As a sales leader, it can be hard to gain visibility into the state of your business, chasing your team for updates, and spending days gathering data without getting the full picture.

With the sales research agent in Dynamics 365 Sales, you can use natural language to start a dialog with your data or pick from AI-suggested topics. This dialog helps you gain deep understanding of the sales performance of your team, territory, and product portfolio.

You can access the research workspace directly from within Dynamics 365 Sales where you're already connected to your sales data. When you ask a research question, the agent creates a research plan. It then gathers, analyzes, and transforms data into meaningful research outputs. These outputs are tailored to your context, business domain knowledge, and deep understanding of the business data, and are delivered to you as comprehensive, AI-generated research blueprints.

The sales research agent is not just bringing back answers but suggestions for where to go next. You can effortlessly build multibranch research journeys and zoom into any research finding to explore the output from different angles using the AI cursor, a new AI-powered, context-aware approach to engaging you in the research journey. You can even augment your research by uploading data files from external sources such as HR or e-commerce to provide additional context and richer outcomes by building a comprehensive understanding of your business.

As a sales team, you often spend a lot of time identifying and prioritizing high-potential leads, but that can result in wasted time and missed opportunities. Additionally, after identifying key leads, you spend a significant amount of time navigating across multiple apps to identify and execute the most relevant steps for qualifying the leads.

This feature directly addresses these issues by identifying the most impactful leads within your workflow, explaining the reasoning behind the prioritization, and providing the most relevant actions to help qualify the leads. This streamlined process enhances lead qualification and empowers sales teams to execute necessary actions efficiently, improving overall sales performance, and increasing the likelihood of meeting targets.

As a seller, you often juggle multiple leads and opportunities, making it challenging to stay organized and respond to various customer requests. This complexity can lead to missed follow-ups and delays in the sales process, ultimately hindering your ability to close deals. Our latest update addresses these issues by automatically capturing essential follow-up actions from conversations. By suggesting next steps such as sending emails or scheduling meetings, it empowers you to focus on engaging with customers rather than managing tasks. This increased efficiency enhances productivity and fosters a smoother sales process, allowing you to meet customer expectations more effectively.

As a seller, you typically need to build a qualified pipeline to cover 2-3 times of your target quota goal. However, doing so requires manual work across fragmented tools. It's also inefficient as you have to spend hours each week sending hundreds of prospecting emails, only to book 2-3 meetings with prospects, of which perhaps one will convert to a qualified opportunity.

The sales qualification agent in Dynamics 365 Sales now eliminates the human toil by autonomously researching information about every lead from CRM data and public web sources, making a recommendation on whether that lead should be qualified and pregenerating an email with highly personalized talking points to grab the prospect's attention. To ensure that you never miss the best moves to build a qualified pipeline, the agent surfaces the most important actions you should take on your leads in a new UI that follows you across lead and opportunity grids. With the agent, you can now spend more time meeting customers and less time triaging leads.

Sellers know that sending follow-up emails significantly increases their chance of getting a reply, booking a meeting, and accurately qualifying a lead. However, they often miss out on follow-ups due to insufficient time, competing tasks, lack of a reminder, and so on. The sales qualification agent automates follow-ups with leads, nudging if there is no response, reminding if they’re out of the office, and facilitating a meeting when positive intent is detected.

Unlike traditional cadences, the agent can dynamically adjust what is sent and when, based on the context of a lead’s response. This way, sellers can ensure they consistently engage leads with the right content, at the right time, and without manual effort. This will make sellers more effective by increasing the number of replies received, customer meetings set and leads progressed through the sales process.

As a seller, you aim to expand your pipeline and boost conversions but often you might miss valuable cross-sell and upsell opportunities hidden within service interactions. Customer service teams handle product inquiries and challenges that signal high purchasing intent, yet you may struggle to receive these insights in time.

The sales qualification agent in Dynamics 365 Sales bridges this gap by automatically identifying new leads from existing accounts and customers by aggregating their service interactions and case history. For example, a customer reaching out to support after hitting a service limit could indicate a need for an upgrade, or frequent inquiries about a premium feature might signal interest in an upsell. By leveraging these insights, you can drive revenue growth and strengthen customer relationships.

Sellers have their own tried-and-true selling techniques, including a unique tone of voice to use in email outreach to leads. This is important to improve email engagement from leads because it allows sellers to personalize outreach with an effective tone that differentiates them from other sellers. The sales qualification agent will now generate emails in the seller’s own tone of voice, so they draft more consistent communications that lead to better response rates and qualification outcomes.

Marketing interactions such as attending a product demo or engaging with an email campaign are strong indicators of buying intent. For Dynamics 365 Sales customers using Customer Insights - Journeys, the sales qualification agent now automatically incorporates email interactions, event attendance, and form submissions to prioritize and surface the most engaged leads.

This seamlessly bridges the gap between marketing and sales without requiring customers to build and maintain a custom solution to extract, aggregate, and sync marketing engagement data into Dynamics 365 Sales, saving significant time and costs. You can also define high-intent interactions such as a Contact Us form submission or attendance at a product demo event as signals requiring timely engagement. This ensures sellers focus on the most valuable opportunities sooner.

With this feature, the agent streamlines lead prioritization using engagement data, enabling sales teams to quickly act on potential opportunities.

As a sales team, you need research that is not only comprehensive but also tailored to your specific industry, customer segments, and business strategy. While a sales qualification agent’s out-of-the-box research provides broad insights, many organizations rely on industry-specific sources, regulatory databases, or niche publications to make informed decisions.

With this enhancement, the agent can deliver more relevant, customized insights by incorporating data from public web sources that matter most to each business. You can gain real-time access to industry-aligned insights and can engage leads with deeper context, using up-to-date information—ensuring outreach is timely and impactful.

We are upgrading our Exchange infrastructure to enhance support for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium features such as Relationship analytics and Who knows whom. With this release, Exchange data integration will shift to server-side synchronization (SSS), enabling more granular control over email sync settings. This boosts reliability and provides users with greater flexibility in managing the timing and scope of their email synchronization.

Top sellers consistently have a stronger pipeline than others. Their success can be attributed, among other factors, to being disciplined about choosing the right leads to engage with. What if you could encode their methods of lead selection and prioritization and have every seller follow the same approach?

With sales qualification agent, now you can. First, you can customize the lead selection criteria based on your ideal customer profile (ICP) using Dynamics 365 data such as job title and public web sources such as market cap from Bloomberg. You can also customize the agent's prioritization logic, ensuring it always shows the most important ICP-fit leads to your sellers.

Different industries and businesses use unique data points to assess a lead’s fit with their ICP. For example, financial services teams may prioritize prospects based on total assets under management, while technology companies may focus on subscription usage. Even among ICP-fit leads, prioritization varies. Some businesses may favor recently engaged leads, while others prioritize those from high-growth industries or webinar attendees. With the sales qualification agent, sales operations teams can fine-tune lead selection and prioritization using custom instructions that replicate the intuition of top sellers. By connecting data from Dynamics 365, Dataverse, and external open web datasets, the agent delivers deeper insights that guide more precise qualification and prioritization.

With a strong lead selection and prioritization logic, the agent can emulate top sellers and ensure that every seller spends time engaging only with the leads with the highest probability of converting.