When deploying Dynamics 365, and important question to as is What’s In it For You (WIFY). For each role — salesperson, csr, marketing, technician, what is the “why” for that user that will drive their adoption of the system.

If you cannot clearly answer that question, there is a strong chance that the adoption of the system will be limited. Or if your answer is “we want them to…” it is a clear sign that the system is driven more by what management wants than what users need. Will the value that users receive from the system be greater than the amount of work they need to invest in it? In many traditional CRM deployments, that answer has been no — say we want our users to put all of their contacts in the system and track their activities — people will not see value from the system until they invest a fair amount of time to populating their data in the system.

Fortunately, Microsoft has added many intelligent features to Dynamics 365 Online that reduce the time to value for users and makes the application a system that users want to use. Some examples:

• Insights powered by Inside View
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator
• Relationship Assistant
• Email insights
• Coming soon — Who knows Whom powered by office graph
• Coming soon — Text analysis and recommendations from notes
• Coming soon — AI based talking points that summarize important details from activity history

By giving users an intelligent system that provides value without requiring a major investment of effort by users, you will provide an application that makes user’s lives easier and in return gives management what they want.

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