Viva Sales uses artificial intelligence to take notes, automate data entry and handle other repetitive tasks. Another example of how CRM is evolving to improve the sales experience.

CRM editors claim that their tools improve the work of salespeople. The more critical view of some analysts is that CRM is above all a tool for supervising, or even monitoring, salespeople, and a means of centralizing customer data - primarily the address books of salespeople. As a result, CRMs do not necessarily facilitate the daily work of sales forces. But things seem to be changing.

There are several examples of this at Oracle, HubSpot or Salesforce. And today at Microsoft with Viva Sales, which will be released on October 3rd.

What is Viva Sales?

Viva Sales is a CRM automation tool. Its artificial intelligence (AI)-infused features handle tasks such as data entry into the CRM or note-taking during calls. The AI relies on Microsoft's NLP, speech recognition and machine learning to, for example, track actions in Teams or leverage data in emails and calendar related to a business case.

On the market, HubSpot's "Operations Hub" already offers AI tools to auto-populate and cleanse CRM data. Salesforce, meanwhile, acquired Troops.ai earlier this year to build "Slackbots" that could resemble some of Viva Sales' features, but in the Slack environment.

For Dan Gottlieb, a senior director at Gartner, these tools are signs of a long-awaited movement toward improving the sales experience.

"We're clearly seeing the beginning of a significant investment in end-user applications," Dan Gottlieb believes. "This is an example of what I think we're going to see a lot of in the next wave of CRM."

Automate manual, routine, non-value-added tasks

AI that helps salespeople reduce the number of clicks on a screen and switches between applications in their typically complex daily workflows is very good news for them, Dan Gottlieb concludes.

Viva Sales' ability to dip into Outlook calendar data and use AI to determine whether or not it should be imported into the CRM could save sales teams a lot of time anyway.

Any automation that takes away the need to take notes, summarize calls or manually schedule follow-ups will make CRMs more efficient, adds Kate Leggett, VP and analyst at Forrester Research, for her part.

"This allows salespeople to focus more on the negotiation ... instead of taking notes for reports, which are often done at the end of the day, [which can be] a source of errors and oversights," she says.

As for Viva Sales, the tool integrates with Outlook and Teams-which has 13 times more users than Slack (Salesforce). Nevertheless, Salesforce users are far more numerous than Dynamics 365 CRM users. The challenge for Microsoft will therefore be to convince Salesforce customers who also use Office 365 to take out a subscription to Viva Sales