Plan and prepare for Dynamics 365 Sales in 2024 release wave 1

Important

The 2024 release wave 1 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from April 2024 to September 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 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 2024 release wave 1, we continue to use data and AI to help sellers understand customers and accelerate deals while staying in the flow of work. Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales helps sellers make the most of their customer engagements by providing recommendations, summarizing data, retrieving information, and performing actions in context and within the flow of work.

For 2024 release wave 1, we are focused on enabling sales organizations to:

• Understand their customers by providing sellers with information about customers when they need it and where they need it.
• Accelerate deals with insights and action on how to move deals forward along with ROI calculations.
• Stay in the flow of work by making sellers more productive, which is at the center of transforming how sellers work.
• Configure and extend by opening Copilot in Sales to first and third parties, allowing customers and partners to extend and enrich experiences with their own data and insights.
• Empower sales leadership, expanding our generative AI leadership to a broader surface area beyond seller productivity and toward the transformation of sales leadership roles.

Do you have a new feature idea or feedback? We encourage you to connect with us at Sales Ideas.

Updates to Dynamics 365 Sales 2024 release wave 1

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.

Revenue intelligence
The revenue intelligence capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales allow your sales team to manage revenue by setting up pricing and discounts for products, defining targets, forecasting sales, visualizing deals, and managing their top line proactively and efficiently.

The following capabilities are planned for this release wave to enhance revenue intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales:

• A new and enhanced opportunity management experience that helps you visualize your sales funnel and track your deals while being able to edit opportunities on the fly.
• Ability to create forecasts with yearly and weekly recurrence.
• Support for adjusting forecast values at the drill-down level.
• Ability to configure forecasts for each business unit in your organization.

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 engagement and execution
Sales engagement and execution encompass defining and implementing sales strategies while actively engaging with customers to drive conversions. Sales execution involves the practical implementation of a sales plan, including prospecting, pitching, negotiating, and closing deals to achieve revenue targets. On the other hand, sales engagement focuses on fostering meaningful interactions and building relationships with prospects and customers throughout the sales cycle. Capabilities in this bucket will help sellers build sales strategies or effectively execute them.

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:

Check out the release plan

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.