Get document recommendations from SharePoint (preview) from Copilot for Sales

Last Friday I noticed that a highly anticipated feature in Dynamics 365 Sales is now in preview! This feature is part of the 2024 release wave 1. With this feature sellers will be able to get product related files directly from within the Sales Hub in Dynamics 365 Sales! I believe this is a very important feature because how often are sellers searching for the latest product information like brochures, specification and other documentation? I bet a lot of times this information is hard to find and stored in different places, which means sellers are wasting a lot of time trying to locate these files! With this new feature that will no longer be the case! Sellers can now ask Copilot for a list of documents that are stored in SharePoint, but keep in mind that the SharePoint environment that Copilot will search, is the one that is in the same tenant Dynamics 365 Sales lives in.

How does it work?

It’s simple, really. Before a seller can ask for documentation, they will first need to summarize the opportunity. This can be done by opening an opportunity record, which will have Copilot for Sales automatically summarize the opportunity, or by clicking on the prompt icon and clicking on the ‘Get info’ prompt and selecting ‘Summarize Opportunity’ and entering the opportunity name. Copilot for Sales will show the opportunity summary and the seller will notice a new prompt below the summary, called ‘Get product-related files (preview)‘.

It is important to understand that in order to get these product related file suggestions, there will need to be products associated with the opportunity. If there are no opportunity products related to the opportunity, the prompt will not show up. Once the seller clicks on the prompt, the seller will list the related opportunity products. The seller can hover their mouse over a product, and the ‘Get files’ button will appear. When the button is clicked, Copilot for Sales will search SharePoint for any related files and show them in the side car. There is also a button that allows sellers to ‘Show all in SharePoint’. When this button is clicked, it takes you to the search page in SharePoint. NOTE: I noticed that it looks like the search uses the opportunity product name in the SharePoint search to find any related files.

There are a few additional options available for the documents that show in the Copilot sidecar. One of them is to copy all the listed documents into an email message, users can do this by clicking the email icon next to the ‘Show all in SharePoint’ message in the sidecar. Please note that the documents themselves will not be attached to the email, but instead a link to where the documents are stored in SharePoint will be added to the body of the email. If the recipient of the email doesn’t have access to the docs, they will not be able to view them!! Another option is to copy the link of a document directly from the Copilot sidecar. When you hover your mouse over a document here, you’ll notice a copy button appears. By clicking ‘copy’, the link to the document on SharePoint will be copied here as well, so make sure the recipient has access!

Enable the preview

The only two things an administrator has to do to enable this preview and try this out for themselves are to enable Copilot for Sales in Dynamics 365 and to opt into the Copilot preview features. You can enable Copilot for Sales by opening the Sales Hub and navigating to the ‘App Settings’ area. You’ll notice the ‘Copilot’ navigation item on the left side of the screen. In the setup section you’ll need to enable Copilot for Sales for at least one of the apps in the list. To enable any preview features for Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales, you’ll need to check the box next to ‘Try our newest preview features before they’re rolled out to everyone’ on the top of the screen.

Once you make any changes to the setup, you’ll notice the publish button on the bottom of the screen. Click the publish button to publish any changes you’ve made to the setup. Before you try this functionality, make sure that you create and upload a few documents to SharePoint for Copilot to find when requesting the files. And that’s it! I love this new functionality, because I believe this will really help sellers become more productive, as they will a lot spend less time searching for documents! 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!