Conversational CRM: How to use Sales Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot (preview)

I am sure most of you have heard of Copilot for Sales, which was announced by Microsoft in the fall of 2023. Back then you had to pay an additional fee for Copilot for Sales, but today it is available to all users who have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. If you’re not familiar with the functionality of Copilot for Sales, let me give you some more details on this. Copilot for Sales or Sales Agent as it’s called now, lives right where sellers already work: Outlook and Microsoft Teams. In Outlook, sellers can view the Sales Agent by clicking on the Sales icon from within an email message. The Sales Agent pulls customer insights straight from Dynamics 365, summarizes long email threads, drafts polished responses, and reminds you to follow up so nothing slips through the cracks. Over in Teams, it gets even better: The Sales Agent can prep you for meetings, generate meeting recaps and suggested next steps after the call. Pretty cool stuff right?! The only thing it doesn’t do is allow users to ask questions and reason over CRM Sales data, think about allowing the Sales Agent to summarize an account, showing all stakeholders and visualizing associated opportunities in a chart and allowing sellers to export this information as an account plan! Yes, today we can ask some questions about sales data in the side car inside Dynamics 365 Sales, but the questions we can ask are very limited. How great would it be to get this type of functionality.. Fiction? Not so much! We can now use the Sales Agent inside Microsoft 365 Copilot so that we can start doing things like that! And the best part: this is available in preview for you to try out today!

Enable Sales Agent in Microsoft 365 Copilot

If you are already using Copilot for Sales the Sales agent in your organization today, sellers will see the Sales Agent in the agent list in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. There are a few prerequisites before you can start trying this out. The first one is the need to have the Sales App installed in both Outlook AND Teams. If you only have it installed in one of these then this will not work. For instructions how to install the sales app, please visit this page. The Sales Agent also needs to be connected to a CRM system like D365 Sales or Salesforce.
To enable this feature you’ll need access (or have a friend who has access) to environment level settings in the admin settings for the Sales Agent. What exactly you need depends on the underlying CRM system (Salesforce or D365 Sales) but if you’re using Dynamics 365 Sales you’ll need a system administrator or system customizer role. If your security role changes (let’s say you didn’t have the correct role, but it has been assigned to you) make sure you sign out of the Sales agent in Outlook or Teams, and sign in again after 15 minutes. (This is how long it can take for the user permissions to be synched over to the Sales Agent.) You can access the admin settings for the Sales agent in Microsoft Teams by opening the Sales app and clicking on the ‘Settings’ Tab. From here you’ll need to access the ‘Access Settings’ under ‘Environment’ first and enable access to the Sales Agent. When enabling access, you’ll also notice a setting that allows you to restrict access. NOTE: You can also access the admin settings from Outlook by clicking on the ‘Apps’ icon on the left side bar and opening the Sales App from there. The same ‘Settings’ tab as shown in the screenshot will be available if you have the correct security access levels assigned.

To initialize the Sales agent, you will need to open the Sales Chat settings page at least ONCE, if you don’t do this, the Sales Agent will not work with Sales Chat! NOTE: There is no other way to initialize this process other than by opening the Sales Chat settings page. When you open the Sales Chat page for the first time it will start the initialization process and the default tables will be loaded.
If you use Dynamics 365 as your underlying CRM system you’ll notice that by default the lead, product, opportunity product, opportunity close, activity pointer, salesorder, invoice, goal, opportunity, account, contact, QuoteClose, email, quote and competitor tables are enabled, but additional tables can be added to this list if needed by clicking the ‘Add’ button and selecting the table(s). Sales Agent will have access to all columns in the added table(s). To remove tables, select one or more tables from the list and click the ‘remove’ button. Keep in mind when you remove tables from the Sales Chat section, which means that access will no longer be provided to the Sales Agent in chat. If the same table is still available under the ‘Forms’ configuration of the agent, the table can still be accessed in other features of the Sales app.

Add synonyms & glossary terms to CRM columns

By adding synonyms and glossary terms for CRM table columns you can help Sales agent better understand and identify CRM information. This improves the agent’s ability to interpret requests and leads to more relevant and reliable responses. Glossary terms provide specific organization terminology and synonyms are different names or phrases that sellers may use to reference a CRM field. For example, a sales rep might ask about a “company” or “client,” even though the CRM column on an opportunity record is labeled Account. Adding these synonyms (and glossary terms) allows the Sales agent to recognize those variations and respond appropriately.

The more closely your configuration reflects real user language, the more effective Sales agent becomes. Admins can setup synonyms and glossary terms in Copilot Studio, which can be accessed at https://copilotstudio.microsoft.com. Make sure the correct environment is selected before making any changes! Search for the ‘Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales’ agent and open the knowledge tab. Open the dataverse ‘SalesSpecificQnA’ knowledge source and click on the ‘Synonyms’ tab. You can select the table you want to add synonyms for by changing the value in the ‘Select Item’ field. From here you can add synonyms and descriptions for table columns. You can add glossary terms under the ‘Glossary’ tab.

Accessing the chat functionality

We can access these chat capabilities from different places. The first one I wanted to mention is Microsoft 365 Copilot. You can access Microsoft 365 Copilot by navigating to https://m365.cloud.microsoft/chat/. To start chatting with the Sales Agent, you can open the Sales agent from the list of agents, or you can @mention the agent in the M365 copilot chat. But wait, you’re working in Outlook? Just click on Copilot icon on the top left side of the screen and a chat pane appears. @mention the Sales agent and you’re ready to go! No wait, you’re working in Microsoft Teams instead? No problem, click on the ‘Copilot’ icon and @mention the Sales agent! From here you can start chatting about your data, ask questions, ask the agent to show you the data in a table or generate a chat! I hope you enjoyed this article! Be sure to check in again soon or subscribe here to never miss another post!