2024 Wave 2: Copilot for Sales

Well, folks, Microsoft is at it again! They’ve just dropped some serious coolness with the 2024 wave 2 release notes! I’m very excited to bring you a new series of articles covering all the juicy details for Dynamics 365 Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, and more! In the second article in the series, I am going to explore all the exciting stuff coming up for Copilot for Sales. Some of you might spot some features that have been in public preview already or were part of 2024 wave 1. Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. So, get comfy, and let’s dive in! There are a bunch of updates for Copilot for Sales. If you’re not familiar with Copilot for Sales, this is an AI assistant designed to help sales teams maximize productivity and close more deals. Copilot for Sales is not part of the Dynamics 365 Sales, it requires a separate license on top of Dynamics 365. Copilot for Sales integrates with Microsoft 365 tools like Outlook, Teams, and Word, as well as CRM platforms like Dynamics 365 Sales and Salesforce.

See improved contact insights in Outlook

Sellers were already able to view recent emails and meetings in the recent communications tab in the side pane in Copilot for Sales in Outlook, but this feature will provide sellers with more actions. Sellers will be able to do things like summarize, or open a recent email, open a meeting, or see all emails and meetings from the communications tab in Copilot for Sales.

Manage customer objections in real time

It seems that the bulk of this feature lives in the Microsoft Teams App. According to the documentation, Copilot for Sales will keep track of objections that are raised during meetings, providing them with insights into concerns while helping refine sales strategies. It also will provide real-time suggestions, like context-specific responses and counter arguments as these objections arise during the meeting. Knowledge base integration will be used by Copilot for Sales to support these responses with relevant examples. On top of that Copilot will provide personalized coaching tips to sellers based on their past performance and common objectives encountered, which will help them to improve their objection handling skills.

Update CRM directly from the post-meeting insights page

Another feature that lives in Microsoft Teams, is the ability to update Dynamics 365 (or Salesforce) directly from the post-meeting insights page, and to connect the Teams meeting to Dynamics 365 from the meeting summary. Sellers will also be able to get suggestions to update specific columns in Dynamics 365 records. I suspect this will depend on the things that were said during the meeting: I.E if the prospect mentioned they have a budget of $50K, then there might be a column update suggestion to set the budget amount to $50,000.

Part of the above feature is also the ability to create new records in Dynamics 365 (or Salesforce) from within the meeting summary. The ability to create meeting follow-up emails from a meeting summary gives sellers a proactive reminder to send post-meeting emails to their prospects and customers, which allows them to be more productive. The ability to create opportunities from a sales meeting summary allows sellers to quickly create a new opportunity from a meeting summary, without having to switch to Dynamics 365 Sales (or Salesforce). Columns like account, contact, close date etc will be automatically populated based on the data in the meeting summary.

Monitor and alert sellers on adherence to playbook

The way this functionality is explained in the release notes is that sales managers can upload a playbook for sellers to use during their meetings. (I am not sure what this means, is this a document that will be uploaded to the meeting, or if this is hosted somewhere else.) Copilot for Sales will monitor how well the seller(s) adhere to the playbook by keeping track of the things that were discussed. In some point in time (the documentation is not clear on this) the seller will receive feedback on things they missed and how well they did in following the playbook.

See adoption data in Copilot Dashboard

To access the Copilot dashboard, admins will need to use Viva Insights, as this is where the report lives. There is an out of the box PowerBI report provided, but if needed, admins can build their own dashboards as well. I don’t believe there is a Viva Insights license needed for this, at least not today.

OneNote Experiences

It sounds like there will be deeper integrations between Dynamics 365 Sales (and Salesforce) and OneNote. The Summarize and save notes into CRM directly from OneNote feature is pretty self explanatory, it will use Copilot in OneNote to summarize a seller’s notes. These summarizations can be saved directly to Dynamics 365 (or Salesforce) without having to leave OneNote. I hope you enjoyed this article! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!