What is Microsoft Viva Sales – All you need to know

Microsoft has brought some of the best working platforms for the professionals in the market so far. These platforms helped the working professionals to work remotely during the pandemics. These include Office 365, Microsoft Suite, and Teams. One such efficient and the user-oriented platform is Microsoft Viva Sales. This is a platform developed for the sellers who often struggle to connect with their customers and mainly remain busy with administrative work. Viva helps sellers to reduce the time spent on administrative tasks than selling.

As the tech giant describes, Microsoft Viva Sales is an employee experience platform. It binds various aspects of work together such as resources, insights, knowledge, communications, and learning. It is powered by Microsoft 365 and it can be well managed through Microsoft Teams. Thus Viva amalgamates various experiences of different tools developed by Microsoft. Microsoft mentions that Viva Sales nurtures a culture that empowers employees and teams to be their best from anywhere.

Microsoft Viva Sales: How useful is it for the sellers?

The past few years have been challenging and also innovative as organizations had to figure out ways to manage remote work. Every organization across the globe has now been bound to each other with the thread of digital platforms and technologies. Every other field now works digitally and this has given rise to a new future of working remotely.

One of the main features Viva Sales offers to the sellers is the ability to work remotely. Sellers can carry out their tasks from the office, their homes, or any other place. This increases their efficiency by greater means.

Viva also lets the sellers stay connected with their customers using Outlook and Teams.

One of the most frustrating and time-consuming tasks the sellers do is to log the interactions and essential business data into their CRM systems. They further use this data to track deals and project revenues. This manual data entry work not only frustrates sellers and wastes their time, but it also dampens team morale, and decreases employee satisfaction. Microsoft Viva helps sellers to consolidate the data from across multiple systems so that they can have a unified view of customer interactions and deals.

Microsoft Viva Sales is powered by Microsoft 365 and Teams. Hence, it is possible to manage work, see the insights, analyze the data and communicate. Viva offers a perfect digital employee experience supported by the power and security of Windows.

Let us look at the features of Viva Sales:

Features of Microsoft Viva Sales

Viva comes with 5 main features which are as follows:

1. Viva Insights
2. Viva Goals
3. Viva Learning
4. Viva Topics
5. Viva Connections

Read further to understand these features in more detail.

Please note that some features of Viva Sales only come with Microsoft Viva Suite which can be bought with a subscription.

1] Viva Insights

Viva Insights is one of the main features of Microsoft Viva Sales. It improves productivity and wellbeing with data-driven, privacy-protected insights and recommendations.

Viva Insights basically helps you explore ways to build better work habits. It also tracks and improves the effectiveness of the meetings. As a seller, you need to also prioritize your well-being. Hence, Viva Insight helps you achieve this with actionable recommendations, such as reserving time for focused work.

Microsoft Viva Sales is integrated with Headspace, a web application that helps users work with mindfulness. It is a tool that has helped millions of users reduce their stress and increase productivity. Thus, Viva Insight, along with Headspace ensures work-related happiness and mental health. There are different features available for Insight for business leaders and managers.

2] Viva Goals

As the name suggests, this feature of Microsoft Viva Sales helps sellers set, review and analyze their goals and sales targets.

Managers and leaders can now set, manage, and achieve goals for themselves and their teams. They can align teams to their organization’s strategic priorities and achieve results. They can easily connect teams and individuals to common goals with the help of integrated tools such as Microsoft Teams.

Viva Goals helps you Align, Focus and Integrate goals. It helps you achieve the following:

• Create clarity and stay aligned: You can connect employees and teams to your organization’s top goals, help them understand their impact, and ensure cross-functional alignment.
• Easily create, approve, and align on OKRs: You can create new OKRs or start with built-in templates, and define success at all levels with approval workflows and flexible views.
• Create an aligned, purpose-driven work culture: You can gain visibility into goals across your business with an organizational, team, and individual views, and focus teams on your most critical priorities.
• Connect projects and tasks to OKRs: See how your team’s daily work impacts your organization’s key priorities, and connect OKRs to the work systems your team is already using.
• Focus teams on impact, not output: Viva Goals fosters focus discussions, provides context and simplifies reporting on progress with custom dashboards and dynamically updated OKRs.
• Keep everyone focused on high-impact work: You can easily view and share progress, and enable check-ins and nudges in Microsoft Teams.
• Present on progress at meetings: It is quite easy to share progress, context, lessons, and next steps with employees using customizable presentation templates.
• Use Viva Goals in Teams and Azure DevOps: Promote a purpose-driven culture with the Viva Goals app in Teams and Azure Dev Ops.
• Rally conversation around goals: You can communicate, collaborate, and check in on goals with the message extension in Teams chat.
• Increase visibility: Increase visibility into goals and progress with integrations into critical work systems like Teams, Azure DevOps, Jira, Tableau, and ZenDesk.

3] Viva Learning

Microsoft Viva Sales offers yet another wonderful feature that helps organizations and sales grow rapidly and that’s Viva Learning. It makes learning a natural part of the day. You can easily incorporate learning where employees already spend their time.

You can achieve the following objectives and many others with Viva Learning:

• Create a collaborative learning space for your team: You can add a learning tab to your Teams channel to find, select, and pin training in the channels where you work with others.
• Create conversations about learning: Now share learning content in Teams messages, meeting chats, or emails. Encourage peer learning and mentoring conversations.
• Share learning recommendations with colleagues: Recommend relevant learning content to peers and colleagues, track their reported completion progress, and view courses recommended for you.
• View assignments: Keep track of the required learnings by connecting learning management systems to view and access assigned learning content.
• Get notifications: You can stay on top of learning tasks by getting notifications in Teams for new or overdue learning tasks.
• Aggregate learning from across your organization: You can help employees find relevant content from learning sources across your organization.
• Manage Content sources: Connect learning content from Microsoft, your own organization, and the learning providers and learning management systems your organization uses.
• Highlight the features content: Feature top-of-mind content for employees from any connected learning source in the featured carousel banner.

4] Viva Topics

Yet another important pillar you get with Microsoft Viva Sales is Viva Topics. Viva Topics helps employees to put their knowledge to work. It uses AI to pull its expertise from the apps they use every day. Employees can see their content automatically organized across apps and teams with built-in security and compliance features.

Viva Topics offers three main features including Identifications, Curation, and Discovery.

1. Identification: You can turn content into knowledge with the help of Viva Topics. Use AI to reason over your organization’s data and automatically identify, process, and organize content. Viva Topics automatically identifies topics. It recognizes common topics across content and conversations, organizes information, and generates topic pages. Then it finds related topics.
2. Curation: Viva Topics helps organize knowledge and improve topics by combining AI and human expertise. Viva automatically builds topic pages. It creates topic pages and topic cards using suggested definitions, related content, relevant conversations, and expertise.
3. Discovery: Viva makes knowledge easy to discover. It automatically displays topic cards across Microsoft 365 apps to discover knowledge in the context of your work.

5] Viva Connections

Viva Connections is built on top of Microsoft’s SharePoint technology, and it will include things like company news, town halls, or even employee resource groups and communities. It’s basically a dashboard for connecting with colleagues remotely.

You can achieve the following with the help of Viva Connections:

• Encourage employees to contribute ideas and share views: Create a workplace where everyone’s ideas and voices matter and employees have the flexibility to engage and participate from anywhere.
• Invite meaningful conversations: Gain insights about what’s top of mind in your organization. Build trust and transparency through dialogue and share polls and surveys.
• Build a healthy and inclusive workforce: You can improve employee engagement with data-driven recommendations, and turn inclusion feedback into everyday actions.
• Target, prioritize, and schedule: Provide updates to the right people at the right time. Target news and engagements, boost critical content, and easily gather community feedback.
• Get in touch with everyone’s vision, mission, and priorities: Create a workspace that can evolve and grow with modern storytelling tools, all while celebrating company values and identity.

How much does Microsoft Viva cost?

Microsoft Viva Sales comes with five main features namely,

1. Viva Insights
2. Viva Goals
3. Viva Learning
4. Viva Topics
5. Viva Connections

Out of these, Viva Connections is included for free with Office 365.

Viva Learning is partially included without any cost. Included facilities are:

• Viva Learning in Microsoft Teams
• Access full Microsoft Learn and Microsoft 365 Training libraries and the top 125 LinkedIn Learning courses
• Search, share, and chat about learning content
• Create learning tabs in Teams channels
• Organization-generated learning content with SharePoint and Viva Learning

You need to buy a subscription for the remaining features such as Course recommendations and progress tracking and so on.

Microsoft Viva Insights is also partially included with Office 365. Included features are:

• Personal insights in Teams
• Viva Insights add-in and inline suggestions in Outlook
• Your daily briefing email
• Your monthly digest email and personal insights dashboard

You would need to buy a subscription for the features such as Manager insights for leading strong teams.

Viva Topics and Viva Goals only come with a subscription.

The current price of the subscription to the Microsoft Viva suite is $9.00 per user/month.

You can get more details about pricing and features on the Microsoft Viva Pricing website.

How can I set up Microsoft Viva Sales?

Microsoft Viva is an organizing layer for employee experiences that puts people at the center, uniting them to share knowledge, skills, and connections in the natural flow of the workday. It delivers personalized and actionable insights when and where they’re needed in Teams, SharePoint, and other Microsoft 365 services.

Microsoft Viva consists of four modules: Viva Topics, Viva Insights, Viva Learning, and Viva Connections. To set up the whole suite, you’ll set up each module individually.

Get more information on setting up Microsoft Viva Sales here.