As I prepare for my Dynamics 365 certification in sales (MB 210), I’m creating blog posts based on my revision. I hope that collectively these posts may prove useful to anyone also preparing for the MB 210 exam. This time I will cover the concepts around sales insights.

You will see that sales insights are mentioned in the skills measured statement within the section headed “Perform Configuration”. Additionally I have highlighted configure relationship cards, as whilst configuring Sales Insights I will also reference configuring the sales assistant. (Also known as the relationship assistant.)

Sales Insights covers multiple features! Including;

• Assistant (Formerly known as Relationship Assistant) – Uses AI to show contextual insights to sales people
• Email Engagement – Follow emails, set reminders etc.
• Auto Capture – view details from your inbox in Dynamics and easily track.
• Sales Insights – connection insights, predictive scoring, talking points and more.

Therefore Sales Insights actually includes multiple topics. That is quite a lot to cover in one short blog post! Therefore in this post I plan to focus on the assistant and cover other topics in future posts.

But before I dive into the Assistant lets touch on how to configure Sales Insight …

Configure Sales Insights

Before using any of the Sales Insights features you must accept the privacy statement and then configure each one. You will find the AI setup options in the “Sales Hub” app. Simply load the app and navigate to “App Settings”. Then load the “System Configuration” option you’ll find under the sales intelligence heading.

Tip:
Previously this same settings option was available from the “Sales Insights” option in the advanced settings. (You may also still find the system configuration for Sales Insights there!)

Below you can see that after accepting privacy statement I can now configure or enable the various Sales Insights options as required.

Another Tip:
If Sales Insights hasn’t been installed you might need to ask your administrator to do that before you can configure it. They’ll simply need to load the Dynamics 365 admin center and use the manage solutions option on your instance. They will check that the Sales Insights solution is installed and if missing simply install it. (Screen shot below shows my install about to start!)

What is the Assistant (Formerly known as relationship assistant)?

The Assistant is one tool within a collection of solutions that help to provide insight into your relationships with customers and prospects. The idea being to help organisations spot “trends” or “patterns” in customer behaviour and then influence the customer experience based on these insights. The aim here is to help users take action with the right customer at the right time. One simple example might be alerting a user to the fact that a sales opportunity is reaching its expected close date.

The Assistant is designed to analyse data and provide contextual information in real time. It does this by presenting configurable “cards” to users. Each card will highlight something connected with a specific interaction with a customer.

We see “cards” in several places in Dynamics 365, including on entity forms, dashboards and directly in the Assistant.

Below you can see my Assistant with a couple of cards. These are displayed as I have a task and appointment due today.

Below you can see an example of the Assistant being show directly on an entity form. In this example we can see that on my account form I have a card flagging that an opportunity is due to close soon.

Plus we can use the “light bulb” icon to load the Assistant from anywhere in Dynamics 365.

Configure The Relationship Assistant

I have already mentioned how to enable the Sales Insights option, now let’s look at how to configure the Assistant.

Once the Assistant is enabled we can view which cards are “on” and by selecting any of them change their status. Below you can see that in my Assistant tab the card to warn of tasks due day is on. And by opening it I get a preview of that card and have the ability to disable it.

Additionally we have a feature to decide if each card should show for all roles or just specific roles. As of July 2019 this is a preview feature. Meaning (as shown below) you will also have to enable the preview features.

In addition to controlling which cards show by role it is also possible to use the personal configuration option to decide which cards you as an individual want to see (or not see).

Another preview feature is the ability to optimise the ranking of cards. For example, we might want to prioritise any cards which relate to opportunities with a high estimated revenue.

Hopefully this post has given you a sense of what is possible with the Assistant and helped with your MB 210 revision. As always I encourage you to experiment with the various options. Hands on experience is very important when preparing for any of the Microsoft exams! In future posts I will cover other aspects of Sales Insights.