Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Sales in 2023 release wave 2
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to Welcome to Dynamics 365 Sales. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365, Power Platform, and Cloud for Industry release plans.
Important
The 2023 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2023 to March 2024. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Dynamics 365 Sales.
Overview
Dynamics 365 Sales is the market-leading sales application that empowers every organization to sell more by understanding their customers and the way they want to buy—powered by data, intelligence, and experiences that people love. Dynamics 365 Sales brings the power of business data wherever the seller is working—across their favorite productivity tools like Office 365 and Teams. By focusing on the most relevant and authentic engagements, sellers can quickly get to the heart of in-the-moment customer needs and sell more efficiently.
The world’s way of working has transformed dramatically in the last decade and even more so within the last couple of years. The role of the seller is evolving, too. Buyers expect a blend of digital and personalized experiences throughout their journey. The seller evolution requires a need for several shifts in their current experience: prioritization of their work, intelligent digital communication tools, better collaboration to improve productivity, and spending more time becoming trusted advisors to their customers. To do this, sellers can't be overwhelmed trying to make sense of too much data and information; rather, they need the data to work for them by providing value in every customer interaction.
For 2023 release wave 2, we continue to use data and AI to help sellers prioritize their engagement. The introduction of Copilot in Sales, an omnipresent experience in Dynamics 365 Sales, helps sellers reduce mundane tasks and accelerate execution and business outcomes by providing recommendations, summarizing data, retrieving information, and performing actions in context and within the flow of work.
Do you have a new feature idea or feedback? We encourage you to connect with us at Sales Ideas.
Updates to Dynamics 365 Sales 2023 release wave 2
Investment areas
Copilot
With Dynamics 365 Copilot, organizations empower their workers with AI tools built for sales, service, marketing, operations, and supply chain roles. These AI capabilities enable everyone to spend more time on the best parts of their jobs and less time on mundane tasks.
Sellers spend a lot of time managing complex customer relationships, and many sales teams struggle to scale seller experiences. Seller productivity in terms of time management and efficiency is key to success. Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales experiences focus on enhancing seller productivity and effectiveness in their flow of work, by enabling them to automate the sales process, and augment seller actions and decisions with AI-powered insights and actions. Copilot features help sellers save time, boost productivity, lighten workloads, and stay focused on connecting with customers and closing deals.
Copilot and AI innovation
Sellers spend a lot of time managing complex customer relationships and many sales teams struggle to scale seller experiences. Seller productivity in terms of time management and efficiency is key to success. Copilot is an AI assistant that helps sales teams be more productive and efficient in their daily work. It has a chat interface that sellers can use to get a quick summary of their opportunity and lead records, catch up on updates, prepare for meetings, and read the latest news about their accounts.
Sales engagement
The way sellers and sales teams operate is undergoing rapid transformation, with 90% of decision-makers expecting remote and digital models to persist long-term. Additionally, 80% of business-to-business buyers prefer videoconference connections over audio and phone, emphasizing their critical role in modern sales interactions.
Sales engagement capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales empower sellers to intelligently engage with customers. Our purpose-built experience provides AI-driven insights into customer relationships and conversations, providing smarter interactions. Features such as Sales Accelerator, Sequences, Focused View, and more enable sellers to effectively navigate and standardize the selling process. By leveraging these features, sellers can maintain healthy customer relationships and conduct impactful conversations, driving sales success in today's digital landscape.
Sales execution and sales force automation
The sales execution and sales force automation capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales empower sellers to focus on the most promising leads, streamline their workflows, and gain valuable insight into customer organizations, all of which can lead to increased sales and improved efficiency and customer relationships.
With the ability to route leads and opportunities based on skill, location, and other business rules, sellers can focus on the most promising prospects. The automatically generated follow-up tasks based on information from Office applications provides friendly reminders to help sellers stay on track. The enhanced input forms simplify the process of creating opportunities, while the AI-powered solution provides targeted selling suggestions and precise workflows. The customer org chart helps sellers understand the roles of contacts within an organization and view relationship maps.
Seller experiences
Seller experiences focus on features and tools that are meticulously designed to cater to the unique needs and challenges faced by sellers in their daily lives. These seller-centric solutions empower sales professionals to efficiently manage customer data, monitor deal progress, facilitate team collaboration, engage with customers, enhance sales conversations, and deliver timely value to expedite deal closures.
The primary objective of these offerings is to streamline and simplify the day-to-day tasks of sellers, enabling them to operate with heightened efficiency and effectiveness. By leveraging these capabilities, sellers can not only navigate their professional responsibilities more seamlessly but also discover avenues to optimize their time and resources, ultimately resulting in increased productivity and a greater number of successful deal closures.
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Dynamics 365 Sales below:
For application administrators
User-impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User-impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.
Get the most out of Sales
| Helpful links | Description |
|---|---|
| Release plan | View all capabilities included in the release. |
| Licensing | Improve your understanding of how to license Sales. |
| Product documentation | Find documentation for Sales. |
| User community | Engage with Sales experts and peers in the community. |
| Upcoming events | Find and register for in-person and online events. |
| Product trials | Get started with Sales. |