Avanade, a leading Microsoft solutions provider, soars on the strength of its accomplished consultants. The results it achieves for clients begin with highly trained sellers who keep Avanade’s project pipeline flowing. But as its client base and sales support technologies proliferate, the high-touch field of professional services selling is growing increasingly complex. Using the AI-infused Copilot for Sales and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales, Avanade reduces workload for sellers with a range of time-saving features, helping them create and update contact records, summarize email threads, pull related data together, and improve email responsiveness. Even in the early stages of implementing Copilot for Sales, Avanade sellers are showing clients that they are top of mind while saving time and working more productively than ever before. The early adoption of Copilot for Sales is part of Avanade’s overall ambition and transformation to ready people, processes, and platforms and responsibly innovate and work with AI.
“When our sellers can reduce the time spent on sifting through multiple channels to find what matters with Copilot for Sales, we can be more focused so that we can deliver with clients and drive our business strategy faster.”
Jennifer Ferrara, Global Business Lead, Avanade
Supporting dream team sellers with a dream “copilot”
When Avanade talks about reimagining the future of business, it speaks from a wealth of experience. Founded by Microsoft and professional services provider Accenture as a Microsoft solution–focused global consultancy in 2000, the company helps its clients shrink time to value through the many services it offers. Its nearly quarter century of accelerating success for its 5,000-plus clients, many of them among the Fortune 500 and the Fortune Global 500, speaks to the trust the company earns. In addition to being awarded 2023 Microsoft Global Systems Integrator (GSI) Partner of the Year for the eighteenth time, Avanade is also prized as a great place to work. That focus on caring for its employees and giving them the tools they need to succeed sparked the company’s inspiration to make it easier for its sellers to succeed.
The high-touch world of professional services sales requires timely client communication, precisely directed messaging, and most importantly, the personal touch. Avanade sellers found that updating their sales data in Microsoft Dynamics 365, an intelligent customer relationship management (CRM) system, and tying together relevant threads from Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams was beginning to infringe on valuable face time with clients. “Our sellers spend a lot of time just trying to qualify lead data, understand the accounts, stay on top of what’s happening with their clients, and stay informed on the client industry,” says Jennifer Ferrara, Global Business Lead at Avanade. “They’re always on the move, so we need to minimize tedious updating and searching for data in multiple, disconnected places.” And in the intensely collaborative field of professional services selling, sifting through long email threads for vital nuggets of information, and exchanging updates among a busy team, was more time-consuming than it needed to be. Hopping between productivity apps to ensure a complete picture took time for sellers needing to be responsive in a competitive industry. Though important, that manual work was a distraction from the most important person in the equation: the client.
Leading the way with an AI-enabled tool
Avanade knew the answer lay in AI technology. After nearly a decade of partnering with Microsoft on AI, the company’s recent global AI readiness research indicates 79 percent of employees anticipate that the use of generative AI tools will impact up to 20 hours of their work week. As part of its internal Early Access Program (EAP), Avanade is prioritizing ways to help its people become early adopters and achieve the most with generative AI tools. The organization is using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Microsoft Copilot for Sales, an AI sales assistant that helps sellers update Dynamics 365 records, summarize emails and meetings, and prepare sales information for client outreach directly in their Microsoft 365 collaboration apps, like Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams. Avanade’s private preview of Copilot for Sales addressed both the functionality of the tool and the broader context for its use. “We prioritize responsible AI here at Avanade,” explains Ferrara. “In this fast-moving space, it’s vital that we support our clients and help them to institute responsible AI governance.”
There was another dimension to the company’s choice and deployment of a solution. “We are our own test client for all Microsoft technologies,” says Scott Riddle, IT Sales Transformation Solution Architect at Avanade. “It’s important that we show the value of emerging innovations for our clients as early as possible. And everyone in our pilot group was super excited to try Copilot for Sales.” He’s referring to people like Sydney Gorst, Senior Consultant Business Development Executive in Avanade’s healthcare and public sector client group. She’s one of 250 sellers in the United States who participated in Avanade’s trial of Copilot for Sales. “Every sales cycle journey with a client is unique,” she emphasizes. Honoring that journey called for a tool that could help sellers like Gorst succeed by minimizing the work of coordinating diverse communication threads.
That’s why Avanade infused its EAP with organizational change management, such as its “Disrupt Avanade” team, to explore the company’s options for deploying AI-focused initiatives like Copilot for Sales. It’s all part of a people-centric change strategy that coordinates onboarding and curated experiences with educational resources like Avanade’s “School for AI” for its employees. “When our sellers can reduce the time spent on sifting through multiple channels to find what matters with Copilot for Sales, we can be more focused so that we can deliver with clients and drive our business strategy faster,” asserts Ferrara.
Prospecting the “gold” from the inbox
Until Avanade’s Copilot for Sales trial, sellers like Gorst had to work hard to establish a contact cadence with prospective clients. She’s impressed with the time saved on email alone. “There may be multiple email threads about the same sale, but Copilot for Sales summarizes the key points and helps me craft an answer to my client,” Gorst explains. “It saves clicks and keeps me from having to jump from one interface to the next.” Andy Blevins, Industry Portfolio Lead at Avanade, agrees. “The first time I read an email summary, I honestly didn’t think it could be so easy. But reading back through the lengthy thread showed that the app had correctly summarized everything,” he says. “This one feature probably saves each person 30 to 60 minutes a week.” Gorst concurs. “With the time we’re saving, what we sellers can accomplish is truly incredible.”
Discovering new value in data
In his role of managing a team of sellers, Blevins finds wide-ranging productivity potential for using AI-powered tools. He recognizes the time savings sellers can achieve by writing optimal prompts to help them prepare for client meetings, describing the context for that client, the solutions Avanade provides, industry scenarios, and even specifics like the client’s current competitors or projects. This concept of prompt engineering is key to getting the best possible results. “I can tell the light bulb goes on for sellers when they see the power of a well-written prompt,” Blevins explains. In addition to time savings, he notices the potential for Copilot for Sales to help his sellers develop deeper relationships with their clients. “It’s very challenging to be smart about how you manage 50 contacts that can be clients, colleagues, and Microsoft counterparts,” Blevins adds, “but staying on top of those key relationships will be much easier with Copilot for Sales AI capabilities.” And thanks to the accessibility features in Copilot for Sales, neurodiverse employees can excel just as anyone else would as part of teams like his.
“Since deploying Copilot for Sales, we’ve discovered that we have more valuable information about any given opportunity than we’d realized,” continues Blevins. “The increased intent information from clients that we now have was only a dream before.” Ferrara looks forward to sharing that success with Avanade clients. “This is an exciting area,” she concludes. “We can be our own test client and share rich insights with our clients that help them with their AI journey."
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“Since deploying Copilot for Sales, we’ve discovered that we have more valuable information about any given opportunity than we’d realized. The increased intent information from clients that we now have was only a dream before.”
Andy Blevins, Industry Portfolio Lead, Avanade
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