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With Viva Sales, Netlogic is growing sales, delighting its customers while improving employee work-life balance.
"It has been a long journey to find the right solution for our productivity challenges, and until recently, there were few products like Copilot in Viva Sales. My team was thrilled when I used the new email thread summary feature in a meeting. We get tons of email threads every day. Now we can look at these six bullet points and understand what to do." said David Swenson. As a Business Development Director at Netlogic, David is constantly on the move, relying on Outlook and Teams to stay connected. He functions like a virtual CIO for his customers, guiding them through technology road-mapping processes, including budgeting, purchasing, training, and deploying services like Azure, AWS, and Microsoft 365. David attends several customer meetings daily, diligently takes notes, and creates meeting summaries and follow-ups. At the end of the day, when he gets home, David saves all of his informative notes into Dynamics 365 Sales, so his stakeholder teams can have the latest customer updates.
Accurately capturing customer requests and responding to customers promptly is essential to keeping Netlogic's customers happy and deals progressing. However, notetaking skills and styles vary significantly across David's team. As a result, sometimes critical information on customer needs gets captured differently, is inaccurate, or altogether missing from hand-written notes. Accurate notetaking is particularly challenging for new employees who are still learning to sell and must familiarize themselves with contract terms and products. The inconsistency across notes constantly created a need for alignment before responding to a customer resulting in a loss of time spent cross-referencing notes and searching for missing information. The lost time compounded with each customer meeting, increasing the sales cycle for David and Netlogic.
David and Netlogic's business development team started using Viva Sales in November 2022 to solve these challenges. Viva Sales analyzes transcribed text from Teams meetings using Natural Language Processing (NLP) models to generate key discussion highlights tailored for sales roles. David uses Copilot to create meeting summaries from these discussion highlights and then saves them to CRM, saving time and streamlining information sharing with colleagues. David Swenson said, "Using Copilot for meeting summaries has saved me at least 30 minutes per meeting. Now I can copy, paste, adjust a few things, and quickly send. It has increased my velocity tenfold; my opportunities are closing faster, and my closing rate has climbed." The notes created by Viva Sales are accurate and standardized across all team members, eliminating any discrepancies in notetaking and further saving time by reducing the need for cross-checking. Moreover, David can now focus solely on the customer during meetings, improving the quality of his interactions. He especially likes mentions as a cue for important keywords, such as people or product names. By using meeting summaries, action items, and mentions, he can better understand and track customer needs, respond to them faster, and close his day, knowing that all relevant information has been communicated. Since his customers get information more quickly now, they are happier and can execute faster on their decisions, making David's sales more effective.
At Netlogic, Viva Sales is helping solve business problems beyond their sales team. Firstly, the rapid distribution of information from David's business development team ensures that other groups, like field services, are more prepared to serve customers on their calls. Their digital optimization team has identified trends in customer challenges across meeting notes helping them improve current sales operation processes. The standardized notes, available more readily now, are helping newer salespeople learn the ropes and train while on the job. David Swenson added, "We have a young sales team with little industry experience. So not only does using these tools across our business areas help standardize customer notes, but it's also taught our team a lot about what's involved in an actual sales and contract process." The vast benefits of recording and summarizing meetings have led them to include it in their customer contracts as part of their standard operating procedure, allowing them to record every customer meeting easily. This was an easy decision as all Microsoft products and features, including Viva Sales, undergo thorough internal reviews to ensure they comply with privacy, security, and AI's ethical and responsible use.
Overall, Viva Sales has empowered David and his business development team to get more value from their CRM data by providing access to data and insights in Outlook and Teams. With meeting summaries and Copilot, they have improved customer experience and reduced sales cycle time. Most importantly, Viva Sales has helped him and his team save time, improving work-life balance. David Swenson affirms that "Implementing Viva Sales has saved time, improved skills, contributed to better work-life balance, and increased revenue by 25% in one quarter due to reduced burnout and enhanced efficiency. We finish tasks quickly, enjoy our personal time, and therefore are more productive the next day."
