Improve Sales with AI in Microsoft Dynamics 365

Microsoft has made artificial intelligence (AI) a key element of its strategy, and you can see evidence of how deeply invested they are throughout the Dynamics 365 suite. Some of the most exciting AI capabilities lie within Dynamics 365 for Sales Insights, such as emerging insights about key metrics, alerts, and other important data that will help set your business apart in terms of sales performance and operations.

Dynamics 365 Sales Insights

In today’s buying environment, change is the only constant! Customers expect better services, lower prices, a tailored experience, and personalized communication. Sales teams must be reactive to this expectation. The key to staying ahead is AI. Put customers data to work, identify patterns in buyer behaviors, and predict needs that cannot be easily detected by human capabilities alone. Dynamics 365 Sales Insights is all this, a product intended to help sales teams improve their performance by continuously analyzing the vast collection of customer interactions stored in Dynamics 365 Sales to better understand business relationships, evaluate activities in relation to previous successes, and choose the best path forward.

Here are some of the cool features of Dynamics 365 Sales Insights:

• Assistant is a feature that constantly scans communications to create “action cards” that are displayed in different dashboards and records throughout the system. Action cards provide users with reminders of upcoming activities, makes recommendations on when to reach out to a contact, identifies emails that need a response, and alerts users to key milestones tied to opportunities, to mention a few.
• Auto capture analyzes emails to find all messages that might be relevant to sales. The application looks for messages to or from relevant email addresses and presents the relevant messages right in Dynamics 365 Sales.
• Email engagement helps users to understand how their contacts are interacting with their emails. For example, it follows email messages to see when a recipient opens the email, selects a URL, opens an attachment, or responds.
• Relationship analytics gathers information from Dynamics 365 Sales for key performance indicators (KPIs) and activity history and displays it in a graphical representation.
• Premium forecasting helps sales reps to focus on revenue generation efforts by providing forecast projections based on sales pipeline and historical data.
• Notes analysis monitors notes regarding a recent meeting or discussion with customers, and it provides intelligent suggestions and next steps to undertake.

This quick demo video shows these and a few other top AI features of Dynamics 365 Sales Insights, it's worth a quick watch.

Predictive Lead and Opportunity Scoring

Previously for MSDW, I have written of how to use Machine Learning in Dynamics to optimize products in stock with a predictive algorithm that analyzes the demand for a specific product. The predicted score would give an indication of how many requests a product would have under determined conditions, making it possible for retail and online stores to allocate the relevant availability and thus reduce the risk to go under or over stock.