Microsoft Viva Sales is now part of Microsoft Sales Copilot

aaronbjork · ‎Jul 18 2023

Today we announced Microsoft Sales Copilot, a Copilot designed for salespeople that works seamlessly with Microsoft 365 apps and your CRM.

Microsoft Sales Copilot is a role-specific Copilot that bridges a customer’s CRM and the Microsoft 365 productivity tools their sellers use. It’s designed to work “out of the box” with either Dynamics 365 Sales or Salesforce and boosts productivity throughout the entire sales journey, from proposal to deal closure and beyond. Microsoft Viva Sales, announced in June 2022, kickstarted our work of transforming seller experiences, and these capabilities are all now part of Sales Copilot. Viva Sales, the product experience, is being renamed Sales Copilot. As a Viva Sales customer, there is no change to your product experience other than the change in product icon and product name happening in July. The Viva Sales subscription is also being renamed Sales Copilot. Again, the only change you will see is the change in subscription name happening starting in September.

In our own sales organization at Microsoft, over ten thousand sellers have been using Sales Copilot. Early results show that it reduces time-to-action by automating, searching, and obtaining information, and reduces the number of clicks and steps necessary for processes. Using Viva Sales to identify if a customer is already a contact record requires just one click and can be done from within Outlook, whereas nine clicks and two other applications were needed beforehand.

"Sales Copilot has had a massive impact on our productivity by integrating with Outlook and Teams to augment seller actions and decisions, with AI-powered insights to drive efficiencies and best-in-class customer engagement. It saves time, cuts down on redundant work, and lets our team work to their fullest."

-Judson Althoff: EVP & Chief Commercial Officer, Microsoft

Many businesses are also already using Sales Copilot to complete tasks faster while driving improved CRM data quality. Martin Midelkoop, an IT Manager at Konica Minolta, says, “Sales Copilot is a digital personal assistant that writes meeting minutes and emails, shows the latest customer information from emails and CRM, and tracks customer conversations in an easy and user-friendly way. With it, all the information about our customers is in one place.”

Today, we are announcing Sales Copilot integration with People.ai that will bring contact and relationship intelligence to sellers right in their flow of work in Outlook and Teams. "Every go-to-market organization is desperately trying to win more revenue, faster. AI is in our DNA and we’re thrilled Microsoft has entrusted us to bring unique AI-powered people, account and opportunity insights to complement the Sales Copilot experience, including buying group engagement and the golden path to closed won deals," said Oleg Rogynskyy, CEO of People.ai. “With these insights right where the majority of the world’s sellers work, directly inside Microsoft’s productivity and collaboration tools, sales leaders and their teams will be more productive, generate more pipeline, and tighten deal execution thanks to People.ai generated insights and recommendations.”

Reimagine seller productivity with Sales Copilot

Sales Copilot is experienced in the applications where sellers work, whether that is Outlook, Teams, or Dynamics 365 Sales, and connects to other CRM systems like Salesforce. Since February, we’ve been adding new generative AI capabilities to help sellers be more productive with capabilities like email drafts and email thread summaries with sales- specific prompts and actions informed by Outlook and CRM data. Within Teams, sellers receive coaching tips during meetings, helping them reply to customer inquiries, and meeting summaries with action items that are automatically converted to tasks in CRM, saving sellers time and personalizing customer interactions. These capabilities from Viva Sales are now part of Sales Copilot along with new functionality like AI-generated opportunity summaries for sellers to quickly catch up on pipeline and meeting preparation which summarizes customer details, past interactions, and related news.

Sales Copilot in Outlook

Sales Copilot in Outlook allows you to stay on top of all customer interactions and see customer information where and when you need it, get rich sales-specific insights, and easily share CRM data with coworkers. The highlights card with contextual recommendations and summaries, along with the CRM card for opportunity and account records, provide relevant customer information in your flow of work to reduce time spent looking for information. In Outlook, Sales Copilot generates sales emails, summarizes customer information, and even updates CRM with customer interaction data.

Email summary and CRM card for opportunity record in Outlook

Here are some key capabilities of Sales Copilot in Outlook that you can use today:

• AI-generated email content tailored to sales scenarios and enriched with contextual CRM data improving the quality and timeliness of your customer communications.
• Email thread summaries convert prolonged email interactions into a few bullets so you can understand, stay on top, and respond quicker to your customers.. You can save these summaries as notes in the CRM, fostering a shared understanding of the customer within sales and stakeholder teams.
• Opportunity and Account Summaries extract essential information from relevant opportunities, notes, and activities so you can prepare for customer meetings quickly.
• Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) capabilities on CRM data from Outlook helps find and update customer information in the flow of work improving your focus and ensuring your CRM data is always up to date.
• The ability to save emails and meetings to your CRM ensures that your sales organization always has easy access to the latest customer engagement information.
• Both out-of-the-box and custom CRM record types are supported in the Outlook experience. With customizable forms, CRM admins can tailor Sales Copilot to meet the unique needs of their organization by choosing which fields to display for contacts, accounts, and opportunities and setting advanced properties for editing permissions.

Customizable CRM records in Outlook

Sales Copilot in Microsoft Teams

Within Teams, sellers receive coaching tips during meetings, helping them reply to customer inquiries, and meeting summaries with action items that are automatically converted to tasks in CRM, saving sellers time and personalizing customer interactions. The Business Development team at Netlogic is saving up to 30 minutes per customer meeting by leveraging automated meeting summaries. “Implementing Sales Copilot has saved time, improved skills, contributed to better work-life balance,...” says David Swenson, Business Development Director at Netlogic.

Automated meeting summary and sentiment analysis in Teams

Here are some key capabilities that Sales Copilot offers in Microsoft Teams:

• Access, update, and share customer data from CRM records easily in Teams chats and channels.
• Unlimited conversational intelligence capabilities to generate call summaries, track customer sentiment, and capture action items for customer follow-ups in your CRM.
• Meeting summaries generated in Teams are available immediately in Outlook. As soon as you start to author an email to your customer, Sales Copilot will suggest you summarize your sales meeting with a first draft that you can just send to your customer and save to CRM.
• Real-time tips during customer meetings automatically share helpful information based on competitor and brand mentions from your CRM data and Bing search results.
• Seismic integration will provide content production, collaboration, task automation, and engagement intelligence across Teams meeting experience to help drive deals and relationships forward.
• Collaboration spaces, provide sellers with an organized and effortlessly created Teams space tailored to their needs enabling seamless collaboration with colleagues and customers, fostering teamwork and enhancing productivity.

Sales Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales

At Inspire, we announced Sales Copilot capabilities in D365 Sales, for more details see the IT Pro blog. Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium customers can access the Sales Copilot capabilities at no additional cost.

Here are some of the key capabilities available in D365 Sales:

• Email composition in D365 Sales enables sellers to compose emails with AI assistance directly within D365 Sales, streamlining the email creation process and ensuring impactful communication.
• Opportunity summary catch-up in D365 Sales, helps you quickly get up to speed on opportunities, making it easier to stay organized and informed throughout the sales process.
• Summary of accounts and news helps you prepare for meetings ensuring that you make the most of your customer interactions.

Contextual email reply in D365 Sales

Getting started with Sales Copilot

Sales Copilot can streamline sales processes, improve customer engagement, and enhance collaboration within sales teams using CRM data and next generation AI capabilities. To learn more about Sales Copilot and its capabilities, visit the announcement blog and product webpage.

Here are some additional resources to get started today:

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