Important updates to Dynamics 365 Sales & Marketing in the 2022 release wave 2

Dynamics 365 Sales is a powerful solution that combines the power of sales force automation with AI-driven insights to enable smarter selling and improve conversion rates. Dynamics 365 Marketing is a marketing automation tool that enables organizations to build targeted campaigns, track and nurture prospects, and successfully transition leads to sales. Many businesses utilize both of these systems together for unified marketing and sales processes.

As with all Dynamics 365 products, Microsoft releases two waves of new features and updates per year. In this post, we will highlight the top new features for Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing in the 2022 release wave 2.

Send text messages from the Sales Accelerator workspace

A new feature will be made available in March 2022 that allows sellers to send text messages to customers directly from the Sales Accelerator workspace, without leaving the application. Many sellers and customers find SMS a convenient and effective channel for communication. With this new feature, sellers will be able to configure an SMS step as part of any sequence to send reminders or updates before and after key events. Key functionalities of this new capability include:

• Sales managers can choose a service provider for sending and receiving SMS
• SMS and automated SMS may be added as a step in a sequence
• Sellers can create and add SMS templates in the configured sequence step
• Sellers can send SMS directly from within the Sales Accelerator workspace
• Access to past SMS interactions in context

Enhanced sequence creation experience with new designer

In the 2022 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft has enhanced the user experience and features of the sequence designer. With this update and enhancements, the sequence creation experience will be consistent across Dynamics 365 Marketing customer journey building and Dynamics 365 Sales sequences. The new sequence designer makes it easy for sales managers and operations teams to:

• Edit a sequence step with a side panel with an improved experience
• Discover and provide an exit criterion for a sequence
• Use an exit icon to intuitively display the end of any sequence icon
• Easily save changes with a single click

New seller dashboard

In March 2023, a new dashboard will be made available to sellers to help them monitor everything they are involved in.  Sellers are often involved in multiple sales activities while managing relationships to increase revenue opportunities. To help improve performance and efficiency, sellers can use this dashboard to review and recalibrate any execution efforts as needed. Sellers can use the dashboard to monitor their progress and unlock a summarized view of activities they are involved in.

Easily identify and manage duplicate leads

Duplicate leads can be detrimental to the process of nurturing a lead if multiple colleagues attempt to connect with the same prospect. This may display a lack of streamlined communication from your organization and result in a negative perception of your company. Additionally, duplicate leads can negatively impact your organization’s sales reporting and data consistency. In the Dynamics 365 Sales 2022 release wave 2, a new feature was added to help users identify and manage duplicate lead records found in your system. With this new feature, system admins can:

• Configure parameters to be considered for duplicate detection of leads
• Delete duplicate leads as necessary

Improve lead quality with the new email validation feature

Sellers rely on email to connect with prospects and nurture sales outcomes. However, email addresses are often not regularly validated. This can lead to reduced quality of data over time. Currently in public preview, a new email address validation feature was added to Dynamics 365 Sales to flag addresses in your system that are in the wrong format, have expired, or have a fictitious domain. Additionally, by cleaning up data, sellers can prioritize leads that have valid email addresses.

This new email validation feature will help sellers:

• Lower email bounce rates
• Improved engagement rates
• Better return on your invested time

Create sales activities such as tasks and phone calls directly from journeys

New capabilities to help marketers to nurture leads and opportunities with real-time journeys will be in public preview in February 2023. With the Dynamics 365 Marketing 2022 release wave 2, marketers will be able to create sales activities such as tasks and phone calls directly from journeys. This capability ensures that leads will get individualized attention at the right time, increasing engagement. Marketers will also be able to activate a sales sequence to accelerate a deal while ensuring that sellers receive automated recommendations. With this new feature, marketers can:

• Quickly respond to leads by routing them directly to sales agents
• Add sales activities to nurture journeys
• Trigger a sales sequence in Dynamics 365 Sales to provide recommendations for the seller who receives the lead

New segment builder with drag and drop logic

In the 2022 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Marketing, the segment builder received several enhancements. Marketers need to be able to target the right audience in order to maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns. Segments are an impressive tool that marketers can use to ensure they are targeting the right audience. With the new segment builder, users can now build segments effortlessly using natural language or by using an easy drag-and-drop logic builder that does not require specialized knowledge of complex data structures or logical operations. Additionally, with the new segment builder users can preview the members and estimate the size of segments during the creation process. They can also build segments using leads and customer journeys.

Increased capacity for leads and messages

To be in public preview in February 2023, additional capacity for contacts, leads, and messages will be added to Dynamics 365 Marketing. This added capacity will empower marketers to deliver personalized experiences at scale and grow business. The updated capacities for Dynamics 365 Marketing will include:

• 100 million marketing contacts – Previous capacity was only 30 million contacts. These are the contacts that you engage with via interactions such as emails, SMS, and push notifications.
• 300 million monthly outbound interactions – Previous capacity was 100 million outbound interactions per month. Outbound interactions include email, SMS, push notifications, or other custom channels.
• Create segments of up to 100 million marketing contacts
• 30-second response time – When a trigger is activated the appropriate message will be sent in approximately 30 seconds, enabling marketers to engage with customers in near real-time.

Enhanced reminder and recurring message orchestration capabilities

In the 2022 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Marketing, new capabilities will be added to enable marketers to send reminders and repeat messages to customers until a qualifying event or activity occurs. This feature encourages customer actions while simplifying journey logic, creation, and analysis. For example, a journey can be created for when a customer has started registering for a conference. Marketers can easily add reminders to the journey to remind the customer to complete the registration until they finish or until the registration window has closed. This new feature empowers marketers to:

• Simplify the logic, increase readability, and lower the maintenance of customer journeys
• Add a set of messages such as reminders to journeys
• Create reminders that end based on the customer taking action or based on a certain date or time

Create and manage multiple brand profiles for your organization

Brand profiles empower organizations to create consistently branded content efficiently. In the 2022 release wave 2, marketers will now be able to easily manage content across multiple brands. Organizations can create multiple brand profiles for their organization or various business units. Additionally, they will be able to define default senders for emails and set default social links for each brand.

Rand Group is your Dynamics 365 support partner to highlight new Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Marketing features that your organization should utilize, train your users on the new features, and perform system checks to ensure all modules are performing as planned after each release wave. Ready to start using these new features from the Dynamics 365 2022 release wave 2? Contact Rand Group today to schedule a consultation.