In Dynamics 365 Sales, you have the pre-built list views available, which you can customize by changing filter and columns. This is one example (and some of our favorite parts) of the extreme customizability of the app’s interface. You can build your own views with only the data you want to see. Then you can save those views to use later, share them with your team, work with that data, and even export it.

Soon, we’ll be seeing many of the features mentioned in Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 and Power Platform 2024 Release Wave 1 Plans--a lot of items will become generally available in April. While they may not be here just yet, there are a few things standout features that we think lots of CRM users will find value in.

As part of the 2024 Release Wave 1, Dynamics 365 CRM has been updated with a new modern look and feel. Early access to the New Look was rolled out in February 2024, with general availability in April 2024.

The New Look brings upon visual changes to make Dynamics 365 sleeker, more modern, and more intuitive to use. Here’s a breakdown of the subtle yet impactful changes you can expect to see.

If your company uses Microsoft business solutions such as Dynamics 365 Sales or Business Central, you’ve probably been seeing Copilot in your app recently. Copilot is Microsoft’s answer for how to begin integrating AI into your normal business processes and includes a variety of tools to improve efficiency, such as providing summaries and generating email content ideas.

Though it is true that every business handles its sales funnel a little differently, in broad strokes, an opportunity will be nurtured until it is either lost (if the prospect decides not to buy) or until they are ready to see a quote. Within CRM, the quote is both an extension of the Opportunity stage and a new record itself. So first we’ll talk about creating a quote from an opportunity, making a quote from scratch if you don’t have an associated opportunity, revising the quote, and then converting it into an order (if you handle orders in your CRM).

If you’ve done any A/B testing in the Outbound Marketing module, you’ll know that the system is primarily based around setting the tests up at the email-level since that is the primary focus of Outbound Marketing. Real-Time Marketing has a couple additional channel options, such as texting, outside of just sending emails. As such, it pulls the A/B testing back to the Journey-level. Rather than setting up an A/B test on an email and then adding the element to the customer journey, we instead will simply add an action to our journey and select “Test which variation performs better.”

Sandboxes are for playing around and testing customizations and features. Production environments are where you do your actual work. Now let’s dig in a little deeper into how to work with sandboxes, and how to move your sandbox content into a production environment if/when you want to!

Microsoft has announced that on September 1, 2023, Dynamics 365 Marketing and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights will be combined into a single product offering called Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. The new unified application will help users continue to deliver excellent customer experiences and harness customer data in ways that further brand loyalty and growth.

Although this sounds like a major change, there’s no need to panic. We’ve broken down everything you need to know about the unified app and how you can benefit from it.

Dynamics 365 Sales offers duplicate detection for your account and contact records. Duplicate detection works by flagging fields with identical unique values (last names, email addresses, phone numbers, company names, etc.—info that is unlikely to be common) across several records. From there, you can decide how to handle these overlaps.

Until recently, though, only account and contact records had duplicate detection. But no longer! Now you can create custom duplicate detection rules for other record types. And the first place we ran to implement these rules was for leads, which, as all sales and marketing individuals know, is perhaps the messiest entity in a CRM, due to their impermanent nature. After all, they are potential customers at the beginning of the sales funnel. Some of them work out, and lots don’t.

This is part 2 of a series exploring the tools and records that guide you along the sales process within Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales CRM system. In part 1, we covered Leads and their role in the sales process and within the system. If you haven’t read that part yet, you can catch up here: Exploring the sales process in Dynamics 365 Sales: Starting with Leads.

To put it broadly, bounced emails are ones that were unable to be properly delivered to a recipient’s mailbox. There are a variety of reasons that an email may have bounced and they fall into two main types: hard and soft.

One of Microsoft’s primary goals when updating old features or developing new ones for its fleet of business productivity apps is right there in the name: Productivity. One thing that can lead to slowdowns and hang-ups is navigating between a bunch of different pages. Even aside from the slowdowns, it just doesn’t feel as good for the user. A relatively new feature to Dynamics 365 CRM is Focused View. This feature is aimed at reducing the number of screens users have to jump between when working with different record types.

Access and security in Dynamics 365 CRM is a pretty big topic and can be a complex undertaking when you get into the granular details. It is the system administrator’s responsibility to configure and assign access and security, but proper setup impacts every single user, and it’s not a bad idea to have a general idea of how you and your coworkers are given access.

When we zoom out and look at it in broad strokes, your admin gives you access to CRM in three main ways: security roles, business units, and field-level security.

In this blog, we’ll discuss leads within Dynamics 365 Sales: how we get them there, what we do with them, and also how we move them from a lead into the next step of the sales funnel—an opportunity. In future blogs, we will discuss the sales process beyond this step.

Back in 2019, Microsoft implemented a new model for Dynamics 365 storage capacity. This was done in an effort to help organizations better take command of their database usages. The amount of data that organizations need to track and store has been ballooning as digital transformation progresses. Understanding data usage and storage is integral to maintaining a database of effective, relevant data.

In CRM, the command bar is the strip at the top of page that contains a bunch of different functions for the page. Recently, Microsoft has implemented an improved functionality for customizing the command bar to the Power Apps designer for CRM apps.

The first batch of new features will soon be available for Power Platform and the entire Dynamics 365 suite. 2023 Release Wave 1 will continue to enhance the way you work with your business data, create personalized lead engagement efforts, optimize your sales cycle, and support industry-specialized functions. Preview access is now available, allowing you to test and validate features in a sandbox environment, and will become generally available in April.

We’re always watching the latest and greatest changes coming to the Dynamics 365 suite to see how they can benefit our users. Lately, there have been a few helpful shifts regarding the timeline and forms within Dynamics 365 CRM apps that allow for better workflow and easier management of what you’re doing within the system. Although these features aren’t brand new—they are generally available and your administrator or partner can help get you started with them whenever you want—but we’re highlighting them since they may not be on your radar.

As your organization’s CRM or Power Platform system administrator, you’re responsible for overseeing the permissions, settings, and functionality available to all your users, and you want to ensure that everyone has access to what they need to do their jobs efficiently day in and day out. When new employees are added to the system, or when current users need increased permissions, each request must be reviewed and approved by you – and the faster they are approved, the faster they can get logged in and start on essential tasks.

Dynamics 365 CRM users were eagerly awaiting enhancements to grids, and this new Grid control feature is the natural evolution from the previous read-only grid control and editable grids in model-driven apps. With it, you can now edit grids and add nested grids in groupings, making it much easier to see the target data in one location. Let’s check out the other features it offers, as well.