This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Every organization is looking to maximize their AI ROI, and we want to help. Each month, we’ll share how customers are using Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents to transform work and business processes, along with highlights of the latest Copilot innovations. Let’s dig in.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
While data is often hailed as the key to unlocking business success, the reality for many sales teams is more complex. How do you sift through mountains of information and determine which leads deserve attention? Which deals are truly progressing, and how can you accurately forecast the outcomes of your efforts?
At the heart of this challenge lies the core issue of pipeline prioritization. Without clear data-backed guidance, sales teams are forced to rely on intuition, guesswork, or outdated customer relationship management (CRM) systems. The potential for missed opportunities, wasted effort, and inaccurate forecasts is enormous.
Sales reps have a lot on their plates managing multiple leads at once, and every choice can influence a deal. Real-time insights are crucial, but they’re not always easy to come by. That’s where AI-powered predictive analytics can help.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales
Close more deals and increase seller efficiency with an AI-powered CRM solution.
Imagine a sales team that knows not just which leads are in the pipeline, but which leads are most likely to convert. And imagine having the ability to predict the trajectory of a deal with accuracy, and to receive real-time recommendations on how to move that deal forward. This isn’t science fiction; it’s the promise of AI-powered sales optimization.
For many sales leaders, pipeline prioritization and accurate forecasting have long been elusive goals. Traditional sales systems rely on past data, making it harder to stay ahead and focus on the right opportunities. Real-time insights can solve this by helping leaders prioritize effectively and make smarter decisions to close more deals.
By using advanced predictive analytics, sales teams not only know where deals currently stand, but also have clear, timely guidance on how to push them over the line.
The shift to predictive sales management
So how do we move from a reactive sales approach to a proactive one? The answer lies in predictive insights and AI-powered pipeline management.
Predictive insights empower sales teams to go beyond surface-level data and identify key trends, patterns, and behaviors that can indicate the likelihood of success. These insights provide sales teams with real-time intelligence about their pipeline, helping them to focus on the deals that matter most.
Consider a few key scenarios where predictive insights are already transforming sales:
Facilitating targeted prospecting. AI tools can analyze past behaviors, customer engagement, and historical data to identify which prospects are most likely to convert. Sales teams no longer need to guess where to focus their efforts—they can let the data guide them.
Responding to requests for proposals (RFPs). Crafting the perfect pitch often requires an enormous amount of time and effort. Predictive insights can help sales teams analyze RFP requirements quickly, offer tailored solutions based on previous successful proposals, and even suggest content for a winning pitch.
Improving forecast accuracy. Traditional forecasting methods are static, relying on past data. Predictive insights continuously update forecasts based on real-time data, ensuring that sales leaders have the most accurate picture possible of their pipeline’s future.
These use cases demonstrate that AI doesn’t just help sales teams manage their pipelines—it revolutionizes the way they approach their work, making it smarter, faster, and more precise.
The Microsoft solution: Turning insights into action
While the potential of AI and predictive analytics is clear, the challenge for most organizations lies in implementation. Many sales teams already have access to vast amounts of data, but they lack the tools to make sense of it. This is where Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales can make a real difference.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 and its embedded AI capabilities provide the actionable insights needed to optimize pipelines, drive smarter prospecting, and improve deal closure rates. Let’s take a closer look at how these tools solve the problems faced by modern sales teams:
Prioritizing leads with a dedicated agent. Sales Qualification Agent for Dynamics 365 Sales works hand-in-hand with sellers to research leads around the clock using external and internal data. Sellers receive a prioritized list of leads with recommended next actions. Sales Qualification Agent can then proactively draft personalized customer emails, giving time back to sellers to focus on customer engagements.
Optimizing revenue forecasting.Teams can harness real-time insights from their sales pipeline to refine revenue expectations. Traditional forecasting tools are reactive, but Dynamics 365 Sales provides predictive forecasts, continuously updated based on customer interactions and behavior patterns. This enables sales teams to adjust their strategies dynamically, based on the most up-to-date insights.
Enabling efficient pipeline management. By automating routine tasks, such as lead follow-ups and report generation, Dynamics 365 Sales frees up valuable time for sales reps to focus on building relationships and closing deals. The result? A more streamlined sales process and improved win rates.
Close more deals with predictive insights
When sales success depends on agility and precision, real-time relationship insights and predictive analytics are essential. With Dynamics 365 and Copilot, organizations can transform their data into actionable insights, enabling their sales teams to operate smarter, faster, and more effectively. Sales leaders who embrace these tools will be better equipped to prioritize their pipelines, forecast accurately, and close more deals.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Introduction
Since 2019, Dynamics 365 Finance has supported direct system-to-system integration with the web service provided by His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to submit Value Added Tax (VAT) returns for UK-registered companies under the Making Tax Digital (MTD) project.
Due to security requirements, we must modify our implementation approach. We can no longer support this integration for on-premises deployments of Dynamics 365 Finance.
Deprecation scope
To meet security requirements, we are implementing modifications to the Dynamics 365 Finance direct system-to-system integration with the HMRC web service for submitting VAT returns for companies registered for VAT in the UK. This involves the adoption of an Electronic Invoicing service as an intermediary to facilitate secure access to the storage of credentials essential for software authorization within the HMRC APIs. These services will not be accessible from on-premises deployments of Dynamics 365 Finance.
After transitioning cloud-based customers to the new integration, the current access for on-premises customers will be discontinued.
Deprecation plan
In version 10.0.43 of Dynamics 365 Finance, we will introduce a new feature with enhanced security protections. In version 10.0.44 of Dynamics 365 Finance, this feature is enabled by default, and all environments will be transitioned automatically.
Starting June 6, 2025, we will discontinue support for the UK MTD VAT integration feature in on-premises deployments of Dynamics 365 Finance.
Recommended alternatives
Do you have on-premises deployments of Dynamics 365 Finance using current MTD direct system-to-system HMRC web services for VAT returns? Consider the following options to maintain compliance with HMRC’s VAT submission requirements.
Option I: Migrate to the cloud-based solution, Dynamics 365 online
Transitioning to the cloud deployment of Dynamics 365 Finance offers several advantages. These include enhanced security, automatic updates, and compliance with HMRC’s MTD requirements. This provides seamless integration and access to the latest Dynamics 365 Finance features.
Additionally, you can use a cloud-based environment as intermediary software for submitting your VAT return to HMRC from your on-premises deployment. To implement this solution, establish a cloud-based environment configured to interact seamlessly with your existing systems.
With adjustments to the UK MTD VAT Electronic Messaging, you can efficiently submit your VAT returns to HMRC using Dynamics 365 Finance’s cloud-based solution. This approach allows your organization to benefit from cloud capabilities such as more security options, improved data management, and staying updated with regulatory changes. We recommend this option to ensure compliance with HMRC’s VAT submission requirements.
Customers maintaining on-premises deployment should consider third-party software for VAT return submissions to HMRC. These solutions should meet your operational needs and compliance standards.
Review these options and act before on-premises VAT submission support is discontinued to avoid disruptions in compliance and VAT reporting.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
As a marketer, the key to optimize your email performance lies in understanding your customers. Every interaction with a customer is a goldmine of information, revealing critical insights into their behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns. Savvy marketers harness this data to tailor content, enhance customer experiences, and elevate engagement rates.
Despite the rise of new digital marketing channels, email marketing continues to be incredibly effective, with its value only growing over time. According to Forbes, email boasts an impressive average open rate of 36.5% for marketing campaigns, and people are three times more likely to make purchases through email marketing than social media. Hence, data and analytics are becoming indispensable tools for unlocking their full potential and optimizing campaigns.
In this context, we are excited to introduce 4 features to optimize your email marketing:
Email Heatmap
Device Types and User Agent Insights
Link Insights
Variation Insights
These enhancements are designed to offer a deeper understanding of customer engagement, empowering you to fine-tune your email campaigns and drive effectiveness to new heights.
Visualize engagement patterns to refine your email content and design
Understanding the effectiveness of email campaigns can often be complex, particularly when information and links are abundant. Gaining clarity on which areas or links captivate your audience and drive them to act is crucial for refining the user experience and boosting email performance, but it often requires compiling and analyzing various email metrics. To help simplify this process, you can leverage the click map for your emails. It provides a quick, visual way to understand engagement based on your email design. You can easily discern what is hitting the mark and what’s missing it.
Leveraging the heatmap results you can strategically optimize your emails marketing. By identifying the hot spots in your emails that attract the most attention, you can optimize your design and layout to ensure your content is highly visible.
Furthermore, based on those insights you can boost user engagement by:
Adjusting the length of your emails to align with reader engagement
Improving the hierarchy of your sections
Strategically positioning your Call-To-Action (CTA) elements for enhanced visibility
For example, Contoso used the click maps to understand which areas of their emails were the most engaging. They discovered that their call-to-action buttons were not getting enough attention. By repositioning these buttons higher in the email and making them more prominent, they increased their conversion rates.
Inform your content strategy by evaluating the performance of each link in your emails
In email marketing, links and buttons serve as essential navigational tools, guiding recipients towards intended actions. As marketers, our goal is to entice readers to engage with the links embedded within our emails. This engagement is a steppingstone towards increased website traffic, heightened brand awareness, and ultimately, higher conversion rates. Consequently, understanding the performance of these links within your email will help you reach your campaigns goals.
Link insights assist you in making data-driven decisions based on the URL’s engagement in your emails. You can easily evaluate the performance of each link within your emails and identify top performing links. This information can guide the strategic placement and promotion of these links in future emails. Furthermore, the insights derived from link performance can inform your content strategy.
If certain types of links consistently perform well, it may indicate that your audience is particularly interested in that content, suggesting a need to feature similar content more prominently. It can also be used to personalize your emails, understanding which links resonate with your audience can help tailor emails to their interests.
For instance, Contoso used link insights to identify which product links were most popular among their customers. They then featured these products more prominently in future emails, leading to a sales increase for those items.
Optimize your email design and layout based on customer behavior across devices
Customers interact with emails using a range of technologies and devices. Understanding the devices and user agents your customers use to interact with your emails is crucial, as it can help you optimize your email design, content, and delivery to align with your audience’s preferences.
In real-time journeys under email insights, you can now get info into the type of applications and platforms your customers use to engage with your emails. You can get data about: device type, email client, operating system, and browser type. By leveraging device data you can optimize your email strategy.
For instance, if most of your customers use mobile devices to read your emails, ensuring your email design is responsive and mobile-friendly becomes essential.
Moreover, knowing the most popular email clients among your customers can guide your testing efforts. By focusing your testing on these platforms, you can ensure that your emails display correctly for most of your audience, improving the overall user experience.
Consequently, by tailoring your email design and content to align with the technologies most used by your audience, you ensure seamless readability for your messages and ultimately increase customer interaction and loyalty.
For example,Contoso used email by device type, and they noticed that a significant portion of their customers were using mobile devices to interact with emails and opened emails on Gmail. By ensuring their email designs are responsive, mobile-friendly, and testing how it renders on Gmail, they increase click-through rates and reduce their bounce rates.
Identify your audience preferences to personalize your email content
Each audience has unique preferences and specific interests. By gaining insights into what content resonates with your customers you can increase open rates and reduce unsubscribes. Variation Insights serve as a powerful tool in this regard, offering an in-depth analysis of the performance of each email variation you’ve sent. It equips you with a comprehensive understanding of essential interaction metrics, including unique opens, unique clicks, the number of messages delivered, open rate, click rate, spam messages, and unsubscriptions for each variant of your email campaign.
By harnessing these insights, you can easily identify which links and content engage each audience, as well as understanding which audience is the most engaged, enabling you to refine your content strategy effectively. This data-driven approach ensures your messaging remains relevant and impactful for each audience.
For instance, Contoso used variation insights to understand which types of products were most appealing to different segments of their audience. Subsequently after tailoring their new email content to match these preferences, they saw an increase in engagement and an increase in product sales.
Understanding your audience is crucial in email marketing. It is the base upon which successful campaigns are built. Thanks to Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys advanced analytics features, you get invaluable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and engagement patterns. Whether it’s optimizing email design based on device usage, visualizing engagement patterns to refine content, evaluating link performance to inform strategy, or identifying audience preferences for personalized content, these analytics tools are designed to optimize your email marketing effectiveness.
Ultimately, these advanced analytics features not only demystify customer engagement but also offer a roadmap to continuously optimize your email marketing campaigns. Ensuring your messaging hits the mark every time, fostering stronger customer relationships, and driving business growth.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
Modern enterprises that offer a diverse range of products and services have equally diverse needs and challenges, including managing complex growth, optimizing costs, and ensuring profitability. These organizations require agile solutions that can adapt to evolving business needs and support smarter decision-making. Microsoft is dedicated to addressing these challenges by providing robust, scalable ERP solutions through Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Transform your ERP processes with agents in Dynamics 365
Join us for an exciting session on the future of ERP systems with Dynamics 365.
Microsoft being recognized as a Leader in Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric and Product-Centric Enterprises*, from our perspective, highlights the ability of Dynamics 365 to deliver flexible, composable ERP solutions that meet these diverse needs of modern organizations to drive results across financial models, operational processes, and organizational structures.
Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises**Figure 2: Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises**
For example, BDO, one of the largest accounting and advisory networks in the world, successfully unified its complex tax and accounting services using Dynamics 365 Project Operations and Microsoft Copilot. By connecting their data with AI-driven tools, BDO’s teams have gained critical insights and efficiencies with enhanced visibility across projects and clients.
With Dynamics 365 and Copilot, they have streamlined project oversight and empowered their teams with actionable insights, enhancing their service delivery and customer satisfaction. Read the full story here.
Empowering leaders with financial, operational, and organizational agility
For today’s leaders facing complex growth, cost, and profitability challenges, Dynamics 365 provides a scalable ERP system foundations that can adapt to evolving business needs—empowering faster adaptation, smarter decision-making, and optimized performance. This achievement positions Dynamics 365 as an essential partner for leaders committed to transforming their organizations to thrive in today’s rapidly changing markets.
Financial agility to drive strategic decisions
Leaders today need financial clarity and flexibility to make bold, data-backed decisions—whether for mergers and acquisitions activity, international expansion, adaptive pricing, or new product and service offerings. Dynamics 365 can provide a financial backbone that goes beyond traditional ERP systems, enabling leaders across finance, operations, and strategy to assess complex scenarios, plan for the future, streamline compliance, and mitigate risk. Business models are shifting and hybrid revenue streams like subscription and consumption-based models are becoming more prevalent; Dynamics 365 supports organizations in navigating this complex landscape.
Through embedded analytics and AI-powered insights, like business performance planning and analytics capabilities, Dynamics 365 helps ensure that decision-makers have the financial, operational, and organizational visibility they need to stay agile. By aligning financial operations with strategic goals, leaders can pivot confidently with a product designed to support compliance, enhance audit readiness, and improve security. Dynamics 365 can also empower executives with the insights needed to support rapid, impactful financial decisions, positioning them to meet today’s demands while planning for future growth.
Operational agility to build resilient and adaptive processes
Operational agility is essential for organizations striving to deliver products and services on time, within budget, and at scale. Dynamics 365 equips leaders with tools to help develop resilient processes that can adapt to changes in supply chain dynamics, regulatory environments, and shifting customer expectations. Real-time data and predictive AI-driven insights help organizations proactively manage inventory, resources, and service delivery.
Whether focused on delivering products, services, or a combination of both, Dynamics 365 offers the flexibility to meet diverse customer needs with tailored pricing and delivery models. This scalability enables leaders to optimize operations to drive efficiency, even as market conditions fluctuate. The composable ERP approach of Dynamics 365 helps to ensure that organizations can streamline operations, enabling teams to respond to customer demands with speed, accuracy, and consistency.
Organizational agility to empower people for strategic impact
In a modern organization, empowering people with the right data and workflows is key to driving strategic impact. Dynamics 365 supports leaders in fostering agile, cross-functional teams that can operate with autonomy, making informed decisions aligned with organizational objectives. A composable architecture—in addition to Copilot and agents—help Dynamics 365 connect employees to the insights they need, promoting a culture of proactive decision-making and collaboration.
This adaptable structure is particularly beneficial for hybrid business models that blend product and service offerings as it breaks down silos, allowing teams to work fluidly across departments. Dynamics 365 supports leaders in building an environment where empowered employees can focus on high-impact work, aligning their efforts to drive outcomes that matter.
Why recognizing Microsoft as a Leader in cloud ERP systems for product and service centric enterprises matters
Industry recognition, such as our inclusion in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report, helps support the unique ability of Dynamics 365 to serve organizations regardless of their business focus, helping to ensure leaders have the tools they need to adapt as business models evolve. For service-centric enterprises, Dynamics 365 delivers essential tools for managing timelines, budgets, and resources. Product-centric organizations benefit from advanced supply chain and manufacturing functionalities that drive efficiency and control.
By supporting evolving business objectives and complex blended business models involving both product- and service-centric operations, Dynamics 365 helps organizations scale confidently. Dynamics 365 further empowers leaders to be agile and responsive, meeting the demands of a diverse and interconnected market.
A strategic approach to ERP modernization
Gartner’s dual Leader recognition of Microsoft, in our view, underscores the strength of Dynamics 365 as a flexible, adaptive ERP solution designed to meet the needs of today’s complex business landscape. By delivering insights and tools that support transformation across financial, operational, and organizational models, including Business performance planning and Copilot, Dynamics 365 empowers leaders to align their strategies with agile, performance-driven ERP systems.
The future of business relies on AI – first business processes with autonomous agents as catalysts transforming how work gets done and how operations are managed. We recently announced new pre-built agents that become part of your workflow autonomizing execution of business processes and performing the tasks alongside your teams like confirming product orders, reconciling financial transactions, and managing time and expense reporting. Your teams can scale better and achieve better business outcomes, including the ability to:
Consistently meet customer demand on time.
Enhance cash flow visibility to help make faster and better business decisions.
Promptly invoice customers and ensure projects stay on track and within budget.
Now more than ever, ERP modernization requires a strategic approach that champions agility, empowers teams, and drives impactful results across the organization. Dynamics 365 provides the foundation for leaders to turn their strategic vision into reality, supporting innovation, resilience, and sustained success in an evolving world.
We invite you to watch an exciting session on the future of ERP systems with Dynamics 365 recorded at Microsoft Ignite 2024. You’ll discover the transformative power of AI in ERP systems and how the latest advancements in generative AI are paving the way for more autonomous ERP processes and scenarios.
For more information on Dynamics 365 AI-driven ERP systems, you can request a demo or take a tour today.
*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.
Source: Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises,” Greg Leiter, Robert Anderson, Dixie John, Tomas Kienast, David Penny, November 11, 2024.
Source: Gartner, “Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Service-Centric Enterprises,” Robert Anderson, Denis Torii, Sam Grinter, Naveen Mahendra, Tomas Kienast, Johan Jartelius, November 4, 2024.
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