Viva Sales(preview) | Part 2

Posted by: Dian Taylor | on August 30, 2022

Last week I posted part one of my articles (you can read it here) about Viva Sales which is in preview today. Microsoft describes Viva Sales as a seller experience application designed to get sellers out of the busy work and in front of customers. Viva Sales will connect to any CRM system and will add detailed insights to customer exchanges and activities that take place through Microsoft (aka Office) 365 and Microsoft Teams. Additionally, Viva Sales also comes with AI driven reminders and suggestions! In last week’s article I discussed how Viva Sales works with Microsoft Outlook and in this article I am going to focus of the functionality in Microsoft Teams. Keep in mind, Viva Sales is currently in public preview which means that the product is not finished yet, so most likely there will be some additions before it will become generally available. During this preview, Viva Sales only connects to Dynamics 365 Sales and Salesforce.

Viva Sales(preview) and Microsoft Teams

I am going to start with the functionality in Microsoft Teams chats. Before sellers can take advantage of this, the Viva Sales app will need to be added to the Teams application. The chat functionality allows sellers to share information from Dynamics 365 as cards in the Teams application. We have seen this before, this came out as a new feature as part of the integration between Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Teams but it seems this is now part of the Viva Sales application. The cool thing is that you can very quickly copy contact information from a customer from Viva Sales in outlook, and then paste that into a Microsoft Teams chat, after which the contact card automatically loads in the chat in the form of a card. The card has 2 buttons, allowing sellers to open the Dynamics 365 record inside Teams or in Dynamics 365.
Sellers will also notice the Viva Sales icon visible on the bottom of the chat window. This allows them to access contacts from their CRM system and send the contact card in a chat just like they can with copying the data from Viva for Outlook. You’re probably thinking again that we already have this functionality by using the Dynamics 365 app for teams, but think about organizations that will use Viva Sales with non-Dynamics 365 CRM systems!

The next feature I am going to discuss is the Viva Sales functionality in Teams meetings. This is something that is part of the preview and I would recommend you test out for yourself. This functionality takes advantage of conversation intelligence which you might have heard of before. The Microsoft Teams dialer integration with Dynamics 365 with call recordings is currently also in preview, and we can take advantage of conversation intelligence here as well. This is very similar to that functionality, but instead this is done during a Teams meeting. The way it works in the preview is that you have to schedule a Microsoft Teams meeting from Outlook and invite at least one marked customer to the meeting. That will automatically add Viva Sales to the meeting and you’ll notice a notification stating conversation insights will be generated if the meeting is recorded and transcribed. Please note the ability to record and transcribe teams meetings will need to be turned on in the Teams admin center.

NOTE: You’ll need to go to Meeting Policies (below Meetings) and add this to a meeting policy or create a new one. The transcription and cloud recording can be found below the ‘Recording and Transcription’ section inside the policy. After you turn this and on it can take up to 24 hours for the settings to take effect. After I opened Teams after the policy change, I had to quit and reopen the Teams application on my laptop for the features to become available.

Once the meeting starts, you can record the meeting and start transcribing. This is GREAT functionality because sellers won’t be distracted by taking notes! The entire meeting will be transcribed and saved to the application! After the meeting ends Viva sales will generate a meeting summary with insights from the recording and transcription. It will take a few minutes for the summary to be generated, and a notification from Viva Sales will be sent to the meeting organizer when the meeting summary is ready. The summary includes customer sentiment, keywords tracked, follow-up action items and more. It’s important to note that only sellers that were invited to the meeting will be able to view these details. Just like the Teams call recording, the actual meeting can also be played back if required!

Features not part of the preview

If you watched the ‘See Viva Sales in action’ video on the Viva Sales product page you can see some of the features that Microsoft is working on that are not part of the public preview. The video shows the ability to view coworkers that are connected to a customer from within teams, including the relationship strength your coworkers have with the customer/prospect and the ability to start a chat directly from within the Viva Sales Pane! You’ll also see some of the AI in action, as the application adds a suggestion during the call in the video!

Microsoft is really connecting all the dots with Viva Sales. This is not just a tool that allows sellers to focus on selling, but it really streamlines processes and allows sellers to quickly move from one application to the next with Viva Sales being the glue that brings all of these Microsoft tools together. In the video I mentioned earlier, we also see that excel will be seamlessly integrated with Viva Sales. Sellers will be able to manage customer lists by opening the excel sheet directly from Viva Sales. In this excel list sellers can view all their data from Outlook, Microsoft Teams and CRM system in one place. And from excel sellers can access the Viva Sales application! WOW! I can’t wait to get my hands on this! Below is a short video of what I am referring to.

Where does the Viva Sales data live?

It’s important to understand where the data from Viva Sales is stored, and this depends a bit on whether you have Viva Sales connected to Dynamics 365 Sales or a non-Dynamics 365 instance. If you have Viva Sales connected to Dynamics 365 then the Viva Sales data is stored with the Dynamics 365 Sales Dataverse instance. If you have an instance of Viva Sales that is connected to a non-Dynamics 365 CRM system, then a Dataverse instance will be added to your tenant and this is where the Viva Sales data will be stored. The name of the instance will be easily recognized as it’s called msdyn_viva.

To learn more about how to install the Viva Sales preview check out this article. To read the user guide for Viva Sales and Microsoft Teams you can check here. I hope you found this article informative! Be sure to check in again next week for a new article or subscribe here to never miss another post!