The hidden value of Dynamics 365 Sales Insights

Dynamics 365 Sales is a sales-focused CRM that catalogues contact and account information and uses this information to clearly lay out leads, opportunities, and account activity, making it easier for sellers to maximize their outputs while simplifying their workload.  

Sales Insights is what grants users cutting edge reporting, forecasting, AI-powered insights, and generated visualizations to stay ahead of leads and opportunities—it can increase your Dynamics 365 Sales app’s value and productivity tenfold. It’s pre-built into Sales Premium licenses and is a budget-friendly add-on for Sales Enterprise and Relationship Sales licenses (Sales Professional licenses are not eligible for this add-on at this time).

The Dynamics 365 Sales app workspace is an easy-to-navigate and intuitive-to-use workspace that hosts all your Sales modules and is designed to be an all-in-one solution for everything from creating marketing lists, tracking sales cycles, to forecasting revenue, qualifying leads, and closing deals with digital selling tools and capabilities to simplify the sales pipeline and drive your business forward. 

Adding Sales Insights to your workspace unlocks 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: 

Predictive scoring models

Hours of thoughtful marketing efforts have paid off, and you’ve generated new leads for your business. But, how do you know that this effort has brought in leads that are actually likely to close a deal? Usually, leads have been on the receiving end of mass communication efforts, so they start out pretty impersonal—and can be as simple as anyone who has gained surface-level brand awareness. That’s where lead scoring comes in.

Lead scoring can help evaluate and rank incoming leads as they first come in contact, become prospects, and eventually sign contracts—lead management is at the core of every sales cycle from simple brand awareness to becoming sales qualified, confidently closing on deals, and creating a lasting business relationship.

Predictive lead and opportunity scoring uses machine learning to auto-calculate and assign a score from 1 to 100, as well as a letter score of A through D to open leads based on their likelihood of becoming qualified opportunities and converting into viable deals. Scores can help users determine where to best focus their efforts for better productivity, reducing time between qualifying and closing deals, allowing for better allocation of time and efforts, and providing insights into hot opportunities that are most likely to pay off in the long run. 

Opportunity scoring, similar to lead scoring, assigns scores to open opportunities in the pipeline, so your team has better knowledge to help with converting every opportunity into a won deal, closing faster, and pulling in revenue.

The opportunity scoring feature is jam-packed with easy-to-decipher visualizations to help organize and decode data – like the “Relationship Pipeline graph,” where opportunities are plotted as sized and colored bubbles on a chart that indicate relationship health, estimated close date, and estimated revenue. Critical deals that may expire soon would be plotted closest to the lower-left corner, whereas the most promising deals—healthy relationships and high revenue—are near the top of the chart.

In addition to the visual graph, a list view is also available to indicate each opportunity’s estimated revenue, relationship health state based on KPIs (good, fair, poor), and relationship health status (improving, steady, declining). Predictive scores pull in information and analytics from past opportunities to auto-assign scores to your open opportunities, so you can make informed decisions about which opportunities to engage with.

Being in the know when it comes to revenue and budgets is something that every team cares about, and teams can stay on top of quarter or annual projections using revenue forecasting tools using premium forecasting tools in Sales Insights as well—and you guessed it, premium forecasting generates accurate, predictive forecast models based on your real-time data. To get started quickly and easily, you can use pre-defined forecast templates, or start from scratch with the information you have on-hand. Predictive forecasting tools in Sales insights can help cut down on human error or miscalculations by pulling in active sales pipeline information to inform AI-driven forecasts. Account records, historical performance, year-to-date data, and more are used to keep forecasts fluid, and capture changes using snapshots and data visualizations to keep you informed and on track.

Relationship insights

Sales Insights uses KPIs and activity history to calculate the overall health of each relationship, so crucial metrics are always used to inform the scores generated by Sales Insights by linking account activities to records, collecting information on relevant activities, and scores are assigned on a weighted scale, taking the types of activity (like emails vs meetings vs phone calls) and their frequency into account. Insights are then built on things like email engagement rates, how much time has been spent in contact with a customer or contact, data on previous and scheduled interactions, and the average time it takes for your team to respond to customer inquiries.

The list view of relationship health indicators for open relationships displays information like estimated revenue, relationship health state (good, fair, poor), relationship health trend (improving, steady, declining), time spent on activities engaging with the relationship, and more. Using these trends can help you identify and prioritize critical opportunities, and to know when to best act and where to focus efforts at any given time—so you can continue to identify, build, and nurture relationships with customers.

AI-powered automation tools can be used to help steer sellers in the right direction and know which relationships should garner the most immediate actions at any given time by pulling in relevant information based on past actions and account records to generate scores and grades so you know what’s what with each of your relationships.

Sales Accelerator

The Sales Accelerator not only, well, helps speed up the process in which sales can occur as leads move through the sales pipeline, but also makes the whole process easier from start to finish with automation capabilities. Lead assignment and routing to different sellers can be automated by easily setting up routing rules to better distribute workload between sellers. Formulaic sequences can also be set up so the sales process follows carefully laid out steps to ensure each contact receives the right amount of attention and sellers can act accordingly at every step of the way.

Utilize the intelligent work list to see which activities should be prioritized with up-to-date customer context and account records in tow. This can help them reach out to the next best lead as opportunities arise with real-time insights and AI suggestions that use machine learning technology to constantly adapt and grow smarter. Plus, real-time data is pulled in so sellers can make data-informed decisions.

Sellers have a personalized user experience that helps them better focus on reaching customers in the ways that matter by configuring their availability, so workload and tasks are delegated evenly to the best-suited sellers at any given time. Working days, days off, and even blocks of hours at a time can be configured to each user’s liking, so their workspace is equipped to best serve their unique work needs and availability.

In short, users of Dynamics 365 Sales really won’t want to miss out the on the capabilities of Sales Insights. The value you receive is well worth its humble price tag, and it won’t take long to notice the difference that intelligent scoring, forecasting, relationship insights, and more can have on your bottom line.

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Dynamics 365 Sales is a CRM solution that’s a cut above the rest and can help you stay on top of high-impact facts and figures. If you’re ready to make data-driven decisions and maximize your organization’s selling capacity, let us know. Click the button below and we’ll be in touch for a free system demo.