5 Ways to Implement Viva Sales into Your Business Today

Sellers are under a lot of stress. Finding and qualifying leads for your business to convert into closed deals carries a lot of pressure, right? Not to mention, time-consuming. What’s more, according to research commissioned by Microsoft, 66% of a seller’s day is spent managing emails. How can sellers build solid, long-term customer relationships if they spend most of their day on redundant and repetitive tasks? Luckily, Viva Sales was built to solve this issue in particular. 

What is Viva Sales? 

Microsoft Viva is a platform built for and designed for the hybrid work environment. The new module, Viva Sales, enables a new and improved way of selling. This seller experience application takes data and automatically inputs it into CRM software, eliminating manual entry which can be time-consuming and lead to errors. 

Let’s dive into 5 ways that you can use Viva Sales to streamline and strengthen the selling process. 

 

5 ways to use Viva Sales

1) Crafting email responses to prospects and customers 

As mentioned above, managing email is time-consuming. While communication between buyers and sellers is the most important aspect of sales, there is a lot of repetitive work that can be supplemented or automated by AI. 

First, Viva Sales integrates with Microsoft 365, including Outlook. Each time a prospective buyer emails a seller, Viva Sales presents the seller with several AI-generated responses they can use at their discretion. For example, if a prospect asks for the pricing of a specific product or service, the seller can select the option that creates a proposal email for the prospect. Viva Sales generates a proposal email, and the seller can review it and adjust it as needed. 

Viva Sales’ AI can take information from customers’ emails and generate a response in the context of the conversation. But that’s not all! Drafting a proposal is just one of the several response types available. Sellers can also select the options to respond to an inquiry, pose their own question, address a concern, offer a discount, or even customize a specific email type.  

By doing this, sellers can take control of their time and focus on building solid long-term relationships with their customers. Sellers will no longer spend the majority of their time crafting emails but instead edit the generated responses to streamline the process. 

2) Collaborate with colleagues using customer cards 

The next Viva Sales feature that can be used by sales teams today is the ability to share customer cards and profiles within Microsoft Teams. Viva Sales automatically generates customer profiles and includes the prospect’s contact information and relevant information. Sellers can also add additional information regarding the customer’s priorities, product preferences, and goals pertaining to the objectives the sellers are trying to achieve with the customer.   

Viva Sales then takes these customer profiles and syncs them with Microsoft Teams, which allows sellers to share the profiles in Teams chats. Sharing these customer cards in sales Teams chats brings visibility and transparency and empowers sales teams to collaborate on leads easily. Colleagues can indicate whether they have had contact with the prospect in question, and together, teams can devise stronger selling strategies that are tailored to individual customers.   

Two minds, or three, or four, are better than one, right? 

 

 

3) Review and analyze call summaries and transcripts  

The AI-driven call summary function records sales phone and video calls, creates a call summary, and provides the transcript. Salespeople can review the transcripts to see which parts of their talk track most effectively solve customers’ problems and persuade them to close a deal.   

In addition, Viva Sales provides a function that analyzes voice inflections to allow sellers to visually see customer sentiments throughout the call. For example, if a customer audibly becomes irritable at one point during the call, bars will appear on the auditory line at the bottom of the call summary. If a customer becomes audibly excited, bars will also appear on the call line. See what this screen looks like below: 

Sellers can also aggregate the collected data in a dashboard to view who is closing deals faster, which helps junior salespeople on the team devise new strategies based on how the experienced sellers interact with customers. This is advanced stuff! By using this feature today, sellers can gradually improve their selling strategies, connect with customers, and close more deals! 

 

4) Client relationship management integrations 

Viva Sales integrates with client relationship management (CRM) tools like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales. Becoming familiar with CRM features is essential in Viva Sales’ case.  

First, users can create new contacts in their CRM system, with the contact information pre-filled if it’s already in the system. Users can also view their account and opportunity information in Outlook and save emails to the CRM from Outlook. Additionally, users can copy contact and account information from Outlook and share it in Microsoft Teams easily.  

Users can also share CRM information in Teams chats for collaboration purposes and update CRM information directly from Teams chats, minimizing that frustrating and time-consuming context switching.  

Finally, users can save meeting details to the CRM from Outlook, keeping meetings and items organized for the seller. These features are all built into Viva Sales, as it integrates with Microsoft 365 applications. 

By using Viva Sales, sellers can essentially gain a personal assistant in the form of software. Rather than spending hours manually inputting contact information and other data, Viva Sales does it for you! Because of this, sellers can focus on their larger and more complex tasks while keeping the customer in mind every step of the way. 

 

5) Consult Viva Sales actionable item lists 

The final feature that sellers can use today is the actionable item list that Viva Sales creates for sellers based on calls and emails with customers.  

The seller can record their own notes from the call in a notes section within the call summary. Of course, an inexperienced seller may need to learn the best course of action, given the situation and how the call panned out. So, in addition to Viva Sales’ notes section, AI automatically generates an actionable list of suggested notes and actions which the seller can consult. For example, the software will take a conversation from the call and write that “the customer contacted us because they wanted to know the status of their case.” The software extracts relevant pieces of information and creates notes so that the seller doesn’t have to.   

The other significant part of this feature is that the software creates a list of suggested next steps that the seller can take to get closer to helping the customer and closing the deal. For example, an item on the list could include “get the customer the new discount proposal by Friday,” outlining what needs to be done by what date.   

This feature allows sellers to stay on top of their priorities and tailor individual strategies for engaging each customer and closing each deal. 

Should you use Viva Sales?

There are many advantages to using Viva Sales in your business today. We’ve listed five ways to implement Viva Sales into your business, ranging from using the AI-generated email function to consulting the actionable item list found in call summaries.   

Sales is about connection. Sellers connect with prospective buyers and build long-term, professional relationships that are crucial for any business. Adding Viva Sales to your software removes the mundane from your seller’s day, freeing them up to reach more prospects, build stronger connections, and reach your objectives regarding closed deals.