NEIL PARKHURST

Have you used the Sales Sequences feature of Dynamics 365? I hadn’t until recently, so in this post I will explain the concept.

Sales Sequences can be useful if you have a defined process involving consecutive activities that collectively progress a lead, contact, account, or opportunity towards a positive outcome. They help ensure activities are completed in a timely and consistent manner.

One simple example of a sales sequence might be …. you want to send an automated email introducing your company. And then maybe schedule a call for “n” days’ time once the recipient has opened the email. But if in the potential customer immediately replied to the email possibly you want to halt the sequence and cancel the phone call.

Sales Sequences are available if you have a Sales Enterprise or Sales Premium license. (Although, I believe, the number of sequences is “limited” to 1,500 per month with the cheaper Enterprise license.)

Sales Accelerator Workspace

Sellers can access sequences in the main form(s) of the target record, or they can use the Sales Accelerator workspace to manage their “to do” list. Below you can see an example, here I have a list of tasks to complete. These may relate to various record types. In my list (for example) I have a task to email a lead and others to phone contacts and accounts.

See that the tasks are grouped by due date. I have one task that needs to be completed today. And three that I should have progressed yesterday. I’m behind with my work!

Usefully as a seller I can filter my task list, I might (for example) want to only view a list of the phone calls I need to make to my accounts this morning. You can filter on unopened items, specific record types etc.

I can progress my activities directly from the related records timeline or by opening the activity. But it is also possible to quickly update activities directly from the task list in the workspace.

The “Sales Insights” form will also include an “Up next” control which is shown above the timeline. (A control that can now also be added to other main forms!) The “Up next” controls help sellers focus on the next task in the sequence. Whilst also being able to easily view any upcoming and previous steps.

If you open a record and no sales sequence is currently active sellers can use the “connect sequence” option to manually assign a sequence. Maybe you (for example) have a set of “plays” asscoaited with various events on an opporuntity. And it is therefore useful for a sales person to pick the correct sequence from a list.

Initial Setup

Assuming you want to use this feature, your first step will be to enable the sales accelerator.

To do this open your “Sales Hub” app and navigate to the “App Settings” option. In here you can enable the sales accelerator and get started quickly by defining some initial settings.

Firstly, you decide if the sales accelerator is available to all users or just ones with specific security roles.

And you can define which form will be used when opening records from the task list found in the sales accelerator option. This will initially default to the out of the box “Sales Insights” form, but you can opt to select any main form.

Also notice, we have an option to go beyond just the four core records of leads, opportunities, accounts, and contacts. As by using “+ Add record type”, sequences could be created for other records. Including some really useful options like cases, Quotes and more.

Sales Accelerator Setup

Once the Sales Accelerator has been enabled you will need to build one (or more) sales sequences. I will go into a little more detail about that shortly!

But first let’s think about the concepts connected with sequences. As the Sales Sequence setup includes three main components. Firstly we might create segments, a query which allows us to define which records we want to select. Next, we have the sequence which is a list of actions. (Sequences can then be linked to one or more segments.) We can also define assignment rules, as we may want to allocate new leads and opportunities to sellers.

As shown below you can access the sales accelerator options from the “Sales Insights Settings” area of your sales hub. Under the heading of sales accelerator we have four options;

• Workspaces – allows us to manage the record types and security roles used. And additionally, we have some customization options. These allow us to default the filtering in the workspace. And usefully we can use the “work item experience” option to control how each record type is presented in the workspace.
• Sequences – allow us to create and maintain the sequences of actions for each sales process.
• Segments – here we create the logic to include records into segments (Which can then be linked to a sequences and assignment rules.)
• Assignment rules – there allow us to define how records will be allocated to our sellers.

Below you can see how we can use the “work item appearance” option. Notice that when I view leads, I will see their priority and source, I’ve added these fields!

Tip: You might want to review some additional options in the “work item appearance” option. As we can also influence how the sequence advances and what happens as activities are completed.

Building Sequences

Sequences could be very simple or might be complex and long running.

The sequence builder allows me to easily create the sales sequence. I have shown a simple example below, in it we start off by sending an email, if the customer opens the email, then we wait 2 hours and call the customer.

For each type of “action” I add there will be different parameters. For example, below you can see that by adding the “Automated email” action I can then select which email template to apply.

Tip: Usefully as the email templates can be personalised with data from the associated records.

Each activity type or condition will include other properties. For example, my condition which branches the sequence when the customer opens the email includes a time property. As I can define that we will wait “n” days or hours to give the customer time to open the email.

Honestly, I am yet to use all the action options available to me. There are quite a few!! But the ones I have tested have been pretty straight forward to understand.

We can add “simple” steps like, sending an email, creating a task, making a phone call or simply waiting a period of time.

Conditions might be based on the value of a particular field or may on the business process stage. (For example, maybe I’d trigger the next step in the sequence because the business process flow on an opportunity has been advanced.) Other conditions exist, for example after sending an email we can conditionally branch if an email is opened, a link in the email clicked and more.

Commands also allow me to advance from this sequence into another. (I like the idea of breaking my sequences down into manageable chunks by linking them!)

Commands can also be used to update fields on the associated record. Maybe (for example) when we complete a phone call you could automatically update a field to say the lead has been contacted. (I did observe that we don’t seem to be able to edit every field! The concept seems to be that any choice fields can be updated.)

As I have said there are loads of options we could select, which is why I’m yet to test them all! There is even the ability to integrate with LinkedIn Sales Navigator, I will hopefully test that out soon! You can read about the LinkedIn integrations here. (FYI … I think you might need the “Advanced Plus” license to leverage the LinkedIn features.)

Another useful feature is the ability to exit a sequence automatically. One common scenario might be that in your sales sequence you are sending email messages to trigger a customer’s interest. If at any point, they are “hooked” and reply to one of those messages you might want to abandon the automated sequence. We can use the “Exit criteria” option on the sequence to achieve exactly this.

Segments

You can create up to 250 segments, these can include lists of “active” records you want to target. Inactive records will not be part of your segment, you couldn’t (for example) create a list of disqualified leads.

When you create a segment you effectively add one or more conditions which help identify records that should be included. After which you need to publish the segment.

Notice the “simulate results” option. This will look at your existing records and show which would be added to the segment if they were created now. Useful to confirm your query is returning the correct results.

Once the segment is published any records that are modified or created which meet the selection criteria will be added into the segment.

We have an option to allow records to be moved from another segment into this one. You may or may not want to do this!! If a record is already in another segment and that has triggered a particular sales sequence, allowing it to move to this segment could interrupt that sequence and start a new one.

Note:
With leads we get a second option to decide if the seller assignment logic should also be updated.

Once your segment has been published, you can return to the sequence and add one (or more) segments. You do this from the “connected accounts” tab.

Tip: The connected accounts tab is also used to see how your sequence is performing. As you can see the progress of the sequence on an account-by-account basis.

Assignment

The assignment option allows sequence managers to assign leads and opportunities to sellers or teams.

I access the assignment rules from the sales accelerator option with the “Sales Insights Settings” area of the “Sales Hub”. Here we use the “+ New rule” option to create assignment rules for new leads or opportunities.

When creating assignment rules, I have several steps to complete. Step one is to give my rule a name!

In step two we decide which leads (or opportunities) will be considered for assignment. Here we could select the “default segment” which will be all leads! Or we can add one or more of our own segments.

Next, we decide who will get the leads. We could assign the leads to a single seller or to a team.

If assigning to a seller then we can opt to assign to any seller, sellers with matching attributes or specific sellers. Below I have opted for specific sellers and given a list of their names.

Before creating the rule, we need to decide how to assign the leads.

Round robin might be a commonly used option. As with the round robin we’d “simply” loop around the available sellers and allocate them leads evenly. (Load balancing would distribute based on the current workload of the sellers.)

If you want your new leads to obtain a response quickly then it is possible to use the working calendar of the sellers. We might not, for example, want to assign a hot lead to someone who is on holiday.

The seller capacity option allows us to decide the maximum number of leads a seller can handle at any one time.

Tip:
I did seem to experience a “quirk” in the assignment concept during my testing. I have a list of sellers to assign new leads, I am one of those sellers. But what if I create a lead??? As the assignment logic is going to want to assign that newly created lead based on the round robin. Meaning I might create the lead and then it could instantly be assigned to another seller. If your sellers create leads as well as qualify them, you might need to consider this! Maybe you could create a “self gen” flag on the lead and exclude any self-generated leads from the segment of leads to assign.

Conclusion

I hope you can see that the sales sequence feature could be a powerful tool.

Although it is not without the need for some careful configuration! As you are going to need to think about your sequence steps, how you want to segment records and additionally how to assign them.

I recommend you start off with a simple approach and gradually enhance your configuration as you see how it is performing.

All in all, I think this is a cool set of features and something I am looking forward to exploiting.