What’s new in Dynamics 365 Sales & Marketing in the 2023 release wave 1

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 2023 release wave 1.

In the 2023 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft enhances the Deal Manager with a new opportunity view with an intuitive experience for managing opportunities in a single workspace. This new view eliminates many processes that sellers would normally have to do to manage opportunities and streamlines everything into a single workspace. Sellers will be able to easily uncover deals that need attention right away. Additionally, the workspace can be customized to meet the unique needs of each seller.

With this new feature, sellers will be able to:

• Organize opportunities in the way that works for them
• Personalize views
• Update information quickly using the editable grid and side-panel
• Add notes and tasks
• See aggregations of metrics such as pipeline value and number of deals in the pipeline

In this release, Microsoft added additional features and enhancements to sales forecasting in Dynamics 365 Sales. First, users will now be able to configure forecasts for multiple business units. This means that companies with multiple business units can define different forecasts for each unit to track, monitor, and unlock insights to understand how each business unit is performing.

Additionally, in September 2023, Microsoft will release enhancements that enable sellers to create forecasts with a weekly or annual recurrence. Today, users can only configure monthly or quarterly forecast periods. With this new feature, organizations will be able to track their sales objectives at the interval that best fits their needs so they can forecast accordingly.

Available in September 2023, is a new AI-based feature that detects customer intent from emails to ensure that good quality leads are acted upon by the sellers at the right time. This feature helps fast-track the lead qualification process, increasing sales effectiveness and creating operational efficiencies in the lead management process.

In the 2023 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Sales, Microsoft enhances the up next form widget with AI to help sellers focus their attention on priority actions. The up next widget intuitively guides sellers to focus on critical tasks by displaying the upcoming actions assigned to an account. The enhancements to this working area include intelligent AI-based suggestions within the same widget to help guide the seller on follow-up actions. Sellers will see the suggestion surface and can decide to act or dismiss it.

For example, suggestions can include:

• Help in composing emails
• Automatic follow-up tasks
• Suggestion on product recommendations

In the 2023 release wave 2, Dynamics 365 Sales users will have access to a new focus mode to work through their records by completing updates and calls. With this update, sellers will be able to switch any sales view to focused mode to quickly work across their records. This view is ideal for sellers who move across records quickly and need to conduct actions like prospecting calls, record updates, and action management.

This functionality allows users to choose and work in the layout that best works for them. Key capabilities include:

• Switch between current grid and focused view with one click
• Access a consolidated set of filtering and sorting capabilities
• Define the structure and fields you want to see in the focused view

In addition to the features listed above, here are a few other noteworthy updates:

• Sales accelerator worklist items help sellers work efficiently
• Prevent duplicate record creation to improve data integrity
• Improved user experience with new and enhanced opportunity form
• Empower sellers to adapt sequences to personalize their sales approach
• Streamline sequence creation with looping of repeated steps and with templates
• Leverage manager dashboards to coach sellers

In the 2023 release wave 2 of Dynamics 365 Marketing, users will be able to keep sales, customer service, and finance teams in the loop by copying key recipients on email campaigns. This enables other teams to follow up on hot leads or reply to customer inquiries. With this feature, marketers can:

• Add up to five additional recipients to emails in the cc field
• Send to a specific cc recipient or use personalization to automatically select recipients based on the journey or audience
• Copy account managers to follow up with clients
• Include support teams for more efficient support
• Add key stakeholders to email communications to raise awareness

Scheduled for public preview in July 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing users will have access to new visuals in the out-of-the-box dashboards to track pipeline development and analyze the impact and contributions of journeys, marketing messages, and content at different stages of the business process. When using Dynamics 365 Marketing and Sales, users can further optimize pipeline velocity by aligning marketing and sales teams on common goals using a shared view of the pipeline.

• Unlock a comprehensive view to track accounts in the pipeline with seamless integration with Dynamics 365 Sales
• Understand the main drivers for lead generation and qualification
• Discover the most effective sources for high-quality leads

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) code enables users to track sources of traffic for your websites and landing pages enabling marketers to attribute conversions to the right source. Currently in public preview, Dynamics 365 Marketing will now automatically tag all messages with UTM parameters. This gives users full visibility into marketing contributions to web traffic and empowers marketers to optimize traffic and conversions. This new update includes the following features:

• Every link in outbound messages will be automatically appended with default UTM parameters
• Marketers can override the default UTM campaign parameters and insert custom ones

In the 2023 release wave 1 of Dynamics 365 Marketing, Microsoft will increase the capacity for marketing contacts to 100 million from 30 million. Additionally, the maximum monthly interactions will increase to 300 million per month from 100 million per month to empower marketers to deliver personalized experiences at scale. These additional interactions will empower users to grow business and increase customer base.

• Reach up to 100 million marketing contacts
• Deliver up to 300 monthly outbound interactions through email, SMS, push, or customer channels
• Create segments for up to 100 million marketing contacts
• Engage customers in near-real time with 30-second response time

Available for public preview in April 2023, a new lead scoring builder will help users prioritize the best leads, empower sellers, and maximize return on investments from marketing activities. With this feature, marketers will be able to use a new simple but powerful lead scoring builder to define scoring criteria and model more efficiently. This enables marketers to prioritize the most engaged leads from companies that match their ideal customer profile using engagement and profile-based scoring.

• Use the lead score builder to start quickly and update or continuously optimize the model
• Create lead scoring models with behavioral, demographic, or firmographic conditions
• Evaluate scoring model outputs and performance using a new set of enhanced insights
• Define lead qualification criteria and post-qualification actions

In the 2023 release wave, the form creation experience will be enhanced. With the new intuitive forms experience in real-time marketing, users can easily create modern forms with advanced capabilities without depending on developers. In this release, users can:

• Leverage a drag-and-drop editor that guides users through the form creation process
• Easily create a form without the need of a developer
• Instantly publish a form as a standalone page or embed the form into an existing page

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 2023 release wave 1? Contact Rand Group today to schedule a consultation.