There were two waves released for Dynamics 365 in 2024: Wave 1 and Wave 2. This blog focuses on updates that relate to Dynamics 365 Sales 2024 Wave 2.

The 2024 release wave 2 for Dynamics 365 brings new innovations that provide you with significant capabilities to transform your business. The release contains hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications, including Sales, Customer Service, Contact Center, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Project Operations, finance and operations cross-app capabilities, Human Resources, Commerce, Business Central, Customer Insights – Data, and Customer Insights – Journeys, as well as Copilot for business features in Copilot for Sales, Copilot for Service, and Copilot for Finance.

You can find more information in the following blogs:

Administration and extension experiences

Get new features faster with monthly channel

Organisations that rely on semi-annual releases for major changes may find that it limits the speed of innovation and delays access to newer features. With this feature, the Sales Hub app will be enabled for monthly release channel, allowing it to be updated every month. This frequent update cycle ensures that the Sales Hub app receives the latest, generally available features as quickly as possible, enabling you to stay at the forefront of innovation and continuously improve your workflows.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Get new features faster with monthly channel

Tailor Copilot to your specific business terminology

As a sales professional, you expect chat systems to understand not only general inquiries but also your organisation’s unique language and business nuances. You seek a solution that accurately interprets industry terminology and delivers relevant, context-specific responses. Consistency and accuracy in responses are essential, making the chat system a dependable tool for daily operations. A glossary solution within Microsoft Copilot Studio would allow admins to integrate business-specific terms, enabling you to receive precise answers to your questions.

A glossary enables Copilot to understand and use business-specific terms accurately, ensuring responses are consistently relevant to your context. This improves efficiency in closing deals, as you can easily access information with familiar terminology, allowing you to address concerns, gather relevant facts, and answer questions quickly, ultimately streamlining the path to a successful deal.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Tailor Copilot to your specific business terminology

Copilot and AI innovation

Supercharge sales productivity through integrated data, enrichment, workflows, insights, and next-generation AI capabilities.

Maximise sales performance with the most impactful work

As a sales professional, you can:

  • View your top leads in a carousal across the lead and opportunity views.
  • Understand why Copilot prioritised the leads over the others.
  • Take the recommended next best action to move the deal forward.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Maximise sales performance with the most impactful work

Elevate your sales pitch using Copilot email assistance

Copilot lets you spend less time composing emails. With this feature, you can:

  • Select a predefined category or enter your text and Copilot will suggest content with specific prompts and actions.
  • Adjust the tone and length of the email.
  • Customise the suggested content before you send it.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Elevate your sales pitch using Copilot email assistance

Streamline sales process with sales document summary

As a sales professional, you can use Copilot chat to:

  • Get a summary of the documents stored in SharePoint that you have access to.
  • Get a summary of the documents associated with your contact, opportunity, lead, and account.
  • Use the summary to understand the budget, authority (decision maker), need, and timeline based on various documents.

Note: This feature is automatically enabled with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Streamline sales process with sales document summary

Get 360-degree view with account AI-generated summary

As an admin, you can:

  • Enable Copilot Account summary for any Dynamics 365 application.
  • Configure the entities and fields to use for creating the account summary.

As a sales professional, you can:

  • Get a 360-degree view of your account, which is built using all the data associated with the account.
    View a summary of the associated opportunities.
  • Know about the associated leads.
  • Learn the latest news about the account.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Get 360-degree view with account AI-generated summary

Stay updated with action items from customer conversations

As a sales professional, you can:

  • Get a list of follow-up action items gathered from customer conversations such as emails and Teams meetings from Copilot.
  • Get email content suggestions for follow-ups to ensure timely, consistent, and high-quality communication with customers.
  • Get suggestions for meeting agendas and participants to streamline coordination and keep the sales process running smoothly.
  • Track follow-up actions and stay organised as Copilot identifies and creates tasks for you.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Stay updated with action items from customer conversations

Ask questions from sales documents in your preferred language

As a sales professional, you can get answers to your questions from SharePoint documents in your preferred language. Copilot searches all SharePoint files that you have access to and translates the answers from the documents to the language you prefer.

Copilot can answer questions from documents in the following languages:

  • Chinese (simplified)
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • Finnish
  • French
  • German
  • Greek
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Korean
  • Norwegian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese (Brazil)
  • Russian
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
  • Thai
  • Turkish

Note: This feature is automatically enabled with Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Ask questions from sales documents in your preferred language

Lead management

Enable sellers to effectively manage leads to generate a qualified pipeline.

Boost qualified pipeline with sales qualification agent

The sales qualification agent combines the power of three agents that work together to help sales professionals build a qualified pipeline more efficiently (though each agent is not available independently):

The research agent uses data from CRM and public web sources as well as existing copilot skills to synthesise key customer and account data. It enables sales professionals to:

  • Decide whether to engage with the lead using the agent-generated recommendation.
  • Get a 360-degree picture through lead and account summaries.
  • Confirm that the lead has a valid email address and has consented to emails and phone calls.
  • Know who can make an introduction (co-workers who know the lead).
  • Verify that the lead’s company’s finances, priorities, and business environment are aligned with their solution area (annual report, strategic priorities, and so on).
  • Get suggestions for who else at the lead’s company to contact.
  • See existing opportunities tied to lead/contact and account.
  • Review a personalised email, composed using talking points generated from the synthesised research, to send to the prospect.

The prioritisation agent assesses the strength of the data and signals, and evaluates common criteria such as authority, budget, and others to identify leads with the highest likelihood to close. It enables sales professionals to:

  • Get the list of leads to focus on instantly.
  • Stay on top of triaging high-quality leads as the new UI follows you across lead and opportunity grids.
  • The engagement agent creates a personalised email to engage the lead, based on all the data gathered by the research agent, to maximise response rates.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Boost qualified pipeline with sales qualification agent

Sales engagement and execution

Sales execution includes tools and processes that help sellers engage with a prospective customer from the early stage of awareness to closing a sale.

Quickly grasp key email engagement metrics

The email engagement enhancement highlights key engagement metrics, displaying only the first and most recent instances of clicks, replies, attachment views, and opens, while omitting all other instances. This keeps the focus on the most critical interactions. To access this feature, ensure that the email engagement option is enabled in the Sales Insights settings of the sales application.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Quickly grasp key email engagement metrics

Seller experiences

Enable sellers to manage their pipeline, prioritise and guide sales activities, and optimise engagements with seamlessly integrated productivity experiences.

Analyse opportunities with grouping and aggregating

As a sales professional, you can:

  • Group opportunities by account name, seller name, closing date/month, or any other relevant field.
  • Aggregate numeric values such as estimated value and actual revenue in the editable grid.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Analyse opportunities with grouping and aggregating

Customise lead qualification for a seamless experience

As an administrator, you can:

  • Configure the lead qualification process to ensure that leads are thoroughly evaluated.
  • Enable Copilot to generate a lead qualification summary.
  • Configure the creation of multiple opportunities from a single lead.

As a sales professiona, you can:

  • Assign newly generated opportunities to other sellers, fostering collaboration and maximising sales team efficiency.
  • View the AI-generated lead qualification summary after a lead is qualified.
  • Choose to create multiple opportunities from a single lead.

For more detailed information, visit Microsoft: Customise lead qualification for a seamless experience

Full Details of 2024 Releases

For more information, please refer to Microsoft’s Release Documentation:

Dynamics 365 2024 Release Wave 1

Dynamics 365 2024 Release Wave 2

What other applications are updated as part of Dynamics 365 Releases?

Dynamics 365 Releases usually contain hundreds of new features across Dynamics 365 applications, including:

  • Sales
  • Customer Service
  • Field Service
  • Finance
  • Supply Chain Management
  • Project Operations
  • Finance and operations cross-app capabilities
  • Human Resources
  • Commerce
  • Business Central
  • Customer Insights – Data
  • Customer Insights – Journeys
  • Copilot for Sales, Service and Finance
We hope you found this article interesting and informative. For more ideas on how to streamline, automate and digitally transform your business (thereby saving you time and money):
author avatar
Caroline Robertson Project & Planning Manager
Caroline has lived in the CRM and technology world from her very first job! From Sales Executive to CRM Consultant, Project Manager to Marketing Team Leader, she loves ticking things off a list so has a reputation for "getting things done". Outside work, she is a dedicated mother and rescue pup parent as well as caring for her siblings and parents.
See Full Bio
social network icon