Microsoft is ready to talk about its new Viva Sales product, which connects customer data across communications and CRM systems centered around its Teams and Office products.
Microsoft isn’t the first to try this idea: Salesforce acquired Slack in part to beef up its communications tools for salespeople. But Microsoft isn’t looking to compete more directly with Salesforce; rather, the company said it is trying to fill the gaps left behind by traditional CRM systems.
“We definitely think people benefit from a CRM system,” said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365, in an interview with Protocol prior to the announcement. “The difficulty is, a lot of what's happening between a customer and a salesperson is actually never recorded in the CRM system, because it's just too tedious,” he said.
With Viva Sales, teams can automatically sync data between communications applications like Teams and Outlook, and their CRM system, whether that’s Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 or Salesforce’s Sales Cloud. It's arguably a similar play to the Sales Cloud and Slack integration, where Slack conversations can be added to the CRM, and account information can be plugged into Slack.
From Microsoft’s point of view, however, the advantage of Viva Sales is that it’s already integrated with Microsoft Teams and Outlook. Much of the reason why companies like Salesforce buy companies like Slack is to achieve the same level of integration, but it can be harder when trying to blend two different code bases.
Viva Sales builds on Viva, an “employee experience platform" Microsoft launched last year as a new take on the old idea of an employee intranet. In launching Viva Sales, Microsoft may not be trying to replace Salesforce, but it's definitely trying to get salespeople to spend more time inside Microsoft’s applications and less time inside Sales Cloud.
The launch of Viva Sales isn’t just about sales, however. Microsoft also has a broader vision to provide a layer of intelligence across its entire Office 365 suite. The strategy, demonstrated in part via Microsoft Graph, is the cloud giant’s strategy for moving beyond the underlying enterprise resource planning tool toward the type of workflow play heralded by ServiceNow.
This approach represents a strategic shift for Microsoft, Spataro said. In the past, the company’s go-to-market strategy was to tell customers to pick between Microsoft Teams and Zoom or Dynamics 365 and Salesforce. Now it’s changing its tune: Pick any product, and Microsoft will provide the intelligence on top.
“The most significant thing about this announcement is we are saying … choose whatever you want to choose — what we actually think will be most valuable over time will be the layer of intelligence that binds it all together,” said Spataro.
Spataro likened the enterprise software industry to a city: built from the ground up. If Azure, AWS and GCP are its foundations, then SaaS applications and workflow are its roads and buildings.
“People will keep putting money into sewers and roads and stuff like that,” he said, “but a lot more money goes into the hardware put on top.”
