Microsoft is named a Leader in 2023 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Sales Force Automation Platforms
Sellers are fundamental to any organization’s success—and despite economic headwinds, business leaders are concerned about keeping the talent they have happy and productive at their jobs. Many sellers have long relied on highly manual and disjointed processes that involve a mix of email, spreadsheets, and customer relationship management (CRM) tools. But following manual processes and switching between sales tools and spreadsheets can waste valuable time that sellers need to build relationships with customers and close deals. According to the latest Microsoft WorkLab research, 78 percent of sellers would be happy to have some help from AI to make their everyday tasks—like sending follow-up emails or tracking sales—easier. That is why we’ve been busy building a vision for sales-specific AI to help increase seller productivity and success.
Today, we’re excited to share that Microsoft has been recognized again as a Leader within the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms* for the thirteenth consecutive year. In this year’s report, Microsoft is positioned furthest in Completeness of Vision.
Our strong vision and approach with Microsoft Sales Copilot by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities allows sellers to spend more time focused on engaging with their customers.
Empowering sellers through automation and intelligence
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales enables sellers to close more deals and meet customer needs with the help of next-generation AI and real-time insights. Sellers have everything they need in their app of choice to engage with customers, including historical data and access to subject matter experts. Using data, sellers can achieve more consistent sales interactions from creating a lead to closing a sale, predict how much revenue they will generate in a given timeframe, automate repeatable processes and define sales best practices, and promote products and services with targeted marketing campaigns. Additional sales enablement features include adaptive guidance for next best steps based on actionable insights, AI-guided selling features like the sales assistant and conversation intelligence to help build stronger customer relationships, and predictive scoring models to prioritize leads and opportunities for increased conversion and win rates. Sales managers can also get intelligent insights into how their sales team members are performing, so they can provide proactive coaching to improve their teams’ overall performance.
With Microsoft Sales Copilot, which is included with Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licenses, we have established a vision of CRM platform by fusing collaboration experiences with CRM platform data and generative AI capabilities to help sellers reduce mundane tasks and personalize customer relationships even further. Powered by Azure OpenAI Service, Microsoft Sales Copilot features built-in responsible AI and enterprise-grade Azure security. Sellers can access Copilot in the tools where they’re working, whether that’s Outlook, Microsoft Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales. Microsoft Sales Copilot also connects to Salesforce for instant data syncing. Sellers can use Copilot to automate tasks or view email or meeting summaries, helping them save time on daily tasks and spend more time with customers. AI-powered, real-time insights including customer summaries, recent notes and customer news, and highlights of any issues or concerns help sellers enter customer meetings fully prepared to focus on key items. And to help sellers follow up after those meetings, Copilot can generate AI-assisted content and recommendations, such as customer-specific emails using data from their CRM platforms and Microsoft Graph.
Providing sellers with access to customer data in one place is key to helping ensure their success. Microsoft Dynamics 365 utilizes Microsoft Dataverse to store CRM platform data, which enables customers to securely store and manage data used by business applications. By using a platform solution to simplify and unify sales processes, sellers benefit from products built to talk to each other. Dynamics 365 Sales works seamlessly with technologies including Microsoft 365, Microsoft Power BI, and LinkedIn to enhance and extend capabilities for sellers. This means that sellers can continue to use familiar tools, which helps to simplify user adoption and lower overall total cost of ownership (TCO) and IT costs—a priority for many organizations in today’s economy.
Organizations can leverage the power of the full Microsoft Cloud to help sellers succeed. Dynamics 365 Sales natively integrates with Teams to create open lines of communication for collaborating and aligning on work items across marketing, sales, and service departments. With automatic data syncing between Microsoft 365 apps and Dynamics 365 Sales or other CRM platforms, sellers can also surface customer and opportunity information directly in Teams and Outlook, which minimizes context switching and data loss. In addition, sales operation leads and managers can use Power BI to further analyze trends and build reports. And Microsoft Power Platform enables sellers to automate workflows, create apps, and analyze data to increase agility and innovation.
Helping to ensure our customers’ success
Investec, a global financial services company, set out to help its client-facing teams listen directly to customers and build more valuable relationships. This made conversation intelligence in Dynamics 365 Sales appealing because it automatically transcribes sales calls and analyzes the content, sentiment, and participants’ behavior. Conversation intelligence takes advantage of Microsoft advancements in AI and natural language processing to automatically extract meaningful insights from sales calls. With these insights, Investec can review salespeople’s conversation styles, help coach individuals on best practices, keep track of sales conversations, build stronger client relationships, and ultimately keep track of sales conversations, and build stronger client relationships. With Dynamics 365 Sales, Investec automatically incorporates conversation intelligence data across its customer engagement platform, saving time on manual entry, reducing overhead, and building a comprehensive customer view.
MAPEI, a global leader in adhesive, sealant, and chemical product manufacturing, was using 90 different customized CRM systems across 57 countries when it decided to consolidate into a single, centralized system. Migrating to Dynamics 365 Sales helped MAPEI simplify internal processes for its employees and provide more proactive service to customers. Today, MAPEI salespeople can build strong relationships with customers, make data-driven decisions, and close deals faster. The service also helps salespeople track customer accounts and contacts, track sales from prospect to purchase, and better qualify leads to assure they are spending time on the most impactful opportunities.
Microsoft named a Leader by Gartner
Microsoft is recognized again as a Leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms for the thirteenth consecutive year.
Learn more about Dynamics 365 Sales
We’re excited to have been recognized as a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant and are committed to providing innovative sales force automation platform capabilities to help our customers accomplish more.
Read the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms report.
Learn more about:
Contact your Microsoft representative to learn more about the value and return on investments, as well as the latest offers—including a limited-time 26 percent savings on subscription pricing for Dynamics 365 Sales Premium.
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Source: Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Sales Force Automation Platforms, Adnan Zijadic, Ilona Hansen, Steve Rietberg, Varun Agarwal, Guy Wood, 5 September 2023.
*Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
**This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Microsoft.
