KPN amplifies marketing and sales productivity with Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales

Rotterdam-based Royal KPN N.V. (KPN) has been a leading telecom and ICT services provider in the Netherlands since 1881. Today, it’s the digital highway of the Netherlands, offering a wide range of services to its customers. KPN Business focuses on supporting its customers in digitalisation by delivering reliable and innovative solutions in telecommunications, IT, cybersecurity, and network services.

As well as supporting its customers in digital transformation and innovation, it also continuously innovates and improves its business processes in its own digital transformation. This is why KPN in 2024 introduced Microsoft 365 Copilot across the KPN Business organization. 

KPN uses Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales with its Salesforce CRM and Microsoft 365 applications to simplify and accelerate lead generation, automate manual tasks, improve the quality of customer data, and ultimately create more winning sales proposals.

Bridging productivity apps and CRM data

KPN used Microsoft 365 productivity apps and Salesforce CRM to create customer presentations, build and run marketing campaigns, capture leads from downloads, webinars, and other events, and manage a sales cycle that can range from four to nine months. The solution worked well but involved a lot of manual effort. KPN wanted a tool that could help its marketing and sales teams be more productive with a streamlined process that saved time on routine tasks and improved lead quality to increase new business opportunities.

Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales was the natural choice. It bridges the gap between productivity apps and CRM data, seamlessly integrating with Salesforce, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams to enrich customer interactions with sales-specific insights and actions. 

In January 2024, KPN launched a proof-of-concept project with 50 marketing and sales employees. The project focused on using Copilot for Sales to support key sales processes such as lead qualification and deal intelligence after initial contact with a prospective customer. As a subsidiary of KPN and being a Microsoft Solutions Partner, InSpark played a important role in supporting KPN in this introduction.

Empowering teams with Copilot for Sales

Copilot for Sales pulls together customer data in Salesforce CRM, communication data in Microsoft Graph, and data from other sources to provide insights in Outlook and Teams that help KPN’s marketing and sales teams understand customer requirements and context. “From the moment a customer contact becomes an opportunity, we link to that information in Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales, so we can see all relevant data to prepare for a conversation with the customer,” says Pierrette de Leeuw-Koumans, a member of KPN’s lead generation team.

As it turned out, integrating CRM data in Outlook and Teams to prepare for customer meetings was only the beginning. The project quickly grew to include supporting marketing and sales activities from lead generation to close, and just four months later, KPN expanded the pilot to 300 additional sales employees.

KPN’s marketing and sales teams now use Copilot for Sales in so many ways that it’s almost easier to talk about what it can’t do. Mostly what it does, however, is free them from work that they don’t always have time—and in some cases, the skills—to do on their own, empowering them to focus on what they do best.

Copilot for Sales helps employees draft proposals and rewrites technical material to make it easier to understand. “Copilot for Sales helps us write higher-quality drafts,” says Caspar Stuart, Sales Formula Manager at KPN. And with Copilot for Sales-drafted emails, employees can respond to customers more quickly, confident that their response is comprehensive, grammatically correct, and well-written—even when it’s in another language. “Dutch is our native language, so the translation capabilities in Copilot for Sales help me make sure everything is accurate once something is translated to a different language for a customer,” says Karin Beek-van Bergen, Sales Specialist at KPN. “That means I can send more professional emails without doing all that work on my own. Copilot for Sales just does it better.”

When an opportunity moves to the offer stage, Copilot for Sales makes it easier to customize a boilerplate for each customer. Beek-van Bergen explains, “When we create an offer, there is standardized information, but Copilot for Sales helps me craft bullet points that are specific to a customer.”

Copilot for Sales also summarizes key information in sales-related documents. Employees can quickly grasp the key points in a Request for Proposal (RFP), enhancing deal qualification and helping them answer a customer’s questions more efficiently. “We use Copilot for Sales as soon as we start preparing RFP responses,” says Wilco Van Schaik, Account Director at KPN. “It helps us quickly summarize and analyze RFPs, which are usually large documents with a lot of information.”

Van Schaik and his colleagues rely on Copilot for Sales summary cards in Outlook and Teams to get a quick overview of sales opportunities. Summary cards present key details at a glance, like customer contact, account status, deal value, and recent communications. “Copilot for Sales summary cards help me better prepare for meetings by centralizing all relevant emails and contacts,” Van Schaik says.

Copilot for Sales can save customer emails and meeting notes from Outlook and Teams directly to Salesforce. Employees no longer have to search through a voluminous email archive or chat history to refresh their memory before meeting with a customer. The information they need is easily available in their CRM.

Often, they don’t have to review emails and meeting notes at all. They can simply ask. “With Copilot for Sales, I can make better use of the customer data that’s already available,” says Van Schaik. “I have worked with one of our larger customers for nine years, and instead of searching through all my past offers, I can just ask Copilot for Sales the question and I get an answer immediately.”

Making more time available for customers 

Copilot for Sales automates previously manual tasks. Updating opportunities and entering meeting notes in Salesforce, for example, are now one-click actions. “Copilot for Sales saves me time on certain tasks,” Stuart confirms. “For example, I create a sales activity study from a list of questions in Excel, and that used to take four hours. With Copilot for Sales, I just click a button and it creates a form immediately, which saves me that four hours.”

The time savings there are obvious, but don’t overlook convenience in measuring efficiency improvements. Context-switching—opening multiple applications to perform an action—is a known drag on productivity. With Copilot for Sales, employees can easily share contacts, accounts, and opportunities from Salesforce directly in an email or Teams conversation, without having to open their CRM.

In a recent survey of 78 salespeople, KPN learned that Copilot for Sales saves each person an average of nearly two hours a week. They’re putting that time to work, contacting customers and working on offers. “Copilot for Sales gives us more time to put into writing better sales proposals, and it helps us respond to formal RFPs faster,” Beek-van Bergen says.

Improving data quality for more winning proposals 

Convenient access to customer data is useless if the data is incomplete, inaccurate, or out of date. Copilot for Sales makes it easy to ensure that KPN’s Salesforce CRM data is the highest quality possible. Accurately capturing and updating contact and other customer information is just a click away.

And Copilot for Sales enriches that data with up-to-date, relevant information from emails, meetings, and other interactions. “I can create richer conversations with my contacts because the quality of data is better, and that also helps us write higher-quality offers,” says Van Schaik. In fact, in an internal KPN survey, 69% of account managers said that the quality of their offers since they started using Copilot for Sales has improved their chances of winning deals.

Creating stronger customer relationships 

With richer, higher-quality data, KPN sales teams have more insight into each customer’s needs, and they’re using that information to create stronger relationships. “If an account manager comes to me with an opportunity but I don’t know anything about the customer, all I need to do is ask Copilot for Sales to tell me what data is in Salesforce CRM,” says Beek-van Bergen. “This gives me a much better understanding of that customer, so I know what areas to focus on during an engagement.” 

Leading by example with a trusted partner

By implementing Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales internally, KPN has not only enhanced its own sales productivity and operational efficiency but also demonstrated the true power of “practice what you preach.” As a pioneer in digital transformation, KPN leads by example, showing that innovation starts from within. This internal success is not just about KPN benefiting from Copilot for Sales—it’s also about KPN and its subsidiary InSpark bringing these proven benefits to customers.

As a trusted innovation IT partner, InSpark helps organizations adopt Copilot for Sales, guiding them through the implementation process and ensuring that they unlock the full potential of this powerful tool. In this it takes a hands-on approach, working closely with its customers to understand their unique needs and challenges and provide tailored solutions that optimize productivity, improve lead quality, and streamline sales operations.

KPN and InSpark are committed to helping their customers succeed with their digital transformations by sharing their expertise, firsthand experiences, and insights. Through their partnership, KPN and InSpark offer not only the tools for digital transformation but also the strategic guidance to navigate the future of sales with confidence. Together, KPN and InSpark are empowering also other organizations with Copilot for Sales, ensuring that they too, can experience the productivity gains and enhanced customer relationships that KPN has realized.

What’s next 

KPN is excited to explore even more ways that Copilot for Sales can enhance its marketing and sales efforts. “We’d like more proactive assistance, where the tool automatically suggests updates and offers reminders for tasks needing attention,” Stuart says. The company also wants to better integrate Copilot for Sales with other tools to combine insights from different platforms, continuing to improve the quality of its customer data in Salesforce CRM.

Stuart sums up KPN’s experience so far this way: “I use Copilot for Sales all the time in my daily work. I really can’t live without it. Even if I’m just posting a Teams message, I check with Copilot to make sure it’s written well. One of our salespeople even said he would be happy to pay for Copilot himself if we didn’t implement it in production. That’s how important it is to our teams.”