Dynamics 365 Sales Insights 2020 release wave 2 is here!

Dynamics 365 Sales Insights 2020 release wave 2 is here!

Wow, the time has flown! Dynamics 365 release 2020 wave 2 is already here. Can you believe it? Wave 2 has come with a host of new and enhanced features being released from October 2020 through March 2021.  The release contains hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources, Commerce, Fraud Protection, Customer Insights, and Business Central.

I want to specifically point out the Sales Insights 2020 release wave 2 features. If you’re not already familiar with what Sales Insights is, it’s a set of features that Microsoft previously released which they describe as bringing “together the art of science and selling.”  It includes powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to help your sales teams stay ahead of the curve as the buying environment changes.

What’s coming with the Sales Insights 2020 release wave 2

Microsoft has done their research with this release to ensure that it solves challenges many sales organizations are facing. They’ve continued to focus on volume selling, building relationships, saving time with data-automation and improved user adoption.   With wave 2 already here, these are some exciting new features that I’d like to highlight:

• Sales acceleration: Helps your sales teams prioritize the activities related to potential sales on Leads and Opportunities and engage with clients better. Some of the new features I’d like to highlight are:
  • Automatic routing of leads based on sales and marketing automation
  • Enable you to connect with your clients across real-time text channels to increase the chances of reaching a customer who may otherwise be unavailable via a phone call attempt
  • Encourage goal seeking amongst your seller

The full list of new features are:

• • • Automatically perform activities on a seller’s behalf
    • Boost productivity with an intelligent and organized work list
    • Enable automatic intelligent assignment for leads and opportunities
    • Enable organizations to connect with their customers across digital messaging channels
    • Encourage sellers to reach their sales quota and improve performance
    • Provide sellers with conversation insights right where they conduct their daily business
    • Provide sellers with more granular control over a sequence
    • Streamline the sales admin experience
    • Zero-click sequence assignment

• Conversation intelligence: Using AI, this feature can automatically transcribe your calls and detect client sentiment. New features include:
  • Easily onboard with out-of-the-box functionality and integrations
  • Holistic customer view in one place
• Advanced forecasting and pipeline intelligence: Using AI and Machine Learning, this feature can predict forecasts as well as help your team uncover the best deals using Lead and Opportunity scoring. New features include:
  • Enhanced predictive forecasting and deal flow experience
  • Improved snapshot experience
  • Modified infrastructure for scoring leads and opportunities
  • Redesigned predictive score experience
• Relationship intelligence: Allows you to integrate Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 to better identify and nurture client relationships.  New features include:
  • Streamline data capture with auto capture

If you haven’t noticed already, the theme of this release focuses a lot on incorporating advanced technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning. This technology has been around for some time, but has not yet successfully made its way for practical use in Dynamics 365, until now.  As this technology advances and our economy grapples with the changing environments, I expect Dynamics 365 Sales Insights to continue to expand & grow!