Your Guide to Microsoft Copilot for Sales

Recent statistics indicate that sales reps don’t spend most of their time pursuing leads or closing deals.

In fact, sellers spend only 39% of their time speaking to new customers or selling products, while the majority of their time is dedicated to data entry, checking and replying to emails and other repetitive tasks.

Microsoft Copilot for Sales helps reverse this trend by automating time-consuming tasks and freeing up the agents to spend more time with customers.

Copilot optimises the sales department’s workflow by combining data from Microsoft Graph and the company’s CRM to schedule meetings, summarise accounts, generate email drafts and much more.

In this guide, you’ll learn all you need to know about Microsoft Copilot for Sales and how it can help your sales agents hit or exceed their targets.

Understanding the Difference Between Microsoft Copilot for Sales and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales

Although similar, Copilot for Sales and Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales differ in a number of ways.

Copilot is a system feature Dynamics 365 Sales users can activate and customise without extra charge. It integrates with 365 productivity apps like Microsoft Word, Outlook, and Teams to create meeting and email thread summaries that make it easier for sales reps to take follow-up actions or reply to customers faster.

On the other hand, Copilot for Sales is a standalone product that functions as an add-on for Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365 plans. Unlike Copilot in the Sales app, Copilot for Sales offers features like integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud, expanding your company’s CRM options.

The add-on is a more comprehensive AI solution than the Copilot in the Sales app for businesses that want to scale their sales operations, boost the sales of their products and onboard new employees faster.

Deploying Copilot for Sales, connecting it to sources and understanding its architecture requires an advanced set of technical skills, so businesses must make sure their IT departments have the necessary expertise to integrate the AI companion into their CRM and Microsoft 365 ecosystems.

Exploring the Capabilities of Microsoft Copilot for Sales

Copilot’s long list of features is geared towards personalising the sales department’s interactions with clients and leads, increasing product sales and allowing agents to use customer data in the CRM system and Microsoft 365 apps.

For instance, it syncs the data from the CRM system with Outlook and Teams automatically so you don’t have to update records or add new contacts manually in each app. However, you must connect it to the CRM and install the add-on in Teams and other 365 apps.

Copilot for Sales in Outlook

The AI assistant analyses the data it has access to generate records and sales opportunity summaries agents can view in Teams and Outlook or save in the CRM.

Whenever a sales rep interacts with a particular customer, Copilot pulls these summaries from the CRM and uses this data to generate email drafts that contain product details and information about the sales offer.

Its BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Time) assessments allow sales reps to quickly familiarise themselves with an account and stay in the flow of the earlier communication with a client.

Besides generating record and email summaries, Copilot also suggests CRM updates based on the agent’s activity in Outlook, so that they don’t have to add a deal’s close date or its estimated revenue to the CRM.

Here’s the overview of the actions you can perform in Outlook with Copilot for Sales:

• Create, change, or update contacts in CRM.
• Create or update records and view their details.
• Save an activity in Outlook to the CRM.
• Add private notes to a record.

Copilot for Sales in Teams

The tool gives real-time tips to sellers during meetings in Teams that include information about competing brands the client mentions. The AI assistant also helps agents give more comprehensive answers to questions about the products they’re selling by pulling information from the company’s databases.

This feature is only available if the meeting is recorded, so you must first activate this option to get information about a product or a competitor from Bing or the company’s CRM.

Copilot is automatically added to meetings scheduled in Teams, but agents can also perform this task manually.

Copilot for Sales in Word

All meetings recorded in Teams become a valuable resource Copilot for Sales uses to help sales reps prepare for the next meeting with the same client. It can generate pre-meeting reports in Microsoft Word that contain the following components:

• The list of meeting participants, their job titles, and the role they can potentially play in closing the deal.
• An overview of the sales opportunity and open tasks.
• Key points and follow-up actions from the most recent meeting with the same client.
• Summary of the email exchange with a customer.
• Records related to an opportunity.

Creating Collaboration Spaces with Copilot for Sales

Copilot for Sales offers a set of templates that enable users to create a channel for a particular customer or a sales team that works on the same account.

Sales templates feature multiple preset channels and pinned apps that make it easier to create collaboration space connected to the CRM. Account team templates contain General and Shared channels that are linked to the CRM account to enhance internal and external communication.

Deal room templates allow Teams’ users to set up a channel related to an opportunity and facilitate collaboration between the organisation’s sellers. All templates come with pinned apps and links to CRM storage locations to increase the team’s productivity.

Deploying Copilot for Sales in Dynamics 365 and Salesforce

Organisations with Dynamics 365 Sales Enterprise and Premium licences can install Copilot for Sales automatically. This option is also available to Copilot for Sales licence holders.

However, businesses that want to connect the AI companion to Salesforce must manually deploy it.

The deployment process isn’t the same for Dynamics 365 and Salesforce CRMs, so the steps you must take to get the AI assistant up and running will depend on the CRM your company is using.

Here’s what you have to do to start using Copilot for Sales with Dynamics 365:

• Install the add-on in Outlook.
• Set up a policy to install and pin Copilot for Sales in Teams automatically.
• Activate the Recording & Transcription option in Teams.
• Configure the settings for server-side email and meeting synchronisation.
• Assign roles to sales department team members.

The process of deploying Copilot for Sales for Salesforce is slightly different from the one described above. The first few steps are the same as you must install the add-on in Teams and Outlook and assign roles to team members, but you must also make sure that:

• The Power Platform isn’t blocking the Salesforce connector.
• Check if Salesforce is blocking the Power Platform app.
• Choose the Dataverse environment administrator during the first sign-in.
• Customise the Copilot for Sales settings.

Getting Your Company’s Revenue Up with Microsoft Copilot for Sales

Rethinking your company’s approach to sales might be inevitable as more and more businesses implement AI solutions into their sales operations.

Microsoft Copilot for Sales allows you to address the productivity issues that have plagued sales departments for decades and boost the sales of your company’s products or services. The AI companion improves a seller’s productivity by automatically drafting emails, summarising records or generating meeting preparation reports.

Implementing this tool into your company’s sales workflows enables sales reps to spend more time with customers and potentially increase revenue which more than justifies its seemingly high price.