Understanding the Key Performance Indicators that Show the Benefits of Copilot for Sales
Sales move quickly, as your team is constantly under pressure to close deals, nurture relationships, and hit targets to drive success.
A common issue is sellers are too often bogged down by administrative tasks that distract them from high-value activities. While automation has been a big part of Microsoft technologies over the past few years, AI and Microsoft Copilot are taking that to the next level.
Copilot for Sales allows your team to automate routine workflows, streamline client communications, and keep critical data up to date in your system. This enhanced automation frees your team up to focus on building relationships and driving revenue.
Why Tracking AI and Copilot Success in Your Sales Processes is Vital
In this blog, we’ll explore how AI enhances efficiency in Dynamics 365 Sales, the key performance indicators (KPIs) that measure its impact, and the ideal balance between AI-driven automation and human expertise. Through real-world scenarios, we’ll show how AI accelerates routine tasks, delivers measurable results, and helps sales teams maximize their potential.
AI is reshaping sales, but one of its most immediate and impactful contributions is efficiency. By reducing administrative work, sales professionals can reclaim their time for revenue-generating activities. Let’s look at how AI makes this possible.
Efficiency Gains with AI
Sales professionals have long struggled with the burden of administrative work, spending valuable time on tasks that don’t directly drive revenue. 79% of sellers report they spend most of their time on administrative or “non-selling” activities. Copilot for Sales is finally providing a real solution to this long-standing challenge.
Copilot helps reduce the time spent on manual tasks, allowing sellers to focus on what truly matters—strong relationships and closing deals. Instead of being bogged down with CRM updates, generating reports, or sifting through emails, sales teams can use AI to automate these processes, freeing them up for higher-value activities.
Reducing Admin Work with AI
One of the biggest frustrations for sellers has always been the time spent on tasks like:
- Data entry and CRM updates: AI can automatically capture and input relevant data, reducing manual effort.
- Reporting: Instead of spending hours generating reports, AI can provide real-time insights and dashboards.
- Internal meetings: AI-powered summaries and automated follow-ups can reduce unnecessary meeting time.
- Order processing: AI can streamline order management, ensuring accuracy and efficiency.
- Email management: Copilot can draft responses, categorize emails, and highlight key information.
- Paperwork (like RFPs): AI can assist with document creation and completion, cutting down on administrative burdens.
Shifting Focus to Revenue-Generating Activities
By automating administrative burdens, AI doesn’t just save time—it creates opportunities. With these routine tasks off their plate, sales professionals can shift their energy toward activities that directly impact revenue, such as:
- Prospecting and qualifying leads: AI helps identify high-potential leads and prioritize outreach.
- Customer relationships: More time to engage with prospects and build stronger connections.
- In-depth discovery: Sellers can spend more time understanding customer pain points and crafting tailored solutions.
- Presenting quality solutions: AI-driven insights help sales teams deliver more relevant and impactful presentations.
- Strategic thinking: With fewer distractions, sellers can focus on big-picture sales strategies.
AI-driven efficiency is just the beginning. Organizations must strike the right balance between AI automation and human expertise. Let’s explore where AI excels—and where human intuition remains irreplaceable.
AI and People: A Powerful Partnership
AI is at its best when it takes on the tasks that computers naturally excel at—analyzing data, automating workflows, and providing insights—while leaving the strategic, creative, and relationship-driven work to people. When organizations strike the right balance between AI-driven efficiency and human expertise, sales teams become more effective, not just more automated.
What AI Does Best
Microsoft Copilot can handle the heavy lifting with data processing and routine tasks, helping sellers work smarter and faster. It is important to stay focused on what AI is best suited for:
- Data analysis: Quickly synthesizing large amounts of information to identify trends and insights.
- Document search and retrieval: Finding relevant files in seconds so sales teams can respond to prospects with the right information at the right time.
- Predictive analytics: Using historical data to anticipate customer needs and recommend next steps.
- Automation of repetitive tasks: Handling CRM updates, scheduling, and email sorting to reduce administrative burden.
- Image and speech recognition: Transcribing meetings and identifying key action items.
- Objective decision-making: Providing data-driven recommendations to inform strategy.
What People Do Best
While AI can streamline workflows, it can't replace the human skills that drive meaningful sales conversations and strategic decision-making. It is also critical to value what sales professionals excel at:
- Emotional intelligence: Understanding customer concerns, motivations, and pain points.
- Creativity: Crafting compelling pitches and thinking beyond standard solutions.
- Strategic problem-solving: Navigating complex deals and adapting to challenges.
- Reading social cues: Adjusting messaging and approach based on verbal and nonverbal signals.
- Building interpersonal relationships: Establishing trust and rapport with prospects and customers.
- Nuanced decision-making: Factoring in data and human elements when making business decisions.
The most effective sales teams leverage AI without losing their human edge. But how do we measure AI’s real impact? The key isn’t changing what we track, it’s optimizing how we achieve those goals. Let’s dive into the KPIs that define success and how AI accelerates them.
AI Enhances Sales KPIs—It Doesn’t Change Them
Businesses have always measured sales success with KPIs like revenue growth, customer engagement, and deal velocity. It is important to note that AI doesn’t change these fundamental goals—it simply provides you with smarter and more efficient ways to achieve them.
Now, let’s see these concepts in action. Here are two real-world sales scenarios illustrating how Microsoft Copilot helps teams work smarter, close deals faster, and drive results.
Scenario 1: Capturing More Customer Contacts with AI
Building deeper relationships with customers starts with having the right contacts. More complete contact data strengthens sales and marketing efforts, leading to better engagement and new revenue opportunities. However, manually adding contacts is time-consuming, and sales teams often skip this step. AI-powered tools like Microsoft Copilot streamline the process, ensuring contacts are captured effortlessly.
Scenario 1 Walkthrough:
Imagine a salesperson receiving an email from a new contact at a customer’s organization. Instead of manually opening Dynamics 365, searching for the company, and adding the contact, AI automatically suggests capturing the new contact’s details—name, title, and company—directly from Outlook. With one click, the salesperson saves it in Dynamics, ensuring the CRM remains accurate without extra effort.
This AI-driven process goes beyond efficiency—it captures data that otherwise would have been lost. Sales teams no longer need to manually enter every new contact, ensuring richer customer insights and overall business value.
Business Value:
- Improved revenue predictability: More accurate data leads to better forecasting and increased revenue per opportunity.
- Enhanced contact data completeness: AI ensures you can capture critical customer details, preventing data loss.
- More accurate pipeline management: Up-to-date contact records provide better visibility into opportunities and sales performance.
Scenario 2: Working Smarter and Closing Deals Faster
Sales teams need quick access to the information to prioritize deals effectively. AI-driven insights help reps focus on high-impact opportunities, reduce bottlenecks, and accelerate the sales cycle.
Scenario 2 Walkthrough:
Picture a salesperson being able to start their day by asking Copilot to organize their pipeline by the estimated close date, instantly revealing which deals need attention. AI highlights hot leads, ensuring no potential revenue is overlooked.
For an RFP, the salesperson uploads the document into Copilot. The tool automatically matches requirements to available products, streamlining the response process. This allows them to refine rather than build from scratch—saving time and uncovering upsell opportunities.
AI’s impact extends beyond individual tasks—it reshapes sales strategy. By embedding AI into workflows, sales teams can align every action with measurable business outcomes, such as:
Business Value:
- Improved revenue per opportunity: Increased cross-sell, upsell, and optimized deal prioritization.
- Focus on revenue-generating activities: Less time spent on admin, more time closing deals.
AI isn’t just a time-saver—it’s a strategic enabler. By aligning AI with sales goals and KPIs, organizations can drive success with precision and efficiency. Here’s how AI strengthens the connection between strategy and execution.
Aligning AI with Sales Goals and KPIs
Sales goals are rooted in business needs and evolve based on market conditions, customer behavior, and company objectives. AI enhances this process by offering deep insights through market segmentation, trend analysis, forecasting, and product performance tracking. With AI’s analytical power, sales teams can set smarter, data-driven goals that adapt to real-time conditions.
While sales goals define what success looks like, KPIs measure the actions that lead to that success. AI plays an active role in ensuring these actions happen—automating data entry, scheduling follow-ups, generating proposals, and even crafting AI-driven responses. Instead of just offering insights, AI acts as an agent, assisting sales teams in executing tasks more efficiently.
AI bridges the gap between strategy and execution, helping sales teams achieve goals faster. But success isn’t just about automation—it’s about aligning AI with people, processes, and technology. Let’s break down this ultimate analytical trifecta.
The People, Processes, and Technology of AI: The Ultimate Analytical Trifecta
AI’s true power in sales lies in the intersection of people, processes, and technology. A well-balanced approach ensures that AI enhances—not replaces—human expertise while reinforcing structured, measurable sales processes.
People: AI as a Sales Enabler
Sales success starts with people. AI should support and elevate each role, not disrupt it.
- Managers: Use AI for coaching insights, performance analysis, and identifying trends in team productivity.
- Sellers: AI assists with follow-ups, provides conversation insights, and reduces admin work so reps can focus on relationships.
- Sales Operations: AI-driven sales agents streamline processes like lead qualification and CRM updates, ensuring efficiency.
- Collaboration Matters: Engage with coworkers to understand what will help them the most—AI thrives when tailored to real user needs.
Process: Aligning AI with Sales KPIs
Having a strong process is key to consistently measuring success. AI optimizes workflows by reducing bottlenecks and automating key steps.
- Trigger-Based Automation: Use AI at critical points—lead qualification, deal progression, and follow-up reminders—to keep the pipeline moving.
- Stage Gates & Bottlenecks: Identify slow points in your sales process (e.g., RFP creation, approvals) and apply AI to streamline them.
- Consistency in Measurement: A structured process enables more accurate KPI tracking, helping teams refine strategies based on real data.
Technology: Choosing AI-Driven Tools
The right technology investments ensure AI enhances—not complicates—sales operations.
- AI-Embedded Tools: Copilot and other AI-powered solutions provide built-in intelligence to accelerate workflows.
- Customization for Impact: Align AI automation with your organization’s goals and measurable KPIs.
- Data Hygiene is Key: AI is only as good as the data it processes. Maintaining clean, up-to-date records ensures maximum effectiveness.
By leveraging AI across people, processes, and technology, sales teams can work smarter, close deals faster, and drive measurable success. The foundation is set—now it’s time to take action.
Talk to the Stoneridge Experts Today to Find Out How Copilot for Sales Can Improve Your Business
Copilot for Sales has already proven to save time for sellers by automating workflows and eliminating manual data entry. Sellers have used that time to focus their efforts on winning deals and driving revenue.
The Stoneridge team has tremendous experience helping clients win with Copilot for Sales. Talk to us today to help your sales team unlock a new level of efficiency.
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