Discover the latest advancements in Dynamics 365 Sales and Copilot for Sales, set to revolutionize your sales strategy in 2025. This blog highlights the exciting new features rolling out in December 2024 and Q1 2025, available in Public Preview or General Availability. Whether automatically deployed or enabled by your Admins, Makers, or Analysts, these updates are designed to enhance your user experience and drive business success. Stay ahead of the curve and learn how these innovations can transform your sales operations.
Tailor Copilot to your specific business terminology
Public Preview – Dec 2024 – Enabled for Users by admins, makers, or analysts
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.
- Define a glossary with terms and logic that are relevant for your business. This helps you gain greater control over how Copilot interprets your queries. This includes defining business-specific terms, customizing ownership models, fine-tuning CRM queries, and setting guidelines for terms like “Top”, “Best”, and “We”.
- Access the glossary across all skills, including custom skills, ensuring consistent understanding and responses across various contexts.
Define knowledge sources for getting more out of Copilot
Public Preview – Dec 2024 – Enabled for Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Copilot enhances decision-making by drawing from various enterprise data sources, such as Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and external websites, providing comprehensive insights that support timely, informed business decisions. Quick access to accurate data also accelerates sales cycles, enabling you to respond to customer questions, gather necessary information, and close deals more efficiently. Additionally, by unifying data across multiple systems, Copilot fosters better cross-functional collaboration, allowing departments to work from a shared understanding and reducing organizational silos.
- Add various knowledge sources in Microsoft Copilot Studio to enable Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales to retrieve information. The knowledge source can be from Power Platform, Dynamics 365, websites, and external systems, providing relevant insights for users. You can add knowledge sources either at initial setup or later to improve flexibility and enhanced functionality.
- Get relevant and authentic information from the configured knowledge sources.
Access Copilot for Sales usage data via Analyst Workbench
General Availability – Dec 2024 – Enabled for Users by admins, makers, or analysts
You’ll have access to key Copilot for Sales usage metrics via the Viva Insights Analyst Workbench, where you can use a set of provided Power BI templates or build your own custom reports.
Within Viva Insights, you’ll have access to a user-friendly and self-serve mechanism to track Copilot for Sales adoption, covering usage from high-level key metrics to scenario-specific details. Out-of-the-box Power BI templates will be provided to see both high-level usage data pivoted by your organizational data, all the way down to scenario-level usage, and even usage trends over time.
Usage metrics and Power BI templates will be available for user in the Viva Insights Analyst Workbench. The Analyst Workbench gives you access to a wide range of usage metrics from Copilot in Microsoft 365 and Copilot for Sales. These are complemented by an out-of-the-box Power BI dashboard so you can get started rapidly and with minimal effort. You can always choose to build your own customer dashboards using the results from your analysis query in the Analyst Workbench.
Extend email drafts with file links from third-party systems
General Availability – Dec 2024 – Enabled for Users by admins, makers, or analysts
With the new capability to integrate content from third-party systems, customers can now enhance their email replies with the file links from third-party systems.
As an administer, you can create a connector-based plugin that builds connection between Copilot for Sales and the external system to enable file links to be added in email drafts.
As a seller, you can sign in to the plugin and see file links relevant to the emails automatically added to the email replies.
This capability is available in:
- Copilot for Sales product area: Microsoft Outlook
Benefit from enhanced email summaries and drafts with meeting suggestions
General Availability – Dec 2024 – Enabled for Users by admins, makers, or analysts
This new enhancement will help sellers confidently user Copilot for drafting emails and generating email summaries, thereby providing productivity gains.
Email summaries and drafts displayed on the Outlook canvas will be enhanced with the following features:
- You can see suggested meeting time slots based on the email conversations.
- Copilot responses in localized languages are further enhanced to respect language nuances.
- You can now ask for CRM information as part of the custom prompt that can be included in the email draft.
- Email summaries will be very concise, resulting in understanding the email thread context faster than before.
Manage deals with the opportunity intelligence agent
Public Preview – Jan 2025 – General Availability – Mar 2025 – Enabled for Users by admins, makers, or analysts
With Opportunity Intelligence agent in Copilot for Sales, you can now automatically get rich insights to help manage your opportunities. Long gone are the days of manual note taking and fragmented information. Now Copilot is constantly working in the background to extract next steps, key objections, warnings, engagement levels, and more across all your opportunities.
- Opportunity Insights: Review all customer touchpoints such as meetings, emails, and CRM updates, and then summarize recent interactions, next steps, objections raised, warnings, engagement scores across stakeholders, and BANT analysis. These are displayed in the opportunity hub view in the Copilot for Sales app in Teams and Outlook.
- Opportunity roadmap: Bring together all meetings, emails, and CRM updates into a single view that is consistent across the team.
- Summary card in CRM: A summarized insights card that is embedded right into your CRM to provide rich insights about your opportunity such as recent interactions, next steps, key risks, and stakeholder engagement.
- Opportunities View: A multi-opportunity view that tracks your open opportunities and their summaries.
- Configuration: Control which warnings are relevant for your organization and the threshold for each warning.
Share records when composing emails in Outlook
General Availability – Jan 2025 – Enabled for Users, automatically
To ensure teams are engaged on the right record, you can now mention recently used Copilot for Sales records right within the Outlook email experience. This will make it easy to find and show a rich embedded adaptive card to the recipients. Typing the forward slash (/) key followed by the name of the record automatically completes a CRM record name and adds it to the email.
Sharing records is turned off by default, but CRM administrators can turn them on within the Copilot for Sales settings in Outlook, Teams, or other Microsoft 365 applications.
You will be able to leverage the existing Outlook forward slash (/) support to show a dialog box within recently used Copilot for Sales CRM records. As you interact with Copilot for Sales, those records will be added to the available list to be shown within Outlook emails for quick access. Once selected, a rich adaptive card shows the CRM record information for quick access.
Recipients of the adaptive card will only see details if they have CRM access to the CRM record. The adaptive card will auto-refresh to show any changed CRM content, keeping the card from showing any stale data.
Enrich your contacts with LinkedIn Sales Navigator in Outlook
Public Preview – Jan 2025 – Enabled for Users, automatically
With LinkedIn Sales Navigator integrated with Copilot for Sales, you no longer have to switch between applications. You’ll get visibility into contacts’ LinkedIn profile information and insights right from within Outlook in the flow of engaging with the prospects over email.
- Person summary from LinkedIn: Copilot for Sales already matches email participants to CRM contacts. With the integration with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can also access the LinkedIn profiles of contacts including their headline, current and past roles, location, and past experiences.
- Spotlights and talking points: Discover stakeholders who are more likely to engage with you using contact spotlights from LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Use talking points to understand the contact’s interests and what you share in common to make personalized conversations.
- Simplified contact creation using LinkedIn information: Get contact forms prefilled with information from LinkedIn. Review and save the information with a few clicks.
- Keep CRM updated with the latest LinkedIn information: Get notified when contact information in CRM does not match the information on LinkedIn. Discover stakeholders moving companies to update CRM and take corrective action to keep your deals on track.
As an administrator, you can customize which sellers can get access to insights from LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Stay updated with action items from customer conversations
Public Preview – Mar 2025 – Enabled for Users by admins, makers, or analysts
Automatically capture essential follow-up actions from conversations. By suggesting next steps such as sending emails or scheduling meetings, empower sellers to focus on engaging with customers rather than managing tasks. This increased efficiency enhances productivity and fosters a smoother sales process, allowing sellers to meet customer expectations more effectively.
- 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 organized as Copilot identifies and creates tasks for you.
Boost qualified pipeline with sales qualification agent
Public Preview – Mar 2025 – General Availability – Apr 2025 – Enabled for Users by admins, makers, or analysts
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 pre-generating 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.
The sales qualification agent combines the power of three agents that work together to help sellers build a qualified pipeline more efficiently:
The research agent uses data from CRM and public web sources as well as existing copilot skills to synthesize key customer and account data. It enables sellers to:
- Decide on 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 (coworkers who know the lead).
- Verify that the lead’s company’s finances, priorities, and business environment are aligned with their solution area (Account 10-K, 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 data.
- Review a personalized email, composed using talking pints generated from the synthesized research, to send to the prospect.
The prioritization 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 sellers 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 personalized email to engage the lead, based on all the data gathered by the research agent, to maximize response rates.
Easily save meeting notes to CRM following Teams meetings
General Availability – Mar 2025 – Enabled for Users, automatically
Keeping the CRM up to date after meetings is essential for providing the sales team with the visibility they need to close deals faster. However, the inability to save meeting notes to CRM from Teams often leads to missed or delayed updates due to the sellers’ busy schedules.
With Copilot for Sales, you can effortlessly save meeting notes directly to your CRM right after a meeting, without the need to switch contexts. This not only saves time but also ensures that your organization’s business data remains up to date and accurate.
Update CRM directly from the post-meeting Microsoft Teams recap page. Select the Sales button to see sales-related insights. Select Save to CRM to update your CRM by performing the following actions:
- Save the AI-generated meeting summary directly to CRM. You can review and edit the summary prior to saving.
- Link the meeting summary to an out-of-the-box entity or custom entity of your choice.
Meeting summaries are saved to the description field of the appointment in CRM for the sales team to access.
Access Copilot for Sales from Outlook mobile
General Availability – Mar 2025 – Enabled for Users, automatically
Mobile features will be available automatically for all users of the Microsoft Outlook app on Android and iOS devices. You’ll be able to leverage main features from the mobile application by selecting the “…” menu within an email to bring up the Copilot for Sales app. This will include features found on the desktop, including:
- AI generative email responses
- AI generated email and opportunity summaries
- Tracking Outlook activities to CRM
- Creating and editing contacts or other CRM objects
Access Copilot for Sales from Outlook mobile
Public Preview – Mar 2025 – Enabled for Users, automatically
Copilot for Sales provides the following tailored insights:
- Profile updates: For initial interactions with a customer, Copilot for Sales provides insights tailored to the customer’s profile, account, and qualification criteria.
- Deal-related insight: When engaging with a customer with an open opportunity, Copilot for Sales provides insights related to objections, pending action items, and the key stakeholders needed to accelerate the deal.
Copilot for Sales will also provide aggregated daily notifications through the Copilot for Sales bot notifications with key information for each meeting. These notifications can also be customized in settings based on your preferences in case you prefer more frequent updates (for example, one notification per meeting) or more detailed notifications.
