Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Insights

Sales Insights harnesses the power of Artificial Intelligence, empowering teams to understand data in ways they could not previously, helping create efficiencies, and getting more from resources.

Microsoft’s vision for Sales Insights is to enhance the capabilities of sales teams by bringing in AI as part of the core ingredients that augments each selling activity, customer interaction and business decision with intelligence.

Sales Insights is available for Dynamics 365 Sales, as a prebuilt add-on which is easy to deploy and configure to make an immediate impact to sales performance.

In this video, we will cover a series of its capabilities to demonstrate how Sales Insights helps teams sell smarter, strengthen relationships, identify next best actions, and how it helps leaders coach sellers more effectively.

Premium Assistant

This enables any administrator to go into the back end of Dynamics and create “Insight Cards”. So they would click “Create Insight Card”, and it would give a few templates to use i.e. opportunity stage changes, health score update. There is also a “Templates Section” to browse and set up using Power Automate. Alternatively, users can click “Create from blank”, which means you can set cards up for almost anything really.

We also get many Insight Cards out-of-the-box, which is found in the “Global Settings” menu. It will show you which cards are already there and what they would look like. There are a variety of formats and displays for all the cards. They can tell you about nearby customers, recent meetings, stakeholders, missed emails, or even competitors mentioned.

Once this has all been set up in the background, then starts appearing in dashboards or in the “Relationship Assistant” drop down, are notifications regarding the Insights cards. For example, a customer has mentioned a competitor in their email, and it will allow you to open the email and reply straight away.

There will also be notifications for upcoming meetings, it will tell you when they are due to take place, who it’s with and where it is located. Users have the option to open the appointment straight from the card, like the notification, snooze it so that it appears again later and email the attendees.

Another amazing aspect is that when meeting notifications have a location, if there are other accounts that users handle located nearby, there will be a notification to display this – allowing users to decide if they want to arrange a meeting whilst they are close by.

So Premium Assistant using AI, will simply show all of these cards, all in one place, with notifications and prompts. It can be found a dashboard, as a drop down and even on individual records.

Premium Autocapture

What this feature enables users to do is send emails through into Dynamics. This means that any email from individual contacts, including calendar invitations, is then linked to the contact record in Dynamics.

What users will then see is “Activity Suggestions” that appear on the timeline for the contact records that you receive emails from. Even if the emails haven’t been opened and tracked previously, it will tell users they have activity suggestions.

So in this case, there are three activity suggestions here, that I can choose to push into the database for everyone else to see by click the tick icon, which saves and tracks the email as an activity that will become visible to others who have access to the contact.

Once that is done, it will be appear on the timeline for the people with the right security roles to see. But what is also does is add it to the Activity Suggestions tab on the left side options bar, where all activity suggestions for all records are shown together. So, we can see the activity I just pushed through now.

So the basic autocapture will show the activities on the individual records, but this gives users everything in one place. So for now I have 37 activities that I need to see, and they are attached to different contacts, accounts, opportunities, all types of entities.

Notes Analysis

On a contact record, I have added a note to say that I need to follow up with the contact. If I click the subject line, Dynamics will now prompt me to create an appointment, straight from the pop up and it will create an appointment for me in the background.

Like this, the notes analysis will give prompts on activities based on notes added to records, for any entity.

Relationship Analytics

There is a view in Dynamics called “My Open Opportunities by Relationship”, which helps the sales teams work out the status of opportunities. Each opportunity will be given a status of either: poor, fair or good. It will also show if the opportunity is improving, declining or is steady.

This is all based on interaction time spent with the opportunity through phonecalls, emails etc. The amount of time will also be shown, so as the video shows, some opportunities have had 6.7 hours of interaction whilst others have only had 1.5 hours of interaction. However, it is also based on the amount of time we have engaged with the customers; so it reflects their response as well.

The feature looks at previously won opportunities, to see if the current opportunities are in good stead or not. There are some pipeline charts that will show which opportunities users should be concentrating on (in green), and where users are not getting much back from the client (in red).

On the Relationship Analytics tab, on individual opportunities, there is a whole dashboard dedication to that opportunity. It shows what the health scores are based on: interactions by emails, calls, our response time and customer response time – which helps show if they’re really engaged in this opportunity which would suggest we have a better chance of closing this deal.

So there is a lot of information here to help the sales teams close off deals, but specifically identify which opportunities they should be focusing on. It would be a good starting point to discuss in Monday morning sales meetings.

Predictive Lead Scoring

So looking at the “My Open Leads Scored” view, obviously you can see the lead score, but also whether the lead is improving, steady or declining. There is also a grading system to help handles the leads.

Clicking into individual leads allows users to see the information in context. I’ve have clicked into a lead for Charlie Owens and it is showing me, on the right hand side, that the lead score is 96 and it is improving.

The way the ratings works is by training the lead scoring model to calculate it the way we want it to. For example, Charlie Owens is Graded A because the lead has a “C” level position for management, so that is positive and it will show a green arrow pointing up to suggest this has pushed the score up. The lead has also mentioned 3 competing products on the most recent call, which has taken the score slightly down from being 100, and this is represented by a red arrow pointing down. The company Charlie Owens is associated with is a finance company with 250 – 1000 employees and a revenue of £100 – 250 million; all of which pushes the lead score up as we have training the model to see this as positive.

So having all these parameters in place helps us have this useful grading model, and based on additional fields, users can see if the lead is improving or not.

Premium Forecasting

I believe this is one of the best features of Sales Insights.

On the left side option bar, there is a “Forecasts” area where end users and managers can go to see how the team is doing and analyse whether targets, quotas and goals will be met at the end of the month.

This is all set up in the background – as you can see I have set up a July – December forecast for this year. These forecasts can be set up as an organisation chart forecast, product forecast, territory forecast or users can ever create on from scratch. The two I have set up are based on users and opportunities.

Users can set up as many forecasts as needed, and once that is done that, users can go to the forecasts areas to see a drop down showing all the different forecasts that have been set up (active and inactive). These can be role specific too, so that users with the correct security roles can access it.

Once an individual forecast is selected, on the right hand side there is a drop down that breaks down the forecast by month and so users need to select which month they would like to view. I have set this forecast up to be user level, I can see that I have made myself area manager and that there is people who are working below me. The forecast will show each individual’s target, and managers have targets based on everyone in their teams target.

If users then click into one of the names – for this example I have clicked Chris, it will show Chris’s target, prediction and best case scenario. Under Chris’ section, it shows that all estimated input has a forecast category, so each estimated revenue can be placed under pipeline, best case scenario, committed etc. For example, if I have spoken to the client and they aren’t fully committed yet but its not part of the pipeline anymore, I can put that revenue under best case scenario.

Users can also adjust the accounts, the estimated close date and who the account is assigned to. For example, I want to remove Chris as the owners of this account and change it to Simon. So if I go into Simon’s section I can now see it has been moved.

So the Premium Forecasting is just a way for users to see everything in one place, as well as, adjust figures and values. To see more details users can click the pop out under “Actions”, to adjust further details, close it as won or lost, or view the details in a different format.

Users can also change the view of the opportunities, for example selecting the view that shows all opportunities closing this month. These views can be set up in the background so that the appropriate users can see them

The Quota columns presents the target employees are trying to hit each month, as part of the set forecast. Best case and committed columns can contain the actual figures, but can also work by “bands” so that the columns show a hot, cold or mild rating.

The prediction column is based on a prediction model that leverages AI, which looks at the sales teams’ historical data. To train the model there needs to be a lot of close opportunities in the past. For example, Richard typically closes all of his deals at the end of the month, so the prediction model will learn that and take that into consideration. So it looks at current trends and historical data, to predict revenue for the end of the month.

The “Trends” tab, allows users to see all this information as easy to read graphs. The graphs will identify the quota, current status, predicted status and show what it looks like all in context. The “Flow” tabs shows how much of the revenue, and how many opportunities are in each of the different forecast categories. These charts and graphs can be set to see whatever time period the user wants.

All of this data is part of what is called “Forecast Grid History”. The Premium Forecasting feature will take a daily snapshot of the data, which it analyses to produce the reports we’ve been looking at. Click into the forecast grid history, means that users can select any point in time to see what the figures looked like at that moment. This is useful to see what revenues were add, and when they were added.

Talking points

When a contact record is open, because there are a few emails from the contact, users will be able to see suggested talking points.

For example, I have opened Jake’s contact record. In one of this emails, he has mentioned his wife Tracy, and so in the talking points area, it is showing that the email came in an hour ago and that the email mentions family. It will also show the context of the mention of family. It will also show context of the talking points topics such as sports. Jake has emailed saying “thank you for the football tickets”, so it will come up in the talking points, under the sports section.

Therefore, users don’t to be looking through all the emails to find information regarding topics such as health, family, sports etc., as it will all appear in the talking points areas. Making it easier for all users to have the same information.

This feature uses AI to analyses and contextualise whether information is regarding topics as health, family and sports.

Conversation Intelligence

Prerequisite – you can use any phone call recording software that you decide to use. We need to upload it to Azure, and provided it is there, this conversation intelligence panel will analyse the data from the phone calls.

The “Home” area allows users to see information based on the last 2, 7 or even 30 days. Users can also see custom time periods. The area will also show how many deals were won, average revenue and win data. It also manages tracked keywords, tracked competitors and customer sentiment.

The “Team Overview” area, focuses on the sales team and analyses elements such as talking speed, KPIs, average pauses from speech, negative customer feedback, all by individual members in the sales team.

The “Seller Details” area, focuses on individual sellers even more. It shows what seller has been doing within selected time periods. It will show the seller’s call history, with details on each individual call i.e. when the call took place, or if competitors and brands were mentioned using speech-to-text analysis. The call can be listened to again and the sentiment can be tracked and general.

This features brings all your call data into one place to help analyse interactions using speech-to-text intelligence.