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- Welcome to Dynamics 365 Essentials for IT.
Today, I'll walk you through the core components
in Dynamics 365 that enable an intelligent sales
and marketing approach for your organization,
and I'll address the key considerations for you in IT.
You might be used to siloed role
and function-specific CRM solutions that force users
to navigate multiple disconnected sales, marketing,
and related apps and services.
Today, Dynamics 365 solves for this with modular
and connected sales and marketing
SaaS applications within Dynamics 365
that deliver a unified platform, built on Azure
and natively connected to Microsoft 365,
to allow your users to access sales and marketing data
and capabilities, as dedicated app experiences
or within their day-to-day productivity apps.
Dynamics 365 Sales and Marketing apps
are natively integrated and intelligent,
and when used together, automate the process
of identifying, nurturing,
and transforming customer prospects into relationships,
so that your sales and marketing teams
can craft more personalized buyer experiences.
This is enhanced further with the addition
of Dynamics 365 Sales Insights
and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights,
which help you to build an intelligent 360-degree view
across your customers by integrating
relevant data sitting in other apps
and databases across varying aspects of your business,
and extracting valuable hidden insights
that can grow relationships and revenue.
In fact, these Insights apps can also be used
with your existing sales
and marketing solutions if you have them.
But as I'll show you, there are a number of advantages
to deploying them together within Dynamics 365.
As part of Dynamics 365, they benefit from Azure's network
and compute backbone to speed up time to insights,
leveraging bandwidth connections between services
in the Microsoft Cloud to help quickly reason over
complex data architectures and derive insights using AI.
Additionally, native integration
with the Microsoft Power Platform allows both IT
and even non-technical users to automate everyday processes,
build new custom experiences,
and more, all of which address a number
of IT challenges that may be in your way.
Let me explain.
We all know that information is core to any organization.
Of course, IT is central to driving the most impactful
and transformational changes evolving how people work.
This is especially true for how your users interact
with their customers and partners.
The increasing number of tools used for communication,
spanning email, chat, social, telephony, online
and in-person meetings, really make it a challenge
to have a single
and contextual view of your customers,
know who in your organization is interacting with them,
and efficiently determine the next best action.
This is because the data to do all of this is typically
spread across different databases,
services, and even stores.
Understanding the relationships between data repos
can be challenging, let alone programmatically
tying it all altogether.
Also, once you do bring the data together into a schema,
it needs to scale
and allow even non-technical users
to build their own queries
and insights, so that you or your IT
and data analyst teams aren't inundated
with query, analysis, and reporting requests.
To solve for this, Dynamics 365
provides a solid solution foundation.
In our first Dynamics 365 Essentials,
I explained the shared underlying data service
and model in Dynamics 365, called the Common Data Service
and Common Data Model as part of Microsoft's Power Platform.
If you missed that, check out aka.ms/D365Essentials.
This unified or common data architecture is important
because it makes a holistic view possible
across data entities and sources.
Now, if you're thinking, I already have a central store
set up for contact information
and capturing interactions in my on-prem CRM solution,
while that's a good starting point,
as I'll show you, it only gets you so far.
Okay, so I've started to explain our approach
for intelligent sales and marketing, as well as how
this removes many of the common pain points for IT,
but back to the topic of why you may want to use
the key components together.
If you're new to Dynamics 365
and its modular set of applications,
let's now walk through the sales
and marketing modules themselves,
along with the insights apps to demonstrate how together
they give you a connected intelligent sales
and marketing foundation.
Starting with Dynamics 365 Sales, it's designed to help
sellers keep track of accounts and contacts,
and manage the end-to-end sales process from lead to order.
The end-user experience is delivered through the Sales Hub,
which is a web app like other Dynamics 365 experiences,
and uses responsive design,
optimized for both desktop and mobile users.
It's also worth noting, that for mobile,
there is a unified Dynamics 365 for phones app
that brings everything, including the Sales Hub,
into an integrated
and secure experience, so in most cases,
it's just one mobile app for you or others
on your IT team to deploy, containing the breadth
of Dynamics 365 experiences.
Also, Dynamics 365 Sales is designed for both sellers
and their managers, with customer management capabilities
for adding, viewing, or making edits to records, as well as
access to all previous activities and future opportunities.
Team management analytics
and dashboards are available for sales managers.
And there are in-context Office 365 app experiences,
like the ability to export Excel spreadsheets
for custom reporting.
And to validate leads and prospects
we give you native integration with LinkedIn.
Dynamics 365 Sales also feeds into marketing activities
to help create customer
and prospect lists for campaigns or events.
Speaking of which, Dynamics 365 Marketing
brings marketing automation that helps
turn prospects into business relationships.
With Dynamics 365 Marketing,
you can manage end-to-end marketing
and engagement campaigns from one place,
allowing your marketing teams to create automated,
multichannel campaigns with personalized emails,
followup activities, workflows, and more.
You can also securely share information about leads
and contacts, as well as organize and promote events,
and keep all the information about your event venues,
logistics, presentations, speakers,
and sponsors, again, all in one place.
Then finally, with dashboards and reports
you can track the performance
of your marketing initiatives.
With sales and marketing applications running at the core,
you're now collecting data from your customers
and corresponding activities.
And within this data, trends
and patterns begin to form, allowing you to go
to the next level by applying AI and deriving insights.
In fact, our Sales Insights
and Customer Insights capabilities, as I mentioned before,
connect data from other related
and relevant data sources, so let's dig in.
First, Dynamics 365 Sales Insights starts with services
included as part of Dynamics 365 Sales.
Our sales assistant parses activity logs
to generate actionable recommendations.
Email engagement helps create more effective email messages
by tracking if email has been read or interacted with.
This then gets better with advanced capabilities
that are exclusive to the Sales Insights app.
First, the Assistant Studio
allows you to create custom insights,
for example, if you want sellers to focus
on specific offers or closing deadlines.
And you can further tailor
the assistant experience using Power Automate.
Relationship analytics then helps gather information
from Dynamics 365 Sales for key performance indicators
and activity history, all displayed graphically.
Predictive lead and opportunity scoring uses AI
to provide scores highlighting qualified leads
and opportunities, to optimize time to revenue.
Notes analysis monitors notes that you enter in Sales Hub
as you interact with customers
to provide actionable recommendations.
For example, a note about scheduling a meeting
will automatically launch an action card that helps create
the meeting in your calendar in seconds.
AI can also extract conversation starter topics
automatically based on previous interactions,
and by using the Microsoft Graph, it can help you find peers
in your organization who may already know
a prospective buyer, so they can help make introductions.
And finally, the Dynamics 365 assistant for Microsoft Teams
uses the Dynamics 365 bot
and deep integration with Teams
to surface timely insights that your teams can act on.
Sales Insights operates primarily
against existing contact data and sales activities
and connected services, like Office 365
and the Microsoft Graph,
that are natively integrated with Dynamics 365 Sales.
The output is then tailored to sales professionals
and their managers.
In fact, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
then moves further outside the boundaries of sales
and pre-connected services to connect with data
and services outside the Microsoft Cloud
to build comprehensive views of your customers,
so let's take a look.
In the customer pages, you get a consolidated view
of your customers, whether they're individuals
or organizations, based on profile data
gathered from all connected apps and services.
Segment pages show your grouping of customers
based on demographic, transactional, behavioral,
and other custom attributes.
You can use segmentation to target
promotional campaigns, sales activities,
and customer support actions to achieve your business goals.
Measures pages show KPIs tailored
to your organization or business needs.
You can build different types of measures,
using a query-builder that doesn't require you
to manually code or validate your measures,
all from one central place.
So now, back to the question of what it takes
to get your intelligent sales
and marketing experience up and running with Dynamics 365.
As an administrator or analyst, you can choose from hundreds
of pre-built connectors or build your own custom connectors
to set up Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
Secure OAuth flows are used for authentication
and token-based authorization without using or exposing
stored credentials to users or third parties.
Connectors pull in both internal
and external data sources, whether it's activity logs
from authenticated web traffic,
other Dynamics 365 databases,
external databases from Oracle, Teradata,
and Redshift, just to name a few,
as well as common online SaaS applications,
spanning CRM, ERP, and more.
You can also connect to generic file types
and data sources, like CSV files among others.
As you connect to different data providers,
built-in AI automatically maps data fields
and columns across tables and databases,
and AI logic aligns the format of common fields,
like names, addresses, numbers,
and dates, to a unified schema
represented by the common data model.
After the mapping is complete, the built-in AI
then derives relationships to match data between tables,
wherever possible, generating keys,
which can be direct key pairs like an account ID
or fuzzy logic, like name strings or even telephone numbers.
As an analyst, you can validate or edit the derived keys
that are found or create your own keys.
After mapping data sources
and matching the relational models, you can merge data,
where you rank the most accurate data source for any field,
so it's ready and consistent for business analysts,
and, of course, everything stays up-to-date
as changes or additions are made to underlying datasets.
Here, you can also provide granular,
role-based permissions to users
and groups for viewer, contributor, and administrator roles.
Once you're finished, the data is securely available
for less-technical business analysts to create segments
and KPIs, as well as deeply analyze them,
so they don't need to know SQL or other query languages,
making it self-service for them while reducing query queues
that you might otherwise need to manage
as a data engineer or technical data analyst.
Finally, once you build out
your integrated customer views, segments,
and measures, the collected insights then feed back
into the Sales Hub app so that individual business users
also get comprehensive views of their individual customers,
allowing them to deliver more personalized experiences
and have the insights they need to work effectively
and prioritize their time.
So that was a quick overview of the core components
in Dynamics 365 that together enable an intelligent sales
and marketing approach for your organization by infusing
AI-enriched insights across relevant data sources,
giving you a true 360-degree view of your customers.
Please keep checking back to our Dynamics 365 Essentials
for IT series to learn more about adopting specific
Dynamics 365 applications
and services within your organization
and for a deeper dive on the Power Platform.
And if you need more help onboarding your organization
to Dynamics 365, our FastTrack services
are offered free to qualifying customers.
Thank you for watching.
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