Sales professionals are most successful when they can spend quality time with customers and really understand their needs. But keeping track of those conversations as well as other customer information can be cumbersome. Microsoft recently released Viva Sales, an application that automates many of those lower-level tasks so sales professionals can focus on their customers.
Viva Sales is a companion to a company’s CRM that enables users to pass information from the CRM to other Microsoft applications, and vice versa. For example, transcripts from Teams meetings can be brought into the customer record, complete with customer sentiment information, follow-up items, and other valuable data. Likewise, sales professionals can easily bring customer information from the CRM into Teams chats with colleagues.
While Viva Sales might not be for every company, if yours includes a sales arm, it’s worth at least looking at the capabilities it can provide. In the following sections we discuss what Viva Sales is, what it does, the pros and cons, how it can help businesses, and whether or not your company could benefit from it.
What Is Microsoft Viva Sales?
According to Microsoft’s website, “Viva Sales is a seller experience app that automatically captures Office 365 and Microsoft Teams data into any CRM tool, eliminating manual data entry to help you focus on selling.” It is designed to help sales professionals reduce the amount of time they spend on data entry and other busywork so that they’re available for more important matters like relationship building. Viva Sales is composed of five main modules, as follows.
Viva Insights
As you use Viva Sales, this tool analyzes your activity and provides actionable insights on how to increase the effectiveness of meetings and be more productive with your time. With Headspace integration, the tool also helps you reduce stress and improve mental health. Additional features are available for business leaders and managers.
Viva Goals
This module helps you set goals and sales targets, then review them and analyze progress. Sales leaders and managers can set goals for themselves or team members to align with organizational priorities. Each goal can have multiple team members associated with it. This function helps workers understand their role within the company and their contribution toward each initiative.
Viva Learning
Within this function, team members experience learning as part of their normal workday. You can select specific training modules for the entire team to access, share educational content in communication spaces, and encourage team members to discuss what they’ve learned. The learning aspect also allows you to track progress and get notifications for overdue tasks.
Viva Topics
Consisting of three primary areas — Identifications, Curation, and Discovery — this section creates topic areas based on what people are talking about in content and conversations. It generates topic pages and expands them to include related topics. Topic cards are displayed across Microsoft 365 applications so everyone can learn from collective human and AI knowledge.
Viva Connections
This portion of Viva Sales serves as a company communication hub, including company news, town halls, employee resource groups, and communities. This section is essential for helping remote teams stay connected. You can encourage employees to participate in conversations about important matters, ask for feedback and suggestions, create polls and surveys, and provide timely updates.
What Does Microsoft Viva Sales Do?
When users interact with customers on 365 and Teams, the information is automatically transferred to customer profiles within Viva Sales. The application sends reminders and suggestions for interactions with customers, serving as a digital personal assistant. The following are specific actions you can take with Viva Sales.
Manage Customer Information
You can add or revise customer information within tools you already use, such as Teams and Outlook. For example, say you are a water cooler supplier, and you communicate with your customers via email. One of your customers, Sal Patel at ABC Trucking, sends you a message saying the company would like to increase the number of water jugs you provide each week.
Viva Sales appears as a sidebar within Outlook, so you can easily drag and drop this message into the Viva Sales customer contact. Now, when you want to see the big picture of your relationship with ABC Trucking, that information is included.
Access CRM Tools
From within Microsoft applications like Outlook, you can quickly access your CRM tool, such as Salesforce or Dynamics 365 Sales. Using the example above, if Sal writes to you again in a month, you can quickly go to your records for ABC Trucking to remind yourself about the relationship timeline.
View CRM Entries
From within other applications like Outlook, you can hover over customer names to see snapshot views of their Viva Sales information, including a history of tasks completed, such as information sent to the customer.
Share Information With Colleagues
Within Teams, you can use @ mentions to share information with others working on a particular account. For example, say your colleague is meeting with Sal to renew the contract for ABC Trucking for the following year. Using the chat function, they could write, “I’m getting ready to meet with @Sal Patel at ABC Trucking to renew for next year. Can you share any insights?” This function and others are demonstrated in the following video.
The @ mention shows a snapshot view of Sal’s information, which you can open or edit directly to easily remind yourself of the relationship timeline, enabling you to share the most relevant information with your colleague. Additionally, colleagues, including managers, can see progress with each customer to better direct sales professionals in how to move forward on each account.
Use AI Functionality
From recorded meetings, Viva Sales records a transcript and intelligently creates suggestions for important details. They include action items that you can accept as part of a customer’s record, which later generate reminders.
For example, say you had a Teams meeting with Sal to discuss the company’s water cooler needs for its new location. Following the meeting, you have access to tabs that include details, notes, action items, and mentions, with suggestions under each one. You can add to Sal’s contact action items, such as “Send most recent pricing,” that must still be addressed.
The AI component can also help you track positive or negative sentiments during a conversation. Following the call, you get a timeline of each participant and color-coded bars that indicate when they spoke and the sentiment associated with their input.
These features eliminate the need for taking notes or manually entering information from the call to your CRM from memory. So, you can focus fully on the people you’re speaking with, yet also get support for following up on important aspects of each conversation.
Conversation Insights
During calls, you can have information related to the customer available to help guide the conversation. That includes customer history and notes from chat sessions with colleagues about the customer.
After calls, you can see helpful analytics such as talk-to-listen ratio, talking speed, listen duration, and switches per hour. You can review this information and make improvements that will help you become a better communicator and close more deals.
Customer Lists
With customer list functionality, you can create groupings of customers that are meaningful to you, showing critical contact, sentiment, history, and revenue information at a glance.
Pros of Using Microsoft Viva Sales
Microsoft Viva Sales offers numerous benefits.
- Familiar environment. For professionals who already use Microsoft products, Viva Sales provides a familiar environment with a similar user interface, look, and feel.
- Time back. With new ways to get information to and from the company CRM, Viva Sales minimizes repeated efforts and reduces the time spent on mundane tasks and switching between software applications.
- Greater productivity. With follow-up suggestions and reminders designed to help users close the sale, it’s easier to stay on top of important tasks.
- Power of AI. Viva Sales makes the most of online customer contacts with insights derived from each communication, whether through email, chat, or video call.
- Relevant knowledge. The application provides information that you need when you need it, such as during customer calls, to help you be as responsive as possible.
- Convenience. Users can manage customer information within existing workflows, such as when working in Outlook or other applications. Information from email, CRM, and other sources are all in one place. Users can configure dashboards that reflect the information they feel is important to see.
- Efficient collaboration. With easy access to customer information, team members can work more effectively together on each account.
- Modern functionality. Viva Sales takes advantage of AI technology to provide an environment that is more than just a customer database. It supports sales work with reminders, updates, and suggestions that lead to closed deals.
- A more personal approach. With less time needed to record notes, determine action items, and set reminders, sales professionals can be more present with customers, leading to better relationships and more sales.
- More sales. With reduced time spent on administrative tasks, more time spent with customers, and actionable insights from the technology, sales professionals have everything they need to generate more sales and revenue for the company.
How Microsoft Viva Sales Can Help Your Business
New tools can be useful, efficient, and even fun. But they are also expensive, and you will not get a positive ROI unless they actively help your company grow. Viva Sales does so in several ways.
Streamline Processes
Constantly switching between applications might not seem like a big time waster, but think about how the seconds can add up over days, weeks, and months. In a highly competitive business environment, every minute counts. If yours are spent wrangling applications while your competition is chatting up prospects, you are being left behind.
Viva Sales enables users to perform actions that might have been done two or three times, or even more, in the past. For example, a customer call might have resulted in taking notes in a Word document, editing them and transferring to the CRM, and writing a summary in the chat function of Teams to update a manager or colleagues.
Viva Sales brings all those applications together, enabling all those functions to happen with just one action. Additionally, it not only reduces but actually removes work because it can take notes for you, practically eliminating the entire post-call process.
Accelerate Productivity
With that much task reduction, sales professionals can spend their time on more meaningful actions such as researching prospects, meeting with customers, and following up on requests for information. The actual outcome will be different for each company, but imagine that each person on the sales team can increase their sales by 5%. If you have 20 people on the sales team, that’s a significant rise in sales and revenue.
Improve Teamwork
When team members can work together, they can accomplish more. The abilities to pick up where another person left off, share insights about specific accounts, and easily display or show CRM content in existing communication channels are highly useful in streamlining teamwork within sales.
Increase Employee Satisfaction
Digital employee experience (DEX) is something that’s getting a lot of attention these days, but maybe not enough. It refers to how team members feel about their technology, and too many companies don’t pay attention to this critical concept. Frustration, slowed productivity, and embarrassment (such as in the case where a care representative can’t properly serve a customer at a critical moment) are just a few possible results when technology doesn’t work right. In extreme situations, employees may seek employment at a more tech-forward company.
Loss of productivity and the need to expand hiring efforts can cost companies considerable sums, which is why it pays to ensure employees are enjoying positive DEX. Viva Sales streamlines the busywork associated with sales efforts. When used in conjunction with other effective solutions and smart organizational processes, it can help drive positive DEX.
Boost the Bottom Line
Through achievement of the above benefits, Viva Sales also helps boost your bottom line. For example, better teamwork leads to happier customers and faster time to close, resulting in more time to bring in more business. Increased employee satisfaction and positive DEX reduce hiring costs, leaving more budget for developing new products and services that delight customers, leading to more customers and more sales.
Does Your Business Need Microsoft Viva Sales?
So, who uses Microsoft Viva Sales? Sales teams of various sizes across industries. Should your company be one of them? That’s a harder question to answer. Some clues that it might be an appropriate solution for your team are as follows.
- You have identified that your sales team suffers from negative DEX.
- Team members complain about busywork and the inability to spend as much time with customers as they would like.
- Salespeople are failing to close deals due to administrative matters such as not having access to the right information at the right time.
- Salespeople are failing to identify important takeaways from meetings, forgetting to follow up on action items, and missing vocal cues that could help move the process along.
- Salespeople are repeating their work, such as inputting notes into Outlook and the CRM that essentially say the same thing.
- Salespeople need guidance for goals and next steps.
- Teams don’t feel connected or able to easily share information.
- Customers are complaining about lack of response or an inconsistent sales process.
- The competition is using more automation in their sales process and is pulling out ahead.
Viva Sales Is the Next Generation of Sales Technology
Whether or not you decide to use Viva Sales, consider that its features represent the next generation of sales technology. The AI-driven functions of Viva Sales are catapulting the sales process in entirely new directions. No longer are salespeople limited by their own intuition and the next step in a prescribed process. They now have AI support that creates tasks and suggestions based on data analysis. While users still have the ability to take or leave these suggestions, merely having access to them is a major change in how sales are made.
Several competitors to Viva Sales are already on the market, including solutions from Qualtrics, Emplo, and SAP. As they advance and more become available, it will become harder for companies for which the sales function is critical to refrain from bringing on one of these revolutionary tools.
FAQ
What is Viva Sales?
Viva Sales is an app by Microsoft that automates the capture of Office 365 and Microsoft Teams data into any CRM tool, enhancing the selling process with AI and data integration.
How to Get Microsoft Viva?
To get Microsoft Viva, go to the Microsoft 365 admin center, sign in as an admin, search for ‘Viva’, and follow the setup instructions for the desired Viva apps.
Who is the Owner of Viva Supermarket?
Viva Supermarket is managed by Georg J. Fischer, CEO of VIVA, and is part of a retailing group led by Renuka Jagtiani, Chairwoman & CEO.
