Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Sales in 2024 release wave 2
Important
The 2024 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2024 to March 2025. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Sales.
Overview
Dynamics 365 Sales is a market-leading sales application designed to help businesses manage their sales processes, improve customer engagement, and drive revenue growth.
In 2024 release wave 2, we're focused on the following capabilities:
- Natural language copilot experiences that allow sellers to summarize information across multiple entities and find the most impactful work.
- A new "full screen" Copilot Home page that provides curated insights and actions specific to the role of the user, seller, or sales manager.
- Helping sellers find high-quality leads using AI-powered insights.
- Empowering sales managers with insights about their sales pipeline.
Updates to Dynamics 365 Sales 2024 release wave 2
Investment areas
Administration and extension experiences
The administration and extension experiences within Dynamics 365 Sales are powerful features that empower sales teams to tailor and elevate the application's functionality to meet their business needs. Administrators play a pivotal role in shaping the application's behavior by configuring settings, overseeing security roles, and seamlessly integrating with external services, ensuring that the application aligns with their organizational requirements.
Extensibility experiences offer a versatile toolkit for sales operations teams and administrators, enabling them to customize out-of-the-box capabilities and craft custom solutions. These capabilities encompass the creation of plugins, workflows, and web resources, allowing users to extend the out-of-the-box capabilities of the Dynamics 365 Sales solution. This level of customization not only enhances the application's adaptability but also provides the means to address unique business challenges, ensuring a more tailored and efficient experience for all users.
Copilot and AI innovation
Sellers spend a lot of time managing complex customer relationships and many sales teams struggle to scale seller experiences. Seller productivity in terms of time management and efficiency is key to success. Copilot is an AI assistant that helps sales teams be more productive and efficient in their daily work. It has a chat interface that sellers can use to get a quick summary of their opportunity and lead records, catch up on updates, prepare for meetings, and read the latest news about their accounts.
Lead management
Lead management in Dynamics 365 Sales helps determine if a lead or prospect is a good fit for your product or service by understanding customer needs and aligning solutions to those needs.
The pipeline generation process involves deeply understanding customer needs, challenges, and buying habits and providing an overview of solutions that best meet their specific requirements. Dynamics 365 Sales streamlines this process by offering capabilities for outreach, prospecting, and researching and qualifying leads, ensuring that sales efforts are focused on activities with the highest impact.
This product aids in boosting the qualified pipeline by providing AI-powered assistance during the sales process. Discovering leads from service interactions ensures that no potential lead is overlooked, while the automation of follow-up communications through an agent enhances response rates and keeps prospects engaged. Additionally, the system automatically disqualifies low-intent leads, helping to maintain a clean and focused lead pipeline.
Personalized email engagement, enabled by using one's own tone of voice, further improves interaction rates. Finally, augmenting research with custom insights and knowledge sources empowers sales teams with relevant information, thereby enhancing their ability to meaningfully connect with prospects. Collectively, these features provide a robust framework for effective sales qualification, driving better customer engagement and higher conversion rates.
Sales engagement and execution
Sales engagement and execution encompass defining and implementing sales strategies while actively engaging with customers to drive conversions. Sales execution involves the practical implementation of a sales plan, including prospecting, pitching, negotiating, and closing deals to achieve revenue targets. On the other hand, sales engagement focuses on fostering meaningful interactions and building relationships with prospects and customers throughout the sales cycle. Capabilities in this bucket will help sellers build sales strategies or effectively execute them.
Seller experiences
Seller experiences focus on features and tools that are meticulously designed to cater to the unique needs and challenges faced by sellers in their daily lives. These seller-centric solutions empower sales professionals to efficiently manage customer data, monitor deal progress, facilitate team collaboration, engage with customers, enhance sales conversations, and deliver timely value to expedite deal closures.
The primary objective of these offerings is to streamline and simplify the day-to-day tasks of sellers, enabling them to operate with heightened efficiency and effectiveness. By leveraging these capabilities, sellers can not only navigate their professional responsibilities more seamlessly but also discover avenues to optimize their time and resources, ultimately resulting in increased productivity and a greater number of successful deal closures.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Sales below:
For application administrators
User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.
Get the most out of Sales
| Helpful links | Description |
|---|---|
| Release plan | View all capabilities included in the release. |
| Licensing | Improve your understanding of how to license Sales. |
| Product documentation | Find documentation for Sales. |
| User community | Engage with Sales experts and peers in the community. |
| Upcoming events | Find and register for in-person and online events. |
| Product trials | Get started with Sales. |