As a sales professional whose product portfolio includes CRM, it has always been disappointing to be called out for not being a disciplined user of the product. The reason for this indiscipline stems from the clerical nature of these repetitive tasks like manual data entry, content generation, and note taking. And, then comes Sales Copilot, which leaves me with no excuse for being tardy with keeping our internal CRM up to date. With creating contextual emails using opportunity data, auto-generating opportunity summaries, and highlighting key changes to status and progress, Sales Copilot also suggests real-time tips and answers during Teams meetings when customers mention competitor or brands.
The age-old question – are marketing and sales really part of the same team? Sales are perennially being bombarded with leads from marketing which have not been scored effectively, and marketing is forever following up on what sales did with all the leads passed on to them. Copilot attempts to bridge that gap and brings these functions closer. Scoring is becoming cleverer, and the leads fit your ideal customer base, qualification of the leads, intent-based on data they are filling allows better qualification (even auto-disqualification if they fall into your disqualification criteria) and better quality MQLs entering the system. The sales analytics dashboard improves the experience of working through MQLs into the sales pipeline and onto wins and provides complete visibility on sales performance.
VIVA Sales was already allowing us to see a lot of CRM information and helping draft emails, summarizing emails, and basically allowing us to work with CRM from within Outlook (which is where we are most of the time). The Copilot feature is expected to bring in a lot more intelligent ways of working from Outlook. And, the Copilot within D365 Sales takes it to a completely new level by spitting out AI-generated account, lead, and opportunity summaries. Copilots and generative AI’s ability to pull in and link data being captured to historical data (e.g., identifying that a lead contact is someone we have worked with in a previous account, etc.) allows the salesperson to get up to speed and react much quicker.
The same generative-AI summary of client conversations with customer service matched again knowledge base articles and closed cases is powering better customer service engagement, enhancing customer experience at service touch points.
Incoming emails triggering follow-up actions on a new up-next panel on the opportunity window is something exciting to look out for as is the feature of AI-generated proposals. These two features alone will ensure sales persons are never forgetting to follow up continuously and effectively.
Again, no excuse for not having researched enough before your customer meeting because the Copilot spits out pre-meeting preparation notes based on information captured from previous meetings, similar opportunities to the one you are going to discuss in the meeting, latest news about the account, and so on. And all this is visible on your Teams’ interface when you are on the meeting!
The VIVA Sales phase was short-lived, but we can see it was a springboard and scene opener for some great AI capabilities that Microsoft intends to add to its technology stack, and the effects of this are increasing visible on M365 and D365. In essence, Sales Copilot can turn savior for both lazy and busy sales persons, allowing easy task completion/execution for the former and optimizing the time-on-hand for the latter, time that can be best utilized to sell more.
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