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Oracle has released its Critical Patch Update for October 2021 to address 419 vulnerabilities across multiple products. A remote attacker could exploit some of these vulnerabilities to take control of an affected system.
CISA encourages users and administrators to review the Oracle October 2021 Critical Patch Update and apply the necessary updates.
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2021 has been an interesting year as we embrace the new hybrid world while bringing back the best practices from our old life and work style. With all these changes, the need for products and services to adapt to our new norm has become more important than ever. Sales organizations need solutions that are fluid, dynamic, and cloud-based. During our recent LinkedIn Live session (The Evolution of the Modern CRM), we had the honor to hear from industry sales leader, Santina Franci, Microsoft’s VP of Business Applications, and Amanda Homes, CEO of The Ultimate Sales Machine, as they provided us with gems to help up-level digital sellers.
Amanda mentioned the Dream 100 strategy referencing from her father’s book, The Ultimate Sales Machine, and how this strategy focuses heavily on a small group of clients who purchase your product the most. Implementing sales efforts to narrow down your best clients and focusing your resources on a select group will help yield higher sales. This strategy is much more effective than cold calling 2,000 clients with the slight hope of future leads. It is “the fastest and least expensive way to double sales.” To implement this strategy, you need data from your customer, which can be very complex with the amount of data we receive on a day-to-day basis.
For many sales teams, implementing the technology and human skills to keep up with the evolving demands of digitally savvy customers may seem like a stretch, even by 2025. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales accelerator helps sellers work faster and smarter with a prioritized work list of the next best lead or opportunity, allowing them to engage through their customers’ preferred channel with integrated email, phone dialer, and a Microsoft Teams channel. Sellers are equipped with timely, AI-driven insights and recommendations based on customer events and needs, so sales teams know when to offer customer guidance.
Sellers now have the information and insights to have more meaningful conversations. It is ultimately still your decision on how to proceed with your sale strategy, but these tools can give you a better view of your decision.
As a seller, you are constantly reaching out via email to potential clients, but out of your pool, how many are ready to buy? Amanda mentioned that about 3 percent of clients are in the buying now category, 7 percent are open to your product, and 90 percent are not interested in you, your product, or service. As sellers, we send out emails to that 90 percent of potential customers, explaining our product, while the consumers have no interest in the product or service in the first place. It can be advantageous to educate the consumer on why this product can be of interest instead of explaining the features of the product itself. Being able to educate your customer about the current landscape of their business and the challenges they might face will put you in a better position to market your product to them.
In the era of digital selling, even now more than before, email is one of the most used avenues of contacting new customers. To run an educational marketing strategy, your CRM must be able to integrate with your communication platform, so that all aspects can work together. Not having to rely heavily on manual labor to ingest, respond, and avoid mistakes when communicating with your customers will in return free up time for sellers to further their personal and intimate relations with their customers. Microsoft Dynamics 365 allows you to integrate your communication platform and add applications that can ingest, send, and alert sellers of high-value customers. Collaborative apps from Dynamics 365, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft 365bring together the right people, both inside and outside the companywith new ways to see who is available to chat, call, and collaborateall right from within Dynamics 365 or Teams. Sellers can also bring in resources from across the organization and across the globe in real-time to ensure they have the most up-to-date context.
“On average three out of four salespeople are ineffective at their job.0.08 percent of universities offer sales as a major or minor” as mentioned by Amanda. Without a proper educational background, it is understandable why leads are being missed, follow-up is lacking, and referrals have missteps; it usually all boils down to the human reaction to rejection. After hours, days, and weeks of customer interaction, the last thing you want to hear is, “I am not interested.” With social platforms being such a powerful player in this arena, we must look towards social selling and bring back the element of human empathy. Having the strength to let go of the fear of rejection and instead use tools to help enable social engagement.
With the pandemic, social selling has been an important pillar for sellers around the world and with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365, the ability to socially interact with customers has been made easier. Being able to comment on a post with something engaging or clever brings back the empathy sellers have been struggling with. Actual human interaction, and showing you care, will go a long way when creating relationships with new customers. With conversation intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales, sales leadersand the sellers themselvesreceive real-time insights about the customer’s priorities, sentiments, and emotions during the actual conversation. Also, customer mentions of competitors are flagged for instant follow-up. This helps the seller take action during the call, and it allows the sales leader to help through guided selling. Having the proper tools helps get rid of the fear of rejection.
Watch the recap of our LinkedIn live session: The Evolution of the Modern CRM
As the market evolves, we as sellers must level up as well. In this day and age, having the correct strategy is only half the battle. It is imperative to have the tools and the platform that can help integrate all avenues into one. Santina and Amanda deep dive into this subject. Be sure to check out the recap of the LinkedIn session to gain further insights and learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales.
The post 3 secrets to optimize your sales strategy appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
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Recently Microsoft HLS put on a webinar “Enhance Your Employee Experience with MS Viva.” This all up, high level webinar, led by Microsoft’s Michael Gannotti, covered all four of the current Microsoft Viva modules. Covered were Viva Connections, Viva Insights, Viva Topics, and Viva Learning. To provide deeper insight into each of the Viva modules, and to help customers test and investigate these modules, Microsoft HLS is putting on a 4-part webinar series “Microsoft HLS Viva Webinar Series.” You can read about each of the deep dive webinars below as well as download the individual calendar invites for each. Each session will be delivered by Michael Gannotti, Principal Technical Specialist, Microsoft HLS.
Microsoft Viva Connections – The Personalized Next Gen Intranet for Engaging Employees
Microsoft Viva Connections delivers a role based “curated, company-branded experience that brings together relevant news, conversations, and resources in the apps and devices you use every day.” – Viva Connections. Microsoft Viva Connection is designed not only to inform employees but to also engage them in a meaningful fashion that help reduce feelings of disconnectedness that can arise in a hybrid workplace.
Agenda:
Microsoft Viva Insights – Improving Employee Productivity and Well Being
Microsoft Viva Insights provides powerful, actionable, insights to “improve productivity and wellbeing with data-driven, privacy-protected insights and recommendations.” – Viva Insights
Microsoft Viva Insights enables employees to get personal insights in the flow of work as well as assists employees in managing their day, priorities, breaks, and more. Microsoft Viva Insights also helps managers address team stressors, productivity, and avoid employee burnout. Finally, Microsoft Viva Insights generates valuable insights and reports for business leaders that address challenges within the workplace. In all of these scenarios Microsoft Viva Insights is designed to keep employee data safe, private, while helping to enable organizations to maintain compliance with industry and regional requirements.
Agenda:
Microsoft Viva Topics – Automatically Organize Content/Expertise Across Your Organization Improving Ease of Information Discovery/Use
Microsoft Viva Topics “automatically organizes content and expertise across your organization, making it easy for people to find information and put knowledge to work.” – Viva Topics
With Microsoft Viva Topics you can turn content into knowledge using AI to reason over your organization’s data and automatically identify, process, and organize content. You can organize knowledge, improving topics by combining AI and human expertise. Finally, make knowledge easy to discover by automatically displaying topic cards across Microsoft 365 apps to enable knowledge discovery in the context of your work.
Agenda:
During the Microsoft Viva Insights webinar attendees will:
Microsoft Viva Learning – Bringing Together the Continuum of Learning from AdHoc Projects to LMS hosted Compliance Training
“Empower employees to discover, share, recommend, and learn from content libraries across your organization with this center for learning in Microsoft 365” – Viva Learning
With Microsoft Viva Learning employees can easily discover, recommend, and share all learning within and organization including Sharepoint content, 3rd party learning/training packages, Microsoft public resources, formalized Learning Management Systems (LMS), and more.
Agenda:
During the Microsoft Viva Insights webinar attendees will:
Thanks for visiting – Michael Gannotti LinkedIn | Twitter
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When the working world split between those who could work from home and those who could not, the frontline transformed beyond anyone’s expectations. Frontline workers—the associates at the forefront of your customer interactions, the clinicians delivering patient care, and those running your operations on the ground—have long been underserved by technology and are only now…
The post 3 ways to support frontline workers in a hybrid world appeared first on Microsoft 365 Blog.
Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.
This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.
CISA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA) have released joint Cybersecurity Advisory (CSA): BlackMatter Ransomware.
Since July 2021, malicious cyber actors have used BlackMatter ransomware to target multiple U.S. critical infrastructure entities, including a U.S. Food and Agriculture Sector organization. Using an analyzed sample of BlackMatter ransomware and information from trusted third parties, this CSA provides cyber actor tactics, techniques, and procedures and outlines mitigations to improve ransomware protection, detection, and response.
To reduce the risk of BlackMatter ransomware, CISA, FBI, and NSA encourage organizations to implement the recommended mitigations in the joint CSA and visit StopRansomware.gov for more information on protecting against and responding to ransomware attacks.
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Log Analytics continues it’s journey to improve and fine tune our experiences.
One of the core Log Analytics experiences is the ability to save, share and re-use queries.
We have recently invested in updating and upgrading our query experience with a new modern UI.
Today we are happy to announce that all of our query experiences will be consolidated in the same UI – allowing a single experience for all types of queries in Logs.
Query explorer’s functionality is now available in our new query experience only.
The query explorer experience is fully replaced by the new UI.
Please note, there’s no change to any of the API experiences – so everything ‘simply works’, there’s no investment nor changes needed to enable the new experiences.
All Log Analytics experiences have been consolidated to a new, modern UI in the Logs blade.
See the following articles for additional details:
1. Log Analytics Legacy Queries in the new Query UI
2. Legacy Queries Save/Edit Experience
Alongside supporting our Legacy Queries, the team has recently introduced a new way for saving, sharing and managing queries in Log Analytics- Query packs.
Using Query packs to save and manage your queries has a lot of advantages over using Legacy Queries. to name a few:
1. Resource centric queries – Legacy Queries only work in Log Analytics workspaces and Application insights and are attached only to one workspaces/AI component. Query packs may be used in all Log Analytics context and may be shared between different resources.
2. Rich metadata and smart filtering – Query packs queries contain rich metadata allowing more control over the queries and easier management and discovery experiences.
3. Enhanced security – Query packs are ARM objects. As such, you may manage access and security at the query pack level
4. Manage queries using code – Query packs API supports advanced deployment and management of your query packs and queries.
We recommend using query packs to manage your Log Analytics queries.
To learn more about query packs – click here.
We appreciate your feedback! comment on this blog post and let us know what you think of the this change.
You may also use our in app feedback feature to provide us with additional feedbacks:
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