The Microsoft Dynamics 365 sales accelerator helps sellers sell smartly by building a strong and prioritized pipeline, offering context, and suggesting next actions through sales sequences that expedite the sales process. We’ve made three improvements to sales accelerator that can help sellers be even more productive:

• Sellers can now build their own sales sequences
• We’ve made the sequence designer even easier to use
• Sellers can add the Up next widget to any form

Let’s examine each of these improvements in more detail.

Empowering sellers to build their own sales sequences

Before now, sales managers enforced best practices by defining a set of consecutive activities for their sellers to follow throughout their workday. Managers could connect these sequences to leads and opportunities that appeared in the sellers’ work queue. Sales sequences helped sellers prioritize their activities and focus on selling to be more productive and to better align to business processes.

Now, we’re empowering sellers to build their own sequences. Often sellers are in a better position to decide the best engagement strategy to follow with a prospect. Now they can create sequences for themselves and connect them to records. They can also personalize a sequence with their own language and steps.

The following screenshot shows the new functionality in the Personal settings > Sequences page in the Sales Hub app:

Use security roles to manage permissions to create, connect, and share sales sequences.

Improved design experience for sales sequences

As we give sellers the power to create sales sequences, we need to make sure it’s easy to do. That’s why we created a new sequence designer with a modern UX and an enhanced editing experience. Sellers will realize several immediate benefits:

• Consistency between the marketing journey and sales sequences means sellers don’t have to learn two different systems.
• A side panel makes editing easier and scalable with more space.
• Changes are automatically preserved in the browser and can be saved with a single click.
• The updated top command bar shows relevant options, leaving more space for editing.
• An exit icon effortlessly identifies the end of any sequence branch.
• Enhanced error handling enables easy identification and resolution of any errors.

Add the Up next widget to any form

Sales organizations may have hundreds or even thousands of records their sales teams are working on. As they start using sales sequences, they typically create a few to try out and use them to determine the best way to grow and scale based on business needs. The trouble with that is that then the organizations have a few records that are connected to sequences and a multitude of records that aren’t. For sellers, this means that only the few connected records appear in the Up next widget in their worklist, because the Up next widget is fed by sequences. They have to juggle the worklist and their leads, opportunities, and other entities tables, where their non-sequenced records live.

To solve this challenge, we now allow sellers to add the Up next widget to any form. Previously, the Up next widget and sales sequences were available only in the sales accelerator workspace.

To help new users easily discover the benefits of the sales accelerator, we’ve started adding the Up next widget to the default lead, opportunity, contact, and account forms. Sellers can easily start using the sales accelerator to create sequences, streamline customer interactions, and win more deals.

Learn more

New to Dynamics 365 sales accelerator? Watch the overview video and read the documentation: Configure the sales accelerator | Microsoft Learn

Read how to add the Up next widget to any form: Add the Up next widget to a custom form | Microsoft Learn

Read how to allow any security role to create or connect sequences: Sequences in sales accelerator | Microsoft Learn 

Read the seller guide to creating sequences: Create and connect sequences for yourself | Microsoft Learn 

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Sensor Data Intelligence, a new feature of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, helps you drive business processes based on automated IoT (Internet of Things) signals from machines and equipment on the production floor. With Sensor Data Intelligence, you can:

• Drive predictive maintenance with details collected from machines and equipment.
• Use a simple onboarding wizard instead of manually installing and configuring components in Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS).
• Configure, scale, and extend the solution as business logic running on your own Azure subscription.

Sensor Data Intelligence supports a variety of automated IoT scenarios

Sensor Data Intelligence supports several specific business scenarios, each with its own set of configuration options:

• Asset downtime: Accurately track the efficiency of machine assets by using sensor data to track machine downtime.
• Asset maintenance: Minimize maintenance cost and extend asset life by improving maintenance plans based on sensor readings of critical control points.
• Machine status: Ensure operation efficiency by using sensor readings to notify planners about machine outages and provide options for mitigating potential delays.
• Product quality: Ensure the quality of product batches by comparing sensor readings for properties of each product batch, such as moisture, temperature, or custom-defined quality metrics. The system notifies operators when deviations occur.
• Production delays: Use sensor readings to compare actual cycle time to planned cycle time, and notify supervisors when production isn’t on schedule.
• Custom scenarios: The architecture of Sensor Data Intelligence allows you to customize the out-of-box scenarios and even create new automated IoT scenarios to meet your unique business needs.

Fit equipment with automatic sensors for real-time monitoring and decision-making

You can fit your organization’s assets with a variety of automated IoT sensors, each designed to provide information for a specific purpose. For example, you might fit a metal stamping machine with a sensor that counts each stroke. You could then configure your system to receive a signal from that counter and set a threshold (for example, 40,000 strokes) at which Supply Chain Management should automatically generate a maintenance work order.

Enjoy fast, wizard-based setup for automated IoT scenarios

Sensor Data Intelligence is simple to onboard. Deploy a template of resources (including an Azure IoT hub and Azure stream analytics) by walking through a few steps in a wizard.

It’s just as fast and easy to add a new sensor to your system. Choose a scenario, identify the new sensor, and map it to the required system functionality.

Flexible and extendible Azure architecture lets you fine-tune the system

Because everything is deployed on your own Azure subscription, the solution is easy to scale and configure to your own requirements.

The following architectural diagram provides an overview of Sensor Data Intelligence and its components:

Learn more

Sensor Data Intelligence is a public preview feature of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. For more information, check out the Dynamics 365 release plan and the documentation.

The post Automated IoT sensors keep equipment running safely and effectively appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Sellers rely on email to reach out to contacts when working on deals. The new email address validation feature in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales flags email addresses in your customer relationship management (CRM) system that are in the wrong format or have an expired or fictitious domain. That lets your sellers connect with subscribers and boost their conversion rates without wasting time and energy trying to communicate with uninterested or non-existent customers.

Improve lead quality with email address validation

Email address validation in Dynamics 365 Sales finds and removes non-working email addresses in your CRM. This lets your sellers prioritize leads that have a valid email address for lower email bounce rates, improved engagement, and a better return on their time.

Email address validation looks for the following errors:

• Incorrect syntax: An address that does not have both a username and an email domain
• Disposable domain: An address that has a known disposable or temporary email domain
• Test or spam address: An address that has known indicators of a test or spam address in the email header or metadata, IP address, HTML code, and email content and formatting
• Expired address: An email account that has expired and can no longer receive or send email
• Address with unregistered domain: A domain that does not appear in the domain registry

You can view flagged email addresses on primary entity and sales insights forms as well as on the Up next widget and work list items.

If you try to send an email to a flagged address, a notification gives you the reason the system marked the address as not valid.

• If you know the email address is correct, select Mark valid. The system marks the address as valid and removes the alert.
• If you don’t know the email address is correct but you still want to send the email, select Compose anyway.

More data hygiene improvements in Dynamics 365 Sales

In addition to email address validation, we have also implemented duplicate detection for leads. Dynamics 365 Sales uses AI and “fuzzy” matching algorithms to detect duplicate leads. By “fuzzy,” we mean that the system identifies as duplicates not only records that have exactly matching field values, but also records that have approximately matching field values. This helps sellers focus on the records that truly matter and clears out any “noise” that they would otherwise have to spend time manually reducing.

On top of that, we are continuously working on even more improvements to data hygiene in Dynamics 365 Sales to help your sellers be more focused and productive. 

Next steps

Increasing your sales team’s productivity could be as simple as eliminating leads with incomplete, non-working, or spam email addressesand Dynamics 365 Sales makes it easy.

To get started with email address validation, read the documentation:

• For admins: Enable email validation (preview) | Microsoft Learn 
• For sellers: Work with invalid email addresses (preview) | Microsoft Learn

Not a Dynamics 365 Sales customer yet? Take a guided tour and sign up for a free trial at Dynamics 365 Sales overview.

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