Introduction

By now, if you’ve been involved with Microsoft applications, you will have heard a lot of talk about Microsoft Copilot and how it can help your sales and marketing efforts, but there is still some mystique as to what it is and how in my sphere of B2B sales, it helps and supports your Sales team and of course, not least how much does it cost. Then there is the implementation and having solid ideas as to how best introduce this new AI concept and feature set into your sales and marketing teams daily activities.

This post attempts to answer those questions at this moment in time, although this is a fast moving and evolving environment and application, this post alone has been in work in progress for three months since so much is happening. My focus here is on outlining the core elements of most interest in my view for Sales Management and giving you some resources to review.

Rise of Generative AI

Over the last eighteen months or so since the launch of ChatGPT, the word Generative AI has been a big talking point in business and in the news. The meteoric rise of this topic was pushed to the next level by the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT generative AI in November 2022, where, within a weeks it had acquired a million users for the free version. A $20 per month subscription premium version was swiftly introduced within a month or so!

OpenAI, the company itself was part funded by Microsoft who have a major 49% stake. In the last five years, AI companies have now become the go-to investment for many investors due to their hype and often sited game-changing potential. The stake by Microsoft in this leading technology platform has given it a clear advantage in introducing ChatGPT and ChatGPT4, the next generation AI into its suite of applications. Many other major vendors have been playing catch-up and investing heavily ever since.

Generative AI is all about words and images rather than just complex number crunching and forecasting which is in the realms of other AI toolsets. I ‘ve covered in a previous post more on AI last year, but for more on what is Generative AI, then this post is very useful summary from McKinsey.

During 2023, Microsoft alongside many of the other leading CRM (Customer Relationship Management) vendors such as Salesforce, Hubspot etc began introducing Generative AI across their applications as inbuilt within-app functionality and as separate add-on applications. This is often why it is unclear to many as to what is included and not included within each application.

Although AI had been slowly introduced and was being used already, it wasn’t widely seen or known as Generative AI with the ChatGPT label. For example, MS Outlook has been helping in prefilling in suggested next words or sentences for you as you type for a while now. All this was low level Generative AI and had been gradually introduced across the Microsoft suite over the last few years.

What changed last year was the rapid introduction of this new Generative AI toolkit in the shape of ChatGPT4 revolutionising the power and application of this new version of Generative AI.

Introducing Microsoft Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is built using the ChatGPT technology, so in other words, it focuses best on words and images rather than just the traditional AI focus on numbers. For example, where AI may be used in forecasting, although it is not as simple as that, since for Sales, it can help to predict Lead and Opportunities closure rates etc.

Anyhow we digress, the important point here is that your Microsoft Copilot is looking at your business’s own data, from notes and conversations, sentiment, transcripts and information held within your own CRM and Email and other application, for example, MS Teams/

Dynamics 365 Copilot for Sales

This was launch for both Dynamics 365 and Salesforce Sales cloud in February this year to bring sales-specific insights and recommendations to apps like Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Word..

Following on from my recent post (on how AI is impacting CRM) the key objective for many organisations is still to reduce as far as possible, the 70% or so time spent on non-selling activity, be this in updating CRM, entering in notes, preparing for meetings, doing meeting follow-ups notes and summaries, producing the email follow-ups and in researching new leads and clients, these often-mundane but critical tasks can still be time consuming.

A recent MS survey* suggests those using Dynamics 365 Copilot for Sales are saving up to 90 minutes a week. This per Sales Rep or Account Manager for example, is a lot of extra selling time being made available across the year.

So how can it do this, examples include:

• Create a Meeting preparation Brief, populated with Account and Opportunity summary and the customer information including names and titles of attendees, recent highlight and email threads.

• Creating transactions key summary and action points

• Use natural language to get prompts and contextual recommendations for your Leads and Opportunities with the new screen to use prebuilt prompts or create your own.

• Integrating with MS Outlook and sharing data and enabling faster updates to CRM directly

• Giving you a CoPilot overview of your Sales Workplace enabling you to ask questions

From this meeting, generating the key action point and task for the Team.

A good overview, 8 min deep dive Copilot for Sales overview is now available and this gives both a Dynamics 365 and Salesforce overview together with information on set up requirements, although this latter part is probably best for the IT team.

So, how much does it cost?

Broadly, there are two MS CoPilot licence types relevant to this post

• Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 this is £296.40 annually or £24.70 per user per month* ie this works with your Office 365 own Microsoft 365 suite including Teams.

• Dynamics 365 Copilot for Sales is £493.20 or £41.20 per user per month*.

• Another way to purchase is that this is Dynamics 365 Copilot for Sales is included if you have the Dynamics 365 Sales Premium licence at £111 per user per month*

*Note: At time of writing D365 Copilot for Sales is not available on a CSP month payment option. Latest UK Pricing details for D365 applications and Copilot for sales (add-on) can be found here.

Is it worth it?

Whilst a recent MS study** said that 83% of Sellers using Copilot already claim Dynamics 365 Copilot for Sales helps them improve productivity with sellers saving an average of 90 minutes per week, this still need to be justified. But again, taking equivalent this monthly fee of c £43 is same as £10 per week, so you could argue that 90 mins saving has cost you an additional c.£10.

And according to the influential McKinsey consultancy in their report from November 2023, focusing on the benefits and impact of using Generative AI in Sales and Marketing, they found an increase in Sales Revenue ranging from 3-15% for those firms who have already invested heavily in time and effort in introducing AI

With just these two authoritative statistics, the case for AI investment is getting both stronger and clearer and now is the time you should look to consider this for your own Sales Team.

Introducing CoPilot

The question is really just one of timing and the level of investment you want to fund. However, like any other piece of software, from Excel to CRM, you may only need a small portion of the application to achieve your first impactful results.

How much time you need invest in initial training in order to maximise this investment and in say an Pilot is critical, because if you are not introducing this, then the chances are your competitors are already doing so.

The key is making sure you undertake some time to invest in both a ‘pilot’ approach to gain knowledge and experience and then in ‘User training’ maximise your investment as quick as possible.

Having a clear list of where you will start or a list of use cases, for example, Updating CRM quicker, more effectively and then Meeting Preparation or creating Meeting Summaries and Action points, together with creation of Email follow-ups (with human review in the early stages) are for me a few good starting points. You can also learn more about Copilot in a MS Learn module

Other use cases could be in term of Customer insights or helping create personalised Marketing campaigns and segmentation or in Lead generation.

Key Learnings

In my view, the following are prerequisites prior to introducing Copilot

• Speak to your Consulting partner first

• Establish a pilot or team of Copilot Champions

• Review results and prepare your own training materials/guidance notes and use case examples

• Ensure your Users with a licence receive sufficient dedicated training time.

After speaking with your Consulting partner, undertaking first a Pilot study is really the next key action to take if you are new to this. My view is this should be ideally with a few of your more tech savvy and enthusiastic members of the Sales Team. Typically, Sales Managers may be likely to be good candidates as your ‘Copilot Champions’ initially and then you can look to roll this out to other enthusiastic members, so you capture how this works best in your own business and industry.

My view is that both training and some consultancy advice and support are still very much needed in introducing such a major new feature such as AI or Dynamics 365 Copilot. It is still ultimately a new feature and I’d always recommend talking to your Consultancy partner to understand how others have introduced and benefited from this new functionality. Just adding it and making it available won’t necessarily maximise your investment, and as the old saying goes, ‘you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink’ and this is similar with AI in my view.

Giving your users the necessary training, and this could be only a hour or so focussed on a use case at a time over a period of weeks, will help to build their experience. This is very much needed to give your Users both the confidence and ability to understand and be able to create their own best use cases.

Conclusion and next steps

As above, Dynamics 365 Copilot and Sales AI in general can offer some great time saving advantages, but to maximise this investment, you will need to invest the required time and effort in building confidence and giving focussed training to your Users to ensure widespread adoption. The internal pilot team of your Copilot Champion can give you your best own internal Case study.

Just releasing this new functionality and telling people about it is not enough. You need to train and ensure that this becomes part of their weekly tasks to prove to the users how can save time. This is not simply an add-on app in my view, you need to give due thought and consideration to who and how it will be applied in your Sales Team to maximise this User adoption, a critical KPI in any CRM related application. Just like the early days of CRM, for your investment to be beneficial, your Users need to be confident and enthusiastic enough to use this new tool every day. Hence, the need for a Pilot and Copilot Champions is so important if you are to maximise your investment.

As I said earlier, my final takeaway is to first speak to your Consulting partner, since introducing AI in Sales Teams is more than just new feature adoption, but includes preparation, training and you may need to factor in some degree of change management.

And finally, Copilot is a hot application continuously evolving, so it is likely there will be more changes announced over the Summer.

ENDS

*Note: All D365 Licence types mentioned in this post are calculated for this post on equivalent monthly payment based on minimum annual commitment.

** Microsoft 2023 Work Trends index Survey