The News: Microsoft Viva Sales is a new seller experience application that works in conjunction with Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRM solutions to automate customer updates, share AI-based recommendations and insights, allow more integrated collaboration and productivity, and eliminate manual data entry, creating more time to focus on solely on selling. Initially deployed internally across Microsoft, the rollout has allowed Microsoft to capture user feedback, learn important insights, and make improvements along the way, including activating various Copilot generative AI features to enhance the seller experience and drive productivity gains. Internally, the launch of Viva Sales has been successful, especially with the AI-generated email content enhancements. You can read the original blog post from Microsoft discussing the initial rollout and success metrics at this link.
Microsoft’s Viva Sales, Copilot Driving Productivity Gains for Sales Professionals
Analyst Take: Viva Sales has been launched internally at Microsoft, allowing the vendor to capture user feedback, tweak various features and functionality, and incorporate generative AI features and functions, prior to rolling the application out to external customers. One of the key features is Copilot, which is used to incorporate natural language processing (NLP) into Viva Sales and helps users create ideas and content faster, and complete time-consuming tasks, enabling significant productivity gains due to a reduction in manual effort.
Microsoft has taken an interesting and effective approach to rolling out Viva Sales. By focusing on internal customers, it can identify points of friction, as well as get a better understanding of how salespeople utilize Viva Sales in a real-world environment. Further, by deploying the software in regions with strict data privacy and protection rules are in place, such as within the European Union, Microsoft can ensure that privacy laws and procedures are incorporated into its products, ensuring the ethical use of new technologies such as AI.
Letting Sellers Focus on Selling
A key value proposition with many AI and automation-based technologies is that they permit workers to offload tedious administrative tasks. For sales professionals and organizations, this is critically important to ensure streamlined and efficient operations, and power productivity gains that can let salespeople focus on sales. Viva Sales, which offers conversational intelligence capabilities, eliminates the need for note-taking in meetings (while including sentiment analysis and next-best actions), and lets salespeople spend their time leveraging the insights derived from meetings and briefings in their sales interactions.
Indeed, salespeople spend significant time composing or replying to emails, and particularly when juggling several prospects, may find themselves struggling to commit time and effort to creating emails that are concise, relevant, and adhere to organizational styles and best practices. Viva Sales uses AI to suggest content, saving time and effort in composing the most appropriate message, based on the current deal stage. Users can select predefined response categories or enter their text, and AI generates suggested content, and then can use the content as-is or modify it to meet their needs.
Presenting a Coordinated and Unified Front
Further, Viva Sales supports productivity gains via more efficient internal collaboration within Teams by sharing contact cards and identifying coworkers that have had meaningful interactions with customers. This ensures better insights sharing among colleagues, and ensures that all external activities and outreach are visible and coordinated.
Demonstrating a coordinated and unified external front is especially important to sales professionals, who need to demonstrate that all parties on their end are informed and up-to-speed on previous meetings and interactions. If a sales professional from one division does not realize that the prospect is also speaking with another division, it creates confusion and makes the sales organization appear disorganized and uncoordinated, which can introduce doubt into the mind of the prospect.
Limited Availability of Viva Sales May Be an Issue for Some Enterprises
Viva Sales is not available on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, Microsoft’s on-premises version of the software, and currently is not supported on mobile devices. While the former instance is not a major ding, given Microsoft’s (and nearly every other vendor’s) desire to push enterprises to cloud-based solutions, the lack of mobile support is somewhat surprising. Many of the key capabilities of Viva Sales, particularly around auto-populating CRM contacts into emails, as well as content generation and summarization, are tailor-made for mobile devices.
Consider a salesperson working on the East Coast to close a deal with a prospect located on the West Coast. If the prospect reaches out after normal business hours, and catches the salesperson away from a laptop, a mobile-enabled Viva Sales would be a great way to ensure that a salesperson could still work efficiently and effectively away from the office. Given the shift to hybrid work, it will be interesting to see if Viva Sales eventually migrates to mobile devices to drive productivity gains whenever a salesperson is working.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
