How to Enable, Configure and Use Sales accelerator – Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Hi Everyone,

Sales Accelerator is a preview feature and not meant for Production Use. Follow Microsoft Docs for officially confirmation the launch.

“The Sales accelerator helps sellers in your organization increase their sales productivity and prioritize activities for the day through the work list available in Sales Hub app. A sales manager uses the sequence designer to create a sequence of activities—separated by time intervals—including emails, phone calls, and tasks. The sequence is then applied to leads or opportunities, and assigned to a seller automatically according to your organization’s sales strategies.”

In simple words, this is another tool in the Dynamics 365 Sales Insights toolbox which sales managers and sales reps can utilize to stay on top of their top leads and opportunities. Here everything revolves around Sequence. A sequence is more of a checklist and is made up of activities that needs to be taken place in a certain order by Sales Reps. Sales Manager might wants his team to follow the steps on Lead like first send an email, call them in 24 hours and follow up at some point of time. These events can be configured in Sequence.

Enable Sales Accelerator

Sign in to Dynamics 365 Sales Hub, and go to Change area > Sales Insights settings.

On the site map, under Acceleration, select Sales accelerator (preview).

On the settings page, select I agree to the preview terms and conditions to enable the preview.

Select Get started.

Once you click on Get started, you will see the below where you can create a Sequence and start using Sales Accelerator. Just scroll down a bit, you will see a setting which is enabled by default on Lead and Opportunity and security roles. For now, I have selected All Security Roles and Published.

Make sure you have published the settings before creating the Sequence. Otherwise, you will see an error saying “Sequence is not enabled for this organization. Please enable it for creating a cadence”

Let’s create Sequence now. I have selected Lead.

As mentioned above(highlighted), let’s take the same example.

Once you are done with configuration of the steps, activate the Sequence. Keep in mind that the sequence or any of the steps can no longer be edited after activation.

Let’s create a Lead and see what’s happening. Once we have the lead, connect it to the Sequence from the Homepage grid.

If users need to disconnect from a sequence, they can do this by navigating to the ‘Sales Insights Settings’ area, selecting ‘Sequences’ and opening the sequence. The Connected Records tab is where we can see all the connected lead or opportunity records. Users can disconnect the records from here by selecting the records and clicking the ‘Disconnect’ button on the grid.

Click on Sales Accelerator on the left Navigation pane to check how it works.

You will see the record that has been connected, opened with the information and showing the steps to be taken care like send an email and other steps in the Upnext Widget.

Once you click on the email if the Template is selected in the sequence, it will open email window with the template else normal window by automatically populating To and Subject.

Users can also Skip or Postpone items from the widget and move forward with the next steps.

This way we can enforce the Sales Reps are following right process to get the deals closed.

Hope this helps.

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Happy 365’ing
Gopinath

Notes Analysis from Sales Insights – Dynamics 365

Hi Everyone,

Today I was going through Sales Hub and enabled Sales Insights to understand it more. As part of the Dynamics 365 Sales offering, only some of the basic features are available for free. Somehow, I feel Notes Analysis is a useful feature. It requires you to have a Sales Insight license. You can enable a free trial of this app though, to check how it works.

Enable Sales Insights in Dynamics 365

1) Navigate to Sales Hub and select Sales Insight Settings.

2) Select Try Sales Insights to enable and set up the sales insight subscription.

3) It takes few minutes to install and once the installation is completed, you will see the screen as below. Click on Go to Configuration or Navigate to Sales Insight Settings.

4) Enable Notes Analysis by click on Set up button. That’s it. Notes analysis has been enabled on your instance.

Before we go into reality, let’s try to understand what exactly Notes analysis does for us.

“Notes analysis provides you with suggestions for actions based on customer-related activities. When you create an activity, such as appointment, phone call, task, note, post, or custom activities, the notes analysis feature analyzes the descriptions provided in these activities and gives you intelligent suggestions. With these suggestions, you can take actions, such as creating a meeting request and adding a contact.”

Let’s check what exactly it does in reality.

I just opened an existing Account and entered Notes with Subject and Description as below and the system has changed the description to link and on click of that we see a popup of the card to take an action.

Subject – Next week
Description – Le’ts have a call next week.

Subject – Meeting tomorrow
Description – Let’s have a meeting tomorrow 4 PM and close the deal.

On click on Edit and Create button in the card, the system opens a Quick Create form for Phone call.

“There are two bugs in this, Subject has div tags and Regarding is showing No name. Hoping Microsoft fixes them soon.“

Hope this helps.

—
Happy 365’ing
Gopinath