MICROSOFT ANNOUNCES VIVA SALES, A NEW CRM COMPANION
Microsoft continues to develop and release new business applications. Recently, the company has unveiled Viva Sales, the first role-based module in the Viva lineup. Viva Sales is a sales experience tool that looks at data and relationships across CRM, Office 365 apps and content and Teams to assist sellers with advice and context. With the dominant market position of both Office 365 and Team, this can be an interesting possibility for both existing Microsoft Dynamics customers as for users of other CRM solutions.
“Viva Sales is a companion of any CRM system,” said Emily He, Corporate Vice-President of Microsoft Business Applications. The product “captures valuable customer engagement data, intelligently automates data collection, delivers real-time insights to customer interactions and recommends next-best actions from initial leads all the way to closing deals. It also gives sales management a more holistic view of what’s happening in each account, so they can better manage and forecast their sales results,” she added.
Microsoft plans to launch Viva Sales in Q4 2022. It will integrate with Dynamics 365 Sales as well as other CRM solutions, according to Microsoft.
The new module of the Viva product family aims to address pain points like data entry, gathering customer engagement data stored in documents and reducing administrative work.
“Viva Sales is a new modern way of selling,” wrote Judson Althoff, Microsoft Executive Vice-President and chief commercial officer. “As a smart CRM companion, Viva Sales makes sellers’ lives easier while enriching their CRM. Think about all the customer and deal insights that are already in Outlook, in Teams and in Office applications like Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but never make it into the CRM system. These insights are hard to capture because the seller is tasked with entering data manually.”
Microsoft launched Viva as an “employee experience” platform in early 2021 with the aim of providing a one-stop shop for communications, knowledge, learning, resources and insights. The original set of modules included Learning, Insights, Topics and Connections.
If you feel that there is room for improvement in the way your sales organisation works, let’s have a chat on how Viva Sales can enrich your current CRM solution and make your sales teams more effective.
