Sales Collaboration: Your Secret Weapon for Business Success

What is Sales Collaboration and why does it matter to your business?

Sales Collaboration is a business technique that integrates your sales representatives with the other parts of your business, especially your marketing department.  In general, a higher degree of understanding and cooperation between departments can improve your overall success in promoting your products and services.

Sales Collaboration Tools and Techniques

Depending on the size and scope of your business operations, different tools and techniques may be more appropriate for creating sales collaboration throughout your company.  Therefore, it’s important to recognize that, while not all techniques listed below may be suitable for your situation, many of them may be.

One of the best ways to engage in Sales Collaboration is to have regular communications between your sales and marketing personnel.  In the past this was done by having scheduled meetings between the two groups.  However, meetings often had a negative stigma because of their tendency to be less than optimally productive, especially when there were other things that the sales and marketing employees could be doing, such as actually going out and marketing the products instead of simply talking it.  To help keep things on track, meetings needed to be focused and controlled which did not promote creative thinking.  Now there are newer internal social media tools which can be utilized to promote communication.  This includes such things as internal email and internal social media programs which allow for real-time chat streams which are immediate, and accessible to multiple people and recorded for future retrieval.

Another current tool for sales collaboration is customer relationship management (CRM) software.  CRM software allows the company to acquire and track data on customer interactions that allows various departments, such as sales, marketing, customer service, research and development, shipping, finance and administration each do their job better.

Regardless of the technical tools used, the greatest tool is to build relationships at multiple levels within and between departments.  Rather than having only the managers communicate with each other on a regular basis, employees at all levels should be encouraged to exchange ideas and work with each other, even between different departments, to achieve true collaboration.  When this happens, events and activities can be analyzed from multiple points of view and many major problems can be addressed before they even occur.

Putting the Tools and Techniques into Practice

Sales Collaboration is only effective when properly utilized; and putting it into practice within your own company can be difficult to do.  It’s important to emphasize that rather than your departments giving power up to another department who will be making the decisions for them, Sales Collaboration is about working together and helping each other by breaking down the isolated silos of information which leads to exchanging information and providing timely, useful feedback on the plans and ideas that each department has.  The end result of this is a sales and marketing program that is more efficient, better able to change things that need to be changed, and one of the biggest driving forces for your business’ success.

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