What is Sales Insights and how can it help my sales team?
What is Sales Insights?
In previous articles, we have already talked about Dynamics 365 Sales, the product of the Dynamics 365 suite focused on sales teams. As such, it offers organizations a set of functionalities focused on improving relationships with their customers and managing their sales force. The next step is to get to know Sales Insights.
What is Sales Insights then? It is an add-on for Dynamics 365 Sales that offers us the possibility of using artificial intelligence to strengthen our control over sales. It makes use of the data obtained and proactively offers ideas (insights) according to the results.
This will allow us to better understand business relationships, assess past operations and choose the best path forward. To develop client relationships, make better decisions, and close opportunities faster.
What does Dynamics 365 Sales Insights provide us?
Sales Insights helps sellers prioritize key deals and achieve success with intelligent capabilities. This suite is made up of several features that are divided between standard and premium. Within them, they can be divided into four categories:
| GUIDED SELLING | SMART PRODUCTIVITY | KNOWLEDGE OF CONNECTIONS | PREDICTIVE MODELS |
| Guide sellers on their next course of action with timely and actionable information. Boost sales with a smart worklist. | Free up salespeople’s time by minimizing manual data entry with real-time, contextual suggestions to update existing records or create new ones, ensuring data is always up-to-date. | Build stronger customer relationships and move relationships forward with AI-guided selling. Take proactive steps to mitigate risks with a relationship “health score.” | Increase conversion and win rates by using AI to prioritize leads and opportunities that are most likely to convert and purchase. Eliminate the guesswork and forecast sales more accurately and without bias. |
What does each category offer me within Insights?
We will now explain in a little more detail what exists within each of the four categories.
Guided Selling
Study Assistant (Standard and Premium)
Insight cards help you stay on top of your work within Dynamics 365 Sales, letting you know when you need to follow up on an email, attend a meeting and more. They are displayed throughout the app to provide information relevant to the deal you are working on.
With Assistant Studio, you can use Power Automate to create custom insight cards tailored to the specific needs of your team. For example, to register a new contact from a webinar, or any other event, allowing you to act when it matters.
Sales accelerator
A single workspace that is supercharged with everything you need to engage the right customer, stay focused, and maximize productivity. It is also advisable to activate the features of predictive models, which we will explain later.
With sequences, we can direct potential customers (leads) to a working list of our sellers, based on their attributes (eg, level of knowledge of the industry). It helps to carry out the best sales practices towards potential customers, allowing sellers to focus on the sale instead of the process and maintenance.
Smart talk
Get instant insight into customer emotion, competitive market, sentiment, and priorities on phone calls to enable guided selling.
Conversation intelligence helps sales managers in your organization get a big picture view of the call center and drill down to the individual salesperson level of call statistics.
This helps sales managers change the shape of the business, offering smarter advice and improving sales.
Smart productivity
Note analysis
Action suggestions based on customer-related activities. When you create an activity, such as a meeting, email, phone call, post, or custom activity, the note analytics feature analyzes the provided descriptions and gives you smart suggestions.
With these suggestions, you can do things like creating a meeting request and add a contact.
Premium Auto Capture
Auto capture helps salespeople by simplifying the recording of customer-related activities within Sales. Auto Capture provides activity suggestions for related emails and meetings based on data captured from your Outlook account. This helps you see relevant emails and meetings on your timeline, along with all other activities related to a given record.
In addition to activity suggestions based on email and meeting capture, premium auto-capture also provides suggestions for creating new contacts.
Knowledge of connections
Relationship analysis
The relationship pipeline view provides a bubble chart, giving you a quick view of the health, close date, and estimated revenue for your upcoming opportunities.
Use relationship analytics to view customer activity history: Contact, Opportunities, Leads, or Accounts in a graphical view through KPIs and activity histories. For this, it makes use of a process described in the following image.
Talking points
As a sales rep, you interact with many customers and it can be difficult to remember details about each of them.
Talking points provide a mechanism to automatically identify those conversation starters in your emails. Conservation starters include topics related to sports, vacations, family, and entertainment.
This helps the rep remember conversation starters for their customers and be more personal.
Who knows who
As a sales rep, you’ll be interacting with potential customers (leads) you’ve never met or talked to. Because of this, it can be difficult to turn these interactions into positive results.
Who Knows Who provides details of colleagues who know the prospect, including their names and email addresses. With this information, you can contact your colleagues to help you talk to a potential client.
This help can increase the chances of getting a positive result during the first interaction.
Predictive models
Predictive Opportunity Scoring
In a highly competitive market, it’s important to spend time on quality opportunities to reach your goals. The most likely opportunities must be identified and prioritized to turn them into profits.
Dynamics 365 Sales Insights predictive opportunity scoring provides a scoring model, generating scores for the opportunities in your pipeline. The default model chooses the main factors to take into account.
Scoring helps sellers prioritize opportunities, improve qualification rates, and reduce qualification time (applies to predictive scoring as well).
Predictive Forecast
Eliminate the guesswork and forecast sales more accurately and without bias.
This plugin provides AI-powered forecasting that helps your salespeople and managers understand how much revenue your sales team can achieve. These predictions are based on historical data and the current sales portfolio, and are accessible at every level of the hierarchy. A detailed breakdown is also provided.
Should I try Sales Insights for my business?
As a final point, we must mention that what has been exposed is a small appetizer of all the possibilities and capabilities that Dynamics 365 Sales Insights can provide us to improve and take our sales team and its relationship with customers to another level. To get a view of the entire capabilities landscape, we also show you the following graph, which places these capabilities in the different areas of Sales Insights.
In short, Sales Insights can become a key tool to maximize the performance and potential of your sales team during contacts with potential and existing customers. It also improves communication and organization skills in your company and favors the adoption of new technologies and practices by your team. In our opinion, an essential complement for any company in the world of sales.
Learn more about managing Sales Insights features here.
