Smart Selling Powered by GPT: What you need to know about Copilot for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales

There’s no shortage of opinions on how AI advances will change your business. At Velosio, we think that it will have an impact for sellers early, and Microsoft is headed in the same direction. Sales is the lifeblood of every business. Time is a seller’s most valuable commodity. High-value engagement with customers is the best use of that time. Last week, Microsoft announced a new generative AI-powered experience in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Viva Sales. It’s called Copilot, and it is guaranteed to change the way sellers work — in some very smart ways.

Here’s a look at Copilot for Viva Sales — what it is, why it matters, and how it will help your organization unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills.

Copilot for Viva Sales Has Touched Down

Copilot for Viva Sales leverages the power of the Azure OpenAI Service and Open AI’s ChatGPT. It makes sellers more effective with features like auto-generated email responses for common, everyday sales-related scenarios. Copilot enriches those responses with context-appropriate content from applications such as Dynamics 365 CE, Teams, and Outlook. All Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licensed customers can use Viva Sales (now with Copilot) at no additional cost.

Why It Matters

Salespeople spend up to two-thirds of their day managing email. Since many of those emails are to and from prospects and customers, you might think that devoting so much time to it is necessary — strategic even. But most of that time isn’t spent actively selling or directly engaging with clients. Instead, it is spent gathering thoughts and data points and crafting a well-written email.

By automatically suggesting AI-generated, customizable, contextual content for your emails, Copilot allows you to spend less time composing your messages and more time creating and nurturing profitable relationships with prospects and customers.

How It Works

It’s not a stretch to say that Copilot is like having ChatGPT built into Outlook, CRM, and Teams. It dynamically integrates content from emails sent to and from customers, data from CRM opportunities and accounts, and insights from Teams, to engage with customers more efficiently and effectively. In short, it frees up time and increases customer engagement, allowing your sellers to close more deals.

Real-World Use Cases

Below are some ideas and inspirations about incorporating Copilot into your day and winning back more time.

• Creating a proposal. Customers expect quick responses to their inquiries, but a reply to a request for a proposal takes time. In a typical scenario, to craft a professional response to the inquiry, you’ll need to open your CRM application, navigate to the opportunity, review your notes, and then copy and paste details into the email response.Copilot, one click launches the GPT experience, where you can select from various prompts, including “Request for proposal.” Choosing this prompt sends Copilot into action, crafting a suggested response enriched with information from the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales opportunity record, including data points like products, quantity, and price.
• Following up on a proposal. Viva Sales can remind you when to follow up with a prospect or customer, and Copilot can expedite that follow-up. Use Copilot to auto-generate a preformatted email response, including personalized text and next best actions, along with details such as product descriptions, proposals, and deadlines. Then, edit the response to your liking and send it along.
• Scheduling a meeting. With Copilot, you can now generate email replies with proposed meeting times based on your own calendar availability in Outlook, making it easier to schedule customer meetings and streamlining the back-and-forth involved in finding a time that works for everyone.
• Summarizing a meeting. Successful sellers provide meeting attendees with a clear summary of the interaction, including action items and next steps. It’s best to capture and share that information right away while the content and context are fresh in your mind. Copilot can help. It leverages the existing conversation intelligence technology in Dynamics 365 CE/Viva Sales to provide you with meeting insights, together with CRM data and the new text generation capabilities. The result is a super-simple way for you to generate meaningful meeting summaries quickly.

Some of the Perks

Now that you’ve got an idea of what Copilot for Viva Sales can do, we wanted to further highlight some of its beneficial capabilities.

Choose in-context response prompts

As you review an email and determine the type of response warranted, Copilot is there to help with a menu of “response prompts” such as Reply to an inquiry, Offer a discount, Make a proposal, Address a concern, and even Suggest your own.

Build upon a generated reply

We mentioned that you can fully edit the automatically generated responses to make them your own. In addition to that, you can feed Copilot additional prompts (like, “make it shorter” or “sound more formal”) to build on its previous suggestion and get you closer to your ideal message.

Where’d that come from?

Copilot draws its data points from Microsoft Graph, which taps into data from the Microsoft applications your business is using. So if you are curious about precisely where that date, name, or dollar amount is coming from, just hover over the highlighted text, and Copilot will reveal the source.

Vote on the winners and the losers

Copilot values your opinion. Microsoft added a new feedback mechanism that allows you to rate the generated content with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Copilot will consider your feedback as it adapts to the unique needs of every seller.

Let Velosio Be Your Copilot

Copilot for Viva Sales is just one small part of the Copilot initiative. Generative AI features are being delivered across the Microsoft stack, and we are parsing the information about availability and pricing, so that you can fully understand the impact.

Velosio is here to help you navigate Copilot, explore its capabilities, and maximize its value to your organization. We’re leveraging our elite status with Microsoft and deep AI expertise to stay out in front of the technology and help you better understand its capabilities and how to incorporate them into your business. We’ll be posting on the topic frequently to share what we’re learning. In addition, our experienced consultants can answer your questions, provide in-depth demonstrations, and help you discover how this powerful tool can transform your business.

It’s hard to name another product release garnering more attention than the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) natural language text generation application developed by OpenAI. Everyone, from students to newspaper reporters to major companies, has dabbled with it, making it something of an overnight sensation.

You’re likely aware that Microsoft is a significant investor in OpenAI. That partnership places Microsoft ahead in the race to leverage Generative AI in business applications. For many of our customers, their core business systems are built by Microsoft. For most of our customers, their productivity applications are built by Microsoft.

This will impact all of us.

Things are moving fast. ChatGPT made a splash in November. Last week, Microsoft began to release Generative AI features into D365 and M365. There’s a lot already there, and there’s a lot more coming. They’ve branded it Copilot, and its arrival is set to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills.

We at Velosio know this transformation raises as many questions for you as answers. Which features are in preview? When will those features reach general availability? What are the use cases that matter most to my business? How much work will it take to configure this functionality? How do I avoid unintended consequences? How should I enable my users to get the most out of this transformation? Even ChapGPT doesn’t have the answers yet. (We checked).

Since Copilot was announced, we at Velosio have been laser-focused on surfacing answers. We are actively working with the technology to understand its maturity and stability. We are leveraging our elite Microsoft status and deep relationships in Redmond to understand where all this is headed. We are identifying the use cases that will have the largest impact on our clients’ businesses. We are considering the enablement implications and strategies. We will be posting often in the coming days, weeks, and months—to share answers and our point of view as it evolves. We will be posting about opportunities to seize the advantages that this inflection point will offer. Velosio will be your copilot.

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