After having transformed the worlds of office automation and video conferencing (among others) in recent years, Microsoft is now directing its target towards the world of sales.
The IT giant has introduced Microsoft Viva Sales in a bid to give businesses of all sizes an AI-powered boost when it comes to modernizing CRM.
The latest addition to your Viva work toolset will work with any CRM platform, including Salesforce, Zoho, and Freshworks, meaning there's no need to learn new systems or pay for new subscriptions.
Microsoft Viva Sales
Viva Sales connects directly to the Microsoft 365 suite to sync with tools like Excel, Outlook, or even Microsoft Teams, pulling data directly and eliminating long "busy work" periods caused by manual data entry.
Users can tag customers in Microsoft 365 tools, with Viva Sales automatically capturing it as a single, individual specific customer record, creating a new profile with all the relevant data about that customer. These can then be shared with colleagues to quickly pass on tips or hints without a lengthy vetting process.
Once processed, Viva Sales can use this data to provide recommendations and reminders to users through its built-in ContextIQ artificial intelligence models, which offer real-time insights that Microsoft says could make a difference when it comes to events for conclude an agreement.
"As we've come out of the pandemic, there have been some really big changes in the job market and really, in people's minds and hearts, how they expect their job to be done, and that's where Viva was." was born," Jared Spataro, CVP, Modern Work, Microsoft, told TechRadar Pro.
“Viva comes with a number of different modules to suit all employees in an organization,” he noted. "Viva Sales is a whole new version of that - it's still the employee experience, but we recognize that while there are many things that apply to all employees, everyone has a job within an organization and this job is specific, with Tickets. , outputs and performance, expectations and vision.
Spataro added that Viva Sales is the beginning of a new approach for Microsoft, being the first app to bring the idea of the employee experience to the role itself.
"It basically works as a bridge between the systems of record and the communication systems, and its goal is to help sellers do their job," he adds. "It allows us to really connect the dots between people who are working, sometimes on the same thing, and then we can stitch that together in Microsoft graph data with the system of record, and you have a very rich set of data by reasoning
"This is just the beginning for us," he concluded, "We think a lot of things will be possible, because we're basically bringing communications and artificial intelligence together and putting them on top of your recording system, and we think that's just a whole new area of application really in the industry.