Microsoft presents "smart CRM companion" Viva Sales

On Thursday, Microsoft unveiled its first role-based application designed for sellers, the Viva Sales. It practically automates data entry to CRM using the data from places like Outlook and Teams. This automation, according to Microsoft, saves salespeople from the burden of manually encoding data, allowing them to focus more on customer interactions for faster deal closure.

“Microsoft is reimagining the selling experience and empowering every salesperson with Viva Sales, a new application where sellers use Microsoft 365 and Teams to automatically capture data in any #CRM system,” says Microsoft EVP & Chief Commercial Officer Judson Althoff in a LinkedIn post. “Viva Sales empowers sellers to stay in the flow of their work, where they are moving deals along using Teams and Office while enriching their CRM system with new customer data.”

Viva Sales builds on the recently launched Microsoft Viva and syncs with the tools within Microsoft 365, including Teams, Excel, Outlook, and many more. It gathers the information relevant to your customers scattered all over those different places and automatically puts them into your organization’s CRM system of choice. This is the beauty about it — there is no need for the business to change their traditional CRM system to get the automation service of Viva Sales. It works with Microsoft’s very own Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and other brands of CRM systems, such as Salesforce, Freshworks, and Zoho.

While working using the tools within Microsoft 365, users can simply mark someone as a customer. For instance, while using Outlook, Viva Sales will let you identify a contact as a customer. It will collect interaction data you have with that person, then synch with your CRM system. You can also tag any of your customers within the Microsoft 365 tools, and Viva Sales will recognize the data related to them.

Described by Microsoft as a “smart CRM companion,” this newest addition to Viva’s suite of workplace tools won’t just handle the strenuous data encoding for you: it can also guide you on the proper steps and actions to take in relation to the customer.

“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,” says Microsoft in a post. “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,” the company adds. “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.”

Meanwhile, to make the organized CRM data easily accessible for a collaborating team of sales individuals, the customers’ account information can be easily shared on Teams through live links, removing the need to copy-paste all the data from one app to another. Users can also directly edit the information from Teams. 

Viva Sales will be in a public preview this July and will later generally be available in the fourth quarter of 2022.