Understanding Sales Insights

Sales Insights is a collection of Dynamics 365 Sales features designed to help sellers build stronger customer relationships, save time, and better manage Leads and Opportunities with real-time, AI-based insights. Some Sales Insights functionality is included with a Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise license, while more advanced functionality requires additional licensing.

What You Need to Use Sales Insights

To use the Sales Insights features covered here, you need:

• Microsoft Exchange Online
• An instance of Dynamics 365 Sales
• A Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise license

Some features may also require an administrator to enable or configure them before they're available to users.

Use the Standard Assistant to Track Daily Work

The standard assistant helps users keep track of daily actions and customer communications through insight cards. Dynamics 365 includes a collection of standard cards, and an administrator can determine which cards are presented to users. Standard cards can be enabled, disabled, or customized based on your organization's needs. Insight cards can notify you about situations such as:

• An email that's due today
• A task that's due today
• An Opportunity with no recent activity
• A competitor being mentioned

These reminders can help sellers identify activities that need their attention without manually reviewing every record.

Automatically Surface Relevant Activities with Auto Capture

Auto capture helps salespeople keep customer-related activities connected to Dynamics 365 Sales. Using information from Outlook, auto capture can suggest emails and meetings that appear to be related to CRM records. These suggestions can appear alongside the other activities in a record's timeline. An untracked email associated with a customer, for example, can be suggested on the appropriate record. The suggestion is private until you choose to track the activity. This can help salespeople identify relevant communications that otherwise might never make it into CRM.

Understand Customer Interactions with Email Engagement

Email engagement provides additional information about what happens after you send a customer an email. You can use email engagement to determine when a customer:

• Opens your message
• Selects a link
• Opens an attachment
• Sends a reply

You can also receive an alert when a customer opens your message for the first time, use your organization's email interaction history to help select an effective message template, and set reminders for email follow-up. Email engagement information can also appear through relevant insight cards in the assistant, such as an Email Opened card.

Manage Your Work with Sales Accelerator

Sales Accelerator is also available to Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise users with limited functionality. The Sales Accelerator work list provides a centralized place to view work associated with Contacts, Opportunities, Leads, and Accounts. Activities created through a record's timeline can appear on the work list, making Sales Accelerator function like a focused sales to-do list. Sales Accelerator can also be added to apps other than Sales Hub.

Automate Sales Activities with Sequences

Sequences let you establish a predefined set of activities for working with prospects. A sequence might include steps such as:

• Send an email
• Call the customer
• Wait for a specified amount of time
• Follow up with additional communication

With an Enterprise license, you can connect up to 1,500 records to sequences per month. Sequences provide a way to automate and standardize portions of your sales process while still allowing sellers to personalize their customer communication.

See What's Next with the Up Next Widget

The Up Next widget helps sellers understand the next activity due for a particular record. This can be particularly useful when a sequence has established a defined series of follow-up activities. However, the Up Next widget can also work when there isn't a sequence connected to the record. Instead of manually determining the next step, sellers can quickly see what activity is coming up.

Use Who Knows Whom

The basic Who Knows Whom feature can help identify existing connections between a prospect and people within your organization. If someone at your company has previously corresponded with an individual through tracked email or appointment activities, that relationship can be surfaced within Dynamics 365. This can give a salesperson useful context when preparing to communicate with a prospect.

Score Leads and Opportunities

Lead and Opportunity scoring can help sellers understand which records deserve attention based on predictive models. To begin training the predictive model, you need at least 40 qualified and 40 disqualified Leads. You can customize which fields have the greatest influence on the resulting score. Once configured, scoring can provide another piece of information for sellers deciding which prospects to prioritize.

View Basic Relationship Insights

Basic relationship insights use emails and appointments sent and received from Dynamics 365 to provide information about customer relationships. These basic insights are available out of the box and don't require additional setup. Relationship information can be useful across records such as:

• Leads
• Contacts
• Accounts
• Opportunities

This gives sellers additional context about their history of interaction with a customer or prospect.

Explore Conversation Intelligence

Conversation intelligence adds another type of Sales Insights functionality by working with Microsoft Teams calls. The feature can record Teams calls and analyze the conversation for information such as customer emotion, sentiment, and priorities. This can provide additional information about customer conversations beyond what is manually recorded in CRM.

What's Available with Sales Premium?

Dynamics 365 Sales Premium expands on the Sales Insights functionality available with Enterprise licensing. Additional Premium functionality includes:

• Premium assistant capabilities
• Enhanced relationship analytics
• Notes analysis
• Enhanced Who Knows Whom using Exchange data
• Premium forecasting

Organizations interested in these more advanced capabilities can evaluate whether moving to the Premium licensing tier makes sense for their sales process.

What If You Don't See These Features?

If you have a Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise license but don't see some of these Sales Insights tools, they may need to be enabled or configured by your administrator. Many of the settings are available in: Sales Hub → Change Area → Sales Insights Settings Your organization may also need to use the appropriate Sales Insights forms within Sales Hub.

Get More from Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise

Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise includes several Sales Insights capabilities that organizations may already be licensed to use. Features such as the standard assistant, auto capture, email engagement, Sales Accelerator, sequences, Who Knows Whom, predictive scoring, and relationship insights can help salespeople organize their work and better understand their interactions with Leads, Opportunities, and customers. Some capabilities are limited with Enterprise licensing and expand with Dynamics 365 Sales Premium, but organizations using Enterprise can start exploring the included functionality and identify which Sales Insights tools provide the most value for their sales process.