Sales can be nuanced, yet the speed required to be successful in the industry doesn’t always allow for it. And selling is just one part of a sales rep’s already packed day. Between following up with leads, logging customer interactions, and keeping opportunities moving, salespeople can get bogged down with managing the sales process instead of actually connecting with prospects.
Your sales team needs tools that make it easier to build strong customer relationships while keeping deals moving. Dynamics 365 Sales Accelerator brings the tools and information your salespeople need into one place, helping them spend less time handling administrative tasks and more time making sales.
What is sales acceleration?
Sales Accelerator is a Microsoft application, but sales acceleration itself is a practice of optimizing the entire sales pipeline to improve conversion rates, strengthen customer engagement, and close deals more efficiently. The goal is to increase your sales velocity, or the rate at which leads and opportunities move through your , without sacrificing the relationships that make successful sales possible.
How Sales Accelerator can help your sales team
Modern consumers expect a lot from their salespeople: consistent support, regular communication, and ongoing availability.
Sales Accelerator can help your sales team keep up with those expectations by working as an overlay within —an application they're already using. Sales Accelerator can also be added to any custom model-driven app, giving your team access to its capabilities within an application that's already tailored to your organization’s needs.
Because it organizes and streamlines the sales process, Sales Accelerator can make it easier for salespeople to know what to do next to keep opportunities and leads moving forward.
With Sales Accelerator, you can give your sales team the tools they need to meet modern customer expectations while working more efficiently. Here are some of the specifics on how it can help:
Organize sales tasks
Sales involves a lot of moving pieces: following up, making calls, sending emails, and keeping track of what needs to happen next. Sales Accelerator brings all those tasks together in one place under “My work list.” Tasks are organized by urgency and clearly outline the next action needed, whether that’s calling a lead or sending a contract.
Instead of relying on memory or juggling notes to remember who needs a follow-up or what they promised to send, your salespeople can see what needs to be done and do it right away.
Plan and prioritize
Salespeople can apply several different filters to their work list to change their task view. Tasks can be filtered based on record type, due date, activity type, or whether they’ve been opened yet. You can also sort your list by due date, score, name, activity type, record type, and sequence name, and choose what appears first and last. This flexibility allows your sales team to better plan their time, forecast their capacity, and address urgent tasks right away.
Sales Accelerator also surfaces your salespeople's most pressing next tasks at the top and center of their in the Up next widget.
Tailor workspaces
While there are established best practices in sales, every sales team has their own approach to achieving them. Sales Accelerator’s customizable workspace lets your team work the way that works best for them.
As explained above, users can customize their worklist by choosing how to sort and filter records, deciding which fields are displayed and reordering them as they like. They can also hide filters they don’t use.
Admin users have even more flexibility. They can determine which records are available, add new filtering options, and customize the fields users can sort and filter by. While users can tailor their worklist, administrators control the broader workspace and form configuration.
Create sequences
One of the most useful features of Sales Accelerator is sequences. A sequence is a series of steps you plan to take with a record, organized as a decision-based flow. For example, if you email a lead and don’t hear back after two days, your system can prompt you to call them or send another email (with templated content already populated) based on the sequence assigned to that lead.
Sequences automatically populate your sales team’s work list with their to-do list items, so they can spend less time figuring out how to engage customers and more time taking action.
Sequences can be available to your entire team or limited to your personal workspace. Your determine which team members have permission to create them.
Once you’ve created a sequence, you can activate and connect it from a view, form, or the sequence record itself. You can also use a Power Automate flow to connect sequences automatically or connect them through a segment.
How to set up Sales Accelerator
As an admin, you can configure Sales Accelerator to fit the way your team works. Choose which team members can use it, which record types should appear in the accelerator, and which forms they should use. You can also decide whether users can customize their own workspaces or whether your entire team should work from a similarly configured work list.
Even without this setup, users can still view activities they’ve created manually through the timeline for contacts, leads, opportunities, and accounts. And if you choose not to use sequences, you can still populate the activities in the worklist manually.
Sales Accelerator licensing requirements
The Sales Accelerator features available to your team depend on the you have.
If you have a Sales Enterprise license, you can connect up to 1,500 records to sequences per environment per month.
With a Sales Premium or Sales Insights license, you get unlimited access to Sales Accelerator features and capabilities.
Talk to your Microsoft Partner about the Sales Accelerator
The sales cycle can be both seamless and supercharged with the Sales Accelerator. Put powerful tools into the hands of your sales team with automated capabilities, customizable workspaces, and connected applications that keep everything they need within reach.
By taking repetitive tasks off their plates, Sales Accelerator gives your salespeople more time and energy to focus on selling rather than suffocating under their to-do lists.
Curious about implementing Sales Accelerator with Dynamics 365 Sales?