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Microsoft Viva Sales – From Concept to Creation

Thursday, March 16, 2023
Reading time: 4 minutes

Microsoft Viva Sales is now a reality, here’s what Companial Partners need to know…

The Concept of Viva Sales

Cast your mind back to July 2021, at Microsoft Inspire, where a bold announcement was made by Satya Nadella in his keynote speech stating:

Today, I’m excited to share that Teams customers will receive access to Dynamics 365 data within Teams at no extra cost, regardless of whether they’ve a Dynamics 365 license.”

This was such an exciting announcement, creating a real buzz in the Dynamics partner channel as the removal of such licencing implications could massively impact user adoption and drive real momentum in the market.

Sales team challenges

Initially, this was planned to be delivered via “Collaborative Apps,” specific apps, provided by Microsoft that controlled data access alongside what could be annotated and updated by users within Teams.

Viva Sales Evolved

Step forward Viva Sales, announced in June 2022, and built on top of Microsoft Viva, the employee experience and engagement suite of products.

If you’re familiar with Microsoft 365, you’re probably also familiar with the “daily briefing” that now lands in your inbox, encouraging you to prepare for meetings and highlighting actions to be completed, driven by email conversations around specific points digitally discussed with colleagues and customers.

Microsoft Viva Sales is an extension of this, bringing everything from Dynamics 365 out of the core applications, through automatic logging and tracking, contextually into the right place for everyone, not just Microsoft Teams but throughout Microsoft 365. This includes account and contact details, AI guided next best steps for actions and even sentiment analysis.

Benefits of Viva Sales

Microsoft position Viva Sales around saving time on admin tasks from a seller perspective, reclaiming what often gets lost. If you think of this in the eyes of a typical salesperson, and the challenges with adoption of systems, particularly when it comes to admin around data capture, the benefits become clear, very quickly.

Reducing overheads around data entry, whilst also bringing it contextually back into tools that sellers and relationship-oriented employees use frequently, can only be a good thing.


For example, imagine you are talking to an internal colleague about a customer account on a Teams conversation.  Bringing the ability to @ mention the contact and then directly bringing that contact record synopsis into the thread has huge value.  The contextual information appears in place, without having to switch to Dynamics, find the record and share the link, bringing significant productivity gains.

Product and Localization Information

Microsoft state that Viva Sales is designed to integrate with any CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution, not just Dynamics. For example, it also works with Salesforce.com Professional (with API access enabled,) Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions.

Viva Sales can be installed by Microsoft 365 administrators and needs to be assigned to users/security groups for access. It’s a cloud only offering and therefore does not work with on-premises installations of Dynamics 365 nor Exchange.

Conversation intelligence is available in English, German, Dutch, French, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese and Chinese Simplified (PRC.)

Purchasing Viva Sales

Viva Sales is included in Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise/Premium. It is not included in the Viva suite but can be attached with an additional licence. It is not available for Dynamics 365 Sales Professional nor any Dataverse/Power Platform SKUs.

Where your customers have already purchased qualifying SKUs, this is a fantastic opportunity to have a conversation about enabling this functionality for them as part of a professional services offering.

For customers who have SKUs where it is not included, or have not yet committed to Dynamics 365, the powerful capabilities of Viva Sales can be used as a conversation starter to position the significant value that Microsoft Dynamics Enterprise offerings bring to all market segments. Specifically for Business Central partners currently attaching the Sales Professional SKU, this is an opportunity to broaden the conversation beyond.

All editions of Dynamics 365, Microsoft Viva and Microsoft 365 are available to Companial partners via the Companial marketplace.

Viva Sales Summary

Ultimately, Viva Sales is about driving increased productivity for salespeople, allowing them to work as they are, rather than being driven down the route of having to use multiple applications, removing data silos.

Pertinent information from emails, Dataverse, even Microsoft Teams meetings can be transcribed, stored, and surfaced consistently, visible to everyone who has access to learn from, use, and action.

To sum this up simply, it enables salespeople to “stop collecting, start connecting.”

To learn more about Microsoft Viva Sales:

 Companial Members

 Listen to Steven Vlaanderen Oldenzee, Cloud Solutions Architect at Microsoft, talk about Viva Sales in more detail in the Companial Academy.

 Microsoft Resellers

 Contact Companial and ask to talk to your local representative
about
membership options.

 Microsoft Customers

 Contact Companial to find a specialist Dynamics 365 partner, a trusted member
of the Companial community.

Chris Parkes

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