in the perfect target audiences, that includes campaign assets aligned with your brand identity. And instead of doing so in months, being able to create a good draft…in minutes.

Imagine if each time customers interacted with your company, no matter what department or touchpoint they engage with, they felt known, and each interaction built on the last.

With generative AI and our Microsoft Dynamics 365 customer experience solutions, these “imagine ifs” are reality.

The innovative capabilities that are coming to you in Microsoft Copilot for Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will help you elevate the seller experience through AI-driven process transformation, optimize the buying journey with the power of data, and personalize every customer interaction.

Elevate the seller experience through AI-driven process transformation

A recent study of sales professionals showed that up to 70% of their time is used for administrative and non-selling tasks that reduce the quality of their interactions with customers.

With Copilot for Sales and Dynamics 365 Sales, we enable innovative AI-enriched experiences to support sellers as they move through the sales process. We help transform sales teams from just following leads and opportunities into being trusted advisors who can predict and support customer needs.

Copilot for Sales is designed to be an invaluable assistant helping drive productivity and improve sales efficiency. It combines all the unique role-based sales capabilities with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 to deliver a unified and highly relevant seller experience right within the Microsoft 365 suite of applications, keeping the seller in their flow of work. Sellers can use chat to identify answers to top sales questions, whether it’s to find out more about an account or opportunity, or to view the sales pipeline. We deliver relevant sales context using natural language and prompt-based actions.

Let’s look at some of the newest features within Copilot for Sales, an application for sellers who use either Dynamic 365 Sales or Salesforce but prefer to work within their Microsoft 365 productivity apps to manage their day:

• Enhance email summaries and replies to minimize app switching and provide a response that’s aware of the customer context. Insight related to sales such as buying intent is emphasized, and suggested changes such as updates to sales stages, opportunity budgets, or estimated close dates appear in the side panel allowing instant updates.
• Easily create meeting preparation reports that give you the information you need to engage your customers confidently. You can share the meeting prep with your team members so everyone can be on the same page with knowledge about the customer and the account. Using the power of Copilot in Word combined with Sales insight from your customer relationship management (CRM) application.
• Get immediate AI-generated tips, suggestions, and advice in Microsoft Teams meetings to help sellers concentrate on the meeting dialogue and ensure they can respond quickly to requests and possible challenges, such as competitor references, by surfacing relevant information when and where they need it.
• Generate post-meeting follow-up quickly and easily allowing sellers to follow-up with tasks and notifications that are generated from the Teams intelligent recap screens and review the key questions that need to be answered. Follow-up work with their team members can be managed using deal rooms and planner activities to review task suggestions and assignments ensuring no follow-up is missed.
• Keep systems up to date without the pain of manual effort. Copilot for Sales allows for quick creation of records, such as leads and opportunities, right in the Microsoft 365 surface area. In the Copilot side panel, create new records and update fields using pre-filled suggestions without leaving the screen.

Dynamics 365 Sales continues to be our market-leading CRM solution designed to streamline sales processes, cultivate customer relationships, and expedite deal closures for businesses of all sizes. We bring the power of generative AI right inside this surface area and help sellers transform their CRM interactions to support customer conversations and land deals. With the latest release we’re helping sellers to:

• Transform the CRM sales experience by using the immersive full-screen Copilot view right in Dynamics 365 Sales. Get all key information in one place including pipeline, suggested actions, deals in progress, and real-time insights on key accounts. Sellers can query that information to get further details and insights using natural language and suggested prompts. Use it to get started every day as a homepage for all sellers using Dynamics 365.
• Make the best use of prospecting time with intelligent lead management to make sure that sales development teams are using their time wisely and focusing on leads that have a higher chance of closing quickly. In this release, we’re adding qualification criteria that incorporate signals to help show how interested the customer is. The distribution of those leads is then improved based on seller capacity and our new notification alerts make sure that sellers don’t lose the opportunity to interact when the timing is right.

Optimize the buying journey with the power of data

It all starts with data. Generative AI takes what used to be specialized and trained roles and democratizes them so customer experience (CX) professionals can use and take advantage of the data, insights, and workflows from their CRM system. Generative AI will autonomously assist customers and sellers in their day-to-day experiences to:

• Elevate customer experiences in real time: With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, CX professionals can now ensure customer profiles and associated insights are updated in real time based on data signals, allowing them to provide the most targeted and personalized experience as they engage with your website or mobile app, which will foster loyalty, increase engagement, enhance satisfaction, and drive higher conversion rates.
• Know your account better with AI-generated account summaries in Dynamics 365 Sales: With integrated data from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, sellers can now quickly access a comprehensive overview of each account, enabling them to prioritize their work effectively and engage with customers in a more personalized and targeted manner.
• Maximize sales success with AI-suggested past successful deals: In Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers now have the ability to use the collective intelligence from past successful deals to identify and pursue similar opportunities effectively. This AI-driven feature simplifies the decision-making process and increases the likelihood of closing deals quickly. By analyzing personal success stories and industry-specific data, sellers can make well-informed decisions that enhance sales effectiveness. The strategic use of AI suggestions not only improves efficiency but also significantly raises the chances of winning deals, thereby boosting overall sales performance.

Personalize every customer interaction

Marketers and CX professionals are being empowered to go beyond automated spam to creating cross-channel cohesive, conversational experiences that drive loyalty and retention. The innovative capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights that are releasing in this wave enable CX professionals to:

• Take campaigns from concept to launch in minutes using Copilot in Customer Insights Journeys: With Copilot, instead of breaking down a series of fragmented work items, the team begins by telling Copilot the outcome they want to achieve. In minutes, they’re presented with the new project board, curating ideas for every component central to the campaign: such as segments, content, and journeys, all ready for review. It’s fueled by unified data from all sources of customer data, brand guidelines, past campaigns, and creative briefs.
• Generate unique on-brand creative assets in minutes: No more scouring media libraries or resorting to use of stock images. You can ensure images are on brand and personalized for each audience, generated by Copilot using the new Typeface integration. Copilot allows you to generate variations that then can be used for personalization—no special photo editing abilities required.
• Personalize omnichannel experiences with no code using Optimizely: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Optimizely now unlock omnichannel personalization and experimentation capabilities, enabling marketers and citizen developers to personalize every customer touchpoint with no code or prior expertise required. By combining insights and segments from Customer Insights with Optimizely audiences, you can create experiences that are tailored to your customer’s browsing activity, their loyalty, past engagement history, and other real-time signals. Moreover, you can continue the conversation or re-target your visitors by delivering the same consistent experience through customer journeys, based on which Optimizely treatment cohort the customer was part of.

With generative AI and Copilot, we’re revolutionizing the workflow for sellers and CX professionals. First, sending personalized content at every stage of the marketing campaign, improving the quality of sales leads, and next, optimizing the productivity of sellers and enhancing every single engagement with their customers, helping them to close deals faster, all thanks to Copilot. There has never been a more exciting and productive time to be a seller or marketer. We can’t wait for you to experience it.

Learn more about 2024 release wave 1 capabilities

The future of customer experience is here, and it’s driven by cutting-edge AI technology that empowers businesses to better connect with their customers, drive sales, and improve overall satisfaction for both customers and employees. This release wave is truly driving transformative change for customer-facing roles, so get your organization set up today.

To see how all of this comes to life, watch the CX overview segment of the Business Applications Launch Event and check out the 2024 release wave 1 plans to read more about these game-changing capabilities.

The post 2024 release wave 1: Transforming experiences with Microsoft Copilot and Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Selling is all about relationships. We hear a lot these days about the disconnect that our increasingly digital world can create. But at Microsoft, we believe that digital tools, especially those powered by generative AI and real-time insights, can help strengthen sellers’ relationships with their customers. We’re continually investing in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales to enable sellers to engage with their customers more meaningfully. We are pleased to announce that Microsoft has been named a Leader in The Forrester Wave^TM: Sales Force Automation, Q3 2023 report, with top scores possible in the Vision, Innovation, and Roadmap criteria for our sales force automation (SFA) platform.

Reducing complexity to drive seller success

The role of a seller has only grown more complex. A process that used to involve a couple of phone calls and face-to-face meetings now includes everything from targeted emails to impromptu online chats. Organizations rely on everything from digital sellers to field sellers to customer success champions to ensure their customers are supported end-to-end throughout the sales journey. Especially with hybrid workplaces and shrinking travel budgets, sellers need assistance from technology to build connections—between colleagues, across multiple data sources, and with customers. 

The challenge is that sellers need to build these connections and foster relationships without sacrificing productivity. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, sellers spend more than 66 percent of their day managing email, leaving only about a third of their time for actual sales activities. Our answer is to provide simple solutions—focusing on collaboration, productivity, AI, and insights—to help sellers focus on closing deals. As Forrester states in its report, “Dynamics [365 Sales] showcases how SFA and office productivity solutions work together.” We believe this is what has earned our position as a Leader: we built solutions to give sellers access to real-time customer insights, subject matter experts, relevant data across different sources, and important customer and account information right in their app of choice—no context switching necessary.

Dynamics 365 Sales works natively with Microsoft Teams to create open lines of communication for collaborating and aligning on work items across marketing, sales, and service departments. Additionally, copilot capabilities bring next-generation AI and customer relationship management (CRM) platform updates into collaborative apps like Outlook and Teams, unlocking productivity for sellers whether they are working in Dynamics 365 Sales or Microsoft 365 apps. By helping to eliminate manual data entry, meeting summarization, and other cumbersome processes, Dynamics 365 Sales ensures sellers have more time to create and nourish their customer connections, ultimately driving sales.

Providing insights that improve customer retention—and grow revenue

Referring to Microsoft, Forrester also reports that “Embedded insights are a highlight of the product”—something that Microsoft customer, DP World, knows well. DP World is the leading provider of worldwide, end-to-end supply chain and logistics. DP World implemented Dynamics 365 Sales to help the company diversify and scale after an acquisition that was driving new demand and traffic to the company. Dynamics 365 Sales provides its sellers predictive lead scoring and prioritized worklists based on AI, giving full visibility into its sales funnels and helping it effectively qualify leads and opportunities. This reduced DP World’s sales cycle, enabling five times more proactive sales and two times greater customer retention.

Learn more about sales

We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave and are committed to providing innovative sales force automation platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more.

Microsoft named a Leader

We received top scores in The Forrester Wave™: Sales Force Automation, Q3 2023.

Read the report

Learn more about:

• Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 Sales
• Microsoft Sales Copilot

Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including a limited-time 26 percent savings on subscription pricing—for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium.

Source: Forrester: “The Forrester Wave™: Sales Force Automation, Q3 2023”, Forrester Research, Inc., 20 September 2023.

The post Microsoft is a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Sales Force Automation, Q3 2023 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

The innovation continues. Generative AI has opened the door to a new world of what’s possible.

In business applications, we’re using generative AI to break down silos and bridge gaps between data, insights, and people so sellers, marketers, and customer experience (CX) professionals can deliver exceptional experiences across the entire customer journey, seamlessly.

With our 2023 release wave 2, we’re taking these capabilities to new heights across our Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Sales Copilot, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights applications.

As unveiled at yesterday’s Business Applications Launch Event, I’m thrilled to share highlights of what’s to come, including new ways that these applications—fueled by generative AI and Copilot—can help you use data and insights that used to be hidden, unlock capabilities previously out of reach, and reach new levels of productivity and collaboration more easily than ever before. With a focus on delivering value to each line of business employee, our solutions are proven to maximize business outcomes across your organization.

Many of these capabilities are available today; all of them will be generally available or in preview before April 2024. Let’s check it out.

Use data and insights that used to be hidden

To deeply understand your customers, it all starts with data. But if your data is incomplete or you can’t get to it or take action on it, how valuable is that data and the insights that come out of it?

The new AI-driven capabilities releasing in this wave are set to revolutionize your customer experiences. With Copilot’s assistance, marketers, data analysts, and CX professionals can rapidly unlock data for enhanced decision-making, obtain valuable customer demographic and behavioral insights, and streamline both journey orchestration and content creation processes to fuel customer experiences.

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will help you to harmonize disparate data sources into one complete 360-degree view of each customer; it will automatically assess incoming data and offer suggestions to improve the quality, resulting in a more complete view and better insights into each customer.

For sellers to maximize the number of qualified leads or deals closed, it’s important that they spend their time with leads and contacts with the highest likelihood of conversion. Obtaining this clarity involves looking across a growing number of customer touchpoint signals that sellers often don’t have access to (such as website visits or store visits), nor have time to analyze. That’s where the combined power of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Sales comes in. As sellers are working their leads, Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales automatically summarizes the lead details, status, and recent activity details, including profile summaries from Customer Insights – Data. Combining sales data with important intent signals helps sellers get a full picture of their customer so they can tailor every engagement, right in their flow of work.

Unlock capabilities previously out of reach

Another one of the many beautiful things about Copilot is that it can unlock capabilities that were previously out of reach, and it applies to various roles across your organization.

For instance, thanks to dialog with data—a Copilot capability in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights—marketers and CX professionals can get insights and define the right target audience just by asking a simple question instead of relying on data experts to do the work for them.

Creating customer journeys has also been completely transformed with Copilot. Marketers can now use everyday language to describe the customer journey they want to create, and Copilot instantly designs that journey for them, offering suggestions on segments, trigger-based actions, communication timing, branching options, and much, much more. What’s even better is that the suggested journey is now editable. So if the marketer needs to make a last-minute change to the journey’s scope, they can do so by simply asking Copilot to make the update.

When it comes to creating marketing content, bottlenecks can often arise: organizations may not have the right creative resources, enough time, or funding to produce effective content. So unfortunately, many promising campaigns never see the light of day. However, now, with the assistance of Copilot, marketers and CX professionals can easily produce highly appealing content with none of those roadblocks. Copilot capabilities like content ideas and content rewrite help these professionals write or refresh emails, forms, and more. And to make sure that collateral is on brand, they can use style assist which automatically applies colors, fonts, and styles based on a web URL and brand profiles to ensure a cohesive brand identity.

And to make it even easier to both understand your customers through data and act on insights from that data, we’ve combined Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights into a single offering, with the name “Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.” 

Reach new levels of productivity and collaboration

With customer expectations on the rise and customer loyalty at stake, sellers and marketers need to be more on top of their game than ever, so infusing Copilot into the tools they already use—whether it’s Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, or Outlook—our solutions empower them to transform their day-to-day operations and supercharge their productivity.

Sales Copilot capabilities in Outlook deliver insights and opportunity summaries so sellers no longer have to work across multiple applications to get a comprehensive view of an opportunity or to prepare for a meeting. These summaries are accessible in various places, including collaborative deal rooms, ensuring collective visibility.

To ensure that collaboration flows smoothly across sales teams, Sales Copilot in Teams provides AI-powered planner tasks, like simplifying task assignments, setting due dates, and keeping everyone in the loop. And once it’s time for the presentation, the team is equipped with real-time tips and suggestions within the Teams meeting so they can take charge of the discussions.

And with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, sellers no longer have to sift through tabs and sections, they have access to what they need at their fingertips, like AI-generated account summaries, and the ability to quickly follow up on emails using recommended actions.

Our goal is to equip sellers with the right information at the right time, in real time, so they can make every moment count when interfacing with a customer; and we’re making it all available within their flow of work.

Learn more about 2023 release wave 2 capabilities

The capabilities coming in this release wave are ushering in a new era of AI-powered efficiency and innovation, enabling you to use data and insights that used to be hidden, unlock capabilities previously out of reach, and reach new levels of productivity and collaboration.

To see how all of this comes to life, watch the CX overview segment of the Business Applications Launch Event.

The future of AI-driven success is here, and Copilot is leading the way. Stay tuned for more exciting updates, and be ready to implement these transformative capabilities in your organization.

Dynamics 365 2023 release wave 2

Generative AI has opened the door to a new world of what’s possible.

See what’s new

The post Release wave 2: Transforming customer experiences with generative AI and Microsoft Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Note: As announced at Microsoft Inspire 2023, as of September 1, 2023, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights have been brought together into one offering. We are retaining the existing Dynamics 365 Customer Insights name to encompass this new offer of both applications. Customers can start with one or both applications and then further invest in the application they want to scale by buying the capacity they need.

In today’s turbulent economic times, companies are facing critical business challenges such as customer acquisition, increasing customer loyalty, and maximizing lifetime value. Often, to save time, they follow a one-size-fits-all approach—resulting in impersonal marketing strategies with low customer engagement. According to the Microsoft Work Trend Index, 89 percent of marketers say they struggle with having time to do their jobs.

To meet these complex challenges, it is crucial for companies to shift their approach from traditional mass communication to personalized engagement based on a deep understanding of each customer’s preferences and actions while ensuring their marketers have more time to leverage their creative and strategic skills to engage their customers. With this very goal in mind, Microsoft launched Dynamics 365 Marketing in 2018.

We are pleased and honored to share that in a short span of five years in market, Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms* for the second consecutive year. In this year’s report, Microsoft is positioned highest in Ability to Execute.

For Microsoft, this placement recognizes our commitment to help companies better connect with their customers at scale, across all departments, to make this simple and easy for any company with a broad range of skillsets to employ.

Accelerating the journey to more personalized customer engagement

We started our Dynamics 365 Marketing journey in April 2018. Since then, we’ve gathered feedback and continued to learn at a rapid pace to help our customers on their journey to drive meaningful customer engagement, ensure long-term loyalty, and accelerate business success. To be competitive in today’s market, organizations must harness the power of data to gain a deeper understanding of their customers, anticipate behaviors, and craft one-on-one personalized experiences across all touchpoints, including sales, marketing, business operations, and service functions. Generative AI makes these capabilities within reach for every company. That’s why we’ve brought together Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights as one offering named Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, an AI-led solution to revolutionize customer experience. The new Customer Insights enables our customers to be more flexible by giving them access to both a modern, AI-driven customer data platform (Customer Insights data application) and real-time marketing with customer journey orchestration (Customer Insights journeys application). Customers can start with one or both applications and invest in the areas where they most want to scale.

To drive the necessary customer experience (CX) transformation, companies cannot rely on piecemeal integration of sales, service, and marketing products. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 50 percent of replacement customer relationship management (CRM) sales technology decisions will involve solutions including non-sales software comprising other modules from a CRM or a CX suite.^[1] However, the reality is that only a few companies are currently delivering on these expectations. Customer experiences often remain fragmented across channels and departments, leading to inconsistencies. Microsoft is uniquely positioned to help customers overcome these challenges, and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights was built exactly for this purpose—to support customers throughout their end-to-end CX journeys.

Like all Dynamics 365 offerings, Customer Insights relies on Microsoft Dataverse to store CRM software data, which enables our customers to securely store and manage their data and harness the true power of that data by removing silos across sales, service, and marketing via a unified platform approach. Customer Insights helps marketers and customer engagement professionals gain a holistic view of their customers, anticipate their needs, and discover growth opportunities. Marketers can also deliver more relevant, contextual, customer-triggered engagements through the power of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Some of our most recent Copilot capabilities in Customer Insights enable marketers to:

• Deliver a consistent brand narrative and customer experience with emails, forms, and event registration pages that align to their organization’s branding guidelines.
• Easily orchestrate contextually relevant customer journeys across marketing, sales, and service, to respond to customers quickly, generate sales leads, and increase customer satisfaction.
• Quickly build, summarize, and simplify targeted segments using conversational, everyday language, enabling more time for building customer relationships and reducing time to build complex segments from scratch.
• Discover new customer insights by using natural language to ask questions and gather information and suggestions for forming additional, deeper questions.
• Get help developing content for emails, social posts, and other text with a tone of voice that matches their brand and campaign.

Enabling our customers to increase their reach

Zurich Insurance Group, a global insurer serving people and businesses in more than 200 countries, wanted to optimize marketing processes to help create more personalized customer experiences. Its Switzerland business unit connects to its customers through hosting online and in-person events—but to drive the highest impact, it must be sure it invites the right customers to the right events. It wanted to improve its ability to track if customers opened event invitations—or even received them, as well as the connection to registration and attendance. It also wanted a formalized way to collect feedback or easily use engagement data to continue to optimize the sales process after the event. Zurich selected Dynamics 365 Marketing to give it the flexibility to reach customers in new ways and drive more effective follow-ups to help shape their journeys. With Dynamics 365 Marketing, Zurich increased its lead quality by over 40 percent.

Over the past decade, Natuzzi, a globally hailed creator of exceptional luxury furniture that delivers a harmonious combination of design, function, aesthetics, and ethics, has seen a rapid global expansion of its heralded luxury brand. Natuzzi lacked a customer engagement platform capable of unifying data from its retail point of sale (POS), enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and CRM systems. The company also wanted a way to bring together its business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) related data sets to drive greater insight between audiences. Adopting Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Natuzzi implemented an extensive customer experience platform to transform how its luxury brand discovers and sustains its customers. It uses customer data and insights to nurture customers and prospects through personalized campaigns, delivering emails, SMS texts, promotions, events, sales appointment reminders, and other relationship-building messages.

Microsoft named a Leader by Gartner

Microsoft is named a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms.

Read the report

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to helping our customers unify and enrich their customer data to deliver personalized, connected, end-to-end customer journeys across sales, marketing, and service. We truly believe that bringing together Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights enables us to continue investing in capabilities that will enable stronger, insights-based marketing that helps marketers and data analysts glean insights from customer data.

Read the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms report.

Learn more about:

• Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights

Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights offer.

1. Gartner Forecast Analysis: CRM Sales Software, Worldwide, Roland Johnson, Amarendra, Julian Poulter, 12 December 2022.

Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for B2B Marketing Automation Platforms, Rick LaFond, Jeffrey L. Cohen, Matt Wakeman, Jeff Goldberg, Alan Antin, 20 September 2023.

*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

The post Microsoft is named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for B2B Marketing Automation Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Sellers are fundamental to any organization’s success—and despite economic headwinds, business leaders are concerned about keeping the talent they have happy and productive at their jobs. Many sellers have long relied on highly manual and disjointed processes that involve a mix of email, spreadsheets, and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. But following manual processes and switching between sales tools and spreadsheets can waste valuable time that sellers need to build relationships with customers and close deals. According to the latest Microsoft WorkLab research, 78 percent of sellers would be happy to have some help from AI to make their everyday tasks—like sending follow-up emails or tracking sales—easier. That is why we’ve been busy building a vision for sales-specific AI to help increase seller productivity and success.

Today, we’re excited to share that Microsoft has been recognized again as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms* for the thirteenth consecutive year. In this year’s report, Microsoft is positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision.

Our strong vision and approach with Microsoft Sales Copilot by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities allows sellers to spend more time focused on engaging with their customers.

Empowering sellers through automation and intelligence

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enables sellers to close more deals and meet customer needs with the help of next-generation AI and real-time insights. Sellers have everything they need in their app of choice to engage with customers, including historical data and access to subject matter experts. Using data, sellers can achieve more consistent sales interactions from creating a lead to closing a sale, predict how much revenue they will generate in a given timeframe, automate repeatable processes and define sales best practices, and promote products and services with targeted marketing campaigns. Additional sales enablement features include adaptive guidance for next best steps based on actionable insights, AI-guided selling features like the sales assistant and conversation intelligence to help build stronger customer relationships, and predictive scoring models to prioritize leads and opportunities for increased conversion and win rates. Sales managers can also get intelligent insights into how their sales team members are performing, so they can provide proactive coaching to improve their teams’ overall performance.

With Microsoft Sales Copilot, which is included with Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licenses, we have established a vision of CRM platform by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities to help sellers reduce mundane tasks and personalize customer relationships even further. Powered by Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Sales Copilot features built-in responsible AI and enterprise-grade Azure security. Sellers can access Copilot in the tools where they’re working, whether that’s Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales. Microsoft Sales Copilot also connects to Salesforce for instant data syncing. Sellers can use Copilot to automate tasks or view email or meeting summaries, helping them save time on daily tasks and spend more time with customers. AI-powered, real-time insights including customer summaries, recent notes and customer news, and highlights of any issues or concerns help sellers enter customer meetings fully prepared to focus on key items. And to help sellers follow up after those meetings, Copilot can generate AI-assisted content and recommendations, such as customer-specific emails using data from their CRM platforms and Microsoft Graph.

Providing sellers with access to customer data in one place is key to helping ensure their success. Microsoft Dynamics 365 utilizes Microsoft Dataverse to store CRM platform data, which enables customers to securely store and manage data used by business applications. By using a platform solution to simplify and unify sales processes, sellers benefit from products built to talk to each other. Dynamics 365 Sales works seamlessly with technologies including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power BI, and LinkedIn to enhance and extend capabilities for sellers. This means that sellers can continue to use familiar tools, which helps to simplify user adoption and lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) and IT costs—a priority for many organizations in today’s economy.

Organizations can leverage the power of the full Microsoft Cloud to help sellers succeed. Dynamics 365 Sales natively integrates with Teams to create open lines of communication for collaborating and aligning on work items across marketing, sales, and service departments. With automatic data syncing between Microsoft 365 apps and Dynamics 365 Sales or other CRM platforms, sellers can also surface customer and opportunity information directly in Teams and Outlook, which minimizes context switching and data loss. In addition, sales operation leads and managers can use Power BI to further analyze trends and build reports. And Microsoft Power Platform enables sellers to automate workflows, create apps, and analyze data to increase agility and innovation.

Helping to ensure our customers’ success

Investec, a global financial services company, set out to help its client-facing teams listen directly to customers and build more valuable relationships. This made conversation intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales appealing because it automatically transcribes sales calls and analyzes the content, sentiment, and participants’ behavior. Conversation intelligence takes advantage of Microsoft advancements in AI and natural language processing to automatically extract meaningful insights from sales calls. With these insights, Investec can review salespeople’s conversation styles, help coach individuals on best practices, keep track of sales conversations, build stronger client relationships, and ultimately keep track of sales conversations, and build stronger client relationships. With Dynamics 365 Sales, Investec automatically incorporates conversation intelligence data across its customer engagement platform, saving time on manual entry, reducing overhead, and building a comprehensive customer view.

MAPEI, a global leader in adhesive, sealant, and chemical product manufacturing, was using 90 different customized CRM systems across 57 countries when it decided to consolidate into a single, centralized system. Migrating to Dynamics 365 Sales helped MAPEI simplify internal processes for its employees and provide more proactive service to customers. Today, MAPEI salespeople can build strong relationships with customers, make data-driven decisions, and close deals faster. The service also helps salespeople track customer accounts and contacts, track sales from prospect to purchase, and better qualify leads to assure they are spending time on the most impactful opportunities.

Microsoft named a Leader by Gartner

Microsoft is recognized again as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms for the thirteenth consecutive year.

Read the report

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales

We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to providing innovative sales force automation platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more.

Read the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms report.

Learn more about:

• Dynamics 365
• Dynamics 365 Sales
• Microsoft Sales Copilot

Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including a limited-time 26 percent savings on subscription pricing for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium.

__________________________________________________________________________

Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms, Adnan Zijadic, Ilona Hansen, Steve Rietberg, Varun Agarwal, Guy Wood, 5 September 2023.

*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.

The post Microsoft is named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Sales Force Automation Platforms appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

As a seller, you know you need to focus on building relationships with your customers and getting the details you need to close the deal. The challenge is that like most sellers, you spend less than 30% of your time selling.^[1] Most of your day goes to searching for information and administrative duties like composing emails and keeping your CRM system up to date. You need more from your technology—and we delivered. In February, we introduced the world’s first AI copilot in CRM with the launch of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot. And today, we’re announcing Microsoft Sales Copilot, a role-based copilot designed to improve sales productivity by empowering sellers with the data and insights they need, when and where they’re needed, allowing them to focus on what they do best—selling.

Sales Copilot brings new capabilities to Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and Dynamics 365 Sales, helping sellers to increase their productivity and personalize every customer interaction. And it works out of the box—not just with Dynamics 365 Sales, but with Salesforce, too.

The following Sales Copilot capabilities are now available for preview^[2]:

• AI-generated lead and opportunity summaries to streamline your sales process and close deals faster
• A customer meeting preparation summary view that includes auto-generated summaries of previous meetings, recent notes, highlights of issues and concerns, and CRM information
• Real-time tips and suggested answers during Teams meetings, prompted by the customer’s mention of a competitor or brand
• Customer email summary and follow-up, with contextual replies and actions based on Outlook emails and CRM data

Additionally, we recently announced the general availability of collaboration spaces in Sales Copilot. Collaboration spaces in Teams can easily be created from Sales Copilot in Outlook to help sellers stay better connected with their customers and colleagues.

Watch this brief video to learn how Microsoft Sales Copilot can help you improve your sales productivity:

AI-generated lead and opportunity summaries

Sales Copilot uses generative AI to quickly summarize leads and opportunities for you. An opportunity summary is a concise overview of the status, progress, and potential of a prospective sale or deal. A “catch up” section highlights key updates since the last visit. An opportunity summary is also available in Outlook, where sellers can view a brief background of the opportunity and the latest activities.

Similarly, a lead summary gives sellers an overview that seamlessly combines data from multiple sources, such as CRM information, contact profiles from LinkedIn^[3], and the latest news from Bing to expedite the lead qualification process.

Meeting preparation and summaries

Being prepared for customer meetings is vital for sales productivity. It facilitates informed decision-making and fosters productive discussions, ultimately yielding improved sales outcomes. Sales Copilot detects meetings coming up in the next 24 hours and offers a summary of recent email exchanges and the last three seller notes to help you prepare.

After the meeting, Sales Copilot in both Outlook and Dynamics 365 Sales generates a professional and friendly meeting summary email, making follow-up as easy as clicking a button.

Real-time tips in Teams meetings

In Teams, sellers receive real-time coaching tips (currently in private preview) during meetings right in the Sales Copilot Teams panel, to help them respond to customer inquiries and competitor or brand mentions. It’s easier to overcome objections and demonstrate that you’re knowledgeable and prepared when the information you need is right in front of you.

Summary, follow-up, and contextual emails

Sales Copilot lets you spend less time composing email. Select a pre-defined category or enter your own text, and Sales Copilot suggests content with specific prompts and actions informed by Outlook and CRM data, helping sellers quickly follow up, reply to inquiries, and move deals forward. Adjust the tone and length of the message to better resonate with your customers, fostering stronger connections. You can further customize the suggested content before you send it.

Sales Copilot is equally invaluable on the receiving end, summarizing lengthy email threads when you respond to incoming messages and enabling you to save the summary to your CRM with one click. By condensing complex discussions, it streamlines the communication process and ensures comprehension. It also helps to keep you on track by identifying action items and key customer requests in your incoming emails that you might have missed. It continuously monitors your inbox so you don’t have to.

Collaboration spaces

Sellers can easily work with colleagues and customers in collaboration spaces—predefined Teams channels with pinned apps designed for collaboration. Collaboration spaces link to your CRM system and are accessible from Teams, the Sales Copilot app in Outlook, and Dynamics 365 Sales. Learn more about collaboration spaces.

Responsible AI

Microsoft is committed to investing in features that reduce or eliminate unsafe output from generative AI capabilities in products like Sales Copilot.

Sales Copilot inherits your organization’s security, compliance, and privacy policies and enforces two-factor authentication, making Sales Copilot a tool you can trust.

Because we know that data leakage is a concern for our customers, as it is for us, the language models that underlie Sales Copilot aren’t trained on and don’t learn from your company’s business, tenant, or individual data. Sales Copilot is part of the Azure ecosystem and employs the same safeguards, compliance boundaries, and enterprise-grade security.

Microsoft copilot AI adheres to our commitment to responsible AI. Engineering teams at Microsoft are continuously working to address issues such as misinformation and disinformation, content blocking, data safety, and promotion of harmful content, guided always by our responsible AI principles.

Users have access to specific guidance that helps to reinforce the responsible use of generative AI content. For instance, we provide guidance and prompts through informational elements that instruct the user:

• How to responsibly use suggested content and actions, including prompts
• How to review and edit responses as needed
• How to manually check facts, data, and text for accuracy

Sales Copilot also cites public sources wherever relevant, so the user can easily find the web content it references.

More innovations to transform the customer experience

In addition to Sales Copilot, we’re announcing copilot innovations across Dynamics 365 to empower organizations to deliver exceptional experiences throughout their customer journeys.

• We’re adding copilot capabilities to the newly unified Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and continuing our innovations in real-time marketing. Along with the copilot capabilities that are in public preview (Content Ideas, Query Assist, and Dialogue with Data), soon you’ll be able to use natural language to orchestrate customer journeys as well as style emails, forms, and event registration pages to match your brand guidelines.
• Dynamics 365 Commerce Copilot can craft compelling, persuasive, and engaging content for product listings for online commerce, with an aim to drive discoverability and conversion. It allows merchandisers to optimize for search engines while tailoring the content for their customers, brand, and voice.

Next steps

Try Microsoft Sales Copilot today to see how it can improve your sales productivity by enabling sellers to engage with customers more effectively and close more deals faster.

Enable Microsoft Sales Copilot in Outlook and Teams: Microsoft Sales Copilot deployment guide for Dynamics 365 customers

Enable Microsoft Sales Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales: Enable and set up copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales

Learn more about all the upcoming Dynamics 365 Sales Wave 2 2023 features: Overview of Dynamics 365 Sales 2023 release wave 2 | Microsoft Learn

Not a Dynamics 365 Sales customer yet? Visit the Dynamics 365 Sales website to take a guided tour and sign up for a free trial.

Footnotes:

[1] Global State of Sales Report 2022 (linkedin.com)

[2] At preview, capabilities available in English in geographies that support Dynamics 365 Sales.

[3] A Sales Navigator license is required to access contact profiles from LinkedIn.

The post Improve sales productivity and close more deals with Microsoft Sales Copilot appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Update on 7/18/2023: Viva Sales is now Microsoft Sales Copilot.

Join me, Lori Lamkin, and my esteemed colleague Nathalie D’Hers, as we take you on an extraordinary journey through the development, deployment, and continuous improvement of Microsoft Viva Sales. As the Corporate Vice President (CVP) of Dynamics 365 Customer Experiences, I bring extensive leadership experience and strategic vision to guide the product team responsible for Viva Sales. Viva Sales is a tool that maximizes Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Salesforce seller teams’ productivity with AI-assisted experiences in Microsoft 365 apps. Nathalie, another accomplished CVP, leads the deployment efforts across Microsoft, positioning the Microsoft sales field as customer zero. Together, we bring a wealth of knowledge and expertise to revolutionize the way sellers engage with customers through Viva Sales. In this Q&A session, we will share our insights, experiences, and the remarkable story of Microsoft’s journey in unlocking the full potential of Viva Sales. Get ready to be inspired!

Rapid deployment: Unleashing the potential of Viva Sales

Lori: It’s been six months since you’ve deployed Viva Sales, what results are you seeing? What key considerations did you have when rolling out a generative AI tool like Viva Sales on a global scale?

Nathalie: Viva Sales is deployed across Microsoft. Being customer zero has been invaluable in this process. It has allowed us to confirm the product, learn important insights, and make improvements along the way. We’ve been focused on turning on Copilot features to enhance the seller experience, and the feedback we’ve received from our own teams has been instrumental in refining and perfecting the deployment. I’m so excited to partner with our teams to see the first commercial solution at Microsoft to combine Copilot and Viva Sales.

Since the launch of Copilot in March, we have seen incredible adoption with nearly 4,000 users taking advantage of its capabilities. The impact has been significant, with approximately 37,500 draft emails generated through the power of generative AI. It’s encouraging to see the positive response from our users and the value they are experiencing. In fact, during a recent customer conversation, the Senior VP of Sales expressed their enthusiasm to partner with us as early adopters, emphasizing their willingness to invest in any technology that enhances the productivity of their sellers. It’s a testament to the effectiveness of Copilot and its ability to drive tangible benefits in the workplace.

Lori: It’s been quite the journey since we launched Viva Sales to our Microsoft sellers. What were the main goals your team hoped to achieve with this product?

Nathalie: We’ve been focused on seller productivity gains through taking advantage of conversation intelligence, enabling Copilot features, and ultimately improving customer connection, job satisfaction, and revenue for our sellers. Microsoft being customer zero has provided us with a unique advantage. It has allowed us to test these features within our own organization, gather valuable feedback, and fine-tune the experiences before rolling them out to more customers.

In the new update, we are adding some exciting capabilities to Viva Sales that have been influenced by your team’s customer zero work. Sellers can get real-time suggestions and guidance as they craft emails, pulling insights from automated email summaries. It’s like having a virtual assistant right at their side, helping them to generate compelling content and ensuring that no opportunity is missed. Our sellers have embraced these features with enthusiasm, recognizing how it significantly boosts their productivity and enables them to focus on building strong customer relationships.

Lori: Speaking of Copilot, how does your organization ensure that the implementation of Copilot features align with Microsoft’s ethical and responsible AI principles?

Nathalie: Supporting ethical and responsible AI practices is of paramount importance to us and our customers. As we use generative AI, we are committed to helping our customers be transparent, fair, and accountable to their employees and their customers.

As you know, one of the ways we do this here is with our works councils, where a few of our colleagues volunteer to help us protect the privacy of all our employees when we deploy new technology like Viva Sales. More importantly, they make sure we follow privacy laws in each of the countries and regions where we operate. We roll the feedback that we get from them directly into our products, which helps our customers protect their own employees. It’s this kind of thinking—and these kinds of checks and balances—that helps with the ethical use of AI in Viva Sales.

Lori: We were so excited to be the first Microsoft product to bring Copilot to our users; the feedback we have received from sellers has been incredibly positive! How have our newest Copilot in Viva Sales features influenced your thinking about supporting the employee experience?

Nathalie: It helped a lot! Seeing a tangible implementation of Copilot with real value opened our eyes to what was possible and is influencing ways that we’ll incorporate generative AI into our own employee experience. Kudos to you and your team for dreaming big and acting fast to bring that experience to the market!

Lori: Thank you. So, tell me more about this employee experience and how deploying Viva Sales Copilot in Microsoft has given your team insights and learnings that shaped your approach to using AI?

Nathalie: Just like Viva Sales provides conversation summaries and next actions for sales opportunities, we’re thinking through scenarios that will enable us to transform the way employees interact with our different services—like support and HR—to make them more personalized and efficient.

Broadly, our efforts fall into three categories—AI for IT, AI for the hybrid workplace, and AI for the employee experience. AI for IT includes investments to help us proactively detect and remediate issues in our employee services and IT infrastructure. AI for the hybrid workplace includes investments to help us perfect space planning and to enhance the experience when employees come into the office. Finally, AI for the employee experience is all about transforming the ways that Microsoft employees interact with our services and support. Across each of these investment areas, Viva Sales provided us with a great benchmark for how AI can really propel employee productivity.

Microsoft Viva Sales

Learn more about our internal deployment of Microsoft Viva Sales.

Read here

Talking about works councils and deployment

Lori: Nathalie, as the leader responsible for deploying Viva Sales across Microsoft, I understand that your team has been actively engaging with works councils. Can you provide insights into the impact of working with works councils during the deployment process?

Nathalie: Absolutely, Lori. Works councils play a critical role in standing for the interests of employees within our organization, particularly in European countries where they are prevalent, and they make sure that whatever we deploy internally within the company protects the privacy of the employees who live in that region. Engaging with works councils ensures that we consider the perspectives and concerns of the workforce during the deployment of Viva Sales. Their input is valuable in addressing compliance, privacy, and employee relations matters, making our deployment process more robust and aligned with local regulations.

Lori: What have you found to be some of the challenges in managing a global-scale deployment of Viva Sales?

Nathalie: Deploying any new technology globally has challenges, but the speed and efficiency with which we were able to roll out this transformative product was truly remarkable. We are working on a brand-new solution that is revolutionizing the way generative AI changes the workplace, and being customer zero has given us some unique advantages. We’ve had to navigate compliance and obtain necessary approvals for deploying AI features on a global scale. Our active engagement process, which includes working closely with works councils, has been instrumental in streamlining the deployment process and ensuring that our global teams can receive help from Viva Sales. Despite the challenges, the feedback from sellers has been incredibly positive, especially with the AI-generated email content enhancements we’re introducing. The best part is how easy and painless it is to enable Viva Sales, allowing our teams to quickly harness its productivity-boosting capabilities and experience a seamless transition to a more efficient way of working.

Lori: It seems like building an effective approval process is crucial. How replicable has Microsoft made this process for other companies?

Nathalie: At Microsoft, we have developed a globally recognizable, efficient process for enabling Copilot scenarios. By supporting open dialogue, we can gather feedback, address emerging concerns, and align our deployment approach with evolving regulations. We recently set up a framework with European works councils to supply valuable insights into employee needs and expectations, enabling Microsoft to tailor the product and deployment process accordingly. We encourage all companies to get connected with their respective works counsels to achieve a balance between rapid implementation and compliance, ensuring that their employees are protected, and the organization meets regulatory requirements.

Lori: It’s truly exciting to see the transformative power of Viva Sales in action and see the positive impact it’s having on our organization!

Learn more about Viva Sales

To learn more about our internal deployment of Viva Sales, read about how we’re simplifying sales with Viva Sales. You can also read more about our internal deployment of Viva at Microsoft by visiting our “Viva la vida! Work life is better at Microsoft with Viva” content suite. Learn more about other applications and capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales using the links below:

• Learn more about tips Microsoft has for working with works counsels.
• Take a look at Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales release wave documentation on Microsoft Learn.
• Watch the Copilot in Viva Sales demo.
• Stay up-to-date on Viva Sales features and updates on the Viva Sales Blog.

If you’re not yet a Dynamics 365 Sales customer, check out our Dynamics 365 Sales webpage where you can take a guided tour or get a free 30-day trial.

The post The power of AI in Viva Sales: Insights from Lori Lamkin and Nathalie D’Hers appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Generative AI has left its mark on computing, and it’s only the beginning. The world of business applications will never be the same. For several years now, we have been iterating on and shipping copilot features in Microsoft Dynamics 365, and I’m pleased to announce our next wave of value.

And it’s coming out just in time. Today’s customers demand tailored experiences that cater to their individual needs. They expect businesses to be responsive on all communication channels and to treat each individual with knowledge of their overall relationship and journey. For example, recent research from LinkedIn found that over two-thirds of customers say they’re less likely to engage with sellers whose initial outreach isn’t tailored to them and their role.¹

On the heels of our Business Applications Launch Event (BALE), I’m thrilled to introduce some of the latest features being released over the next few months for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and Customer Insights.

Our new technologies and tools enable you to provide engaging customer experiences, standing out from the competition and building loyalty and trust. It makes your employees more productive and your customers feel more connected. Our latest wave builds on our most recent public releases, such as natural language AI generation through Copilot, and sets up Dynamics 365 business applications to become the game-changing opportunity for you to do more with less.

Business Applications Launch Event Resources

Access resources to learn all about the 2023 release wave 1 updates.

Sign up for access today

A unified approach to Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and Customer Insights

A recent survey from Microsoft found that nearly 9 in 10 business users want to apply AI solutions to more tasks, so that they can focus on the work that really matters.² Our upcoming investments deliver this across the customer experience landscape. We bring together sales, service, and marketing through Microsoft Dataverse and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, marry that with Microsoft 365 data, and apply Copilot generative AI. The result is cohesive end-to-end customer engagements that empower and connect your sellers.

Here are a few highlights coming with the 2023 wave 1 release and recently released capabilities to keep on your radar that were showcased at BALE:

• With Dynamics 365 Sales, navigating records in a database is no longer the norm, and now you can look at opportunities, accounts, and contacts and view both a list and a detailed view of the record. We call this focus mode. It’s a part of our overall vision to move from tracking tools to tools that help sellers get their job done. With focus mode, sellers can prioritize engagement and optimize their workspace, reducing overall clicks to get work done. We introduced text message embedded within Dynamics 365 so you can engage customers through text in Dynamics 365 on customers’ preferred channels. When working opportunities, the new pipeline view experience is the default experience to quickly view and manage the sales pipeline. Deals will also see an updated smart organization chart to view and manage stakeholders. Finally, release wave 1 will showcase the power of Dynamics 365 Copilot generative AI to assist sellers in meeting preparation, meeting follow-up, and proposals. See the release plans for Dynamics 365 Sales.
• With Microsoft Viva Sales, included at no additional cost in Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium, a monthly cadence of improvements to Copilot capabilities are reimagining the way salespeople work starting with AI-generated email replies, proactive insights, summarization, and search. With the latest Outlook calendar integration generative email replies can propose meeting times. Beyond Copilot, an exciting new Microsoft Teams collaboration experience will help connect sales teams and customers in a shared Teams workspace. Salespeople can become trusted advisors to customers, and information can flow through shared files and chat, all linked back to the sales opportunity record for instant updates. Full support for out-of-the-box and custom customer relationship management (CRM) entities will enable organizations to configure the entire experience, and Teams meeting enhancements include CRM integration as well as real-time tips and suggestions. See the release plans for Microsoft Viva Sales.
• In Dynamics 365 Marketing, users can use new copilot features to create engaging emails and define segments using natural language. To generate higher quality leads, users can build modern forms using an intuitive form experience, prioritize leads with the new lead scoring builder, and engage sellers at the right time. The out-of-the-box dashboards make it easy to track pipeline developments and analyze the impact and contribution of journeys, marketing messages, and content. When a marketing campaign hits your customer’s inbox, your sellers can immediately reference a copy of the email and start connecting for more opportunities. Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Marketing.
• Dynamics 365 Customer Insights accelerates customer understanding to know your customers deeply and accurately. Users can understand their data quality more deeply with a data quality score, automatically see which out-of-the-box predictions apply to their data, and seamlessly connect custom models from Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. With Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, users can use natural language to have a dialog with their data to quickly get deep insights without the need for experts. Additionally, sellers can access relevant insights from within their flow of work to further personalize their conversations and close deals faster. AI-driven seller productivity gives your sellers an edge on every opportunity, all within the flow of their work, whether they’re talking to customers in Outlook or Teams or analyzing data in Dynamics 365. Explore the release plans for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.

Real impact, real customers

Look at these inspiring case studies that demonstrate how our upcoming features can transform businesses:

• Greenreb AG, the exclusive Topgolf licensee for Europe aims to deliver an engaging golf and technology-infused leisure experience across Europe and in the United States. As a golfer, I certainly need to try them out! With Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing, Greenreb can use its existing game data to create personally tailored marketing campaigns for each customer. With automated lead generation and no silos between sales and marketing, no customers fall between the cracks. The benefits of the scalability of Dynamics 365 is clear according to Phillip Fu, the CTO of Greenreb who explained that “[b]ecause we synchronize all our data in a Dataverse and have it on one platform, all departments get the same access to all the data in every system. We’ve bundled many functions in one product and can integrate further modules quickly.” To hear more from Phillip, you can read the full customer story.
• Lynk & Co, an automotive company that aims to disrupt the industry by putting the customer at the center of the experience. Embracing the latest capabilities from across Dynamics 365 has enabled it to scale its customer engagement quickly to half-dozen countries across Europe with a small team. Sign up here for access to a video from BALE that highlights how the latest Dynamics 365 release can help the Lynk & Co team prepare for an upcoming event—Planet First Eco-Drive, with a simplified data-informed campaign that uses natural language to query customer data and identify the best audience for upcoming events. To hear more about Lynk & Co and their experience with our business applications, you can access the fireside chat here.
• OBOS is a Nordic leader in housing and financial services—not only in the development and sale of homes and properties, but banking and financial solutions, property management, and real estate brokerage. As a co-op, with its clients also being owners, breaking down silos to deliver a cohesive experience across projects and businesses is critical to both customer retention and employee effectiveness. You can read more about how it was able to transform its business using Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and Customer Insights in the customer story.

Join the Dynamics 365 community on this journey

These innovations are just a small part of what is coming in this wave release. Our goal is to help your employees be more effective and provide your customers with amazing experiences. With generative AI capabilities through Copilot, your teams can do more with less and focus on higher-impact work. Don’t wait to get started—the world is changing now. Many AI capabilities are available now, and we’re seeing many companies shortcut standard CRM rollouts and we have more coming over the following months.

I value your feedback and look forward to hearing how these tools have improved your customers’ and employees’ lives. Connect with me on LinkedIn for more updates and insights, and be sure to share your stories of success with generative AI on our Dynamics 365 Communities platforms. Let’s create better solutions together!

Learn more about generative AI and Dynamics 365

To learn more about all the innovations coming with generative AI, or to see some of the other announcements from BALE, check out these other articles:

• Copilot in Dynamics 365 Marketing and Customer Insights
• New Sales capabilities in 2023 release wave 1
• New Marketing capabilities in 2023 release wave 1
• Release wave 1 expands agility, automation, and innovation across Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform
• Access all BALE event recordings here

¹LinkedIn State of Sales Report 2022.

²Four Ways Leaders Can Empower People for How Work Gets Done, Microsoft WorkLab.

The post Release wave 1: Transforming customer experiences with generative AI and Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Update on 7/18/2023: Viva Sales is now Microsoft Sales Copilot.

Since first announcing new AI-powered experiences for Microsoft Viva Sales last month, we’ve given these capabilities a name—Copilot in Viva Sales—and introduced new sales scenarios and updates.

All of this is happening in conjunction with the introduction of Dynamics 365 Copilot—the world’s-first AI copilot in both customer relationship management (CRM) platforms and finance applications enterprise resource planning (ERP). To date, tens of thousands of customers have used next-generation AI capabilities in Dynamics 365 Copilot and within Microsoft Power Platform. 

Today’s debut of Microsoft 365 Copilot powers even more ways to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills. For sellers, the seamless integration of Copilot across Microsoft 365 and Viva Sales (as well as AI-powered capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales) is a powerful combination. It’s a new way to engage prospects and customers, all while freeing up time previously tied up in “busy work”—like composing every email from scratch.

As we move into a new era for customer experience, we want to ensure that salespeople feel empowered to focus on what matters, which is deeper engagements with customers. Let’s take a closer look at some of the Copilot capabilities in Viva Sales that make this possible.

Try Viva Sales Today

Use Viva Sales to help sellers be more efficient, productive, and effective.

Get a free 30-day trial

Copilot in Viva Sales automated email replies is now generally available

With Copilot in Viva Sales, AI-generated email replies have now moved from preview into general availability, with more features and enhancements built into the generated response. Here are some of the new additions we’ve made:

• Generate replies with proposed meeting times: Sellers can now generate email replies with proposed meeting times based on their calendar availability in Outlook, making it easier to schedule customer meetings and simplifying the process for finding a time that works for everyone.

• Build upon generated replies by providing additional prompts: To make modifications to the generated reply, sellers can refine the results further by providing a new prompt that builds upon the previous suggestion. This allows sellers to more easily fine-tune their email replies according to their unique needs and preferences.

• Understand the data sources behind generated replies: Sellers can now hover over any highlighted areas of text to view the data sources behind generated replies. This provides sellers with valuable context and transparency regarding where the embedded information comes from, such as any previous meetings or sales data from the CRM.

• Improve future replies by providing feedback: Finally, a new feedback mechanism allows sellers to rate the AI-generated content with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. This helps refine and improve future replies to ensure that Viva Sales continues to adapt to the unique needs of each seller.

Meeting summarization: Quickly and easily send follow-up emails after meetings

One of the best practices for sellers is to follow up on meetings and customer interactions with a clear summary, including the relevant action items or next steps. This takes time to compile, and in the busy world of a seller, manual tasks like this can take days to get to, or are sometimes forgotten. We want to increase the buyer-seller connection by providing quick seller responsiveness, demonstrating the priority of the relationship without needing to hunt out the information to create a personalized response.

With the help of Copilot in Viva Sales, alongside the insight from the call and CRM, we can automate to help jump-start the seller into action.

We use the existing conversation intelligence technology in Viva Sales to provide sellers with meeting insights, together with CRM data and the GPT copilot technology. This creates a super-simple way for sellers to generate meaningful meeting summaries:

• Start composing an email and launch Viva Sales.
• Confirm the relevant meeting to get follow-up content.
• Receive the summary email recommendation that refers to topics you discussed and action items you both committed to, and puts all of this in a well-formed email for your review. It even includes relevant data from your CRM to enrich the reference points.
• Simply add the recommendation to your email, edit to your liking, and send.

The major difference between this experience from our intelligent meeting recaps in Microsoft Teams is how the magic happens in the seller’s inbox, connected to CRM data, in the context and tone of a customer conversation. There is no need to switch screens, and minimal email composition is required. The seller can make minor edits, all from within Outlook.

Watch the Copilot in Viva Sales demo below:

Vision for the future of Viva Sales

With a monthly release cycle, Viva Sales brings innovation to delight sellers. In addition to the above-mentioned features, we have some exciting updates due over the coming months.

Learn more about Viva Sales

Copilot in Viva Sales is a powerful AI-boosted application that can help sellers to be more efficient, productive, and effective. By providing personalized insights, automating routine tasks, and helping sellers to prioritize their efforts, the available solutions can help sellers to close more deals and grow their businesses. If you are a seller looking to take your sales game to the next level, consider giving Viva Sales a try.

If you are not yet a Viva Sales customer, check out our Viva Sales webpage where you can get a free 30-day trial.

Pricing and licensing can be found here, and note that all Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licensed customers will have Viva Sales available at no additional cost. A great reason to get started today!

Want to stay in the loop? Stay connected to the latest improvements before everybody else. We welcome your feedback and ideas in the community feedback forum. And learn more about the latest AI breakthroughs with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot on the Dynamics 365 AI webpage.

The post Copilot in Viva Sales available as thousands of customers adopt next-generation AI in Dynamics 365 Copilot and Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Update on 7/18/2023: Viva Sales is now Microsoft Sales Copilot.

For sales teams, the adage “time is money” is more relevant than ever before. Time wasted on low-value tasks literally leaves opportunities to sell and engage prospects on the table. At Microsoft, we want to use AI to help sellers focus time on what matters most—making meaningful connections, building trust, and creating long-term relationships.

That’s why I’m thrilled to announce the preview of a new generative AI-powered experience in Microsoft Viva Sales that helps sellers communicate more effectively with prospects and customers. 

Viva Sales will now generate suggested email content for a variety of scenarios—such as replying to an inquiry or creating a proposal—complete with data specifically relevant to the recipient, such as pricing, promotions, and deadlines. By auto-suggesting customizable content, sellers can spend less time composing emails and searching for sales data from colleagues and databases. Why is this important? According to new research commissioned by Microsoft, managing email consumes over 66 percent of a seller’s day.¹ This new AI-powered capability helps sellers recapture this valuable time, empowering them to focus time on what matters most. 

Microsoft Viva Sales

Through monthly product updates, we’re rapidly adding new innovations to Viva Sales.

Try it out today

Leveraging the power of Azure OpenAI Service and GPT, Viva Sales provides access to rich, people-centric data and insights in the Microsoft Cloud. Viva Sales can remind sellers when it’s time to follow up with a prospect or customer and then auto-generate a preformatted email response with personalized text and next best actions, along with details such as product descriptions, proposals, and deadlines. When responding to an email, Viva Sales provides sellers in-the-moment suggested responses based upon categories such as “make a proposal”, “reply to an inquiry,” or “suggest your own”. The seller simply selects the option to suit their needs and a reply is generated for the seller to review, edit to their liking, and send. The reply is enriched with the combined data from Microsoft Graph—which provides access to people-centric data and insights in the Microsoft Cloud, including Microsoft 365, Windows, and Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security, and the customer relationship management (CRM) system (Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Salesforce®). This allows sellers to improve their overall communication and deliver a superior customer experience—all in the flow of work.  

These new GPT capabilities strengthen our existing capabilities of Conversation intelligence, which leverages state-of-the-art natural language technology to automatically generate a call summary, detect questions, calculate conversational key performance indicators (KPIs), extract action items, and more. With the addition of auto-suggested email content, sellers can free up even more time to focus on priorities.

Watch the Viva Sales generative AI demo below.

Responsible AI

We are committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are putting those principles into practice across the company to develop and deploy AI that will have a positive impact on society. We take a cross-company approach through cutting-edge research, best-of-breed engineering systems, and excellence in policy and governance. Alongside OpenAI’s leading research on AI alignment, we are advancing a framework for the safe deployment of our own AI technologies that are aimed to help guide the industry toward more responsible outcomes.

Learn more about Viva Sales

Viva Sales launched in general availability in October 2022, and the response from our customers has been amazing. We are rapidly adding new innovations to Viva Sales through our monthly product updates. To learn more and get started today, visit the Viva Sales webpage and to stay informed of upcoming updates, read the monthly update blog.

¹Sales Teams Need a Transformation, Microsoft is Ready to Deliver, Futurum.

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