Microsoft Copilot for Sales is reimagining sales. Integrated seamlessly into your daily tools across Microsoft 365 and Teams, Copilot for Sales harnesses the power of generative AI and customer data to keep sellers in their flow of work so they can spend more time with customers.
For August, we've enhanced our recent communications cardin Outlook with support for quick view of meeting recaps and recurring meeting support. We've added time of day supportto our existing date support in record creation and editing; and to wrap-up our enhancements in Outlook this month, we've streamlined CRM taskswith actionable messages in email banners. In Teams, we've added the ability for admins to configure defaults for saving attachmentsto the CRM, and last but not least - made it easier to send post-meeting follow-upswith the ability to draft the email directly from Teams.
Capabilities highlighted below are included in this month’s release of Copilot for Sales. It may take time for specific capabilities to reach every tenant in each market.
In Outlook
Recent communication card now supports meeting recaps and recurring meetings
Relevant information about past interactions with a customer is scattered across multiple tools - including emails in Outlook and meetings in Teams. Consolidating all the information is tedious, manual work. Our recent communication card already had an ability to view summaries of recent email threads but wasn’t able to show meeting recaps. It also didn’t support recurring meetings – showing only the first instance (if it occurred within the last 30 days.)
With this month’s release, we now enable customers to efficiently catch up on recent Teams meetings by adding capabilities to:
- Quickly view a recap in Teams*
- View individual instances of recurring meetings
Learn more about the recent communications card.
*Note: For View Recap button to show in the card for a Teams meeting, a recording needs to exist, and the user must have permissions to access the recording.
Screenshot showing recent communications card with added support for (1) view meeting recap in Teams and (2) see recurring meetings as individual instances when selecting "See all"
Date time support for record creation and editing
When sellers create records in their CRM, they want to record the date and the time of day when creating many record types such as activities, opportunities, and leads. During record creation, we allowed sellers to add date information, but not the time of day.
Now sellers can set the time of dayin addition to the date as part of record creation and editing in Copilot for Sales. Recording the accurate time of day is highly important for business activities and success when using the app.
Screenshots showing the user flow for adding a time of day along with a date when creating a CRM record (in this case, a meeting) plus the resulting view after the record has been saved.
Streamline CRM Tasks with actionable message banners in Outlook
Effective management of important day-to-day CRM tasks, such as adding new contacts or leads and saving customer emails, is crucial for maintaining productive customer relationships. However, these tasks can often be overlooked when exchanging emails with customers in Outlook, with sellers either unaware that these tasks can be completed using Copilot for Sales or needing to self-navigate through the sidecar to complete them.
Effective management of important day-to-day CRM tasks, such as adding new contacts or leads and saving customer emails, is crucial for maintaining productive customer relationships. However, these tasks can often be overlooked when exchanging emails with customers in Outlook, with sellers either unaware that these tasks can be completed using Copilot for Sales or needing to self-navigate through the sidecar to complete them.
To simplify this process and ensure that critical CRM updates are never missed, we’ve introduced Actionable Message Banners directly within the sellers’ Outlook inbox. When reading emails from external customers, these banners will surface contextual prompts that guide sellers to perform important actions directly through Copilot for Sales, such as adding new contacts or leads and saving emails to the CRM, all helping sellers stay organized and save valuable time.
- Each banner is contextual to the email on which it’s shown, surfacing only relevant content and actions.
- Clicking on an action will take the seller directly to the appropriate experience in the sidecar to complete the action.
- Banners will be shown on up to 2 external emails per user per day.
Screenshots showing user flow for two actions, save a contact to the CRM and save an email to the CRM, both actions directly accessed from an actionable banner.
In Teams
Admin settings to save attachments to the CRM
Attachments can be important context to include in the CRM, but not all attachments provide value, yet they all take up space. Different organizations have different requirements about whether saving attachments should be enabled and if so, whether saving all or none of the attachments should be the default.
With this month’s release, the CRM Admin can now configure the attachment saving feature for both emails and meetings, including whether it should be enabled and if enabled what the default behavior should be.
When the feature is enabled, the seller can decide which attachments to save when they save an email or a meeting to the CRM.
Learn more about the save attachments capabilities and details of the CRM admin settings options:
- June 2024 What’s new blog announcing CRM Attachments capabilities.
- Save Outlook activities to the CRM.
- Configure how activities are saved to CRM.
Screenshot showing the new options for CRM admins to configure the email attachments saving capabilities.
Post Teams Meeting Follow-up Email
Today, sellers lack a streamlined flow for post meeting follow-up and need to remember to send meeting recap and next steps to all stakeholders themselves. With a proactive nudge they can send a copilot drafted “Thank you and next steps” email directly from Teams Meeting Recap. This can keep the deal moving forward with stakeholders informed, aligned and accountable.
Sellers can now create a follow up email directly from ‘Sales’ in Teams meeting recap. The email content is generated by LLM and includes a summary and next steps.
The seller can then open the draft in Outlook with the subject, recipient, and generated text pre-populated, make any desired changes, and send the email with a single click.
Screenshot showing the new post-meeting follow-up email draft in Teams and how it can be opened in Outlook with a single click.
Get started
Ready to join us and other top-performing sales organizations worldwide? Reach out to your Microsoft sales team or visit our product web page.
Ready to install Copilot for Sales? Have a look at our deployment guide for Dynamics 365 Sales users or our deployment guide for Salesforce users.
Learn more
Ready for all the details? Check out the Copilot for Sales product documentation.
Ready for the latest tips...and more?Copilot for Sales Tip Time can serve as a foundation for your training of Copilot for Sales users, customers, or partners! This content includes use casesand demonstrates how each feature will benefit sellers, administrators, and sales managers.
Looking for the latest adoption resources? Visit theCopilot for Sales Adoption Centerand find the latest information about how to go from inspiration to adoption.
Stay connected
Want to stay connected? Learn about the latest improvements before everyone else at https://aka.ms/salescopilotupdates. Join our community in the community discussion forum and we always welcome your feedback and ideas in our product feedback portal.
