New sales capabilities in 2023 release wave 2—Helping sellers work smarter

AI is revolutionizing the way sellers operate, enabling them to work smarter, not harder and achieve fantastic results. With AI-powered tools, sellers can access real-time insights, streamline their workflow, and make data-driven decisions, all while minimizing manual effort. These advancements empower sellers to engage more effectively with customers, enhance their productivity, and ultimately achieve better results in today’s competitive market.

Our latest release is working to make AI become a natural addition to a sales toolkit. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Sales Copilot drive forward the lead to opportunity process providing insights, suggestions, and system updates with the click of a button. Each capability released across this wave helps build a fantastic set of scenarios to foster a better understanding of customers and provide ways to collaborate and accelerate deals with personalized and relevant insights.

Let’s take a closer look at how the latest capabilities are transforming sellers into agile and informed professionals, helping them stay ahead of the curve and deliver exceptional value to their clients.

Revolutionizing the seller workspace

Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales: With the general availability of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, we are changing the customer relationship management (CRM) work patterns for sellers. By seamlessly integrating AI into the application, Copilot alleviates sellers from routine tasks, expedites their actions, and ultimately enhances business outcomes. It achieves this by offering valuable recommendations, summarizing essential data, retrieving information, and facilitating context-specific actions, all seamlessly integrated into the natural flow of work.

Not only in a side panel, expect to see Copilot across the CRM application within email replies and across search and homepage experiences to help salespeople think less about data entry, record search, and activity timelines and instead spend more time building strong customer relationships.

Insightful record summaries: We’re introducing new AI-generated summaries, for lead and opportunity summaries including citations and CRM-linked highlights to validate the accuracy of the information. Now a salesperson can see an instant summary to help keep them up to date with the latest changes and news items.

Elevated customer profiles: Sellers understand the importance of seizing the moment with customers, and staying promptly informed to support their deals. Sales Copilot can now integrate with People.ai and Seismic to expand and enrich screens with valuable references and insights, thereby amplifying stakeholder and deal intelligence.

Real-time intelligence: Our objective is to empower sellers with timely, relevant information. When customers mention a competitor or brand during sales conversations, real-time information cards instantly populate the Microsoft Sales Copilot pane within Microsoft Teams meetings. This ensures that sellers are consistently well-prepared and informed.

Efficient sales qualification: Copilot also plays a pivotal role in streamlining the sales qualification process. It proactively prompts sellers with crucial questions during interactions with prospects, ensuring that vital data points are captured to advance the deal. Employing established frameworks like budget, authority, needs, and timeline (BANT) qualification, Copilot guarantees that budgets, key stakeholders, needs, and timelines are all well understood and accounted for in customer interactions.

Automation and assignment enhancements: In addition to all the AI capabilities arriving to Dynamics 365 Sales, we want to ensure quality leads and opportunities get to the doors of the sellers, fast. With the latest assignment features, new leads or opportunities can be automatically assigned to sales teams or added to queues based on lead attributes and matching team or sales queue attributes.

Refreshed user experience: The Dynamics 365 Sales user experience has been refreshed to enhance the look and usability of the system, providing updated styling, including drop shadows and brighter background colors; new fluent-based controls in forms; business process flows; and dialogs and refreshed headers, tabs, sections, and business process flows in form pages. This new and refreshed user experience delivers improved productivity, increased user satisfaction, and better decision-making.

Manage key stakeholders and buyer relationships: Account team members often need help identifying the right stakeholders within a customer organization for their deals. With the new smart organization charts, sellers can build and visualize a customer’s organization, capture the buyers’ roles easily, and get a snapshot of each contact’s activity levels with your organization. This helps sellers maintain a healthy business relationship with their customers.

Learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Copilot

These are just a few of the new capabilities we’re rolling out for sellers in 2023 release wave 2. To learn more, check out the resources below.

• Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Sales Copilot release wave documentation on Microsoft Learn.
• Microsoft Sales Copilot webpage.

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.