Microsoft in 2021 Wave 2, Introduced us with exciting new releases. This blog features some of the best functionality released in 2021 Wave 2. The focus areas for 2021 Wave 2 are:
- Collaborate better with Teams Calling
- Efficiently managing the pipeline
- Enhancement to LinkedIn Experience
- Improve forecasting and productive tools
- Guided selling with Sales accelerator and data hygiene
- Enhancing mobile experience
The Focus Area of Microsoft for Dynamics 365 Sales in 2021 Wave 2 Releases are focused on enabling the seller to be able to harness the power of data and intelligence that will help them before, during, and after each interaction with their customers. Sellers will focus on the highest priority activities and will collaborate using Teams from within Dynamics 365 to accelerate their pipeline. Our goal is to help the seller close more deals, faster while being as productive as possible.
Let’s discuss some of our Favourite features released in 2022 Wave 2
Enhanced Collaboration with Microsoft Teams
We think one of the best features is “Drive seller productivity with a seamless experience between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams meetings“. In this feature, while running Microsoft Teams meetings, sellers now have access to sales records they can reference to have contextually relevant conversations with prospects and customers, as well as streamlined note-taking capabilities that enable sellers to save time, be more productive, and drive more revenue while providing organizations with far better data.
The other amazing feature in this category is “Keep additional stakeholders in the loop by sending automated chat notifications from Dynamics 365 to Microsoft Teams“. Microsoft wanted to shorten sales cycles for organizations by ensuring sellers side by side changes of key sales activity changes as they happen, with notifications from Dynamics 365 to Microsoft Teams. Sellers can communicate with each other without having to switch out of their applications.
Forecasting and Pipeline Management
In 2021, Wave 2 we can see Microsoft knows how much pressure the sales team must sell more and sell faster. To prioritize their prospect that is likely to close and move quickly through the pipeline. Forecasting and pipeline analytics in Dynamics 365 Sales provide predictive lead and opportunity scoring that helps uncover top deals and to forecast with confidence. The feature we are excited about is “Improve predictive scoring by enabling intelligent field augmentation“. This Feature allows Organizations to collect a vast amount of CRM data as part of their regular course of business. This data becomes a powerful source of insight to training an AI predictive scoring model. Certain attributes may have key values that, when recognized by the model, can further its efficacy, and exclude confounding data points. Using field augmentation, users can identify the fields and key values for training the AI model, such as whether a customer is new or returning, an email is legitimate or fake, recent activity, phone number length, and more.
The other exciting feature for sales and pipeline management is “Get streamlined views of forecast hierarchies with user filters to manage your forecasts more efficiently“. I this feature Administrators can filter user records from the forecast hierarchy. This will allow sellers and managers to view only the user records that are of interest for the sales forecasting process, decluttering the forecast grid. An administrator can filter user records from the forecast hierarchy. This will allow sellers and managers to view only the user records that are of interest for the sales forecasting process, decluttering the forecast grid.
Accelerator workspace
One of the best features in this category is “Focus sellers on the right actions with a worklist ownership enhancement“. This functionality will enable each seller to stay on top of their activities and declutter the worklist. Worklists will be populated based on activity ownership instead of entity ownership. This will allow a seller who is responsible to finish the task to stay on top of the activity and would also declutter the entity owner’s worklist. Microsoft also added that the worklist user interface is being enhanced to make it more usable and improve the seller’s productivity. Enhanced filtering and sorting experience would improve the efficiency of the sellers.
Another exciting feature included in this category is “Building a better relationship with automation and structured workflows with sequence management”. In Sequence management, an enhanced UI allows users to easily filter, create default views, and manage sequences. The advanced grid allows users to perform field-level filters and mass actions. The tagging feature lets the users over a period the number of sequences in the system can increase multifold. This feature would help the SEMs to easily maintain these sequences. These features enable the sales managers to easily maintain sequences and track progress.
In the new releases, Microsoft also focused on improving sellers’ productivity with Data Hygiene. It automates process based on an AI engine. These include a Detection mechanism, which enables automated actions upon detection, and user-based decision or resolution interaction. This allows business to save their time and focus more on closing more deals.
These were some of our favorite releases from 2021, Wave 2 Dynamics 365 Sales Releases.
As a Partner Centric Center of Excellence, we work with Microsoft Partners and provide them with our services for Dynamics 365. We work with Microsoft Partners their clients from all around the globe. From our years of experience working in the world of Microsoft Dynamics and implementing over 200+ Microsoft Dynamics ERP and CRM solutions across different verticals, we understand the business requirements and the functionality that businesses could benefit from the most.
To know more about our Center of Excellence email us at santosh@dhyey.com.
