The most successful salespeople are experts at establishing and maintaining relationships. In so doing, they are able to cultivate an understanding of their client’s wants and needs and so be able to offer valuable goods and services to meet those needs. The recent advent of artificial intelligence services becoming both available and affordable - especially Large Language Models (LLMs) and generative AI – has prompted a paradigm shift in how we approach the sales process and where humans can potentially benefit from some AI uplift.
In service to this goal, Microsoft’s collaboration with OpenAI’s GPT LLM has spawned an entire ecosystem of so-called “Copilots”, including our focus today, the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Copilot, an AI assistant is designed to facilitate all the little things sales folks must do to secure long-term success. The Dynamics Copilot has the potential to simplify and optimize the process of establishing and maintaining relationships—the most important part of working in sales.
So let’s take a moment and explore just what Dynamics Copilot is and how you can take advantage of it.
A Helping Hand
We’ve all heard and felt the ripples of fear in reaction to AI – downsizing, cost cutting, layoffs, even wholesale replacement of the human workforce. FUD! While there are some legitimate concerns around artificial intelligence adoption and a general shift away from a fully human workforce, the Microsoft Dynamics Copilot is very specifically designed to work with humans—not to replace them.
So why do salespeople need assistance from a copilot? The answer lies in all of the administrative functions and customer tracking necessary to keep all of their leads and customers’ information organized and easily accessible. Many sales teams utilize multiple programs and platforms to facilitate their everyday business. It isn’t uncommon for someone to operate with Viva Sales, Dynamics 365 Sales, Salesforce, and a CRM. Talk about application overload.
By incorporating a sales copilot, the risk of data silos forming between the different programs and applications utilized by your sales team is greatly reduced. Your AI copilot can intelligently utilize relevant values from common fields across all of your programs to automatically create a unified source of truth for every lead and every customer a salesperson has.
When a salesperson interacts with a customer, they can do more than simply look up basic vital information. Copilot in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Viva Sales can create a summary of every interaction that a salesperson has had with that customer: pulling data from Exchange, Teams, OneDrive, or even a third-party data source like pricing. With that kind of personalized information at the salesperson’s disposal, we can have confidence they’ll be prepared for every call, can develop great pitches, and have everything they need for upselling new products and services - demonstrating the value of their relationship with the customer.
Additionally, because Copilot has been designed using a large language model that can recognize, comprehend, and generate conversational language, the tool can help take the pressure of several other tasks off the plate of the salesperson.
The Dynamics copilot can create transcripts of sales calls and meetings, give summaries of those calls and meetings, and generate targeted emails to customers that can serve to let them know about new products, follow up about questions they may have had in your last meeting, or check in to maintain relationships and remind customers about renewal dates.
These emails are a major part of maintaining relationships in the modern world of sales but writing them is time consuming. With a generative AI copilot, that work is taken care of in a fraction of the time—allowing the salesperson to focus on making sales.
How Does the Dynamics 365 Copilot Work?
The biggest key to Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Copilot’s functions is the ability to recognize language in many different settings. For example, since Copilot is based on a generative large language model, it can recognize the topics and key points from meetings on Teams and generate summaries automatically. This all but eliminates the time a member of a sales team needs to take to transcribe a meeting by hand or create their own summary. Even better, these summaries can be generated for both internal meetings and calls with customers.
Additionally, that generative AI functionality can be leveraged for suggesting text for email correspondence. The sales Copilot can offer suggested text based on the context of previous emails and tailor its suggestions to keywords related to products, services, and references to your competitors. This saves the salesperson so much time. They don’t have to scour past emails and meeting transcripts to find the relevant information they need to craft a communication. Copilot handles the research, offers suggestions as a starting point, and allows the salesperson to edit their emails to make them perfect.
And with Copilot’s optical character recognition functionality, it can ensure that your relevant CRM information is tied to the applications and programs that need that information. This essentially eliminates siloed data in multiple programs and applications. Unifying information across Dynamics 365 Sales, Viva Sales, Outlook, and even Salesforce among others, Microsoft’s sales Copilot ensures that, no matter what application you use, you will have up-to-date information.
Copilot can even recognize dates of last contact across platforms to schedule follow-up alerts to ensure that your sales team maintains relationships with your valued customers, all while saving the time it would have taken to sift through CRM information on their own. Essentially, Copilot utilizes its language recognition abilities to provide the salesperson with all relevant information that they need in an instant—all while ensuring that CRMs are automatically kept up to date.
What Are the Benefits?
In sales, the less time you must spend on anything that is not making your next sale, the better. If you are manually digging through a CRM to find relevant information, you have lost valuable time that could be spent converting leads into sales. If you are pulling from your CRM to collect information for an email blast, you will likely need to take time to reformat what you get to fit the requirements of your mass email program. Wouldn’t it be better to have a virtual assistant that could do that work for you as well as help you come up with text for that communication?
That’s what Dynamics 365 Copilot offers. It gives your sales team more time. It automates time-consuming data entry and research while offering nearly instantaneous summaries of key information from internal and external meetings. Because Copilot is compatible with the entirety of the Microsoft 365 suite of business programs, you can use it to bring relevant information from one program to another with ease.
And your copilot is customizable. Do you use programs and apps in addition to the Microsoft suite? That’s fine. You can still ensure that your copilot will do everything you need to save your sales team time.
An Incredible New Tool for the Trade
The sales copilot developed for Microsoft’s sales and CRM programs is an outstanding tool. There is no better way to help your sales team focus on leveraging their new and existing relationships into new sales. If time is money—and in sales, it is—Copilot is a money-making machine. The administrative tasks required to track customer data take a lot of time to maintain and utilize without help. Dynamics 365 Copilot gives you that help.
To ensure that you are able to customize and optimize your team’s usage of this copilot program, reach out to the experts at TEAM IM. Our AI team has been on the front lines of LLMs and machine learning processes for years and understands how best to incorporate them into enterprise systems.
Don’t miss out on the best sales tool to come along in years!
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