Collaboration As A Team Optimizer

Successful salespeople are by nature outgoing, entrepreneurial, ambitious, self-reliant and fiercely independent, to name a few.  These are the same qualities that also seem to alienate salespeople, either by chance or by choice, from their team members and colleagues.  Salespeople are the driving force behind a company’s success but companies still need to realize the necessity and value of team collaboration throughout the entire organization.  Salespeople need collaboration tools for enhanced customer interaction but that also allow them to be independent and mobile while staying connected to their organization.

E. Brent Kelly, a Senior Analyst and Partner at Wainhouse Research, outlines three primary contributors to sales force optimization:

• Reducing travel while at the same time increasing the frequency and quality of customer interactions
• Accelerating performance by finding  the right people anytime and anywhere within the organization
• Connecting account managers and salespeople instantly with relevant content independent of the media type (text, talk, video)

Collaboration tools such as web, audio and video conferencing, IM and presence, and unified messaging are the means by which organizations can optimize these three key areas and improve sales performance and the company’s overall success.  It is one thing to implement these tools, but it is another thing to actually have salespeople use them.  Therefore, it is also important for team collaboration tools to support the independence and mobility that characterizes the life of the salesperson.

With all the collaboration solutions flooding today’s market, the challenge is finding a product that can be evaluated, purchased, deployed and consumed by non-technical people within an organization but most importantly, once deployed, provides an amazingly powerful collaboration experience for all users across multiple devices.

We welcome your comments and would like to know what you think is the most important tool for a successful sales force.

Written by Bob Barnes