Sales Analytics, Insights and AI summary

Our section on sales analytics covered many ways to view and interact with data to provide actionable insights into your team’s performance.

In this section, we discussed both out of the box or system dashboards along with custom dashboards. In Dynamics 365 for Sales, there are several out of the box dashboards that allow users to measure your productivity and compare how they measure up to other users in their organisation.

If these out of the box dashboards do not meet your needs, you could easily customise them and make new ones for the user to access. We talked about how you can create interactive dashboards to give a visual representation of the data associated with one entity.

Interactive dashboards also give you the option to modify the colours for fields when rendering your chart.

We looked at reports like the activities reports and sales history. You learnt that if you want to create your own reports in Dynamics 365 for Sales, you can do this from the available report grid. We then walked through how to create a custom report. We also looked at the different chart options as well as how to locate and use them.

We discussed other reporting tools including goals, service level agreements with custom KPIs and business process flow analytics.

Goal records are another tool you can use to provide a daily calculation to show progress toward a specific objective. Service level agreements with custom key performance indicators look at the level of service or support your company offers to a customer and sets up key performance indicators to ensure service levels defined by your company are being met, and business process flow analytics where you can track the performance of your business process flows. These are tracked in Power BI.

We looked at the powerful data analysis tool Power BI, which is a self-service platform allowing users to interact with premade reports and create their own visualisations. Power BI can be used as a Windows desktop application and can be enabled in Dynamics 365 for Sales.

One helpful feature here is that you are not restricted to use only a full Power BI dashboard. You can also take components of a dashboard known as a tile and embed them into more traditional Dynamics 365 dashboards so that your user can access the Power BI analytics right from their Dynamics dashboard.

We discussed and worked with Dynamics 365 AI for Sales, which is a collection of five tools that enable you to proactively engage with customers and identify risks and opportunity across customer and lead.

These tools include relationship analytics, which can be used to assemble relevant information from throughout a database to create a graphical display of key performance indicators and activity history.

Predictive lead and predictive opportunity scoring provide a scoring model to generate these scores for leads or opportunities that are available for you and your pipeline. We have connection insights and we have notes analytics as well.