EP 42: Understanding Microsoft Copilot for Sales

Transcript for this Episode:

INTRODUCTION VOICEOVER: This is Tech UNMUTED. The podcast of modern collaboration – where we tell the stories of how collaboration tools enable businesses to be more efficient and connected. With your hosts, George Schoenstein and Santi Cuellar. Welcome to Tech UNMUTED.

SANTI: Welcome to another episode of Tech UNMUTED. Today I am joined by a very dear colleague of mine, and it's not the first time he's been on Tech UNMUTED, and that is Mr. Terry Corder. Terry, welcome to the podcast.

TERRY: Hey, Santi. Thank you. I really appreciate it.

SANTI: Terry, today, we're going to do something a little different. There's some new announcements made from Microsoft regarding Copilot. I think, now Microsoft 365 Copilot has become generally available for everyone. I think that's a great thing because prior to this announcement, it was just enterprise, right?

TERRY: Yes, you had to be of a certain size, invited in, it was very exclusive for the first few months.

SANTI: Now, starting February 1st, we're going to have a different addition to the Copilot family, which we're going to talk about today. Today we're going to be talking about something called Copilot for Sales or Sales Copilot. I've heard it called both ways. Before we get started, folks, is a good time to remind you to subscribe to Tech UNMUTED. In fact, you can do it right now. Click on the bell so that you don't miss any future episodes. You can do this either on your favorite podcast platforms or YouTube if you'd like to sit back and watch us have some friendly banter.

Terry, I think that Sales Copilot or Copilot for Sales, like I said, I've heard it mentioned both ways in the past, it's really legacy Viva sales, which was part of the Viva suite and-

TERRY: Heavily enhanced.

SANTI: -heavily enhanced with artificial intelligence, which Microsoft calls Copilot. In fact, Microsoft is calling everything Copilot these days, which is getting a little confusing.

TERRY: Yeah, we heard just over the week last week, there are 20-some odd different Copilots at this point.

SANTI: Today we're going to be talking about one specific Copilot. It is a Copilot that has been designed with sales people in mind. I've asked you to come to the podcast because you have been tinkering with Sales Copilot with the preview version of it. What I wanted to do is I wanted to review what Microsoft has to say on their website about Copilot, and then see what your experience has been with each one of these features. I think that you're going to bring up your screen because you have it up, and we're going to just walk through and break it down for everyone on the podcast today.

By the way, those of you who are trying to find the website for Copilot, you can just Bing search for Sales Copilot, and it'll bring you to this website. It's basically microsoft.com/en-us/ai/microsoft-sales-copilot. You're better off using Bing, it will bring you right to this page.

TERRY: That's right.

SANTI: As you scroll down here, as you can see, they're calling it Microsoft Copilot for Sales. If we can scroll down to where it starts talking about the features, right after this video here, and we'll start with simplifying tasks. Microsoft does a great job. If there's one thing to do well, they do two things very well, documentation, technical documentation. They do a fabulous job, and, two, marketing.

TERRY: Absolutely.

SANTI: They do a good job. Let's talk about simplifying tasks. According to their website, one of the things you could do here is you can use AI to draft emails and set up meetings in Outlook using data from your CRM, and I believe, Terry, that it's not limited to just Microsoft Dynamics, but also Salesforce, is that correct?

TERRY: That is correct. Sales Copilot or Copilot for Sales, as it's now being called, as Microsoft likes to do, they like to change names. In the changing of the names, they started it as Sales Copilot when they renamed it from Viva. Now they've said, "Oh, well, we're going to do many, many Copilots." One of those Copilots will be Copilot for Sales. I'm sure there will be Copilot for other things here to come. They're very, very good at that.

The other thing Microsoft is very good at is having integrations cross platforms within their ecosystem. You'll see that the Copilot for Sales is actually integrated in both Microsoft Outlook, as well as Microsoft Teams, specifically tied to your preferred CRM, as long as it's one of the big two, of course dynamics, and then secondarily, Salesforce. Microsoft has done a lot to set that up.

In this particular instance, the streamlined communication, once you've linked Copilot into your Microsoft Outlook, it actually will search for a client's email address in your CRM, or if you have a set of emails tagged to a specific opportunity, if that's how you're handling it, et cetera, it will help tie all of those together in Outlook. Plus, it'll help you with some AI in drafting an email. Hey, I need to send Alberto a reply based off this email, and I want to let him know this, this and this, and it will help lay out that email in a methodology that's very clear, very succinct, but gives the details you need.

SANTI: That's awesome. When you think about it, what's the salesperson's most valuable asset? Time. We've always said it. If you can use a Copilot for Sales to draft that reply, you just saved that salesperson a couple of minutes that they could use for something else, so that's the reality.

TERRY: How many of these are they doing every day? 50 or 100 replies?

SANTI: Sure.

TERRY: If you save a few minutes, you're saving hours by the end of the day.

SANTI: That's correct, that's correct. Of course, the next one is summarization. We know that Copilot loves to summarize, so this is no surprise. I create AI generated email in meeting summaries. Okay, so this is nice, because, okay, this is interesting. What it does is, not only can it draft an email for you, but actually can look at your inbox and give you a summary of your customers that are in your inbox. I can see here there's a screenshot. That's amazing when you think about it. That's a time saver there.

TERRY: To be able to read through this email, which we see is three paragraphs long, closing line, who's this from, what is it. Very clearly, they come back with, this is Alberto from fourth coffee, talking about their updated price, adding in a colleague, wants to discuss purchasing the machines. It just very easily gave you three bullet points that summarize the entirety of that email. I don't have to go read the whole email to see what it was about. Then I can hit the button draft email reply. That's where it goes to the part where it helps start that draft for you.

SANTI: Yes, this is awesome.

TERRY: Really beneficial here, to be able to be more efficient in your own mailbox.

SANTI: See, I've said it, Copilot is going to change how we do work. Let's face it. So many folks are terrified of AI because they don't understand the application. In these first two bullet points, we've increased production. [chuckles]

TERRY: Absolutely.

SANTI: That's crazy and-- Go ahead.

TERRY: Here we have, it's able to generate content. Again, like I said, Microsoft is all about that integration across their ecosystem. Their environment is truly fully integrated with this. Pull information about this specific solution that I'm selling to, and pull that into a Word document, or a PowerPoint, or Excel for a cost analysis, things like that. Being able to pull all that data together and have AI help us generate that, again, salespeople aren't necessarily skilled in PowerPoint the way you are, or any other marketing person.

SANTI: Right. Sure.

TERRY: They have to come to a marketing person to get it cleaned up, but if the AI can take a base marketing template that we've provided, and build a deck around that, then the salesperson has fed this data into, they read through it, they tweak it a little, the reply from marketing, "Hey, I'm okay sending this to my client," 90% of the time is going to be, "Yes, absolutely no problem. You're using our template. It looks great." We all know if we can have AI tied to that template, it's even better.

SANTI: Yes, I like that second point they say about preparing or generating meeting preparation briefs. You're basically having the AI generate an outline for how your meeting is going to flow.

TERRY: Exactly.

SANTI: That is a huge time saver because you know how many times as salespeople we will sit there, and we'll try and figure out how we're going to present things and what's the next thing we're going to say, and here the AI does it for you. That's huge. All right, so what's the second stage here of marketing that we have from Microsoft?

TERRY: This is the personalized interactions, and it feeds right into what you were saying, preparing for those meetings. Bring forward all those past meeting notes so that I know what's going on. Have the emails tagged in a single meeting so that I know if I've created this correctly and tied it all back to my Salesforce, I get all of this data in Outlook when I'm preparing my next meeting.

SANTI: If I look at the screenshot, it's giving me an opportunity summary. That's what's being pulled in the CRM, that specific opportunity, and so I don't have to switch screens. I'm in Outlook there. If I'm not mistaken, that's a meeting invite because I could see the team's invite there as well, so you're able to literally have a pop-up, if you would, of your opportunity summary without ever having to switch screens. That's pretty cool.

TERRY: Exactly it. You can get, similarly, if you're in that meeting, you can actually get AI-generated pop-ups or insight from your CRM right there in the meeting.

SANTI: Look at that.

TERRY: I'm in a meeting, I've got Copilot for sales running. I get, "Hey, here's some of the strengths of this software, here's some of the weaknesses." It's presented to me so that I'm prepared. It helps me be prepared with my clients.

SANTI: That is outrageous, man. Think about that. That's live. This is happening live on call. Wow.

TERRY: Now, this is part of it that I have used tremendously, the call analysis. After you're done with a call, and you've recorded that call, Copilot for Sales will go back and analyze the call. If it heard someone say, "Hey, I'll take that as a takeaway, or that task belongs to Santi to follow up on." It will create you a list of all of the tasks, and you can right there create a task in Outlook to remind you, "Hey, this needs to be done by this date." It allows you to see different words or brands that are mentioned, keywords, and how many times. The neat thing is when you click on those, it actually brings up a transcription, or if you've ever done audio and done the playback on a meeting, you see the lines.

It separates the lines out by person, and it will put a little diamond where the button, say I clicked on product catalog, it will put two diamonds down there. We said the word product catalog here, we said the word product catalog here. It gives you that ability to go back and very quickly, "I know we talked about product catalog in this meeting. Where did we talk about it?" You can find it and listen to it.

SANTI: Yes, this is awesome. I love the suggestive task. I've seen AI and Copilot create suggestive-- In fact, Teams Premium gives you suggestive tasks.

TERRY: Yes, it does.

SANTI: What I like is that it has a button so that if you want to accept the task being suggested by AI, you can just go ahead and hit create, and it'll generate that task for you. That's a huge time saver. All right, what do we got here?

TERRY: It definitely is. Streamlining your workflow, it's talking about updating the records. I can update the record in the CRM platform directly out of Outlook or Teams. Within those platforms, I have a client's actual file, their call card, whatever you want to call it.

SANTI: Call record.

TERRY: They need to update, "Hey, we're actually changing our domain name. We've been joesplumbing.com for years. We're actually changing to jpplumbing.com. Getting rid of Joes, it's now Joe and Paul, and we're just doing JP." You can go in and update those records live in Teams, versus having to go into the CRM and change it in every place. That's a great benefit. Being able to add notes to those records, update those records in the CRM platform.

SANTI: That's awesome.

TERRY: Creating and sharing contact cards, I think this is a big thing. For all team members that have Copilot for sales, say I'm communicating between a free sales organization, someone like a business development rep or someone building leads for a sales team.

SANTI: Got it.

TERRY: They say, "Hey, I've created this lead. This client would like to have a conversation with you." Instead of them going out, finding the client's name in the CRM, copying the link, pasting it in there, sending it over to the sales rep, right here in Microsoft Teams, they can say, "Hey, here's your client," and they pull up the copilot for sales, and it lists all those details, and they can send a calling card over, and that immediately gives that salesperson the full record access and everything they need to be able to go in and see that client, see what that pre-salesperson has done, and take advantage of those.

SANTI: With never leaving Teams.

TERRY: Never leaving Teams. The only time they'll leave Teams is when they click into it and dig further into the client, where they really need to be in the CRM. They need to the data stage or something like that.

SANTI: Correct. In this screenshot, it has a button that says Open in Salesforce.

TERRY: Exactly.

SANTI: They have the ability to do that, but the majority of the details they need is in this card.

TERRY: Right here.

SANTI: You don't have to switch applications to do it. You're in Teams, you continue working in Teams, you continue collaborating in Teams. You never left Teams. I mean, this is great.

TERRY: "Hey, I need five minutes. I've got five minutes now. Let me call Alberto. Can you send me his card?" Boom, they sent it over.

SANTI: That's awesome.

TERRY: They can click a button to call Alberto, call right out of the app, because, of course, we're using Microsoft Teams calling.

SANTI: Right.

TERRY: Still don't need to leave Teams. I click a button, I call Alberto. If Alberto doesn't answer, I know who his manager is. I can ask for them when I go to the front. "Hey, Alberto wasn't available today. He says he's out of office. Can I talk to Mona, please?"

SANTI: You know what, Terry, just for the folks listening, because not everybody understands that, Teams has the ability to place and receive phone calls. A lot of people are accustomed to using Teams just for instant messages and collaboration, and maybe a face-to-face video conference, but they don't realize that they can actually use Teams, if it's enabled with a dial pad and actually call a customer to their phone through Teams, or receive a phone call from their customer in Teams. For those environments that have phone calling enabled in their Teams environment, you're right, they never have to leave Teams. Even when they click on the contact card to dial that number, they're still in Teams. This is huge.

TERRY: It is.

SANTI: I love it.

TERRY: It really is. If I can work out of a single platform day in and day out, and I don't have to leave and remember on my computer to run 30 different things and have to pop between screens and do that, it just makes things more efficient. Anybody that can facilitate that for a customer is really facilitating them, excelling in their own industry.

SANTI: All right.

TERRY: You can actually create deal rooms. Again, Teams within Teams. We've talked about using these rooms, and we use them constantly. We, as an organization, use them all the time. You can also tie the pieces of Copilot for sales into those deal rooms so that you can create, "Hey, here is my sales team for the East Coast, and under that, maybe you have a deal room for Joe's Plumbing. Now, let's go rename it to JP Plumbing because we know Joe sold half the company to Paul. They're having a great call there. You can have the subs under that of general or meetings, things like that, and it can all tie into your CRM. Outstanding option to bring on board with Teams. It's only going to get better as more of the Copilot and more of the AI stuff happens.

SANTI: For sure. I love the concept of deal rooms because sometimes you have certain deals that are very complex in nature. It's a lot of moving parts. Rather than have three or four different group chats with three or four different groups, because you have multiple groups involved, you create a deal room, you add AI to it, you pull in the necessary data from Copilot for sales, and you get one resolution in one window.

TERRY: Absolutely. If you're a Teams user and you haven't started using Deal Rooms, and that's something we should probably do a whole other podcast on.

SANTI: Yes, I agree.

TERRY: Because Deal Rooms having all your files for your meeting organized, revisions of, "Hey, here was the original contract, here's the new contract, here's their revisions or requests, here's the statement of work for implementing this piece of it, having all those files that the client sent you that you're going to send to the client, having your Salesforce or Dynamics Connection in there all in one place, it's so beneficial, but we can't get off on that today, that's a whole podcast to itself.

SANTI: You and I can go down a rabbit hole.

TERRY: We definitely can, so here comes the pricing.

SANTI: Yes, here's the pricing, here it is. Everybody's going to want to know, so let's talk about this. All right, so first of all, this is as of February 1, 2024, so the information we're about to give you is as of February 1, 2024. Now, before everybody looks at the $50 charge that is the large number in bold, we need to break it down so they understand where they're getting because they may be thinking, "I'm paying $50 for Sales Copilot?" No, you're paying $50 for a little bit more than Sales Copilot, so let's walk through this.

TERRY: Sure. Now keep in mind you have to have a Salesforce or a Dynamics license separately, that is something that your CRM is going to require. However, with that, you can configure this to connect to other sales solutions, to those sales solutions. It includes Copilot from M365, that's the key thing here. Copilot for M365 by itself is $30, $36?

SANTI: $30.

TERRY: I knew it was right in that area so really what you're paying to have that CRM integration is only an additional $10.

SANTI: Or $20.

TERRY: Or $20, you're absolutely right, can't do math today. You'll see that right here with the asterisk, it says, "Customers who already have Copilot for M365 can purchase Copilot for sales for an additional $20 per month."

SANTI: There you go.

TERRY: Dynamics Sales Premium users only have to pay $30 to use Copilot for M365 and get the full Copilot for sales experience.

SANTI: Got it.

TERRY: You have to make things better for the integrations into your platform.

SANTI: Of course.

TERRY: Don't blame them here for this at all. If you're using Dynamics and you have Sales Premium, if you're using the features of Dynamics and Sales Premium, instead of charging you that extra $20 between Copilot and Copilot for sales, as long as you have a Sales Premium seat on your user with Dynamics, you're only paying for Copilot and the sales experience.

SANTI: For Microsoft 365 is included. Yes, that's awesome.

TERRY: Absolutely. I think this is awesome. I think it's something we're really looking forward to.

SANTI: Yes, I'm glad we touched on the pricing because that always gets confusing. Again, just to recap, when you see $50, it may or may not be $50.

TERRY: Exactly.

SANTI: $50 would include, again just to recap, Copilot for Microsoft 365, that's your entire Microsoft 365 application of a stack, so Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Teams, the whole Suite, and then you would get Copilot for sales piece as well. That's what the $50 is for. However, if you have Microsoft 365 Copilot today, meaning you're paying $30 for Microsoft 365 Copilot, you're really looking at just an additional $20 for the sales capabilities that we covered today.

If you have Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales Premium, why? Well, because Dynamics is a Microsoft product. While many people use salesforce.com as their CRM, Microsoft is obviously going to want to push their product, which is Dynamics. If you have Dynamics Sales Premium, then at that point, you're just paying for the additional $30 for Microsoft 365 Copilot, and the sales capabilities will be included.

TERRY: Exactly.

SANTI: There's a lot going on here. Of course, again, it does require that you have either Salesforce or Dynamics Licensing in place. You've got to have a CRM account, and it has to be one of those two CRMs so those are the two kings, if you would, in the sales world.

Wow, this is awesome. This is good stuff. Man, I really appreciate that rundown because let me tell you, one thing is to read a Microsoft page, another thing is to read a Microsoft page and then get insight from somebody who's actually using it.

TERRY: I appreciate the opportunity to talk to our listeners. Honestly, Tech UNMUTED, it's a podcast I follow. It's a podcast, this is a couple of times I've been on it now, and look forward to continuing to join you at different times. I learn a lot, but I laugh a lot too.

SANTI: It's fun. It's good friendly banter. Terry, we're trying to be thought leaders, if you would, trying to get a connection that's meaningful to our listeners because this world of ours is changing so fast. It is so hard to keep up with it. It really is.

TERRY: It's difficult to keep up the power of AI, the speed of AI is amazing.

SANTI: Well, Terry, I appreciate you joining us today. Thanks for your insight. That was awesome.

TERRY: Thank you.

SANTI: Folks this brings our podcast to an end. Again, take this time to subscribe if you haven't done so to Tech UNMUTED, and make sure you click on that little bell because that way you get notified of any new episodes that come out in the very near future but until next time, folks, remember this, stay curious and stay connected.

TERRY: Stay connected. Thanks, everyone.

CLOSING VOICEOVER: Visit www.fusionconnect.com/techunmuted for show notes and more episodes. Thanks for listening.

Episode Credits:

Produced by: Fusion Connect