Copilot enables salespeople to focus on core tasks

By John T. Hummelgaard, Sales Director Cepheo Danmark.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to revolutionize everyday life for most salespeople with tools that can make a crucial difference.

In my almost 40 years in sales, I have seen many new solutions and technologies. The possibilities that artificial intelligence enables simply makes everything else pale in comparison. The combination of artificial intelligence and CRM can create new opportunities that make salespeople far more productive and free-up more time to spend with customers.

I see three clear advantages, based on the fact that I have rarely come across a salesperson who enjoys administrative tasks. We salespeople live for customer dialogue, and even though we understand the importance of administrative tasks, they are rarely our primary source of motivation. In the following three areas, artificial intelligence will transform sales work.

Save time before and after customer meetings

Do you want to focus on customer dialogues instead of paperwork, which, although important, does not energize in the same way as a good customer relationship? Copilot for Dynamics 365 Sales offers a variety of capabilities for just this purpose. AI-generated  meeting minutes quickly provide a powerful overview of conversation topics, appointments and actions. Copilot not only generates suggestions for the meeting minutes, but can also generate suggestions for the follow-up email to the customer, where the meeting minutes can be attached. These texts only require a quick read and minor corrections and then they are ready to be used.

At the same time, Copilot for Dynamics 365 Sales is deeply integrated into the two applications that salespeople use most often: Microsoft Teams and Outlook. Instead of navigating between countless applications, Copilot is integrated into Teams and Outlook and retrieves data from Dynamics 365 Sales and from other relevant systems. This helps ensure that you always have relevant information about the customer at your fingertips.

Get a quick overview of the customer

It can be a challenge to take over a new customer, as it can take a long time to familiarize yourself with the customer history so you can be well prepared for the first meeting. Copilot makes this process much simpler. With just a few clicks, you can get a summary of all available data about the customer in the CRM system (and other relevant systems), without spending hours going through old emails, notes and reports.

This feature ensures that you can get quick and easily accessible insight into the customer, which makes you better prepared and more professional in the meeting itself. And remember here the 5 P's: Propper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

Source: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales 2023 Release Wave 2 presentation

Get the sales assistant who never takes a day off

As a salesperson, you often have many tasks to juggle, and it takes a lot of insight to meet the customers' needs and understand their situation.

With Copilot, you will be presented with contextual information from both internal and external sources on the customer profile in Dynamics 365 Sales. This will help you be better informed about the customer and provides guidance in relation to the individual customer's situation and needs.

Source: Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales 2023 Release Wave 2 presentation

Copilot also keeps track of your sales goals and, based on data and the status of potential customers, can make recommendations for which customers you should focus on to achieve your goals.

With Copilot as your constant sales assistant, administrative burdens become light, and you can be better prepared to create deeper customer interactions and achieve the desired sales results.

First published as a LinkedIn article in the fall of 2023.