What is Microsoft Sales Copilot?
Microsoft Sales Copilot, formally known as Viva Sales, is an AI assistant that works across Outlook, Teams, Dynamics 365 Sales, and CRM platforms such as Salesforce.
Have you been looking for AI-generated insights to improve customer interactions, streamline sales tasks, or close more deals? You’re not alone, “74% of sellers describe sales intelligence tools as critical in closing deals.” Discover how Sales Copilot helps sellers save time and increase efficiency through automation, personalization, and connectivity tasks.
How Sales Copilot Saves Time
Your AI assistant automates email summarization, CRM updates, meeting scheduling, and follow-ups by using natural language processing and data integration. See how Sales Copilot automates everyday tasks for sellers:
Email summarization: Summarize lengthy emails by consolidating and analyzing multiple email threads, only including sales-specific information related to budget, decision-makers, needs, and timelines. This feature helps sellers quickly grasp key points, important information, and the context of conversations, enabling them to stay informed and respond more efficiently. The email summaries can also be saved to the CRM as notes for future reference.
CRM updates: Sync updates in Microsoft Teams and Outlook to Dynamics 365 Sales or Salesforce to maintain accurate customer records. It also suggests CRM updates based on the email content or meeting discussions, such as creating new contacts or leads, updating opportunity status or stage, or adding notes or tasks. This feature helps sellers keep their CRM data fresh and consistent without switching apps.
Meeting scheduling: Schedule meetings with customers in Outlook by using AI capabilities to draft emails and propose meeting times based on their calendar availability. Sales Copilot also integrates Outlook Calendar and CRM to display relevant customer information and insights before the meeting. This feature helps sellers streamline the communication process and prepare for meetings with ease.
Follow-ups: Assist sellers in creating follow-up emails after sales calls. By analyzing the meeting discussions, it generates personalized and comprehensive follow-up emails. This ensures important points are addressed, and action items are clearly communicated, thereby strengthening customer-seller relationships. The follow-up emails can also be saved to the CRM as notes for future reference.
By automating these tasks, Sales Copilot can save time for sellers, increase their productivity, and improve their customer interactions. In turn, this gives sellers more time back to work on prospecting, and the ultimate goal, closing more deals. According to a case study by Microsoft, implementing Sales Copilot has saved time, improved skills, contributed to better work-life balance, and increased revenue by 25% in just one quarter due to reduced burnout and enhanced efficiency.
How Sales Copilot Increases Sales
Sales Copilot empowers the seller to increase sales through data-driven personalization. Through AI intelligence, data is extracted from customer interactions. This includes real-time call insights and conversation analysis to provide personalized content recommendations to the seller. If you use Salesforce, Sales Copilot provides seamless data integration and collaboration for sales teams through its connectivity capabilities.
Let’s deep-dive into how Sales Copilot uses generative AI to accelerate the sales process. First, a seller receives an email from a customer, then Sales Copilot offers prompt options. Context data is gathered from the customer’s connected CRM and Outlook. This includes replying to an inquiry, making a proposal, addressing a concern, or summarizing a sales meeting. A reply can then quickly be sent.
When internal collaboration is needed, Sales Copilot uses the same data extract model to provide insights on a customer shared in Teams, and centrally stored in Dynamics365 sales. The task of searching for information, writing a summary, and ensuring that your team is up to date is now completely streamlined. See how sales increase when there are unmissed findings in customer profiles.
September’s Latest Releases of Sales Copilot
While Sales Copilot sees new updates frequently, the latest features of Microsoft Sales Copilot include AI-powered opportunities in deal rooms, email summaries, CRM operations, and more here.
How to get Sales Copilot Today
Microsoft Sales Copilot is available for Dynamics 365 Sales and Salesforce Sales Cloud customers. It is included in Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium subscriptions at no additional cost, and available as an add-on for other Dynamics 365 Sales plans. Designed to boost productivity, lighten workloads, save time, and sell more, Sales Copilot can be quickly enabled for sales teams and their managers. The experience offers configuration but does not require developers.
In addition to license requirements, there are role requirements to consider. If you're using Dynamics 365 Sales as your CRM system:
Administrators must be assigned either a System Administrator or System Customizer security role to customize Sales Copilot. If you're using a custom security role, additional privileges are required to use Sales Copilot.
Users must be assigned either a Sales Manager or Salesperson security role to use Sales Copilot.
If you're using Salesforce as your CRM system, see permissions required for Salesforce administrators.
Learn more about Sales Copilot and how it can accelerate your sales growth!