Despite the leaps and bounds made in customer relationship management (CRM) tools, salespeople have still faced technology struggles. Many spend more time entering data than they do building customer relationships.
There are plenty of big sales and pipeline tools out there, but they can be disconnected from the larger picture. This leads to re-entering of client data and a lack of communication between customer support and sales.
According to Microsoft, 34% of seller time is spent doing administrative tasks, and just 32% is spent on selling. This is a lopsided equation that the company is trying to correct with its latest offering in the Microsoft Viva universe.
Viva Sales is a new seller tool that is a “CRM helper.” It improves the seller experience by automating much of the data capture process and giving salespeople more customer face time.
This new offering is currently available in public preview and is due to be fully launched in Q4 2022. It’s worth taking a look at if your team also has a challenge balancing data entry and admin tasks with customer-facing sales activities.
How Does Microsoft Viva Sales Work?
Viva Sales is not a CRM, instead, it connects to whatever CRM you are using, as well as other tools in the Microsoft lineup. Salespeople can simply tag accounts when working in programs like Teams, Excel, or Outlook and have that data either added to the customer’s record or served up in a popup to reference that account information.
This feature also makes it easy to share information with other team members, without having to search things out and copy/paste them into an email or SMS. Viva Sales acts as a bridge for various siloed information and serves it up to sellers when they need it.
The AI-powered interface also looks at various steps on a prospect or customer’s journey and will make recommendations to salespeople about the next best steps.
Viva Sales can be added from the Microsoft Admin Center. When admins search for the app, they’ll see both an Outlook and MS Teams app to add to their Microsoft cloud services.
What Does Viva Sales Have to Offer Sales Teams?
Removes the Reliance on Form Data Entry
Viva Sales is designed to automatically collect data from multiple tools. This includes CRMs (including non-Microsoft), Outlook messages, Excel, Teams, and all other Microsoft 365 applications. It captures all customer touchpoints in these apps.
This native data gathering not only reduces the burden on the sales team to manually enter that data but also helps to ensure all data is captured. Often, a customer interaction may happen, but not make its way into the CRM record.
For example, if a customer or lead called into the office to ask a question, but the call was handled by someone not on the sales team. This causes issues with the customer relationship if the salesperson is unaware of that interaction. With Viva Sales, anyone in the organization can use the tagging feature to instantly add a client touchpoint to the record so the sales team has visibility into any interaction.
Valuable Data Metrics
One mantra you often see in motivational sales quotes is that good salespeople listen more and talk less. Do you know the average talk-to-listen ratio for your salespeople and their clients? We’d guess that most business owners do not.
With Viva Sales connected to your Teams application, the tool can review call transcripts to provide KPIs like average talking speed and talk-to-listen ratio. Because Viva Sales is a connector that looks at data from multiple resources, it can provide many meaningful insights in an executive summary. This helps sales teams improve their craft and selling results.
AI-Driven Recommendations
One challenge for sales managers is training salespeople to properly nurture the leads in the sales funnel. One salesperson might follow up too much, while another lets leads shrivel up on the vine. This is another area where Viva Sales can help.
It looks at all the customer data and touchpoints and provides prompts to salespeople on the next best action to take based on industry knowledge. This optimizes the follow-up process and helps create a more consistent seller experience.
Customized Dashboards
Salespeople can make Viva Sales their own by customizing their dashboards. It’s also easy to download all the data insights that the app collects into an Excel sheet
The customization gives salespeople the opportunity to design a sales tool interface that works for their distinct workflow.
Learn More About Microsoft 365 and Viva Sales
PartnerIT can help your Ontario business explore Viva Sales and the other Viva tools in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Our cloud specialists can help you optimize and integrate your cloud-based team for better output.
Contact us today to learn more at 519-672-0900 or through our website.
