This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Customers are looking for connected business applications to increase productivity and agility. With digital selling, it’s imperative to have a landscape of work tools that orchestrate seamlessly across a seller’s workflow. For the best outcome, solutions must offer automated and integrated workflows, enhanced with prescriptive, yet configurable intelligence. The combination of Microsoft Teams, LinkedIn, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 generates insights directly into Dynamics 365 mobile and desktop workflows. And, our passion for intuitive user interfaces is showcased through a streamlined pipeline manager workspace with data visualizations that keep sellers on top of their key metrics. As part of release wave 1, updates for Dynamics 365 Sales showcase the best of Microsoft productivity, collaboration, and intelligence in one business appwith the sole purpose of guiding sellers to close deals faster. Keep sellers closing deals with an integrated workflow A complete digital selling solution with Microsoft Teams in Dynamics 365 Sales: In our 2021 release wave 1, an embedded Teams chat experience allows sellers to remain focused on sales motions while collaborating with stakeholders. While in Teams, a seller can search for Dynamics 365 information and share it with participants in Teams chats and channels. Also, a seller can log an activity, note, or other action in Dynamics 365 while having a Teams conversation. From Dynamics 365, sellers can access linked Teams chats and channels and view recent Teams chat lists. A seller can immediately act on important action items and information generated from deal-related Teams chats. Additionally, sellers can see a message preview, a collaborator’s Team avatar, and their meeting availability all from within Dynamics 365. LinkedIn Sales Insights in Dynamics 365: Sales teams will discover valuable account data in Dynamics 365 thanks to real-time market and company information powered by the LinkedIn network. Our solution brings up-to-date company profile data from LinkedIn to Dynamics 365 and associates it with every matched account. We remove the time-consuming and manual labor involved in reconciling out-of-date and irrelevant data. Now, it’s even easier to identify the fastest-growing target buyers and make key prioritization decisions when account planning. Optimized opportunity management with pipeline manager: In this release, we’re introducing an optimized seller workspace focused on opportunity management workflows. Sellers can immediately understand pipeline health with out-of-box interactive charts and metrics, and course-correct fading deals with AI-driven relationship and opportunity scores. One-click actions and built-in collaboration from Teams keep sellers focused on their sales workflow and remove the need to bounce in and out of disparate sales tools. Sellers can update key information fast with access to robust data that can be searched, filtered, and personalized in many ways. Automating sales tasks: The most common, mundane tasks that sellers are often required to perform can now be automated. No longer will a sales rep have to manually manage menial follow-up tasks based on a change to customer status. Creating a new email, editing an email with relevant information, sending an email to customers, and manually checking for responses can now be automated to keep sellers focused on selling, not juggling administrative busy-work. Level up sellers with intelligence across the deal cycle Conversational intelligence: Dynamics 365 Sales automatically extracts actionable business insights directly from sales calls. Dynamics 365 Sales processes and analyzes conversations across multiple channels and multiple formats, such as inbound and outbound audio and video calls, and calls that are made from a desktop computer, mobile device, and desk phone. Teams calls can be made directly from Dynamics 365 Sales. And, we have extended these capabilities to third-party telephony providers and other recording platforms used by our customers through admin configuration. Pipeline telemetry: Simple, intuitive, and out-of-the-box pipeline data visualizations will give sellers clear visibility into the deals in their pipeline. In this release, sales managers can enable KPIs for their sales teams through a new dashboard that allows them to track team progress in real time, providing insightful coaching and guidance throughout the sales cycle. Likewise, sellers can see their performance against management key metrics and proactively adjust to meet management expectations. Manager KPIs include a number of active leads in the org versus previous periods, conversion ratio between leads and opportunity, leads by source types, and per seller. Seller KPIs include a number of qualified leads, number of calls made, number of meetings scheduled, and estimated deal value. Activate a mobile safety net for successful customer engagements Meeting preparation card: The new Dynamics 365 Sales native mobile app provides sellers with relationship and logistics data sourced from LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook, and Dynamics 365 Sales. In a single meeting card, the seller knows key meeting details and attendee responses from Outlook, paired with up-to-date LinkedIn information. Dynamics 365 Sales data is pulled so the seller sees associated opportunity title, estimated revenue, closed date, pipeline phase, notes, and AI-generated reminders. Push notifications, smart deep linking, and lookups for Outlook calendars, emails, files, notes, and one-click launch of Teams meetings are additional key release wave 1 highlights for the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app. Conversation transcripts with follow-up actions: The mobile features introduced in release wave 1 save sellers from missing details from customer engagements. Sellers conduct numerous customer interactions from their mobile devices. Nuances can be easily overlooked, especially if the seller’s attention is spread across multiple items while speaking. Call transcriptions with market-leading natural language processing are now available in the Dynamics 365 Sales mobile app. The app will apply AI insights, sentiment analysis to the call transcripts, and provide suggested follow-up actions for the seller. And, each call will be automatically assigned to its relevant Dynamics 365 entity and populate the appropriate data fields within Dynamics 365, taking manual data management out of a seller’s day-to-day activities. Personalize your customer outreach for a seamless brand experience Enhanced Dynamics 365 Customer Voice surveys with customized scoring matrices: Gather and track the customer metrics that matter to your business, and respond swiftly, with Dynamics 365 Customer Voice. In this release, Dynamics 365 Customer Voice introduces enhanced headers, allowing users to upload custom images, specific branding imagery, and format text to create a more personalized survey experience. Additionally, significant survey scoring enhancements now include the ability to customize satisfaction metrics, creating a scoring index with points assigned to survey questions so organizations can analyze data in their preferred way. Dynamics 365 Customer Voice, automatically available for users with select Dynamics 365 applicationssuch as Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketingtransforms the organization’s ability to understand their customers. Sellers have been operating, and will continue to operate, in an almost entirely digital world. What has been made clear over the past year is that in order to succeed, sellers need a consolidated, streamlined, and integrated set of sales tools that allow them to conduct their day-to-day selling activities in a frictionless environment. And not only that, with the abundance of digital signals being created by the customers in a digital world, AI intelligence can guide sellers to more deals won, more often. Learn more Activate digital selling with Dynamics 365 Sales and realize your sales goals. Check out additional information about the 2021 release wave 1 highlights for Dynamics 365 Sales. Or, if you are ready to get started, discover how Dynamics 365 Sales can transform the way you do business

The post Intelligence and collaboration converge in Dynamics 365 Sales appeared first on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Blog.

Brought to you by Dr. Ware, Microsoft Office 365 Silver Partner, Charleston SC.