Dynamics 365 Sales – April 2020 release notes

It’s that time of year again, Microsoft’s 2020 Release Wave 1 plan is finally here and brings with it some noteworthy and exciting updates to Dynamics 365 Sales.

Wave 1 looks set to continue to focus on evolving Dynamics 365 Sales to continue to meet sales professionals’ needs. As early as February, users will be able to access a wide range of new features and updates that will empower their organisation to ultimately drive forward their sales efforts. The key changes for Dynamics 365 Sales come in the areas of forecasting and simplifying the user experience.

Forecasting

Dynamics 365 Sales and Incremental understand the vital role that forecasting plays in your organisation and its influence on decision making. For many organisations, however, it can be a struggle to develop accurate sales forecasts that therefore empower data-driven decisions. The new forecasting features outlined in the release notes will give you more power over your forecasting by allowing you to tailor them to your business. The new features include:

The ability to modify forecasting

Microsoft recognises that a one size fits all approach to forecasting doesn’t work in today’s climate when there are multiple different variables to consider such as industry, products and geographies. The new features account for these variables and will allow you to tailor your forecasting by allowing you to:

• Create custom forecast calculations tailored to your organisation.
• Create forecasts based on product, territory or reporting hierarchy.
• Enable quotas in the forecast grid.
• The ability to upload quotas for full forecast time periods using an Excel template.
• Ability to filter out specific opportunities using the new query builder.
• Enhance your security by defining who has access to specific forecast models and fields.

Empowering managers

Sometimes a seller’s experience is more informative than the data being presented. In addition to the addition of customised forecasts, sales managers will now be able to:

• Quickly adjust forecasted values based on existing forecast or organisational hierarchy, including the ability to delete or revert back to an older adjustment.
• The ability to analyse a forecast by viewing an audit trail of all adjustments that have been made.

Accurate pipeline management

It’s not uncommon for there to be a disparity between an organisation’s forecasts and its opportunities. Dynamics 365 recognises that it is fundamental that sales users understand where forecast values are derived from to reduce disparity. In the new forecasting capabilities, sellers will be able to directly modify deal information in the flow in real time. The new features include:

• Using visual cues to create a representation of the whole forecast hierarchy and quota.
• View and edit underlying opportunities for any calculated metric instantly modifying the forecast.
• Easily manage and update the full forecast with the drag-and-drop feature to move opportunities across different stages.
• The ability to edit a forecast in real time ensuring that data is current.

User experience

The second block of key changes outlined in the April release notes all relate to the simplifying of the user experience. We all know that a seller’s time is best spent building customer relationships through meaningful interactions. The new features within Dynamics 365 Sales seek to support this by focusing on improvements to a user’s day to day experience with the system so that less time is spent on completing tasks and admin. Users will see improvements and simplification in the following areas.

Product items:

• The ability to add products by allowing users to look up products directly from the catalogue enabling users to add multiple products at once.
• User can now view and compare product details before selecting.

Email templates:

• Ability to select an email template from the gallery intuitively.
• Users can now get a quick preview of the template before selecting it for use.
• Ability to use categories to speed up the search for a template.

Activities:

• Navigate and update activities quicker and more intuitively.
• The ability to see all activities in a visualised calendar view.

Opportunity Kanban views will also allow users to benefit from the ability to:

• Easily toggle between the existing grid view and the new Kanban view.
• View their opportunity pipeline by sales path on the Kanban board.
• Simplified and intuitive experience to move opportunities into a different stage. The Kanban view allows your sales team to move opportunities from one stage to another by simply dragging it.

A new Sales Team Member App

Lastly, there is also a new Sales Team Member app module coming that will be available to users with the Team Member license. It is designed for users who aren’t tied to one particular function but still need basic access to Sales. Users with this module will be able to:

• View customer details
• View leads and opportunities related to a customer
• Create and view activities for a customer or related leads or opportunities.

Early access to all of these new features will be available from Monday the 3^rd February 2020. To get early access before they are automatically applied to your environment in April, you will need to opt-in. This will give you time to test these new features for yourself and get staff up to speed with the changes. Alternatively, get in touch and lean on the expertise of Incremental to help your organisation maximise all of the new changes coming.

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