Let’s face it, sellers are rarely enthusiastic CRM users. They’re driven to land the next big deal. Updating CRM is far less of a priority.
They might acknowledge some productivity benefits, but ultimately, CRM is viewed by many as a system of record.
However, with the increase in intelligent AI capabilities, this perception is shifting as more people benefit from genuinely time-saving features and insights that boost sales performance.
Reducing data entry with Sales Copilot
Forrester found that sellers spend as much as 27% of their time on non-core internal tasks¹, including updating systems of record. A LinkedIn State of Sales report² suggested the drain on time is even more acute. It concluded that sellers spend less than 30% of their time selling.
When people are under pressure, they look for a workaround.
For sellers, this typically means finding ways to work around CRM. That can cause delays in updating records and even result in some interactions and contacts going untracked.
To help sales teams be more productive, Copilot for Sales brings additional Dynamics 365 and AI capabilities to Outlook.
If you are already familiar with the Dynamics app for Outlook, you’ll find that Copilot takes this functionality to a new level.
Automate data capture
Let’s start with an inbound email. In the prominent highlights area, Copilot makes it clear if the sender isn’t saved as a contact in CRM. Clicking the “add contact” button will quickly fix that.
Copilot will capture the full contact detail from the sender’s email signature – a significant improvement from the regular Outlook connector.
Mobile phone, job title, business address and other information can be automatically extracted and mapped to the appropriate Dynamics fields without copying and pasting.
With less effort needed, adding new contacts and saving emails in Dynamics has never been easier.
Save time with automatic email highlights
Copilot provides email summaries to help you quickly interpret longer messages and identify follow-up actions.
Best of all, these helpful summaries can be saved directly to the associated Dynamics 365 record. This allows you to add these summarised points to a Dynamics contact as a note without leaving the Outlook interface.
As a result, these email highlights are visible in the CRM timeline without needing to open the attached email.
Quickly draft email responses
Copilot also offers a time-saving solution for responding to emails.
Select a suggested prompt, such as “respond to an enquiry”, or describe the type of message you want, and Copilot will draft your response.
These drafts will use contextual information from your emails, including previous messages in the thread. Additionally, Copilot will pull relevant information from your Dynamics system, including opportunity and quote details, to increase relevance.
These draft messages need fine-tuning before sending, but Copilot can help here, too.
You can adjust the length or tone of the email quickly. If appropriate, a meeting time can even be proposed based on your current availability using Outlook calendar sync.
Once satisfied with the initial draft, you can copy the text into the reply to make further edits.
This is just one example of how Copilot saves time by minimising repetitive actions such as composing emails from scratch.
Keeping your data private
It’s important to note that Copilot is grounded in your data and remains secure and private to your organisation.
That sets it apart from copying emails into a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT and asking it to respond.
LLMs lack context, so their replies will likely be inaccurate. Also, this approach poses a risk to privacy and security. Sharing customer details in the public domain will be used to train the model and may lead to potential data leaks.
By contrast, Microsoft doesn’t use customer data to train LLMs. Copilot connects LLMs to an organisation’s content in Dataverse and Microsoft Graph for contextual and relevant answers.
However, Microsoft has announced a secure solution to connect external AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT with Dynamics 365 data.
Embedded CRM insights in Outlook
Remaining in the Outlook interface, switching to the Dynamics 365 tab, Copilot provides a summary of items related to the sender.
A single display can cover any related entity, including an associated account, leads, opportunities or orders. This can be customised to reflect the information sellers want to see, subject to admin-granted permissions.
This process may seem like the regular Dynamics app for Outlook, but the display is visually improved, and it’s quicker to open and edit these records.
For instance, click an associated opportunity to edit the forecast deal value or estimated close date from an email without leaving Outlook.
By updating your CRM records in the flow of work from Outlook, it’s another of reducing the friction of switching between apps.
The opportunity overview in Outlook includes an AI-generated summary to help you quickly gain context without the time-consuming effort of navigating to the Dynamics record.
As another example of making CRM data more accessible, the same overview can also be accessed from Outlook calendar meetings.
Copilot will also present contextual notes about the contact, including ice-breaker tips and background details.
Throughout these screens, Copilot provides persistent nudges to add contacts to Dynamics 365 and save interactions in CRM.
Next steps
These are just a few examples of Copilot brings CRM capabilities and data to the interface sellers are most familiar – Outlook.
This is important, because it means that sellers can see time saving benefits and CRM data as a driver of actionable insight.
If you are licensed with the Dynamics 365 Enterprise or Premium SKUs, you already receive entitlement to limited Sales Copilot features at no additional cost.
If you have any questions about deploying Copilot for Sales, we’d love to hear from you.
More information
- Licensing Copilot for Sales
- What Early Adopters Reveal About Copilot
- Ensuring Security and Compliance with Microsoft Sales Copilot
