When Microsoft launched Viva last year, it framed the platform as an employee portal that can be accessed for parental leave policy or other internal communications aimed more generally at company policies and culture. It further reinforced this idea last month when it launched Viva Goals, a Viva module designed to give employees access to their KPIs. But it appears that Microsoft has broader ambitions for Viva than simply providing important employee information found on the typical employee intranet. Today, he announced the first of what could be multiple jobs within Viva, starting with sales. Emily He, corporate vice president in charge of business applications at Microsoft, says this announcement is something that brings together information for specific jobs that she’s been hearing about as a kind of employee holy grail for years at companies and jobs, and it was a of the reasons why she was attracted to Microsoft. “Viva Sales in my mind really represents a new way of working by breaking down silos of data and breaking down silos of experience,” she told TechCrunch. She said one thing she’s learned from working with vendors is that they have too many tools and they need a way to extract meaningful information from the tools they’re using and present it in a more centralized way. “They really want a more streamlined experience. So Viva Sales allows a salesperson to use the tools they already love and use every day, including their email system like Outlook, Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and Teams,” she said. The tool is based on Office 365 and tuned for Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM. By tagging a customer’s name or contact, Viva Sales can pull the documents, spreadsheets, presentations, emails, and other materials into the CRM tool automatically, all organized under the tag, greatly reducing the amount of clutter. manual data entry required. “Sellers spend a lot of time manually entering account information or forecast data. So this removes [much of the] manual data entry. But more importantly, it now creates a more holistic view of the customer,” he told me. With all that data stored in one place, it means customers can use it to drive machine learning models on how to improve sales. “You can use AI and machine learning to generate recommendations for sellers and deliver those recommendations to sellers wherever they are, whether they’re writing their emails or in virtual meetings,” he said. While it appears to be Microsoft-centric, it will also support Salesforce CRM right out of the box, and He says they may add support for additional tools over time as customer demand dictates. Additionally, the company plans to add more types of jobs to Viva over time. The end game here seems to be to expand the employee communications portal to include not only company materials that are useful to employees, but also tools for doing their specific jobs. She says they are doing this because they have been hearing employees asking for this kind of help from within the portal itself. It’s worth mentioning that Viva Sales will be offered for free to Microsoft Dynamic 365 customers, but as you access third-party data, such as using Salesforce, you will be charged for using the tool. Viva Sales will be available in public preview in July and is scheduled for GA in the fall. For now, the only other CRM integration available besides Dynamics 365 will be Salesforce.
