1 – Outlook & D365 Sales Integration to Avoid Double Booking

Whether online or in-person, scheduled meetings are still a core element of the sales teams’ activities. Microsoft is implementing a small but important quality of life change to avoid double-booking.

From April 2022, users will be able to integration Outlook and the Sales Accelerator. This will help with a couple of key steps:

• Sequenced tasks are scheduled with the Outlook calendar in mind, ensuring existing calendar events are considered and avoided
• Process automation also checks against the Outlook calendar, to avoid double booking through automated tasks

The Sales Accelerator is an engagement platform developed to help appreciate customer motives and engage with them also multiple channels from one space. This feature will be enabled by default for all premium or enterprise users from April 2022.

2 – Quick Activity Updates in Sequences

Sequences allow sales managers to create activities that will automatically appear in the up next widget in Sales Accelerator. This will encourage users to add details to their activity timelines at key stages, to ensure those insightful details aren’t missed. This includes:

• Allows users to add notes whilst completing an up next activity
• Automatically update the activity description from the sequence step description
• Open activity details with a single click from the up next widget
• Better timeline control in Sales Insight, to match up activity with the up next widget

3 – Quickly Edit D365 Records from Teams & Outlook

Sharing D365 records in Teams and Outlook is one of the most common ways of sharing data across a team. Soon, the Teams and Outlook apps will display editable snippets from the records shared via URL.

Just paste a URL to a D365 record in either app and your colleagues will see an interactive preview of the record, including the key details and information they might need to use.

This small feature will help improve workflows by further reducing the steps needed to access and update records when collaborating with your colleagues.

4 – Better Sales Insights with Conversation Intelligence

The last few years have proven how important it is to be adaptable and flexible, with many sales teams working in hybrid environments. With sales teams working in the office, at home and on the road it’s more important than ever to have clarity and transparency between colleagues.

From August/September 2022, Microsoft will be rolling out significant changes to the Conversation Intelligence withing D365 Sales.

The first set of big changes will enable Conversation Intelligence to capture all interactions with customers to help provide complete insights. These automated integrations will feed calls and interactions from your sales teams directly into D365 Sales to improve efficiencies, reduce manual input and enable you to focus on improving conversions and sales. These integrations include:

• Teams calls – Whether you’re making or receiving calls, these will be fully integrated into Conversation Intelligence
• Teams meetings – If you prefer video calls through Teams meetings, or are pitching to a new client, all Teams meetings can be fed into D365 to provide insights for the sales team on the call and their supporting colleagues
• Third party integrations – If you’re using a different VOIP or video platform, it can integrate with Conversation Intelligence via a suite of API calls to provide the same excellent real time integrations
• Other Azure & D365 apps – Many additional products within the Microsoft stack will provide first-party integrations to provide insights for your sales teams

With all these new insights available, sorting through the data to find usable information could prove challenging. Fortunately, Microsoft hope to address this by also introducing a series of new features designed to improve search and collaboration. Here are a few of the new key elements Microsoft is looking to introduce from September 2022 onwards:

• Improved discoverability – Using Conversation Intelligence to surface the most relevant and valuable insights at the right time in your team’s workflow
• Better notifications – Both in-app and email updates to ensure the sales teams don’t miss opportunities and insights as their appear. Also, to remind the team of their tasks and scheduled reminders
• Better collaboration – With comments, mentions and sharing a key part of the Conversation Intelligence, teams will be able to share and support each other and their workflows
• Improved search – With a more powerful search and filter suite, users will be able to find the exact information they are looking for, easily and quickly

There are many more upcoming features to look forward to in the 2022 release wave 1 plan for D365. If you would like to find out more about these new features and how your business could use them don’t hesitate to contact our friendly team.

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