New AI Agents to close deals faster
You might have noticed some buzz online last week when Microsoft announced three new AI-driven sales agents within Microsoft 365 Copilot and Dynamics 365 Sales. These new Agents are designed to enhance sales teams’ efficiency and effectiveness. By grounding them in CRM data, Microsoft graph and other business data , these agents will give highly personalized and context-aware responses, helping sales teams engage with prospects and customers more effectively. Since Agents don’t sleep, they are constantly working to to expand the sales pipeline, optimize outreach strategies, and accelerate deal closures. You won’t have to wait long to try them out, these agents will be available in (paid) public preview starting in April and May of this year. Now let’s take a look at each agent to understand what they do and how they can help!
Sales Chat Agent
The first agent I want to discuss is the Sales Chat agent. This agent will be accessible from Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat and its main purpose is to help sellers find information quickly so that they can close deals faster. Sellers can engage the agent by asking questions about sales data in natural language. For example, a seller can ask the Sales Chat agent for an account summary, instead of opening the account record in their CRM system and reading through all the account details, documents, associated emails etc. It can also help sellers prep for sales meetings by populating meeting agenda’s and goals, related files and documents and details on recent communications, including dates when the communications occurred, people involved and a summary of the communications. This will allows sellers to get up to speed quickly without having to search through emails, appointments, documents etc. manually to get ready for a call.
On top of that, the agent can also provide coaching related to opportunities! For example, a seller can ask what content a seller should show in their next opportunity meeting, or they can ask what the risks are for a certain opportunity. Now let’s talk about the data it’s grounded in. The agent integrates with Microsoft 365 graph, which means it has access to Microsoft 365 data like emails, appointments, and documents, but also CRM data and other data sources like the web. This agent will also be available on mobile, so sellers can use it on the go, which is another great feature! When can you get your hands on this? This agent is set to be in (paid)public preview starting in May 2025.The thing I found interesting is that the logo of the Sales Chat agent in the video that Microsoft published, has the same logo as Copilot for Sales……did you notice? I am not sure what that means, if this will be a part of Copilot for Sales or not, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see.
Sales Research Agent
The second agent in this list is the Sales Research Agent. I think this will be a big one! This agent acts as a business research tool. It helps sales leaders get real time insights into their organization. Think about how much time is usually spent on finding data to generate reports on how the business is doing. Usually because of lot of this data is spread across lots of different systems, which makes it hard to get the full picture. This is where the Sales Research agent comes in. Sales leaders can interact with the agent in natural (business) language and ask questions on how to solve certain business problems and make the organization run better. For example they could ask “what is the best way to optimize territory distribution and account assignment”, or “how to maximize coverage and revenues?”. This agent uses deep reasoning over enterprise data, data which is not just limited to Dynamics 365 Sales. Sellers can add data from external resources such as HR, E-commerce, finance data or even an excel sheet!
Once a question is asked, the agent starts building a research plan by analyzing the underlying data. The response includes written findings, but it also shows graphical visualizations that are generated on the fly. I love how the agent’s response shows in a dashboard kind of way. In case you were wondering, yes the agent only has access to the data the user has access to. Sellers can view the reasoning behind the agents’ response, this helps them understand the data that was used to generate the response and the agent’s thought process behind it. Sales leaders can continue to ask questions to dive deeper into the analysis if needed, and they also have the ability to add data from sources like Dynamics 365 Customer Service, connect to other instances of Dataverse, PDF’s, etc. This is the only agent (of the three mentioned here) that will live inside of Dynamics 365 Sales. This agent is set to be in (paid) public preview starting in April of 2025.
Sales Agent
The last agent in this list is the Sales Agent. First of all I wanted to make sure that we don’t confuse this with the Sales Qualification Agent, which I wrote about here, as these are not the same! This agent can work as a fully autonomous agent and is accessible from within Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat. It’s important to note that this agent works with Dynamics 365 and Salesforce’s CRM systems, just like the Sales Research agent. Again I noticed the Copilot for Sales logo, which makes me believe that this agent might be part of Copilot for Sales.
The Sales agent focuses on the research, prioritization and qualification of leads. The thought behind this is that this agent is part of the sales team, in other words, it will act as a Seller. This means it can research leads, reach out to them, schedule meetings and more. We’ve already seen Copilot create emails based on the requirements the seller enters in the email, but this takes it to a whole other level! Why? This agent can actually send emails on your behalf! On top of that, the agent can have an actual email conversation with prospects. It can respond to questions or follow up if no response is received from the prospect, or provide meeting times based on available times in outlook! This agent will make sure no lead will fall through the cracks! I can see a lot of scenarios where this will be a gamechanger! Think about prospects filling out marketing forms, resulting in the automatic creation of a lead record in a CRM system. Usually it takes days or maybe even weeks before the lead is assigned and a seller reaches out to a lead, and as a result of that sellers might lose the sale. The Sales agent can be the perfect answer here, as it can reach out tot the prospect immediately by sending a highly personalized email response within minutes! During the sales cycle, the agent keeps sellers updated by sending card type notifications in Teams, offering key insights and best next steps so sellers are aware of what is going on. In the meantime they have more time to focus on building relationships and closing deals.
There is also the ability to fine-tune the agent, to match your organization’s brand guidelines and language. Microsoft’s video shows the uploading of a word document and even a preview window so you can see what the agent’s response is on a specific question asked by a prospect. This is completely going to change the way that businesses are engaging with customers and prospects today. The sales agent is set for (paid) public preview starting in May 2025. Let me know what your thoughts are on these new agents! Watch this space as more articles will follow on this topic! 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!
