Create your own Insight Cards with Power Automate in Sales Insights

Sales Insight’s cards are not just restricted by what is provided by Sales Insights for your Org, you can make your own using Power Automate too. Here’s how –

Requirements

These features aren’t free under Free Features of Sales Insights. Sales Insights license is for $50/user/month. More info on licensing here – Sales Insights Licensing

For free features, only pre-defined Insight Cards show up. You don’t get to create your Cards. To try this feature, you can create a 30-day Sales Insight trial.

Scenario

Let’s say you have a custom field on the Account called as Renewal Date which holds a Date of renewal for an account. And you want to create an Insights card to show up whenever this date is within 5 days –
fieldOnForm

Create a new Insights Card using Power Automate

Let’s say you have Sales Insights already setup in your Org and you have moderate knowledge of Power Automate (formerly known as Flows)

  1. Navigate to Sales Insights settings in Sales Hub > Global Settings > under Assistant Studio, look for Home and you’ll see a button to Create a new Insight card.
    navigateToCards.png
  2. Since our requirement is a pretty common one and Power Automate has a template for it already, you can select one or even start from scratch.
    template
  3. Make sure all the permissions are correct and you’re set to modify a Power Automate Template (or create from scratch)
    permissions.png
  4. Let’s say you are making this run on a daily business during your non-business hours.

Little Tweak to store a Reminder Date in D365

I wanted to have a custom reference of the Reminder Date in my own way in D365 instead of making the Power Automate query more complex.
I’ve created a Calculated Date field for RenewalReminder to store date of 5 days before the Renewal Date and this will be maintained for all records.
renewalDateField
So that the field stores 5 days prior to the Renewal Date
fieldValue.png
(I’ve hidden it away in actual implementation later on)

In the past, I’ve implemented a similar scenario to store current date used for views in D365, reference Blog: Store ‘Today’s Date’ in a field to use in workflow conditions in D365 CE

Design Power Automate

Since we’ve chosen a template to get a reference from, feel free to remove/modify whatever you need to –

  1. Now, I want to Flow to be triggered every day at UTC midnight
    flowPart1
    Details: Every midnight, fetch me Accounts where I RenewalDate has passed so that selective Accounts will be queried, and then I want to create cards for those accounts in the next step.
    And I’m only comparing the RenewalReminder field value to the current date since it will run everyday
    dateConfig.png
  2. In the final step, for Each account, I’ll create a Card with the Account’s details which the user needs to see.
    createCard.png
    I’ve set some properties which are quite self-explanatory. I’ve made the Open button on the card to open the record itself.
    And I’ve also made the card to show up only until the Renewal Date. (Maybe setup a separate process for Accounts past renewal date)

    And that’s that! Your Power Automate is ready to create Insight Cards which remind you of an upcoming renewal

Seeing it Run

Now, every day when the Power Automate runs, it will create Insight cards for you and they’ll appear as you’ve configured them. In this case, For Alpine Ski House account, the Renewal Date is 20th Nov, so the card has started showing up since 5 days before the Renewal Date (Date stored in RenewalReminder for referencing, you can choose your own way to do so in Flows)
cardShowUp

Even in your Dashboards, since you’re the owner of the record and it’s set to show only to the owner, you’ll see it and clicking on the Open button will open the Account record itself
clickOpen.png

Hope this helps!!

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Talking Points in D365 AI For Sales

Overview

Talking Points is a D365 AI for Sales feature that helps you to start a conversation or bring in ice-breakers if you are going to communicate with a contact the next time.

It gives you highlights on the Contact form about what was communicated in the past and you can use that suggestion to bring it up in your conversation with the D365 Contact.

Talking Points works for the below topics –

Health, Family, Sports and Entertainment

Pre-Requisites

  1. The user who will use Talking Points must have Server Side Sync enabled for their mailbox.
  2. Make sure Analytics feature is enabled for your organization. You can find it in the Admin Center.
  3. Enable Sales AI in your D365 Organization. To learn more about Sales AI, check my post on enabling Sales AI for your Organization – Enable D365 AI For Sales in v9.1.x
  4. Turn on Talking Points by clicking on the check box
    selectTP
  5. And then clicking on Save button show on the top right corner of the screen.
    clickSave
  6. Once Talking Points preferences are saved, you can see what all you selected
    savedSettings
  7. Additionally, also make sure the card to display Talking Points is enabled on the Contact form.
    contactForm1
    visibleByDefault

Talking Points

Now, let’s see an example of it’s working.

  1. Priyesh sent me an email telling me that he’ll be late as he was at a Baseball game. And out of curiosity, asked if I follow Red Sox team.
    redSoxMail
  2. D365 AI For Sales’ Talking Points analyses the conversation and in D365’s Contact for Priyesh Wagh, shows this card telling me that Sports was being discussed/sent in the message
    talkingPoints
  3. So, if I am about to talk to Priyesh and I am looking at the D365 Contact before I speak, Talking Points can tell me what else I can talk about apart from just work.
  4. It’s a great functionality to give a more personal touch to the conversation than just discussing work, maybe.

    Enjoy exploring Talking Points.

Enable Embedded Intelligence and configure its features in D365 v9.1

Embedded Intelligence you features like Relationship Assistant, Auto Capture and Email Engagement. Yes, you’ve seen them before in previous D365 versions and configuring them got easier in D365 v9.1

Read Policy and Accept Terms

  1. Navigate to Settings > Sales AI. Under Overview tab, click on I accept as shown below.
    acceptTerms
    Note: Make sure you read the Privacy Statement if and whether or not it violates your organization’s privacy policies.2. Once Accepted, features like Relationship Assistant, Email Engagement and Auto Capture are available to be configured as follows
    EITurnedOn

Relationship Assistant

Relationship Assistant helps you to draw your attention to what matters about the information in Dynamics 365 at that moment.

It shows you Action Cards that are relevant to the user at the given point of time and where the users can quickly take some common actions associated with it. need to take action on and are relevant given at the point of time.

Example, if an Opportunity is due tomorrow, the Relationship Assistant will show up on the Opportunity and show you this.

relationshipAssistant

Configure – Relationship Assistant
You can configure the Relationship assistant on the next tab in Sales AI itself.
configureRA

 

Email Engagement

Email Engagement will tell you how your communication is being taking shape. Track insights about the emails you send from D365 and accordingly, take your next move.

Like, you can set a reminder to follow up and track what happened to the email you sent.
emailEngagement

Configure – Email Engagement
1. Turn on Email Engagement by simply clicking on the Disabled button to Enable it.
disabledEE

2. Email engagement is turned on now.
EETurnedOn

 

Auto Capture

Get a glance of emails relevant to your D365 records but which aren’t actually tracked in D365 . You can then decide if it matters for you to pull it in D365.

autoCapture

Configure – Auto Capture
All you need is to enable Server Side Sync with your Exchange Online mailbox.

 

Hope I summarized the idea! 🙂

D365 AI for Sales: Notes Analysis feature

Turn on Notes Analysis

Make sure you’ve enabled D365 AI For Sales for your organization. For more information on enabling D365 AI For Sales, check my blog on Enable Dynamics 365 AI for Sales in v9.1.x

You can turn on Notes Analysis once your D365 AI For Sales is setup. Navigate to Settings > Sales AI and look for Notes Analysis and turn it on like so if it appears Disabled –

enableNotesAnalysis

Simply turn it on.

Notes Analysis at work

Remember, you’ll need to have the Timeline control enabled in you D365 Unified Interface. Timeline control is available for Contacts, Opportunities, Leads, Accounts and Case forms (COLAC).

Now, with a normal Note put on Accounts in the Timeline, you’ll see this – where you have your usual Note entered and it appears that it isn’t clickable.

normalNote

But, with the Notes Analysis turned on, you’ll be able to perform Actions on the same.

noteAnalysisRecord

The Note is now a clickable link and once you click on it, based on the context of the Note entered, it will show actionable item to be performed.

 

Notes Analysis can provide suggestions like creating activities, tasks, contacts etc. I’ll keep exploring what else it can do and let you all know!

Enable Dynamics 365 AI for Sales in v9.1.x

One of the recent offerings by Microsoft is D365 AI For Sales. I saw this available on my D365 Trial instance which is 9.1.x.

I will quickly summarize on how you can enable D365 AI For Sales on your D365 environment having any of the Sales subscriptions.

d365Version

It has features like –

  1. Relationship Analytics
  2. Predictive Lead Scoring
  3. Predictive Opportunity Scoring
  4. Connecting Insights

More about which, you can read from the Microsoft Documentation – https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/ai/sales/help-hub

Before we begin

  1. D365 AI For Sales is only available in the (NAM) North America region.
  2. You’ll need a D365 AI For Sales license for the same.

Check if Sales AI is available

Quickly, you can check your Settings area if you already see the Sales AI appears or not.
settingsArea

Or you can simply go to the below link to setup a trial for yourself –

https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/ai/sales/

Or even from the Applications screen in the Dynamics 365 Admin Center –

adminCenterOption

Setup

  1. Let’s assume you’re on this page after you go to Settings > Sales AI. You can accept the terms to enable the Embedded Intelligence or even chose to do so later.
    embeddedIntelligence
  2. Moving further, I chose to directly enable the D365 AI for Sales by scrolling further and clicking on Get it now as shown below.
    aiGetItNow
  3. Then, I provided consent and Accepted.
    acceptConsent
  4. Agree to terms and click on Continue.
    clickContinue
  5. While it’s installing, you’ll see this –
    installing
  6. It took about a few hours until it was being setup in the background. Finally, once successfully done, D365 AI For Sales is now available for you to setup and you’ll see multiple tabs where you can configure each of the functionalities separately.
    aiEnabledYou can then choose to configure each of them separately. Hope this quick initial setup info helps!