Highlights –

  • Viva Sales will automatically capture customer data from Microsoft 365 and Teams, eliminate the need for manual data entry, and provide AI-driven reminders and recommendations.
  • Officials said Viva Sales would extend support for other CRM systems with Dataverse APIs.

Tech giant Microsoft has revealed a new seller experience application, Viva Sales, which enhances any Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system with customer engagement data from Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams. It leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to offer personalized insights and recommendations for sellers to stay connected with their customers and personalize engagements for faster deal closure.

Viva Sales enables sellers to capture insights from across Microsoft 365 and Teams, eliminate manual data entry, and receive AI-driven recommendations and reminders — all the while staying in the flow of work. Viva Sales streamlines the seller experience by surfacing the insights with the right context within tools salespeople already use, saving sellers time and providing the organization with a more complete view of the customer.

Officials confirmed that the app would work with other company CRM systems and Microsoft’s own Dynamics 365 Sales CRM service/app.

Officials said the Viva Sales app “turns Microsoft 365 into smart sales assistant”. It uses the “Context IQ” set of predictive AI technologies that Microsoft officials mentioned last fall while talking about the generation of contextual reminders and recommendations.

Viva Sales: An addition to Viva?

This announcement has raised the question of whether Viva Sales is related to Microsoft’s Viva, an existing employee-experience platform. Viva offers an integrated employee experience platform that brings together a perfect combination of knowledge, communications, learning, and insights to empower each team member to give their best from anywhere. Viva Sales is the first role-based Viva application designed for sellers.

What Viva Sales is all about

With the recent public announcement, the company is just broadening the meaning of “employee experience” by including the following –

It provides tools for better productivity and insights into sales leadership needs: While working, sellers can tag customers in Microsoft 365 or Teams apps and Viva Sales will automatically capture it as a customer record with all the relevant data about the customer. It will become easier for sellers to share details with team members without looking it up in a CRM or retyping.

Data and AI power the app: Viva Sales recommends the next steps to help a customer through the sales funnel and then prioritize work as per the plan. It empowers sellers to get a full history and customer interaction materials. Furthermore, its real-time insights help gain a deeper understanding at which stage the customer is in their purchase journey and the next course of action to take it further.

It helps sellers deepen customer engagement: The AI-driven solutions include actionable reminders, optimization of follow-ups, and plans on how to close more sales. Viva Sales uses Context IQ to ensure relevant content is connected across Microsoft apps and services, such as  Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365, to help sellers save time and maintain the flow of work.

The app will be in public preview from July and will be available later this year. After its launch, it will be available to Dynamics 365 customers at no additional cost. The prerequisites for the Viva Sales app are a CRM system of choice and Office 365/Teams. It will have out-of-the-box integration with Salesforce in the future. Officials said Viva Sales would extend support for other CRM systems with Dataverse APIs. “We will look to provide more out-of-the-box integration based on customer demand in our roadmap,” according to a spokesperson.

Microsoft’s Viva Sales shows how the company continues to work on defining new category apps by additionally automating some of its existing flagship products.

Experts’ Take

Judson Althoff, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer at Microsoft, said, “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. Empowering sellers to spend more time with their customers has been our goal — and we’ve done that by reimagining the selling experience with Viva Sales.”