Microsoft today announced Microsoft Viva Sales, a new seller experience application. Microsoft Viva Sales is not a standalone CRM system, instead it will work with any CRM system with customer engagement data from Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.
Until now, sellers must manually fill the customer engagement data found across mail, chat, and documents into CRM systems. Microsoft Viva Sales makes this complete process seamless through a simple customer tagging feature that can store the customer and deal insights that are in Outlook, Teams and Office applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint into CRM systems. Viva Sales can also use AI to offer AI-driven recommendations and reminders based on the customer engagement data.
“The future of selling isn’t a new system. It’s bringing the information sellers need at the right time, with the right context, into the tools they know, so their work experience can be streamlined,”said Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft.
Microsoft Viva Sales features:
- Viva Sales provides tools for sellers to do their jobs, while providing the insights that sales leadership needs. As sellers are working, they can tag customers in Outlook, Teams or Office applications like Excel, and Viva Sales will automatically capture it as a customer record, layered with all relevant data about the customer. Being able to automatically capture this level of customer engagement data was not available previously. This data can easily be shared with team members while collaborating in Office and Teams without retyping or looking it up in a CRM.
- Powered by data and AI, Viva Sales recommends next steps to progress a customer through the sales funnel, prioritizes work and next steps, and enables sellers to access full history and customer interaction materials. Real-time customer insights provide a deeper understanding of where each customer is in their purchase journey, and how to guide the relationship.
- Viva Sales also provides AI-driven recommendations to enable sellers to enhance their customer engagement —optimizing follow-through with next best steps, actionable reminders, and recommendations to accelerate and close more sales. Viva Sales is using Context IQ, announced last fall, to ensure relevant content is connected across Microsoft apps and services —like Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365 —so sellers save time and stay in the flow of work.
