Improve sales productivity and close more deals with Microsoft Sales Copilot
As a seller, you know you need to focus on building relationships with your customers and getting the details you need to close the deal. The challenge is that like most sellers, you spend less than 30% of your time selling.[1] Most of your day goes to searching for information and administrative duties like composing emails and keeping your CRM system up to date. You need more from your technology—and we delivered. In February, we introduced the world’s first AI copilot in CRM with the launch of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot. And today, we’re announcing Microsoft Sales Copilot, a role-based copilot designed to improve sales productivity by empowering sellers with the data and insights they need, when and where they’re needed, allowing them to focus on what they do best—selling.
Sales Copilot brings new capabilities to Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and Dynamics 365 Sales, helping sellers to increase their productivity and personalize every customer interaction. And it works out of the box—not just with Dynamics 365 Sales, but with Salesforce, too.
The following Sales Copilot capabilities are now available for preview[2]:
- AI-generated lead and opportunity summaries to streamline your sales process and close deals faster
- A customer meeting preparation summary view that includes auto-generated summaries of previous meetings, recent notes, highlights of issues and concerns, and CRM information
- Real-time tips and suggested answers during Teams meetings, prompted by the customer’s mention of a competitor or brand
- Customer email summary and follow-up, with contextual replies and actions based on Outlook emails and CRM data
Additionally, we recently announced the general availability of collaboration spaces in Sales Copilot. Collaboration spaces in Teams can easily be created from Sales Copilot in Outlook to help sellers stay better connected with their customers and colleagues.
Watch this brief video to learn how Microsoft Sales Copilot can help you improve your sales productivity:
AI-generated lead and opportunity summaries
Sales Copilot uses generative AI to quickly summarize leads and opportunities for you. An opportunity summary is a concise overview of the status, progress, and potential of a prospective sale or deal. A “catch up” section highlights key updates since the last visit. An opportunity summary is also available in Outlook, where sellers can view a brief background of the opportunity and the latest activities.
Similarly, a lead summary gives sellers an overview that seamlessly combines data from multiple sources, such as CRM information, contact profiles from LinkedIn[3], and the latest news from Bing to expedite the lead qualification process.
Meeting preparation and summaries
Being prepared for customer meetings is vital for sales productivity. It facilitates informed decision-making and fosters productive discussions, ultimately yielding improved sales outcomes. Sales Copilot detects meetings coming up in the next 24 hours and offers a summary of recent email exchanges and the last three seller notes to help you prepare.
After the meeting, Sales Copilot in both Outlook and Dynamics 365 Sales generates a professional and friendly meeting summary email, making follow-up as easy as clicking a button.
Real-time tips in Teams meetings
In Teams, sellers receive real-time coaching tips (currently in private preview) during meetings right in the Sales Copilot Teams panel, to help them respond to customer inquiries and competitor or brand mentions. It’s easier to overcome objections and demonstrate that you’re knowledgeable and prepared when the information you need is right in front of you.
Summary, follow-up, and contextual emails
Sales Copilot lets you spend less time composing email. Select a pre-defined category or enter your own text, and Sales Copilot suggests content with specific prompts and actions informed by Outlook and CRM data, helping sellers quickly follow up, reply to inquiries, and move deals forward. Adjust the tone and length of the message to better resonate with your customers, fostering stronger connections. You can further customize the suggested content before you send it.
Sales Copilot is equally invaluable on the receiving end, summarizing lengthy email threads when you respond to incoming messages and enabling you to save the summary to your CRM with one click. By condensing complex discussions, it streamlines the communication process and ensures comprehension. It also helps to keep you on track by identifying action items and key customer requests in your incoming emails that you might have missed. It continuously monitors your inbox so you don’t have to.
Collaboration spaces
Sellers can easily work with colleagues and customers in collaboration spaces—predefined Teams channels with pinned apps designed for collaboration. Collaboration spaces link to your CRM system and are accessible from Teams, the Sales Copilot app in Outlook, and Dynamics 365 Sales. Learn more about collaboration spaces.
Responsible AI
Microsoft is committed to investing in features that reduce or eliminate unsafe output from generative AI capabilities in products like Sales Copilot.
Sales Copilot inherits your organization’s security, compliance, and privacy policies and enforces two-factor authentication, making Sales Copilot a tool you can trust.
Because we know that data leakage is a concern for our customers, as it is for us, the language models that underlie Sales Copilot aren’t trained on and don’t learn from your company’s business, tenant, or individual data. Sales Copilot is part of the Azure ecosystem and employs the same safeguards, compliance boundaries, and enterprise-grade security.
Microsoft copilot AI adheres to our commitment to responsible AI. Engineering teams at Microsoft are continuously working to address issues such as misinformation and disinformation, content blocking, data safety, and promotion of harmful content, guided always by our responsible AI principles.
Users have access to specific guidance that helps to reinforce the responsible use of generative AI content. For instance, we provide guidance and prompts through informational elements that instruct the user:
- How to responsibly use suggested content and actions, including prompts
- How to review and edit responses as needed
- How to manually check facts, data, and text for accuracy
Sales Copilot also cites public sources wherever relevant, so the user can easily find the web content it references.
More innovations to transform the customer experience
In addition to Sales Copilot, we’re announcing copilot innovations across Dynamics 365 to empower organizations to deliver exceptional experiences throughout their customer journeys.
- We’re adding copilot capabilities to the newly unified Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and continuing our innovations in real-time marketing. Along with the copilot capabilities that are in public preview (Content Ideas, Query Assist, and Dialogue with Data), soon you’ll be able to use natural language to orchestrate customer journeys as well as style emails, forms, and event registration pages to match your brand guidelines.
- Dynamics 365 Commerce Copilot can craft compelling, persuasive, and engaging content for product listings for online commerce, with an aim to drive discoverability and conversion. It allows merchandisers to optimize for search engines while tailoring the content for their customers, brand, and voice.
Next steps
Try Microsoft Sales Copilot today to see how it can improve your sales productivity by enabling sellers to engage with customers more effectively and close more deals faster.
Enable Microsoft Sales Copilot in Outlook and Teams: Microsoft Sales Copilot deployment guide for Dynamics 365 customers
Enable Microsoft Sales Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales: Enable and set up copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales
Learn more about all the upcoming Dynamics 365 Sales Wave 2 2023 features: Overview of Dynamics 365 Sales 2023 release wave 2 | Microsoft Learn
Not a Dynamics 365 Sales customer yet? Visit the Dynamics 365 Sales website to take a guided tour and sign up for a free trial.
[1] Global State of Sales Report 2022 (linkedin.com)
[2] At preview, capabilities available in English in geographies that support Dynamics 365 Sales.
[3] A Sales Navigator license is required to access contact profiles from LinkedIn.
