Reimagine selling with Viva Sales
Today we’re announcing the general availability of Microsoft Viva Sales on October 3, the first Viva application designed to improve the employee experience for a specific role: sellers. Viva Sales brings together a seller’s customer relationship management (CRM) system, Microsoft 365, and Microsoft Teams seamlessly in their workflow, enabling them to save time and return to what they love—connecting with customers and closing deals.
Designed for seller productivity, Viva Sales:
- Delivers real-time business context from a seller’s CRM system in Microsoft Outlook and Teams to reduce time spent searching for relevant information.
- Keeps sales teams easily connected and deals moving forward by facilitating knowledge sharing and efficient collaboration.
- Augments a seller’s actions and decisions with AI-powered insights to improve customer engagements.
Viva Sales does all this while eliminating the burden of manual CRM updates, thus boosting sales team productivity.
Partner solutions enhance the Viva Sales experience
We’re looking to grow an ecosystem of complementary solutions to enhance the Viva Sales experience starting with a partnership with Seismic, the leading enablement platform that equips customer-facing teams with the right skills, content, tools, and insights to ignite revenue growth. Through this partnership, our joint customers can streamline the meeting and buyer engagement experience for sales teams and improve productivity through preparation, automation, and intelligence in their daily flow of work. As the first step in this journey, Seismic Enablement Cloud uses AI-powered insights from Viva Sales to recommend content, training lessons, and a prebuilt digital sales room as post-meeting follow-up actions in Viva Sales. This delivers value to sellers right in their flow of work. As a customer of Seismic, Microsoft’s global sales team will take advantage of this partnership and looks forward to seeing the results.
“We’re excited to partner with Microsoft to reimagine the future of selling with Viva Sales, streamline the fragmented seller workflow and give salespeople precious time back to do what they do best: sell. Now with Seismic’s leading enablement solutions used by some of the largest enterprise companies, sellers can not only show up to a customer meeting better prepared, but also be equipped with personalized, automated, and intelligent sales tools to help them delight customers and grow revenue.”—Hayden Stafford, President and Chief Revenue Officer, Seismic.
Viva Sales supports customer choice in CRM
The next era of selling must embrace a hybrid world—not only where and how people work, but their technology stack, too. That’s why Viva Sales includes out-of-the-box functionality for both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRM. We’re excited to announce our launch customers—Adobe, Crayon, and PwC. Here’s what they have to say:
- “As our sales teams are spending more time out meeting with customers and balancing the world of hybrid work, the need to navigate multiple systems and tools quickly and easily is vital to their success. Adobe is evaluating Viva Sales to determine how it can improve our team’s productivity and effectiveness, and give them more time to spend building strong relationships with our customers,” said Stephen Frieder, Head of Global GTM and Sales, Adobe.
- “With Viva Sales, we can empower our sales team to spend more time with customers by automating tasks such as entering data into CRM, and the platform provides relevant insights, content, and coaching that helps push a deal forward. As a customer-first company, Viva Sales enables us to spend more time focusing on what’s most important and that’s providing business value to our customers,”said Melissa Mulholland, CEO, Crayon.
- “When we speak with our clients, we consistently hear about how sellers need a more unified and frictionless experience. With Viva Sales, we see a significant opportunity to offer our clients a chance to cut down on day-to-day repetitive tasks and benefit from insights gleaned to improve customer engagements and stay focused on big picture goals,” said George Korizis, Customer Transformation Practice Leader, PwC.
Reimagine the selling experience with Viva Sales
Sellers are critical to an organization’s bottom line. Yet, according to a survey we commissioned with Futurum, nearly 7 in 10 salespeople (68 percent) shared they would be more productive at work if they didn’t have to enter data into their CRM manually. And 81 percent said faulty data has led to an embarrassing mistake with a customer.1 Viva Sales enriches the user experience with AI-driven insights and actions to help sellers maximize their time with customers. With more than 270 million monthly active Teams users, Viva Sales acts as a bridge connecting the data and insights sellers need to sell effectively and close deals faster with the productivity and collaboration tools, they use every day. Viva Sales enables a seller to:
- Eliminate manual data entry by interacting with CRM from Outlook and Teams, and syncing customer engagement data to Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRM: Viva Sales eliminates the duplicative work of updating CRM systems by allowing sellers to update their CRM data from Teams and Outlook. Sellers can capture new contacts from emails and meetings right into their CRM and see key customer insights such as previous activities—including emails and meetings. Furthermore, sellers can save emails directly from Outlook into CRM so organizations maintain customer connection and relationship history.
Figure 1: Update CRM contact from Outlook.
- Easily collaborate with colleagues on customer records within Teams and Outlook: With Viva Sales CRM, sales records are first-class citizens in the digital experiences sellers use most. With contacts, opportunities, and accounts at their fingertips, sellers can move deals forward, make better decisions, and collaborate with others in Outlook and Teams. Sellers can track, search, share, and inline edit CRM entities across Outlook and Teams, leveraging Context IQ, using rich contextual cards, keeping sales teams in their flow of work, reducing unnecessary application and context switching, and boosting satisfaction.
Figure 2: Share business data easily within Teams and Outlook.
- Augment customer engagements with AI-powered insights: Professionalism with customers and follow-through are important attributes of any good seller. When communicating with customers on Teams, Sales Conversation Intelligence (SCI) can generate meeting summaries, track customer sentiment, and suggest action items for customer follow-ups post meeting. SCI eliminates the need to take notes during calls by recording, transcribing, and providing valuable insights. Sentiment analysis within SCI helps a seller to better track caller sentiment about a specific topic, helping to guide the conversation and plan the best approach for future conversations.
Figure 3: Sellers can view a meeting summary along with helpful insights that they can copy and share with their team.
Improve business results by improving team productivity and enabling strategic insights on deal wins and losses
Today, businesses cannot track and utilize insights from customer engagement data along with CRM data uniformly and consistently across sales teams. Therefore, they miss opportunities to learn and use insights from deal wins and losses for the next customer proposal. By tracking customer engagement data effortlessly and consistently in CRM systems, Viva Sales allows sales leaders to have a unified view of activities, deals, and revenues while removing the friction of sellers keeping their CRM systems up to date. These views can enable relevant insights for better sales engagement within and across customer accounts. With improved data tracking, businesses can also run timely and more accurate sales reports.
Switching Viva Sales on is an easy decision! Viva Sales respects company security and privacy policies in sharing customer contact information, including CRM access controls and user permissions. Viva Sales is free for Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium customers, and otherwise available at $40 per user, per license at general availability on October 3, 2022. Viva Sales is available separately and not part of the Viva suite.
Next steps
To get started with Viva Sales, reach out to your Microsoft sales team and visit the Viva Sales webpage for a demo and more information. Read more about Microsoft’s announcements today for the Viva platform from Jared Spataro.
To learn more:
1Futurum.