Microsoft: Copilot for Sales will revolutionize the way salespeople interact with buyers

Microsoft released Copilot for Sales and Copilot for Service, this week after the Redmond-based tech giant teased both AI models a few months ago. They’re available, starting now, with both of them priced at $50 per user/month (including the Copilot for Microsoft 365 license).

Microsoft says Copilot for Sales, especially, will revolutionize the way salespeople do their job, effectively allowing them to handle more calls, requests, and tasks with the help of Copilot which will help them:

• Generate sales meeting preparation briefs in Word.
• Summarize emails and surface relevant buying intent and budget, authority, need, timing (BANT) analysis in Outlook.
• Generate emails in Outlook with relevant product, account, relationship, and opportunity information from their CRM system and Microsoft Graph.
• Add leads and update CRM records directly from Outlook.
• View meeting preparation notes and real-time sales insights during calls in Teams.
• View sales meeting summaries in Teams with conversation analysis, sales keywords, and KPIs, and suggested tasks.
• Create collaborative deal rooms in Teams that sync with CRM data.

Plus, Copilot for Sales is coming with Copilot for Microsoft 365, and this means salespeople will be able to generate presentations in PowerPoint and create and organize plans in OneNote in seconds. They will even be able to ask questions in natural language to easily catch up without wasting any time.

But this is not all, though, as Microsoft is planning to further enhance the capabilities of Copilot for Sales, to let salespeople connect the CMR to the Microsoft Copilot chat experience, effectively giving them the means to come up with precise replies in a matter of seconds, as well.

Later in 2024, Copilot for Sales will also integrate PowerPoint, and OneNote in such a way, that they will come up with tailored answers and prompts specific to every use case.

On the other hand, Copilot for Service is aimed towards organizations, rather than specific employees, and it will integrate multiple platforms, such as Teams, and Outlook, with the organizations’ internal platforms, for a more streamlined workflow.

Copilot for Service unlocks an organization’s trusted knowledge to accelerate onboarding and case resolution, improve efficiency, and automate tasks for agents in their flow of work. Without costly development time, organizations can simply point to their data and, in a few minutes, unlock generative AI-powered conversations across their knowledge bases. And for agents, they can tap into this knowledge with a copilot embedded directly in their desktop software of choice such as Salesforce, as well as the other tools they already use every day like Outlook and Teams.

Microsoft

Microsoft will enhance the tool in a manner similar to Copilot for Sales, with the following features, as the Redmond-based tech giant states:

• In Outlook, Copilot will be able to summarize and draft emails, access case summaries, browse and update CRM records, and schedule meetings informed by case summaries and other relevant information from CRM records.
• In Teams, Copilot will be able to browse and update CRM records during a meeting, as well as recap meetings, suggest follow-up action items, and create tasks that can all be saved to CRM systems directly from Teams.
• In the Microsoft Copilot chat experience, Copilot will be able to ask questions about cases and contacts, as well as summarize cases—all from CRM data.

As you can see, salespeople will have more than enough tools to boost their productivity in a way that wouldn’t feel overwhelming or tiring.

However, it will be interesting to see if salespeople will adopt the new tool as their helpful companion. The latest earnings report from Microsoft says Copilot is the reason the Redmond-based tech giant amassed over 400 million paid Office 365 seats, so a lot of professionals are open about AI.

But what do you think?