Sales Accelerator - Segments & Sequences

Introduction

If you are new to the world of Sales Accelerator, then it is exactly what it sounds like. Sales Accelerator helps in selling smartly by building a strong and prioritised pipeline, offering context and surfacing automated recommendations throughout a sales sequence that helps in expediting the sales process.

Business Context

Imagine a Sales Team that has to do bespoke tasks/activities based on certain criteria's being met. Imagine you have ten different customer segments, one for Leads who are based in NSW, Sydney, the other who perhaps attended an event, third being who have an estimated revenue of $500,000 and etc. You get the drift! So now the big question is what happens to all the leads who fall into that bucket you have just defined. There might be a need for one Segment to have a series of actions/activities that needs to be performed by the Sales Representative which is completely different to the other 9 segments. Hence, we look at Sequences which can be used uniquely for each of the customer segments. Therefore, as a Business Strategy leader, imagine the time and energy conserved in remembering what you need to do for this lead and sifting through a million emails every single time to find out what you need to do. Do remember that all of this is with the potential customer (now, lead) in mind and to convert them from cold to warm and make a potential sale.

Functionality - How it Works!

In order to create a segment and a sequence and then associate the two together, you must enable and configure the Sales Accelerator. Typically, if you have D365 Sales Premium or D365 Sales Enterprise License with System Administrator security roles, this should work fine.

To set the scene, I have setup a Sequence which is basically a series of actions/tasks. For example, make a phonecall, Wait for x days, send an email or complete a task. This could get more and more complex but for the sake of this article we will keep it simple for introductory purposes.

Once a sequence has been established you can then no go and create a "Segment". A segment is a group of Leads/Opportunities which meet a specific criteria. For example, all of the Leads in state=NSW and City=Sydney. When a Lead record is created in D365 dataverse such that the state=nsw and City=Sydney, it will automatically be clubbed in the respective segment. And since this segment is connected to a sequence the Sales person will see a bunch of specific activities to perform for that lead.

Backend DEMO Steps

1. Create a Segment (All Leads from NSW) in Sales Insights settings where State=NSW and City = Sydney.

2. On the Details tab we see the record type (table) this segment is associated to (leads) and the sequence its connected to (Follow-Up Sequence - Leads from NSW) and the segment members who meet the criteria.

3. This is what a sequence editor looks like . The plus sign allows you to add more to fill in with the steps. If you are familiar with Power Automate Flow, the User interface will seem familiar to you.

4. There's a bunch of things you can do in a sequence but for this demo we will stick to Adding Steps. But you could also add conditions and commands.

Front-end DEMO STEPS

In our demonstration, our sequence does the following if it meets the segment criteria.

1. Create a phone call activity "speak to New Lead"
2. Wait for 2 days. Basically do nothing and send nothing to the lead.
3. Send and email after 2 days regarding the discussion that happened on the call. You can use an email template that meets your sales literature and edit the parts needed and send it.
4. Complete the task of building a rapport with a lead.

Business Problem:

Now let's assume I have a business that sells coffee machines and the salesperson in my company has to create a lead which is based out of NSW Sydney who is interested in purchasing 10 expresso coffee machines. This is all data entry but then I want the system to automatically figure out who are the leads who meet the segment criteria and then auto-prompt the salesperson what the next action is required specific for this lead. This is meant to keep the sales team productive in terms of spending time building more and more relationships rather than losing a lead over admin stuff.

1. This is what the new lead record that is not saved yet will look like where the Tile "Up next" is blank.

2. Now lets go the back end and do some checking to find out whether the new lead created shows up in the Segment or not.

3. Now lets go back to the Lead record we just created and ratify from the User's interface if this is working or not.

4. Now lets mark the Speak to new lead Phone call activity complete and see what the tile looks like. As you keep marking tasks/actions complete, all the pending tasks and complete actions will separate themselves. Additionally, the sequence to which its related to will also show up at the top.

Conclusion

So we see for ourselves, how easy it is for a Sales Person to do their tasks with the guidance of the Up Next Tile powered by Sales Accelerator. It allows the salesperson to focus on forging meaningful relationships than being bogged down by admin tasks and looking for what they have to do next.

Additionally what can be done is that as the Sales Person keeps finishing all the tasks from the sequence, a lead score is generated which keeps getting better or worse depending on situations. You could also use this to understand who is a warm lead with a good score and guarantees a sale as opposed to a cold Lead who is just not worth it right now.

I hope this article was of benefit to you. If yes, please like and also drop a note or your thoughts.