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.

If you’re considering adding a sales-oriented CRM to your tech stack, you’re likely shopping around to find the system and subscription level that suits your business needs. Even within Dynamics 365 Sales, there are lots of different features and tiers that may require some digging through details to find your best fit.

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.

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.

On its own, Microsoft Teams give great tools like messaging, calling, file sharing, and much more. Dynamics 365 Sales, on the other hand, provides a plethora of tools for sales teams to better engage leads and customers. By combining these two products, we can expand the capabilities of both. Teams can be integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales to allow for conversations to start directly from records, initiate calls to customers, or link records into Teams channels.

Since 2022 Release Wave 2 updates were announced around August of this year, new features have been appearing in Dynamics 365 CRM apps. Some of these are flying under the radar, while others are front and center and have not been missed. Whether the former or the latter, we wanted to raise up a few features that we find particularly exciting and useful to admin and end users!

Microsoft has released plans for this year’s Release Wave 2, with new features and improved usability across the Dynamics 365 suite of applications – Dynamics 365 Marketing, Sales, Business Central, and more.

If you don’t want to read the entire Release Wave plan, here are the updates you should know about.

Often, there are too many disconnected apps at play in the workplace, so the challenge is to ensure that any additional app you add to your tech stack is multifaceted and adds tangible value to your work process. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems provide useful tools to teams who attract leads, build rapport with opportunities, and support current clients. Here are a few of the ways that CRM apps within the Dynamics 365 suite can be more than just a CRM.

Of top priority for sales teams is the question of how they can become more efficient, more streamlined, while also improving their ability to land more leads and opportunities. Well, as part of the same Microsoft platform, Dynamics 365 Sales and Outlook present a unique ability to make that happen. Managing customer data, creating strong and informed relationships, and optimizing your daily work all become easier when you lean into the interconnectivity of these systems.

Understanding the sales funnel and knowing how to navigate each phase is key for businesses to attract, win, and keep high-quality leads and build long-term customer relationships. Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing are the cloud-based solutions that can help you meet every type of customer right where they are, with exactly what they’re looking for at any point in the sales funnel.

Manufacturers value efficiency, automation, and the ability to forecast orders, sales, inventory, and other important elements of their business. Considering these values, it’s perhaps a curious thing, or maybe not so curious, that many manufacturers use their enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution for customer relationships management (CRM) activities, or else they don’t use any solution for CRM at all. Considering the myriad benefits of CRM functionality—from lead and opportunity management, contact and account management, data analysis, automated marketing campaigns, event management, branded landing pages and forms, email creation, and so much more—it’s a wonder how a business could get by on the limited customer relationship functions a typical ERP provides.

The on-premise deployment of Dynamics CRM is a long-standing, reliable CRM option, but adopting a cloud-based solution like Dynamics 365 Sales comes with an unprecedented level of securities, tools, and features. Plus, making the jump to a cloud-based business application is easier than you might imagine. With features like pipeline visibility, task organization, sales activity automation, collaborative workflows, end-to-end data security, and more, all in one unified workspace, working smarter has never been easier with Dynamics 365 Sales on the cloud.

We’ve broken down just a few of the benefits of adopting a cloud-based system, and some of the features that make Dynamics 365 Sales the premier cloud-based sales CRM solution.

As the new year rings in, many people make resolutions—new habits, self-improvements, changes for the better. Whether or not you ascribe to New Year Resolutions, here’s a change your business can make to kick off this year and build up your bottom line: invest in CRM. A Customer Relationship Management system is a tool that, when added to your tech stack, can return massive ROI by improving your sales and marketing performance and potential. In fact, in 2014, every dollar spent on CRM returned between $5.60 and $8.71 (Nucleus Research).

In Dynamics 365 Marketing, customer journeys are orchestrated to guide a prospect through a predetermined, flexible path toward a preset end goal. Whether this goal is buying a product, scheduling a discover call, or closing a loan, a customer journey is easy to create and personalize to the needs of a segment, which may be thought of as a demographic, or group, of people who share similar characteristic.

When creating a customer journey, you want the most value for your efforts. Here are six practices that can lead to more effective customer journeys.

Sales teams know that using the right system is crucial to their success, and Dynamics 365 Sales is a sales-focused CRM that’s a cut above the rest. Get the most out of its features and functionalities with the Sales Insights add-on. Sales Insights allows users to generate predictive lead and opportunity scores, tap into revenue forecasts, automate sales tasks, and much, much more. Unlock a new world of capabilities to not only better understand where leads and opportunities stand, but empowers sellers to better prioritize work, realize where their time and energy is best spent, and focus on the relationships that matter most.

Here are some of Sales Insights’ standout features:

With Sales Accelerator in Dynamics 365 Sales Insights, save time and effort by automatically assigning new leads to sales team members as they come in. Sales Insights is available by default for Sales Premium licenses or as an add-on for Sales Enterprise. The Sales Accelerator can be activated by navigating to the Sale Insights Settings area. Use the Change Area menu at the bottom of the navigation pane to switch over. Users will also need to have the sequence manager, sales manager, or administrator role.

Effective marketing strategies and tactics are designed to cultivate enough interest to make sure each sales-focused interaction has a stable foundation. Creating lead scoring models in Dynamics 365 Marketing autogenerates a score to indicate each contact or account’s likelihood of closing a deal based on interactions with websites, emails, events, and more. Scoring leads allows users to focus on the most quality prospects by cutting through cluttered sales pipelines and highlighting each lead’s progress towards becoming sales ready.