Collaboration spaces in Copilot for Sales
Collaboration spaces exist in both the physical and the digital world. In the physical world, a collaboration space might be a conference room or office where sellers engage with their customers. In the digital world, a collaboration space is a virtual meeting room where sellers engage with their customers using apps such as Microsoft Teams or Outlook. Digital collaboration workspaces have grown more popular over the past few years, but they can be challenging to set up to maximize sellers' productivity. Ideally, sellers can quickly create teams and channels with the right people and the right information that's organized in an efficient, predictable manner. In practice, however, information is often fragmented, spread across multiple Teams channels, and hard to discover. A better way to address this challenge is to use sales templates to create a collaboration space in Teams. Sales templates bring together the right members, contextual data, and productivity apps to boost group collaboration in Teams.
Sales templates come prepackaged with capabilities that jump-start organized and efficient collaboration. By using sales templates to create a collaboration space, sellers can focus on engaging with customers and driving business outcomes, rather than spending time organizing and searching for information.
What is a sales template?
A sales template streamlines setting up a team and channels in Microsoft Teams that are linked to your customer relationship management (CRM) system for easy access to business data in the flow of work. Templates come with predefined channels and pinned apps. You can create a collaboration space using either an account team template or a deal room template.
Account team template
An account team template is applied at the team level and is linked to a CRM account. It comes with two channels, General and Shared. The General channel is designed for collaboration with people inside your organization. The Shared channel is for collaboration with people outside your organization, such as customers. Apps such as OneNote and Files with starter folders, and links to CRM storage locations, are pinned to boost your sales team's productivity.
Deal room template
A deal room template is applied at the channel level and is linked to a CRM opportunity. We recommend that you create opportunity channels under the team that's linked to the parent account. If the parent account isn't linked to a team, create and link one so that your sellers can collaborate on opportunities. The opportunity channel is for collaboration with people inside your organization. You have the option to create a separate shared channel to collaborate with people outside your organization. Apps such as OneNote and Files with starter folders, and links to CRM storage locations, are pinned to boost your sales team's productivity.
Prerequisites to use collaboration spaces
- You must have a Dynamics 365 or Salesforce CRM account.
- You must have a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license. Learn about the license requirements for Copilot for Sales.
- You must have the Copilot for Sales add-in for Outlook installed. If you don't have it, ask your administrator to install it for you.
- Before you can add customers to shared channels using their federated identity, make sure that your tenant administrator has turned on shared channels in Teams.