CRM systems aren’t really my bag, but having spent the last year or so needing to be more familiar with SalesForce than I cared for (not a requirement in my new position!) I can sympathise with having information split across different systems.

It is very common for CRMs to have things like email integration so that you can automatically include messages into a records history but this can still be quite clunky and is a pain to search back through.

It’s why I was pretty fascinated to see a new “module” coming for Viva soon that is aimed at helping bring some proper intelligence to sales interactions. Thanks to @Lesley for highlighting the link.

Now this is just a very early initial announcement from Microsoft so information is a bit light on the ground and it is all very “salesy” at this point, however if you can spare ~3 minutes jump to the bottom of the link and watch the video called “See Viva Sales in action”. You can probably jump forward to about 30 seconds in where the really cool stuff starts.

I do not proffess to be a Viva expert but you have got to be impressed by the cross solution intelligence being shown here right?

  • Quick tagging as a contact as a customer
  • Providing context for all interactions with that customer (documents, emails, communications)
  • Showing other internal users who have a network to the customer
  • Able to use live adaptive cards in Teams discussions showing everyone the same customer details in one place

And then if you combine that with some of the other super cool Teams functionality like App extensions & Meeting transcripts you can suddenly:

  • Keep track of meeting actions right from inside the meeting
  • Generate tasks & follow up items on the fly
  • Save a transcript of the meeting for future reference (subject to getting permission obviously)

It’s just really fascinating to me to see how all these small components that Microsoft has been working on can all pull together to build such a powerful solution to a common problem.

Obviously this is early doors and my technical head is super curious to see what they mean about how it “Works with any CRM” and what other integrations/hooks are needed behind the scenes, but on the surface this looks super cool.

Is it just me or is anyone else pretty impressed (grudgingly or not) by how this looks?