Microsoft announces Viva Sales, redefines the salesperson experience and improves productivity

On Thursday, June 16, Microsoft Corp. Microsoft Viva Sales, a new salesperson experience application. Viva Sales enriches any CRM system with customer engagement data from Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams and uses AI to provide personalized recommendations and insights for salespeople to be more connected to their customers. This helps salespeople to seamlessly personalize their customer engagement toward faster deal closure.

Employees demand more from their employers in today’s hybrid world – from the tools they use to the hours and locations they work. This is especially true for salespeople. Viva Sales enables salespeople to capture insights from across Microsoft 365 and Teams, eliminate manual data entry, and receive AI-driven recommendations and reminders – all while staying in the workflow. Viva Sales streamlines the salesperson experience by placing contextualized insights within tools that salespeople already use, saving salespeople time and giving the organization a more complete view of the customer.

“The future of selling is not a new system. It brings the information salespeople need at the right time, with the right context, into the tools they know, so their work experience can be streamlined,” says Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft. “Empowering salespeople to spend more time with their customers has been our goal, and we’ve done that by reinventing the sales experience with Viva Sales.”

“Salespeople rely on digital collaboration and productivity tools to connect with customers and close deals, but many of the insights they discover with these tools don’t make it into the CRM,” says Paul Greenberg, founder and managing principal of The 56 Group. “Microsoft is addressing this challenge by offering a solution that complements the CRM. Viva Sales automates busy work, captures critical customer information and helps salespeople get the job done.”

Reinventing the salesperson experience Viva Sales builds on Microsoft Viva, which was launched last year. Viva provides an integrated employee experience platform that brings together communication, knowledge, learning, goals and insights to empower every person and team everywhere to be the best they can be. Viva Sales delivers the first role-based Viva application designed specifically for salespeople:

– Viva Sales provides salespeople with tools to do their jobs, while offering the insights sales leadership needs. While salespeople are at work, they can tag customers in Outlook, Teams or Office applications such as Excel, and Viva Sales automatically captures 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 previously available. This data can be easily shared with team members as they collaborate in Office and Teams without retyping or looking it up in a CRM.

– Powered by data and AI, Viva Sales recommends next steps to guide a customer through the sales funnel, prioritize work and next steps, and give salespeople access to 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 manage the relationship.

– Viva Sales also provides AI-driven recommendations to enable salespeople to improve their customer engagement – optimizing follow-through with next best steps, actionable reminders and recommendations to accelerate and close more sales. Viva Sales uses Context IQ, which was announced last fall, to ensure that relevant content is connected to Microsoft apps and services, such as Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365, so that salespeople save time and stay in the workflow.

With Viva Sales, we are creating a new category of applications that address the sales experience. Microsoft is in a unique position to offer this type of application within the productivity and collaboration apps that employees already use.

For more information, visit the official Microsoft blog and the Microsoft Dynamics 365 blog. Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is enabling digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge. Her mission is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.

Source: crmsoftwareblog