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!

The semiannual Dynamics 365 Release Wave updates are highly anticipated, but it’s no secret that navigating through the Microsoft documentation to research can be difficult and time-consuming, let alone remembering and tracking the progress of updates that interest you. That’s about to be a thing of the past with this new tool: the Release Planner (currently in preview).

The Release Planner is a straightforward interface for searching through update plans. It is organized by application and can be filtered and sorted by a variety of criteria, such as status, availability date, and who the update will be available for (users, admin, etc.).

If you’re invested in making the solution you use work better for yourself and others using it, we’ve got good news. Microsoft provides a few ways to submit feedback and make your voice—and those of many other users much like you—heard.

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.

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To stand out in an expanded marketplace, your business needs to cut through the competition and create personalized, customer-forward experiences. To find prospective customers with the right message, at the right time, and through the right avenues. Dynamics 365 CRM can elevate your sales and marketing efforts by equipping your team with the tools needed to capture each prospect’s attention at the moment that matters most. Here are ways that Dynamics 365 Sales, Marketing, and other CRM services can keep your business agile in today’s increasingly competitive market.

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.

Whether it be a new product rollout, lead re-engagement, subscription upgrades, or any other sales and marketing endeavor, every business needs a strategy to get their message to their target audience in a structured, automated way. That’s just what customer journeys do, by providing highly customizable and personalizable options to build your own outbound and real-time marketing campaigns. Building a customer journey is a straightforward and intuitive process that uses tiles to establish elements of the journey – from who is sent along the journey to every step that occurs along the pipeline. There are quite a few tile options that allow for a huge variety of journey objectives to serve the needs of any business.

Ever heard the proverb “out of sight, out of mind”? Well, the things we measure are in our sight, on our minds, and therefore more likely to be the target of change. We live in an increasingly data-driven world, where gathering data, making sense of it, and garnering actionable insight from it is as easy as it has ever been. The data begs to be used.

Welcome to the second instillation of the series “Habits of highly effective marketers,” where we explore some of the fundamental actions that marketers take to do their job and do it stunningly. In our last blog, we went deep into why and how to document your marketing strategies and processes. Next up are two similar components of marketing strategy and content development: cross linking and cross posting. Fostered from a desire to use content to its fullest extent and the wish to provide viewers valuable content at their fingertips, these two strategies can improve social media reach and SEO (when used carefully and judiciously). Let’s dig in.

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.

Adding a CRM solution to your manufacturing business’ tech stack helps you better understand customer needs and gives you the tools and insight you need to reach them in the best way possible at every touchpoint, whether they’re at the very top of your sales funnel or about to place a repeat order. Dynamics 365 Marketing is a flexible CRM solution that helps businesses in any industry create, manage, and analyze the results of a wide variety of materials to help even marketing beginners create high-quality, engaging content that speaks to your prospects, leads, and longstanding clients. Here are some ways manufacturers can benefit from using Dynamics 365 Marketing to engage prospects and drive revenue.

In marketing, “effective” can mean different things based on the company, team, and even individual. But the core of marketing is intrigue—to get potential customers or clients interested in what you do. The products you sell, the services you provide, your unique brand. That’s a very general, high-level goal, but each company will also have their more specific desired marketing outcomes, as well as their own ways to achieve it.

A cohesive brand is one that is consistent no matter what or where it is. Visually, your brand can be differentiated by the colors, logo, fonts, and other defining characteristics unique to you. Keeping your brand identifiable across all touchpoints your customers encounter boosts brand recognition, which increases reach and effectiveness of your marketing content.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 suite of cloud-based business applications of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. Data-driven and inter-connected, these apps sport modern and aligned interfaces, robust built-in capabilities, and highly customizable development. Whether you use one or many of these apps, there are many build-in features that allow you to create brand-specific content.

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.

Acquainting yourself with all the apps and technology required to perform your job responsibilities is a hefty task, let alone using your tech stack with peak efficiency. That’s why it’s so beneficial when applications work together to help you do your job. Enter Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 applications. Built to seamlessly and natively integrate with each other, these business and productivity apps make it easier to transition from one to the other throughout your workday—sometimes without having to actually open another screen.

Social media is a hotbed for marketing these days: everyone is on it, every business needs to take advantage of it, and there are many strategies to engage your audience across various platforms. Marketers work hard to create strong content for their business’ social media accounts—from witty, thoughtful, or research-backed posts, to content from their own website (like blogs, infographics, and whitepapers), to engaging advertisements.

So, when most of the hard work is done, how do you ensure that those efforts are as effective as possible and return as much on your investment as it can? Believe it or not, it’s often simple steps that lead to immense shifts in social media likes, clicks, website visits, and leads.

Plans have been released for the 2022 Release Wave 1, the semi-annual feature upgrades for the Dynamics 365 suite of business applications. These feature releases keep you on the forefront of technology with improvements based off user feedback – so you can always count on quality updates that really make a difference in your workday.

Here’s everything you need to know about the new, standout features coming to Dynamics 365 Marketing with Release Wave 1: