Several widely known companies recently introduced artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in their product offerings—such as Google, IBM, Amazon, and OpenAI, with its highly publicized ChatGPT. Now, Microsoft is unveiling Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, an interactive, AI-powered tool that’s available in its customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Dynamics 365 Copilot features are powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service, which provides access to coding models that can be adapted to help accomplish tasks like content generation, summarization, semantic search, and natural language translation.
In this article, we’ll highlight how Copilot can work within one of Microsoft’s CRM applications, Dynamics 365 Sales, and its CRM companion application, Viva Sales. Viva Sales is included in Dynamics 365 Sales and is available for purchase separately for other CRM systems, including Salesforce.
Copilot can help supercharge sales activity by automating burdensome tasks, generating complementary content, and summarizing data to glean sales insights. Let’s review some of the top features and benefits of Copilot for sales.
Dynamics 365 Sales
Copilot is designed to help increase productivity and efficiency. With features such as finding relevant information, scheduling appointments, and generating insights, it can provide a range of benefits for sales professionals.
One of the most acclaimed Copilot features for sales is its ability to leverage the power of AI to help write email responses to customers and create email summaries of Teams meetings in Outlook. Sales professionals often spend a significant amount of time on these tasks. By automating email responses and meeting summaries, Copilot can give sellers more time to focus on building relationships with their customers and closing deals.
The AI-generated email feature suggests content based on customer emails, including replies to inquiries and requests for proposals. With access to specific data relevant to each recipient (such as pricing, promotions, and deadlines), sellers can choose from a range of suggested replies that best fits the scenario. This feature also can help refine and improve future replies.
Viva Sales
Copilot in Viva Sales can help increase efficiencies by using AI to formulate effective ways to engage with customers. Meeting summaries, suggested email replies, and direct access to CRM data are a few ways Copilot can help free up time that previously was spent filling in blank screens.
Viva Sales is designed to provide quick access to customer-centric data and insights. Viva Sales can remind sellers when it’s time to follow up with a prospect or customer. Now, powered by AI technology, it also can generate suggested email content with personalized text and recommended calls to action. In addition, it can include details stored in CRM or previous emails like product descriptions, proposals, and deadlines.
Similarly, Viva Sales can help sellers reply to customer emails with in-the-moment suggested responses based upon categories such as “make a proposal,” “reply to an inquiry,” or “suggest your own.” It also uses Outlook calendar data to suggest meeting times based on calendar availability.
Copilot can help sellers easily link an email directly to Dynamics 365 CRM applications with minimal clicks, too.
Automated summaries of key topics, issues, and concerns discussed during sales meetings are another helpful Copilot feature. Summaries can be generated for a range of meeting types in Teams, including multiparticipant and internal calls, helping sellers stay organized and on top of critical, content-heavy sales meetings. Using conversation intelligence, meeting summaries—including action items and follow-up dates—are generated based on meeting and CRM data. Copilot in Viva Sales can isolate keywords and phrases, brands, competitors, and more. It can detect customer and seller sentiment and conversational style. Further, it can translate different languages in transcripts.
Overall, some of the top benefits of Copilot for sales include:
- Accelerated Learning – Sellers can improve their email and phone communications over time, which can result in improved business outcomes.
- Reduced Errors – Copilot leverages state-of-the-art natural language technology, machine learning-based optical character recognition techniques, and existing data from email, Teams, and CRM to generate suggested responses and meeting recaps. Sales professionals no longer need to dig through these systems for information and manually extract useful parts. Not only does this help save time, but it also helps reduce manual entry errors.
- Customizable Suggestions – Copilot can be customized to provide suggestions specific to your business processes. Also, customizing Copilot can help you improve content quality over time.
- Increased Productivity – One of the most significant benefits of using Copilot is the increased productivity it can yield. For sales professionals, the adage “time is money” is still relevant today. Copilot can help sellers create content more effectively, reducing the time and effort needed to complete administrative tasks. This can free up time so sellers can work on other critical and more strategic functions to help close more deals.
In summary, Copilot for sales can help sellers dramatically reduce the time they spend on burdensome tasks. It uses generative AI to comb through existing data to uncover insights, predict customer needs, and offer real-time assistance to sales professionals. Further, Copilot natively integrates with other Microsoft business applications. With its ample range of features and benefits, Copilot can help sales professionals save time and achieve greater professionalism and productivity.
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