Maybe you’ve already heard about Viva Sales and the capabilities that can empower every seller to do more with less? But if you haven’t you may want to check out this video:
And this is not all – there are many other capabilities on the roadmap, such as generating email replies using AI, extensibility to match your requirements and Dataverse schema and many more. Find more in this video: Microsoft Viva Sales generative AI capabilities
If your organization wants to leverage the amazing capabilities of Viva Sales, you need to come up with an adoption strategy and a roll out plan so your sellers can get use of the advantages of the Viva Sales brings.
Where to start?
We have created an Adoption specifically for Viva Sales that will help you put together everything needed to set up a successful adoption strategy. It comes in 5 main steps, which can be executed consequently, or in parallel. On the diagram below you can find how you can start your Viva Sales journey.
You can find the full adoption playbook here: Viva Sales Adoption Playbook
After you download the file, you need to find the right people in your organization to work with.
Create your team
First of all, you need to identify your stakeholders. For a successful adoption strategy, you need to have an executive sponsor – one or two typically – people with high visibility, ideally within Leadership Team in your organization. The executive sponsor must be invested in the benefits Viva Sales will bring to your sellers and drive the message across the organization.
The second group of users you need to identify are your early adopters (pilot users), or the first people that will try Viva Sales in their daily work. This group is very important as the users are going to provide feedback and questions, based on which you will improve your readiness materials.
The third group of users are the champions. The champions need to be people willing to learn and grow their skills in Viva Sales, understand the roadmap and keep up to date with the changes that are coming. For the champions to be useful for other people, they need to be easily distinguished. Some ideas of how to “mark” champions so they are visible for others is to add a Teams badge, or another mark on their profile photo in the organization. Champions need to be easily reachable by other users – via a distribution list, Yammer community or in another way. It is recommended to reward the champions with some swag, kudos, or other organization-wide recognition, as that will give them additional motivation to keep up to date and to help others.
Don’t forget to involve your IT (Teams and Outlook) and SecOps teams early as you will need their help for the technical enablement of Viva Sales. They may not be part of your target teams but without them you can’t technically enable Viva Sales in your organization.
Define your adoption strategy
If you have decided to roll out Viva Sales, you have probably already identified some key challenges sellers are having: entering information instead of connecting with customers, not up-to-date information and contacts, too much time spent in CRM instead of doing work beneficial for increasing the sales, and so on. For your Viva Sales pilot, you need to decide what are the main pain points that you want to address (3-5 pain points) and to document them.
The pain points will help you identify the scenarios that you’re going to address with the Viva Sales implementation, and what are the top priorities for your sellers. It is also very important to discuss what is considered successful implementation of the scenario and how are you going to measure the success. For example, understand how many active contacts in the CRM are outdated, and put a target how to improve that percentage over time, how much time is spent into entering information that can be used in more beneficial activities etc.
In the Adoption Playbook you will find some useful information on how you can structure the user scenarios you’re going to address.
Build a communication plan
You need to create a plan when to communicate what information to which type of users.
Typically, the users you need to communicate to are the executive sponsors, the champions, the trainers, SecOps, the support team, and the pilot users.
These different groups may also need different information to be provided to them. For example, executive sponsors will be interested in the adoption and KPIs, the support team will be interested in any changes that are upcoming, and how these may affect the users (this may cause a spike in raised tickets), and the business users will need to be informed about the changes that are coming, and how these changes are going to affect their work.
There is an example “Welcome to Viva Sales” email message embedded into the Adoption Playbook – you can use that as a starting point for your communication emails, and add your organization branding, logo, and other specific information.
Build a readiness strategy
It is equally important to build a communication plan, and to give the correct resources to the right people so they can do their work.
Viva Sales is very intuitive and user-friendly, so no extensive training is required. Microsoft has published all training materials needed for launching Viva Sales in MSLearn, hence the trainings below do not need to be in-person or to take a lot of hours – it may be as simple as providing users with links to the published Microsoft content or running a webinar and providing the recording.
Early adopters (level 200) – The early adopters (pilot users) are users that need to have access to the readiness materials that will be later provided also to the larger group of business users. Having a pilot group of users enabled on Viva Sales will give you the opportunity to understand if Viva Sales is working well for your organization, or if there are challenges, and to address any technical topics or common questions that maybe raised during the pilot. You will be able to improve your readiness materials and to have less support tickets raised once Viva Sales is launched for all business users. There are a lot of materials online that can be used for the early adopters and business users training, but your organization may want to do their own training materials due to format or brand guidelines requirements – webinars, mandatory trainings, online or onsite events, documentation etc.
Business users (level 200) – The business users will use the same readiness materials as the early adopters, with the feedback from the pilot group addressed in the materials.
Champions (level 300) – The champions are a group of volunteers to help with questions and evangelize Viva Sales. The training materials provided need to be more deep-dive than the business users training. They need to also have access to some more detailed information about the roadmap and the upcoming features and when they should be available for the early adopters and business users. Note, that any timelines on the roadmap may change without a notice.
Enablement and Support teams (level 400) – Enablement team needs to have access to deep dive technical content how to enable Viva Sales, what are the prerequisites, how to set it up and get it working, as well as content needed for SecOps team to get the enablement approved. There is Microsoft documentation that can be curated for the purposes of those teams.
When you build your readiness strategy, you also need to take into account that Viva Sales continues to evolve and there are updates on a monthly basis introducing new capabilities. You need to also create a change management plan for training the users and communication about the new updates.
Timeline
After you have the 5 main steps defined, then you are ready to build your own execution plan and launch Viva Sales. Below is an example how the rollout plan may look like, but of course feel free to change it according to the needs of your organization:
Additional resources
In the Viva Sales Adoption Playbook there are some additional resources shared, such as links, FAQs, technical architecture diagram and some examples of roll out plans. However, below you’ll find some additional resources you may find helpful when building your readiness strategy.
