Unlocking value with Viva Sales!

Today I want to spend some time exploring Microsoft's new Viva Sales application and how its embraces connected productivity within Microsoft 365 and your CRM! At its core Microsoft Viva Sales is an application that works seamlessly alongside your existing CRM system and is designed to improve a seller’s experience (or in fact any user needing to get more out of their CRM).?

Viva Sales went into public preview in July and General Availability was in early October, in that short window of time many of my customers are either enabling or trialing Viva Sales and experiencing for themselves the value it can bring. Furthermore, the rate of innovation and investment in this new application is unparalleled, there is a robust road map of enhancements coming and we are now seeing monthly releases of new capabilities.?If the word "Viva" sounds familiar, its because the Viva suite of products has been around a while and is coupled with the personal productivity apps in Microsoft 365 you already use. In fact, you may already be using Viva Insights to help you plan your day and leverage the daily briefing of important events. Viva Sales is going from strength to strength and stitching together the elements of your favorite CRM system inside your productivity tools.

To explore deeper why Viva Sales exists, its important to note that systems of record and systems of productivity are often not connected, salespeople are often duplicating efforts across various platforms to keep data up to date. When I start my day, I begin in Teams and Outlook, that's where I am most productive and get things done. Teams and Outlook keep me in my flow of work, in front of my customers and in the context of what I need to get done. This gap between the business productivity tools in Microsoft 365 and CRM can be large - but Microsoft is working hard to address this. And by the way, Viva Sales doesn’t mind what CRM you are running. Today we embrace both Dynamics 365 and Salesforce as CRM systems of connectivity and I expect in the future more CRM applications will be added as the product evolves.

The key value proposition of Viva sales and the promise of the application is it will capture data from your customer interactions and keep your CRM in sync. This happens with auto-capture and record tracking across your mailbox and in Teams via conversation intelligence; summarizing your meeting notes and preparing a digest of next best actions – all without you needing to write up notes.

The way it works is Viva Sales is deployed to your users productivity apps and shows up during the moments that matter across Outlook, Teams and in the near future Excel. Its completely turnkey and centrally managed by your Microsoft 365 administrator - there is nothing to install. The intelligence pane of Viva Sales shows you key information from your CRM system such as contact, account and opportunity details, as well as opening insights, private notes, and an activity timeline – it’s a 2-way sync.

The more you interact with Viva Sales, the more it learns and can suggest as you move around your app and collaborate. Its simple and effective – so lets dig into these key capabilities and see Viva Sales in action.

Viva Sales setup: As mentioned your Microsoft 365 administrator licenses and enables your users through the Microsoft Admin portal. Users can be added individually or via AD security groups. When connecting to the CRM, there are some first time run steps to authorize Viva sales to connect to either Salesforce or Dynamics 365. Note with Teams you can try out Teams meetings conversation intelligence by manually adding it to an internal meeting first. More information is available here.

Email from unknown sender: Below we can see an unknown sender emailing me with a product request. Viva Sales automatically detects its a new contact using insights and via a single click, I can have that contact created in Salesforce. This is auto-capture in action, scraping the email and pre-populating the contact quick create form for me – eliminating manual data entry. In addition, we can track and record emails selectivity and tag them to a related record in Salesforce – ensuring traceability of all interactions. In the future we will also detect subsequent updates for that contact to ensure your CRM is kept in sync.

Email from known contact: I receive another email in my mailbox, but this time its from a known contact Beth Baker. Beth and I have worked together on deals previously and I use Viva Sales to bring up my opportunities, account information and activities from previous interactions. Beth shares with me that she is heading to a Seahawks game and is a big fan. I note this in my Viva Sales personal notes section for future use as a talking point. Personal notes are just for me and are not synced with Salesforce, think of it as personal scratchpad to note down salient talking points.

Using @ mentions: I decide to collaborate with my colleague Alan who is a Marketing VP, I believe he can bring valuable insight to my deal negotiations with Beth, but I also know he isn't actively looking at my opportunities. With Viva Sales we are embracing the "@ mention" capabilities by being able to copy/ paste a link right to a Viva Sales record and share it seamlessly with other users. This is in its infancy right now, but you can see that I can cross productivity tools and simply mention the name of the person/ account/ opportunity I want to share and let Viva Sales do the rest. Its important to note that Viva Sales does not elevate a users CRM permissions. What I mean by that, is if Alan did not have permissions to open the Opportunity record in Salesforce I shared, he wouldn’t be able to do so. All users get a snapshot of the record via the Adaptive Card you see, but role-based access permissions are still required to drill through to the underlying CRM system.

Teams Conversation intelligence: When meeting with a customer on Teams, Viva Sales allows sellers to capture the conversation, receive coaching and follow through on the suggested next best actions. Using conversation intelligence is a great way to keep sellers focused on the call and building that all important relationship, rather than having eyes down taking notes. The way conversation intelligence works is by recording and transcribing your customer Teams meeting in your tenant - with the customers permission of course. Recording calls can be polarizing for some organizations who are not comfortable recording customer calls (due to mostly regulatory concerns), but know many organizations are leaning into this technology and getting the intrinsic value from doing so. The meeting summary produced by conversation intelligence gives you the full transcript of the conversation, key moments which you can zoom to and the associated sentiment of what was said and by whom. Sellers can see how they spoke from a talk-to-listen standpoint and drill into any keywords that were mentioned. The Outlook meeting invite itself can be tracked to the CRM system and is the conduit to Teams and the meeting summary.??

So, hopefully this little tour of Viva Sales has shown you the key capabilities and reasons why this application now exists. It is a new solution, and this blog gives you a snapshot in time where stand today with this launch - there is more and more to come! Viva Sales is evolving fast so be on the look out for more insights, Excel integration, file integration, customization, extensibility, and others coming soon. Viva Sales helps make your users more productive through automating CRM data entry and keeping your CRM pristine. It tells sellers things they don’t know, using advanced AI-driven insights right at the moments that matter. Finally, Viva Sales keeps sellers in their productivity tools of choice by allowing them to stay in the flow and context of their work.

Enjoy!