Documenting your customer interactions ensures you and others in your organization have access to information about customer communication, meetings and activities. Better visibility enables everyone to understand what’s happening outside the company’s four walls and respond accordingly. Responding could mean revising forecasts, changing sales processes, or new marketing materials. However, manually updating CRM can be time-consuming. Thankfully, Sales Copilot for Microsoft Outlook, a new AI-driven Outlook add-in, simplifies this process by enabling you to save your Outlook interactions, including emails and meetings, to your CRM with a few clicks.
Here’s a scenario where Sales Copilot for Microsoft Outlook eliminates busy work for sellers.
Save an email or meeting to your CRM using Sales Copilot
Open the email or meeting you want to save to your CRM, and then access Sales Copilot.
On the Highlights tab, click on “Save.” Under “Connect to a record,” choose the relevant record you want to associate with the activity.
By default, Sales Copilot displays accounts and opportunities related to the contacts in the activity. You can select one of these displayed records or use the search box to find and connect to another record of any type. If you wish to save the email or meeting to your CRM without connecting it to a specific record, select “Save without connecting.” The email or meeting will still be associated with contacts listed in the To, Cc, and Bcc fields. The “Related contacts” card will display the contacts associated with the activity, ensuring it’s visible in their timeline.
Click “Save.” The email or meeting is now linked to the selected record and stored in your CRM. You can see the connected record and its type in the “Connected to” card.
Change a connection
If you ever need to change the record to which the activity is connected, select “More actions (…)” > “Change connected record” and choose another record to associate the email or meeting with.
Note: Dynamics 365 users might be familiar with an Outlook add-in called Dynamics 365 for Outlook. There’s some overlap in respect to what these two add-ins do. However, according to Microsoft, Sales Copilot is better for sellers, while Dynamics 365 for Outlook is better for other roles such as customer service desk. I’m on board with that with one exception. You can create new Dynamics 365 Contacts using Sales Copilot for Outlook. But you can’t create new sales Leads. However, you can create both in the Dynamics 365 for Outlook add-in.
There’s more to Sales Copilot that I’ll write about in future blogs. If you want to chat about using Sales Copilot or have questions, feel free to reach out.
By Mark Abes, Vice President, Dyn365Pros, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Partner, San Diego, Orange County, Los Angeles
