Enhancement in Lead Qualification and Email experience in Release wave 2 in Dynamics 365

I have worked with lots of clients on Dynamics 365 for sales and we can’t ignore the fact that lead qualification is one of the major functionality in any tool. However even in a functionality as primitive as lead qualification, there were some issues which didn’t provide a great customer experience. Trust me on this, Release Wave 2 has eased these pain points a lot. And I really wonder why it took such a long time to do so.

This morning I was in my customer location and I just enabled these features in one of their Sandbox environment. Only consultants like us would know how much these simple things are appreciated.

So let’s understand what is new in here.

1. Contact and Account information automatically pulled up when Existing Contact and Account field is selected.

As we all know, we have fields on the lead like “Existing Contact” & “Existing Account” and then we have separate fields on the form to fill out contact information. Previously even if you have selected the Existing contact and account fields, you would see the details fields not getting populated. But now once you select them, the contact and account details are pulled from them.

Please do note however that the details are not changed if you change those look up fields. To reflect the latest value from lookup fields, clear out the details fields and then change the value in contact or account lookup and you would see the new value reflecting.

2. Ability to provide a choice for account/ contact/ opportunity creation while qualifying a lead.

With the new release you can provide an option to the user to choose whether to create a contact or account or opportunity while qualifying a lead. The setting is available in Administration –> System settings –> Sales tab.

As you can see, I have chosen “not to” automatically create account, contact and opportunity record. Now when I try to qualify a lead, I get a prompt where I can choose to create the entity or not.

3. Contextual email experience while creating an email from timeline.

This is something which customers were really annoyed at. For example, say you are working on an opportunity and if you create an email from timeline, it will take you to new email creation page and you loose the whole context of the opportunity.

Well, it’s no longer the case. With enhanced email experience, you can now create emails from your timeline without losing context of the record you are working on.

But first let’s see how you can enable this. It can be tricky if you are not aware.

Step 1:

Open you Sales Hub app.

Step 2:

Once the app is opened, go to the App settings area of the app.

Step 3:

Click on Enhanced email and enable it.

And now when you try to create an email from timeline, you see a nice pop-out

So you can go ahead and edit the email content by taking in required values from the record you are working on and also from related records.

In the above example, you can click on account “Tailspin Toys” and navigate to the account record. The email pop-up would hold it’s place.

Wonderful isn’t it? And do I need to say more that it was loved by our customer.

Hope this helps!

Debajit Dutta

(Dynamics MVP)

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