As part of our ‘Making the most of the Microsoft technology stack’ blog series, this week we explore the recently launched Microsoft Viva Sales application which is designed to enhance the productivity of sellers who use Dynamics 365 or Salesforce by minimising their workload.
Introduction
By automating data capture from Outlook and Microsoft Teams into an organisation’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution, Viva Sales eliminates the need for manual data entry and minimises the need for switching between applications, allowing sellers to focus on what they do best – selling. While it is currently only compatible with Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, it may become compatible with other CRM systems in the future.
For Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium users, Viva Sales is free; for others, it costs £37.15 per user per license. So far, this is what we know about Viva Sales and its exciting features.
How does Viva Sales provide sellers with more time?
Sellers are spending more hours on administrative tasks than selling. Despite the existing integrations between Dynamics, Outlook and Teams, sales professionals can easily lose productivity switching between these applications multiple times a day. When interactions happen over different systems, there is also a risk of failing to accurately capture information and keep CRM data up-to-date.
This is where Viva Sales can help sellers by connecting Outlook, Teams and Dynamics 365 to minimise manual data entry in CRM and allow toggling between these applications.
Many features in Viva Sales are similar to the existing capabilities in the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook. At the time of writing, Microsoft had not clarified how these will work in the future, so we will have to wait for more information to see if the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook will be replaced or rebranded as Viva Sales.
Viva Sales helps reduce the time spent looking for information by accessing customer contact details and related account and opportunity data from Dynamics 365 Sales within Outlook and Teams.
Once you open an email conversation, Viva Sales looks for the corresponding contact record in your CRM database. If it already exists, Viva Sales automatically pulls the relevant contact information into a side pane that opens next to your email. This can be edited, if needed, directly from Outlook without logging into Dynamics 365 Sales.
If the contact is new, sellers can create a new record in Dynamics 365 Sales from Outlook with a few clicks. The information already available, such as first and last names, will be auto-populated, reducing the need to enter data into CRM manually.
Even though this functionality already exists within the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, adding contacts in Viva Sales is quicker and much more intuitive. Like the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, you can also access the Viva Sales pane from appointments and when writing an email. Currently, you can only look for and create contact records in Dynamics 365 Sales from Viva Sales, not leads, which may change at a later date.
Figure 1: Adding a new contact to Dynamics 365 Sales via Viva Sales
Once contacts are linked to CRM records, Viva Sales allows sellers to categorise them as customers or non-customers from Outlook with just one click. This enables sellers to prioritise the relationships that are important by keeping track of all meaningful conversations.
If you have multiple recipients, Viva Sales highlights which contacts have been marked as customers. It also displays previous email exchanges and Teams meetings with customers and allows individual users to add their personal notes which are set in Outlook.
In the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook, emails can be tracked using the ‘set regarding’ or ‘track’ button. In comparison, the ‘Mark as Customer’ option in Viva Sales appears to be much quicker by allowing sellers to track all customer emails with a single click.
Figure 2: Contact details and activity summary in Viva Sales
The integration of Viva Sales with Teams offers many new and exciting features that take advantage of conversational intelligence. If we were to mark the above contact as a ‘Sales Contact’ and then engage with them via a Team call, the intelligence embedded in Viva Sales automatically transcripts the entire conversation and provides a conversation summary at the end of the call.
This is another way to help sellers stay focused, as they don’t have to take notes during the meeting and risk missing something important. You can get a recap of the conversation with highlights, follow-up actions discussed on the call, understand the overall sentiment and track conversation KPIs such as talk-to-listen ratio and listen duration. Once the summary is available, you can add it as a note to the related contact record back in Dynamics 365 Sales.
Figure 3: Viva Sales summary of Teams call between seller and contact
In addition to this, there is a Viva Sales feature that enables sellers to communicate effectively and save time crafting messages from scratch using the widely talked about ChatGPT and OpenAI service.
For example, if a user wishes to reply to an enquiry, write a proposal or offer a discount to a prospect this would typically involve spending time writing messages by pulling in the relevant account details from Dynamics 365 Sales.
Instead, by choosing the type of response you want to send, Viva Sales will automatically generate the email with personalised text, along with details such as product descriptions, price and deadlines. The seller can review this and make any modifications to reflect their tone before sending it.
These AI-driven recommendations in Viva Sales allow users to make the most of the time they spend with leads and eliminate time spent on the more mundane activities. Users also improve their communications and optimise follow-ups which results in more engagement.
Figure 4: Viva Sales generated personalised email
Make the most of easy collaboration with colleagues
As a Dynamics 365 user, the capability to conveniently share contact records on Teams by copying and pasting them as an adaptive card is now available. This feature is also integrated into Viva Sales, streamlining collaboration across the organisation.
By copying the customer record link from the Viva Sales add-on in Outlook, sellers can effortlessly insert it as an adaptive card into a Teams conversation, include it as a hyperlink in an email message or reference the contact using the ‘@’ prefix. These options enable chat participants to obtain customer context without requiring them to switch over to Dynamics 365 Sales.
Figure 5: Sharing contact records via Viva Sales
Frequently, sales teams must switch back and forth between CRM, Outlook and Teams several times a day to access, update and exchange data.
However, Viva Sales streamlines this process by consolidating all these applications into one cohesive workflow, resulting in more efficient use of time.
With Viva Sales, users can promptly retrieve and display the information they need, enabling them to concentrate on the most important aspects of their work – building those connections and helping to finalise those deals.
Discover more
If you are interested in learning more about Viva Sales or how it can help your organisation, our experts here at Incremental are keen to speak with you and will guide you through the Viva Sales product. Contact us today.
‘Making the most of the Microsoft technology stack’ blog series
Catch up on the series so far: