Top new features in Marketing and Sales in Dynamics 365 release wave 2

Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Sales are two powerful applications that use artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to help teams deliver the right message at the right time, enable sellers, and turn prospects into customers. Many businesses leverage both these products together for a unified Marketing and Sales process.

As with all Dynamics 365 products, Microsoft releases two waves of new features per year. With 2021 Dynamics 365 release wave 2, Marketing is focused on helping users make faster and better decisions with AI, engaging customers in moments that matter across all touchpoints, and personalizing engagements for each customer. For Sales, Microsoft added new features that help sellers have contextually relevant conversations, focus on the highest priority activities, and collaborate using Teams to accelerate their pipeline.

Below is a recap of the top new features in Dynamics 365 release wave 2 from our team of experts.

Analytics and AI

Leveraging the power of analytics and artificial intelligence, Microsoft added new features that help users make faster and better decisions when creating emails and targeted segments. The three new features below became available on October 1.

• Use natural language to create targeted segments – You can now enable the creation of Marketing segment query blocks using natural language to describe the people you want to include, reducing the time it takes to get started creating a segment. Examples of how to describe your desired segment include “Contacts living in Chicago” or “Contacts with a birthday before next month”.
• A/B email testing – The new editor in Dynamics 365 Marketing now has the ability to A/B test your emails, allowing you to optimize the performance of your emails. Test the subject line, body elements including text and design, or the full content of the email and analyze which version performed better.
• Automatically generate content for emails – AI-based content ideas automatically generate a set of content snippets (based on provided key points) to serve as an inspiration for your email. You can review, select, and fine-tune generated content ideas based on your needs.

Moments-based

Microsoft announced several new features in Dynamics 365 release wave 2 that give the user more control over connecting Marketing insights with Customer Service, plus revamped tools and integrations to deliver powerful interactions.

• Azure data lake storage integration – Many customers choose to store their Customer Insights data in their own Azure Data Lake Storage. You can now use data stored there to build segments, specify conditions, and personalize messages to build rich, real-time journeys while maintaining full control over the underlying data. Public preview for this capability begins in February 2022.
• Twilio and TeleSign integration – Available October 1, SMS messaging through the Dynamics 365 Marketing mobile channel now integrates with Twilio and TeleSign for additional capabilities.
• Re-vamped email editor – The email editor will be updated in December to include precise drag-and-drop interactions, easy selection of elements, columns, or sections, and in-context menu for faster content creation.
• Visualize customer journey interactions in one location – When Customer Insights and Dynamics 365 Marketing are connected, all marketing interactions are available as activities in Customer Insights. You can include this combined timeline in Dynamics 365 apps with the Customer Card add-in solution or in a Power BI dashboard. This feature becomes available in December.

Personalization

Creating personalized journeys for customers based on their demographics and behaviors can help increase engagement. These three new features, rolling out from October to December, allow users automatically personalize journeys and emails.

• Augment customer journeys with Power Automate – Utilize Power Automate to trigger a customer journey or have a customer journey action trigger a different action. For instance, when a back-ordered item is back in stock, trigger a marketing campaign for customers who previously attempted to buy the item. Additionally, if a customer seeks feedback with a survey submission, update your team via a Teams channel in real time as feedback comes in automatically.
• Increased attribute availability in journey branching – With this release, you can now create journey branches based on any attribute associated with the customer or event trigger that started the journey, plus use relative dates. Examples include:
  • Checking the marital status of the contact
  • Checking if a customer’s birthday is this month or if their membership is up for renewal in the next 90 days
• Add lists of data to emails – You can now include lists of data that are specific to the individual receiving the email. For example, add a list of sessions in a conference registration email or a list of purchased items in an order confirmation email.

Accelerator workspace

The Sales accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales provides a tailored experience for sellers by minimizing the time they spend on their search for the best next customer to reach out to. In Dynamics 365 release wave 2, Microsoft added several new features to the accelerator workspace to boost efficiencies for sellers:

• Manager dashboard to view team performance and coach and guide sellers
• Organizations can define seller KPIs and see progress in real-time
• Updated intelligence worklist with customizable filtering and sorting capabilities
• New sequence management and tagging features to help sales enablement managers maintain customer engagement best practices
• Ready-to-use, preconfigured sales sequence templates for faster implementation that Microsoft developed based on best practices
• Ability to leverage LinkedIn Sales Navigator within a sequence
• Automatically route leads to the right sellers to improve lead qualification outcomes

Collaboration using Microsoft Teams

Announced earlier in 2021, Microsoft Teams users can gain access to Dynamics 365 data directly in Teams. Within the context of Dynamics 365 Sales, users of both applications will experience more efficiencies. Users can edit a Dynamics 365 Sales record from within in a Team chat or channel, plus share records in a Teams message to make collaboration easier. To boost productivity in meetings, users can now create and join Teams meetings directly from Sales, update records within the context of a meeting, capture notes during a meeting and have them sync back to Sales, and access real-time call analysis and insights during a meeting. Additionally, there are automated notification features between Dynamics 365 Sales and Teams including:

• Use @mentions in the timeline of a record and the user will be notified automatically in their Microsoft Teams chat
• Get notifications of AI-driven insights from Dynamics 365 Sales assistant
• Get Microsoft Teams chat notifications for the records you’re following; use the follow/unfollow feature in Dynamics 365 to get automatic notifications about the updates to sales records
• Configure the notifications that you want to receive within Microsoft Teams, where, and at what frequency

Forecasting and pipeline analytics

In Dynamics 365 release wave 2, Microsoft provides sales teams the ability to share their forecasts with other stakeholders.

• Administrators can filter user records from the forecast hierarchy to allow sellers and managers to view only the user records that are of interest for the sales forecasting process, decluttering the forecast grid
• Sales managers will be able to share as well as remove access to forecasts with any other Dynamics 365 user
• Using field augmentation, you can identify the fields and key values for training the AI model, such as whether a customer is new or returning, an email is legitimate or fake, recent activity, phone number length, and more
• Sellers will be able to get an annual or year-to-date view of forecasts

For users ready to start using these new features from Dynamics 365 release wave 2, Rand Group is your support partner to assist and recommend best practices. Contact Rand Group today to schedule a consultation.

Not yet utilizing Dynamics 365 Marketing or Dynamics 365 Sales at your company? Rand Group offers a 3-week pilot to visualize and evaluate either solution. We’ll set up a Marketing or Sales test environment using your organization’s data and processes allowing your team to explore key functionalities. At the end of the pilot, Rand Group will present the findings to key stakeholders on how the solution can transform your marketing, sales, and lead generation roadmap. Learn more about the Marketing pilot here or the Sales pilot here.

​