Microsoft has announced two release updates to Viva Sales and Viva Goals, two new tools under its Viva employee experience and engagement product family launched last year.
For Viva Sales, Microsoft has put its new selling tool in public preview. The company bills it as a new app designed for salespeople that connects Microsoft 365 and Teams to customer relationship management (CRM) systems to sellers can easily access customer information and share CRM data with coworkers.
First announced in June, Viva Sales is also designed to help keep hybrid and remote salespeople productive while navigating between CRMs, virtual meetings, chats, email and documents to connect with customers and close deals.
Essentially, Viva Sales will bring everything sellers need into a single workflow.
Now in public preview, Viva Sales offers users the ability to access important CRM customer data in both Outlook and Teams to eliminate having to switch between different apps and reduce time spent looking for information.
The public preview of Viva Sales also allows sellers to connect to the CRM of their choice, including Microsoft’s own Dynamics 365 and Salesforce. Users can also update contact data and create new contacts in Outlook without switching apps.
Viva Sales also comes with the ability to use Sales Conversation Intelligence tools in Teams that generate call summaries, track customer sentiment, and suggest action items for follow-ups.
In a Teams conversation, users can look up customers within Teams and immediately share it with their team, and they can copy customer contacts from Outlook and paste them into a Teams conversation.
In addition, Microsoft sales Viva Sales respects company security and privacy policies in sharing customer contact information, including CRM access controls and user permissions.
A Microsoft 365 admin can set up the Viva Sales application from the admin center and assign the right users.
“Having essential information in the flow of work saves valuable time, helps make better decisions, and empowers sellers to build stronger relationships so they can close more deals, faster,” Microsoft says in a blog. “Furthermore, with customer engagement data tracked effortlessly and consistently in CRM systems, organizations can run more accurate sales reports and forecasts, improving business results.”
Viva Goals Now Generally Available
Microsoft also announced the general availability of Viva Goals, its goal-setting and management solution designed to align to an organization’s strategic priorities, track progress and improve employee experience.
The company bills Viva Goals as a centralized platform for goal setting, monitoring progress and assessing success across an organization. Rather than focusing on effort, the tool focuses on impact and outcomes with customizable dashboards that turn data into insights.
Goals data and actions can be accessed in tools teams are already using, like Microsoft Teams, ADO and other popular data and project management tools.
According to Microsoft, Viva Goals supports the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) goal-setting framework, popularized at Google, Intel, and other Fortune 500 companies for alignment it naturally creates between the work teams are doing and an organization’s top business priorities.
Viva Goals integrates into the employee experience part of Microsoft Viva, providing an integration with Teams and a web app. The tool also integrates with Amazon Redshift, Box, Jira, Salesforce, Smartsheet, Trello, Zendesk and others. Read Microsoft’s blog for a full list.
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