The importance of team collaboration
In order for a business to operate smoothly, all departments of the company have to cooperate well. Management of sales departments is a challenge for all companies regardless of their scale. According to recent studies, salespeople working as a team usually achieve greater results. But when managers in the sales department behave more like individuals instead of cooperating, this may lead to reduced customer retention gauge, increased customer attrition, and other sad consequences for the business. Fortunately, such situation can be resolved by means of the CRM solution and its integrated tools of team collaboration.
Available sales collaboration tools
The sales representatives in the company need to have a convenient system for sharing information without hindrance. Due to CRM solutions out-of-the-box management is possible and absolute control over internal communication in the company and customer journey is enabled. Sales team collaboration tools and advanced integrated tools are used to maintain such control.
Sales team collaboration benefits
1. Data collection and communication without boundaries
The sales processes nowadays are vastly influenced by social media. It is useful for the company to know more about its customers and their preferences. For this purpose, CRM applications track valuable information from Twitter, Facebook and other social networks. Besides, there are special integrated enterprise social networks (ESN) used by CRM vendors (such as Creatio) to strengthen the sales team collaboration. ESNs allow salespeople to cooperate, share useful data, review the news from various assignments and channels. Colleagues from several business units and divisions can discuss the tasks, deals and their progress irrespective of the sales rep’s actual location.
2. Easy monitoring and control of your business processes
Analytics is one of the most important components of the business process management. Sales collaboration tools allow you to assess your sales managers’ productivity. Advanced analytics provided by CRM solutions are able to apply a number of indicators for scanning through all the information available and make meaningful reports from such great data amounts. These reports will help to assess every sales manager’s growth on the basis of the amount of his constructive emails, calls, successful events, and other indices. Such monitoring and analysis of the sales pipeline will allow the co-workers to get a unified view of all sales activities and to prepare for further sales.
3. Coordinating the sales team’s workflow
Sales representatives have to effectively cooperate. With the planning tools of the CRM solution in hand, it is convenient to create individual tasks and schedule group meetings with links to certain documents or contacts. And the sales representatives will get calendar notifications. In addition, the calendar can be synchronized with Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendar.
4. Educating new salespeople in the team
With sales collaboration tools the new sales managers will be quickly engaged into the workflow and fit into the team. They will have access to a knowledge base and vast information volumes, including recommendations on strategies and productive sales techniques, FAQs, presentations, document templates, etc. This will provide productive time-management of the employees and their total focus on the sales instead of solving minor issues.