Microsoft Viva Sales: What It Does and Whether Your Business Needs It
Your sales person finishes a call at 10am, opens Outlook to follow up, and has no idea what was discussed in last week's Teams meeting with the same client. They spend the next 20 minutes chasing notes, checking the CRM, and pulling together context that should already be in front of them. That is time they are not selling.
This is the problem Microsoft Viva Sales is designed to fix. It is not a replacement for your CRM - it sits alongside whatever system you already use and pulls relevant customer information into the tools your team is already working in. Outlook, Teams, your existing CRM. The idea is that salespeople stop toggling between applications looking for information and spend more time in actual conversations with clients.
The friction of manual data entry is a genuine cost. Research suggests salespeople spend around a third of their time on administrative tasks rather than selling. For a small professional services business, where one or two people are managing a pipeline, that overhead adds up quickly. Viva Sales uses AI to capture and surface information automatically - tagging a contact pulls their history into view, call summaries are logged without manual input, and follow-up prompts appear based on where a deal is in the process. Tools that reduce this kind of overhead are part of what gives small businesses their time back, without adding complexity to the day.
When this kind of tool is working well, your team does not have to prepare for client calls by piecing together information from four different places. Context is visible. The next step is suggested. A client feels like they are dealing with someone who knows them, because the person on the other end actually has the full picture in front of them. That is a better client experience, not just a more efficient internal process — and it is consistent with the technology choices that genuinely improve client interactions.
Getting value from Viva Sales - like most Microsoft 365 tools - depends on how it is set up and whether it connects cleanly to your existing systems. If your CRM is already well-configured and your team is using Microsoft 365 consistently, adding Viva Sales is a relatively straightforward step. If your Microsoft 365 environment is patchy or your data is scattered, it is worth sorting the foundation first. A good managed IT support arrangement means someone is keeping that environment in good shape, so tools like this actually deliver when you roll them out.
ITstuffed works with professional services businesses across Canterbury to get more out of their Microsoft 365 setup. If you want a quick sense of where your current environment sits, book a 15-minute IT Fit Check with the team.