AI Strategy for Sales app
In today's competitive market, leveraging AI within your organization is not just an advantage, it's a necessity. An AI strategy for your Dynamics 365 Sales app can provide transformative insights and efficiencies that manual processes simply cannot achieve. By utilizing AI tools, sales teams can benefit from enhanced insights, content generation, summarization and automations of routine tasks.
For Dynamics 365 Sales customers, there are two first party AI Copilot applications role tailored for the sales persona:
- Copilot for Sales is a Sales AI assistant with experiences in the Microsoft 365 apps (Outlook, Teams, Word, Microsoft 365 Chat, etc.). Sellers can work efficiently and improve customer experiences with email assistance, personalized sales content creation, AI-generated insights, and recommendations for next steps. A set of features across Outlook and Teams are included in the Dynamics 365 Sales enterprise license, and for unlocking all the features a Copilot for Sales premium license is needed.
- Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales is an AI assistant for sellers with experiences in the first party app Sales Hub as well as custom sales model driven apps. It has a chat interface that sellers can use to get a quick summary of their opportunity and lead records, catch up on recent changes to their records, prepare for meetings, and read the latest news about their accounts.
AI Ready Design for Copilot for Sales adoption
For your Dynamics 365 Sales projects, please see the next considerations for a solution ready to adopt Copilot for Sales.
| Considerations | Details |
Licensing
| Minimum M365 E3 +
Minimum Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise +
Copilot for Sales license for full set of features. If using with Dynamics 365 Sales enterprise license, only a subset of the features are available – see the comparison here.
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| Server-Side Synchronization (SSS) | SSS is required for Copilot for Sales tracking Outlook activities to Dynamics 365 app.
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| Data model | While there is support for configuration and enhancing Copilot for Sales with custom tables, the core functionality does rely on the core tables Contact, Opportunity, Lead, Account (COLA) and Activity (Email, Appointment).
Therefore, try to adopt COLA tables as per your scenarios and avoid schema deviations. Try to avoid custom activity table and do leverage the appointment table. As a minimum contact table should be used.
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| Data quality | Is the data in Dynamics 365 consistent and of good quality ?
To asses this please consider if the users are persisting their customers, activities and deals in Dynamics (either via Copilot for Sales UI, Dynamics UI in browser or mobile or other integrations) and if there are mechanisms in place to ensure data quality and prevent duplicates.
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| Security model | Copilot for Sales works in the context of the current user and their Dynamics Sales security permissions are honoured.
If you are using custom security roles, these should include access to the necessary tables, fields and operations. These privileges are included out of the box in Salesperson and Sales manager security roles.
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| Automations & Integrations | Any server-side customizations implemented will be triggered by Copilot for Sales operations such as create and update. As such, do consider the flows, plugins, integrations triggered by Copilot for Sales initiated events and the potential impact these might have. For example, triggering a long running sync plugin on contact create or opportunity update might dissuade users from tracking data to CRM in general.
Consider approval processes which might be in scope of record creation such as contacts or accounts and how would those impact Copilot for Sales experience.
Client-side customizations such as business rules, java script are not currently supported in Copilot for Sales. Do consider if these are a must for creating or updating objects – if yes, users can be re-directed to Dynamics for those operations. However, there are client-side rules such as making fields required or read-only only in Copilot for Sales that could be sufficient.
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AI Ready Design for Copilot in Dynamics 365 adoption
For your Dynamics 365 Sales projects, please see the next considerations for a solution ready to adopt Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales.| Considerations | Details |
Licensing
| Minimum Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise |
| Data model | While there is support for configuration and enhancing Copilot in Dynamics Sales with custom fields for summarization feature, the core functionality does rely on the core tables Contact, Opportunity, Lead, Account (COLA) and Activity (Email, Appointment, Phone Call, Task).
Therefore, try to adopt COLA tables as per your scenarios and avoid schema deviations. Try to avoid custom activity table and leverage the appointment table.
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| Data quality | Is the data in Dynamics 365 consistent and of good quality ?
To assess this please consider if the users are persisting their customers, activities and deals in Dynamics and if there are mechanisms in place to ensure data quality and prevent duplicates.
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| Security model | Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales works in the context of the current user and their security permissions are honoured.
Will the OOB owner field be used? If using other custom fields to define record ownership, some of the prompts such as “show my pipeline” might not return the expected results.
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| App Strategy | If using custom apps:- Has copilot been enabled for this app?
- Has the immersive experience custom page been added to the app site map?
If using custom opportunity form, has the opportunity summary widget been added to this form?
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| Auditing | Has audit been enabled for lead and opportunity tables and do the users have access to the audit history ? This is necessary for the Recent changes feature.
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Conclusion
When defining the AI strategy for your sales processes, it is recommended to initially evaluate the first party copilot apps, as they offer seamless integration and an expanding array of features each month. To ensure optimal adoption of the sales copilot applications, we have documented a series of considerations for designing your Dynamics 365 Sales data, security, integrations and app strategy. By following these guidelines, you can ensure the optimization of Copilot's functionality and the enhancement of the overall user experience. This commitment to best practices will undoubtedly drive significant improvements in your company's sales processes and outcomes. Let us embrace these principles and fully leverage the potential of Copilot to advance success.
