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In this video episode of the EY Microsoft Tech Directions podcast, the speakers discuss how to use AI and Microsoft Copilot to enhance sales processes and customer engagement.
EY and Microsoft professionals explore challenges and solutions for sales organizations, particularly focusing on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and Microsoft Copilot to enhance sales processes and customer engagement. The conversation emphasizes the importance of integrating AI to automate routine tasks, allowing sales teams to focus on building relationships and delivering personalized customer experiences.
Speakers:
Jim Nakashima, Partner Head of Product for Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights, Microsoft
Amanda Easton, Associate Director, EY Microsoft Alliance Global Business Applications Go-to-market, Ernst & Young LLP
Keith Mescha, Managing Director, Ernst & Young LLC
Key takeaways:
Challenges for sales in today’s complex environment
The particular issues related to sales in large, highly regulated organizations
The critical role of change management in a successful sales organization
How EY and Microsoft are addressing the way selling has matured and evolved
For your convenience, full text transcript of this podcast is available below.
Kristie Reid
The sales force of the future is vastly different from the past and the future is here. My name is Kristie Reid, Microsoft Business Applications lead for EY in the US. Thank you for tuning in to EY Tech Directions, where EY-Microsoft alliance professionals explore transformative cloud solutions powered by business ingenuity. In this episode, Microsoft and EY leaders delve into the intense challenges sales professionals face in today's competitive climate, and how AI and Copilot are rapidly transforming the sales landscape.
Now, let's join the conversation.
Amanda Easton
Thank you for joining us today. I'm Amanda Easton, our global go-to-market lead for Microsoft Business Applications at EY, and I'm here today with Jim Nakashima from Microsoft. Welcome, Jim. Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Jim Nakashima
Thank you, Amanda. I'm Jim Nakashima, and I am the product leader for both Dynamics 365 sales as well as Customer Insights at Microsoft.
Easton
Thanks for joining us. And I'm also here with Keith Mescha, Executive Director at EY in technology consulting. Keith, tell us a little bit about yourself.
Keith Mescha
I've been working in Dynamics platform for 15 years. I helped EY launch our Dynamics solution and I've pretty much invested my entire career in Power Platform and Dynamic Solutions for our clients. So I do this work on a daily basis with our clients, and it was exciting to be able to do it for EY as well.
Easton
So Jim, what are the challenges you're hearing from sales leaders today?
Nakashima
A few things. Actually, a lot of the challenges are kind of the same challenges of the past, but we're really fortunate because we now have new tools to solve them. But one of the biggest challenges that I hear from sellers is just the overwhelm of all the different signals coming at them. It could be from e-mail, from meetings, calendar, it could be from Dynamics 365 sales, but there's a lot of different systems that sellers are swiveling through. And how do they know where they should spend their time? How do they know what most impactful work is? And then, when they go do that work, the second challenge we hear is that a lot of it's manual. The third one is really around that customer experience and customers expect super-fast responses. They expect you to know who they are, what you're looking for, and how your products and services apply to their business. And so the generic answer just doesn't work anymore. And so, those are the, I'd say the top three things that we hear from sellers as they navigate through days.
Easton
So Keith, those may sound familiar to you, but how do you think those challenges are compounded with an organization like EY?
Mescha
I think for us, we don't really have (a) traditional sales force. We have people that have relationships with clients and accounts that their job is not to work in a CRM system and they have never worked in one before typically. So we need to make sure that they can do things in micro-bites, quick, easy, simple, reduce the number of clicks. And it has to be meaningful for the end result of their job, (which) is to go win more businesses, essentially.
Easton
Absolutely. And with the complexity of all the things we offer to our clients, I can imagine that that just compounds the situation.
Mescha
Yeah, we have a number of service lines. We do a lot of different things, and typically a client or account knows] us for a specific portion of what we do, and trying to bring the rest of the firm to them is a very difficult challenge. And having the insights and know where we are and are not operating in a particular client is important.
Easton
So Jim, how do you think that AI and Copilot can help these sales teams?
Nakashima
There's been a change, some new developments over the course of the last half a year or so, and it's really been this focus on agents. And agents are proactive autonomous operating agents. But what makes them different from automation in the past is that in the past you had to set up a whole bunch of rules, and if you were to automate something, you had to understand every possible kind of situation that you can encounter and code for it. Now, with these agents and LLMs (large language models), they can just understand context, they can understand what other people are looking for, they can understand knowledge, and with that creates new opportunities to automate things that we haven't been able to automate in the past.
And so, this is bringing us the ability to now have agents and sellers work together hand in hand and really back and forth. Sellers doing some things which are intrinsically and requires humans like relationship building or adaptability, judgment. And then, the agents can take, remember that 70% of seller’s time is not spent on selling? Agents can take a good chunk of that 70% and start automating it and provide visibility back to the seller on what they should actually be doing. So at a high level, that's where we see Copilots and agents really changing the equation for sales teams.
Easton
70% of their time is spent on non-selling activities.
Nakashima
Yes.
Easton
Imagine if we can just chip away at a small piece of that, and I think we're going to get a lot further as we look further toward how Copilot and AI can help us.
Now Keith, when you look at EY teams, how do you see Copilot helping our teams internally?
Mescha
Initially, what we're looking at doing is really getting it to be able to coach. We need to make sure that all the fields are filled out so that the actual agents and the other Copilot features can start to be lit up and be useful. We have a vast amount of knowledge, we have a vast amount of documentation on how to do things that you have to go find, which if you have to go find something, you typically are not going to go do it. So if we can bring that to them through Copilots, then they can leverage that, it's right there at their fingertips. Once we get them using the system, comfortable with the technology, now we can start to leverage it for researching, what are similar customers doing, what things are happening in the industries they're working in or at the customers, whether it's acquisitions, it's separations, it's new leadership in certain key roles that are our buyers. That stuff will start to come to life within the CRM system.
Easton
So Jim, I'm going to ask you a very direct question. Generative AI is everywhere these days. How is Microsoft different with Copilot?
Nakashima
Great question. I see most of our competitors are actually focusing on agents in terms of what I would call a chatbot, digital engagement. Super important, we are doing the same. But one of the things that we've done in the sales space is analyze all of the seller jobs: where are they spending the most time, which pieces are now automatable with this new AI agent technology, and actually focused on automating the tasks that will actually have the most impact. And I was talking to an analyst recently and her reply to us was, "Oh, instead of focusing on digital engagement like everyone else, you're focusing on the most impactful jobs." And that was really a big difference for me.
Easton
So Keith, change is very disruptive and it's hard for us, and CRM is already seen by sellers as a burden. So what are we doing at EY to help them understand the value that Copilot, Dynamics 365 Sales can bring to them and really give them time for what's important?
Mescha
Yeah, that's great. Obviously, one of EY's tenets is to do a lot of change with our transformational programs. So we've got a very strong change set of teams and people and leaders, as we bring that into our Dynamics instance and implementation. Lead with that, so top-down has to drive it, communication, celebration, as well as bottom-up communities, getting people together, sharing the knowledge, how to use the system effectively on a day-to-day basis, how to make their jobs easier to get to data quicker. So it's an all-around effort, so the whole culture is adopting it and they're celebrating it. So it's been a celebration of a transformation of how we're going to do business, not just implementing another tool.
Easton
Well, I mean, being a part of that transformation myself, I got to see that it started far before any go-live date. There was a constant drum beat about what was coming and how we were going to be changing the way that we serve our clients in the best way possible. And it's important to keep that conversation going and keep that change as part of your everyday life.
Nakashima
That's so critical as we move forward.
Mescha
Yeah, I think the biggest part of that is just community. So peers talking to peers, and peers showing peers the things versus a formal training. We're doing a lot of AI adoption in the firm with Copilot and we have all these, what we call these centers of excellence as we bring these teams together and people share what they're using, how they're using it. We take that feedback, we snip it up, and we broadcast it out. So that peer-to-peer piece to me is the biggest impact. And so, you got to make sure you're investing in that for the long term because these AI platforms as well as the cloud platforms are constantly changing. So it's not a project, it's a program, and it's for the life of when you own it and clients need to think about it that way.
Easton
Well, that's a good point. I was going to ask you then, how do we help our clients change with confidence? But I think that's the answer. It's not a project, it's a program.
Mescha
Correct.
Easton
Right. And then having those champions in place to help continuously feed the knowledge, the tips and tricks, all of the things that people find interesting because there's a lot to learn when you move to a new technology no matter what it is. Or for all of us today, even thinking about how generative AI is affecting our everyday lives, there's a lot to learn.
Mescha
Well, yeah, I mean, everybody wants a consumerized experience even in business applications. So the next generation of our sales force grew up on these ride apps and ordering food, and they're going to want their CRMs to operate that same way.
Easton
I think that's some of the power that Microsoft brings to the table. It's really configurable quickly, and really we're getting to the people that are using these tools in order to get the right feedback.
Mescha
Most of these tools we have, if you look at even the Outlook bar, there's hundreds of buttons on it. I don't use 90% of those buttons, but when you watch somebody do a job and you can see and coach over their shoulder that this is a lot easier if you did this or that, and really having those experiences with the users is super important.
Easton
Well, let's get back to the basics. So Jim, what do you think sets Microsoft apart from other CRM systems?
Nakashima
Yeah, we've touched on it a little bit in terms of the advantage that Microsoft has in the AI space, but I would say our unified platform, a true unified platform where our apps, sales, service, marketing, power apps, power platform are all built upon the same unified data platform, dataverse, is incredibly powerful, and we built it to unify customer experience. In a world of generative AI, we suddenly realized it was even a more valuable asset than we could have imagined. And of course, it creates consistent customization. It allows you to get insights and actions across all of these, what would otherwise be siloed applications.
The more you can get across all of sales, service and marketing, the more you can get a signal that is going to be more accurate and the more that you're actually going to have impact on the business. But then, I have to mention too, Azure and the fact that we're built on Azure and we're not built on a different Azure, we're built on the same Azure. And so, when you go to use APIs (application programming interface), you want to bring your own data lakes. It's Azure. And it's not yet again another silo or something like that. It's actually all in your control. And then, of course, Microsoft 365, Office, Teams and the ability to connect our data, our insights, our actions to wherever you are, bringing the CRM into M365 and vice versa. I think that's where we've got some serious differentiators relative to it.
Mescha
It's been one of our big tenets is bring the jobs to be done, as you say, to where the people are actually doing the jobs. Automate the ones they don't need to do, but bring the other ones to where they work in email, Teams and not have to go to some other system or go to some other URL or some other place to go do that is super critical. That's something I think you guys have really accomplished well.
Easton
So Jim, as you look down the road from Microsoft, what do you think is going to change the game for sellers?
Nakashima
So clearly for me, agents, and again, that back and forth and it's going to take us a lot of time to figure out the end state, but it really is one where you have humans doing the things that humans are best suited to do. And you have agents doing the things that agents are best suited to do. You can scale these independently and you can offload a lot of the manual work the sellers are doing today in order to enable them to figure out where they should be spending their time and delivering the best experiences and building the best relationships with their customers. And that's where GenAI is really going to make the difference.
Easton
Yeah, that's so key because no matter what anybody says, selling is really about relationships, and we need to give our teams the time to foster those relationships. And those things that are more administrative, we can leave to those agents.
Nakashima
Absolutely.
Easton
So Jim, if there is one thing you would want people to take away from today, what would that be?
Nakashima
I would say if there's one thing that I would have people take [00:13:30] away is that our competitors are out there building agents that are just doing digital engagement, digital communications. We're looking across all seller jobs, all marketing jobs, all service jobs, and actually finding the most effective way to build automation that's driven by AI in new and novel ways into that end-to-end set of jobs that needed to be done. Our approach is fundamentally different from what I'm seeing out there.
Easton
Keith, if there was one thing that you would want people to take away from today, what would that be?
Mescha
I think for me, the one thing I want people to take away is go out there and learn about the tools and technology. Don't be scared to try things and don't underestimate the fact that people's jobs are changing and we need to take them along on that journey and get their feedback and make them feel comfortable and rewarded and make it fun. Make the learning fun and use the tools. Don't just listen to what you hear. Go try it for yourself.
Easton
Thank you, Jim and Keith, for joining us today, and I hope you enjoyed our session. Thank you.
Reid
I hope you gained valuable insights from this discussion on how today's sellers can make a real difference, grow revenue, and close more deals. For more information on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 sales deployment to more than 81,000 professionals at EY and how we bring our experience and insights to our clients, visit ey.com.
