A typical sales organization has glass walls around each department, allowing each to gain insight but not always allowing for communication or collaboration. A winning organization knocks those walls down completely—with a CRM platform as the sales collaboration software to get the job done.
Companies and people are shifting towards digital solutions to simplify everyday life. Slack conversations are often more common than verbal conversations. Trello and Zoom combined have redefined project management entirely. People now use tech to gain every advantage they can, and CRMs are no exception.
Though often seen strictly as software that helps your sales team keep track of their deals, you can actually use CRMs as collaborative tools for an entire organization. Just as Slack or Zoom can unite teams and provide a collaborative playground, your sales CRM can do the same. And if your CRM allows your organization to communicate and collaborate more effectively, it will ultimately help you close more deals.
Sales collaboration software is a communication tool that allows team members to work together on projects. This type of software aims to streamline workflows and increase sales team productivity. The software also makes it easier to manage tasks and stay on top of deadlines.
Modern CRM systems, like Nutshell, offer an ideal solution for sales collaboration, packaged in an easy-to-use, all-in-one platform.
Why team collaboration boosts productivity and sales
KissFlow defines successful cross-functional team collaboration as “effective collaborative strategies that align with project goals so that employees can easily work with each other, even if they belong to different departments or domains.”
CRM software enables cross-functional collaboration by providing your teams with the tools they need to effectively do their jobs while allowing visibility into sales, reports, customer information, and communication histories.
Sales collaboration software eliminates silos
By knocking down the virtual walls around each department within an organization, a collaborative CRM can allow each team to gain previously inaccessible information. For example:
Your marketing team can see support team conversations with your customers and gain insight into pain points and successes you can address through blog content and email nurturing.
Your sales team can see which new leads have already engaged with your marketing team’s efforts so that they can direct their focus on their warmest leads.
Your executive team can keep an eye on all current, past, and forecasted sales, as well as on the daily activities of their teams.
Collaborative CRMs make the important stuff visible
Whether it’s customer profile information or year-over-year sales metrics, a collaborative CRM should allow visibility into all areas of your account and your business.
While most CRMs will also allow you to set up data viewing permissions and restrictions, anyone with access to your CRM must be able to see the information they need, whether it’s a support rep needing to check on previous communication between the company and a customer or a sales team manager needing to export sales reports for a recently launched product.
Speaking from personal experience at Nutshell, transparency is such a major key to business success. The more your team members understand your organization’s sales figures and client relationships, the more likely they are to surface ideas that can drive revenue for you in the future.
Sales collaboration CRMs let you tactically manage your communications
As mentioned above, collaborative CRMs provide visibility into the communication taking place between your teams and your customers, but they should also provide the tools for effective internal communication. Some examples of these tools could be:
Tagging and @-mentioning that trigger notifications for your colleagues
A centralized location to see all recent sales and activity within the CRM
The ability to change individual or team ownership over specific tasks, customers, and sales
A customizable sales process set-up that provides sellers with guidance throughout the pipeline
Spoiler alert:Nutshell has all these features, plus more!
How Nutshell CRM assists with team collaboration
So, how does the Nutshell CRM support team collaborate and assist your sales team in closing more deals? How does your marketing team effectively reach their audiences? What does your support team do to ensure it’s knowledgeable about previous customer interactions? And how does your management team handle new lead delegation and sales reporting?
Nutshell is the best platform for marketers who care about sales outcomes, sales teams who care about marketing outcomes, and management teams who understand that team collaboration is necessary to reach the goal that everyone cares about: revenue growth.
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Which CRM has the features you need?
Our interactive worksheet compares the benefits offered by Nutshell, your existing contact management solution, and any other CRMs you’re currently evaluating.
Here are a few ways Nutshell encourages shared outcomes.
Notifications
Nutshell provides over a dozen notification options for an action within the CRM. Whether you’re being reminded of a task nearing its due date, being alerted to new leads being added to the database, or being mentioned within another Nutshell user’s notes, Nutshell is designed to keep you informed when important things are happening.
The timeline
The Nutshell timeline (or dashboard timeline) is a real-time, up-to-date list of all actions and activities occurring within the entirety of your account. From newly created contacts and leads to every email sent or received between your company and a client to every note or activity logged, you will see it all is occurring right on the timeline.
The timeline can help you stay on top of what’s happening in your company, and you can use it to collaborate with your team, encourage your colleagues by leaving comments, respond to emails, and more—all right from the timeline.
Nutshell mobile apps
We recognize that not everyone remains glued to their desk all day, but everyone wants to stay connected and know what’s happening within their CRM. Our mobile apps for iPhone and Android provide your entire database, timeline, scheduled tasks and activities, synced emails, and sales metrics in the palm of your hand.
You can leave comments, @-mention colleagues, schedule and log activities, call contacts directly from the app, and more, all while on the go! Our mobile app also includes a built-in business card scanner to auto-create new contacts you meet at conventions, rallies, and out-n-about.
Dashboard cards
Designed specifically for seeing data at a glance, Nutshell’s dashboard cards are customizable for each Nutshell user. Whether it’s a list of leads or contacts, sales metrics for the past quarter, a summary of the current leads in your pipeline, or a measurement of your team’s sales and activity quotas, dashboard cards put the data you want front and center.
Nutshell dashboard cards
While a list card of all hot leads within the account may be the daily focus for a sales rep, a team manager may benefit more from seeing a team’s sales quota card, which indicates where the team is on their monthly sales goal, and a marketer may want to know where new business is coming from to focus on a new market through the utilization of a list card of new leads, segmented by source.
The notion of restrictions isn’t often associated with “collaboration,” but there’s a difference between responsible, effective collaboration and a chaotic free-for-all. Nutshell understands that it may be necessary for administrators and managers to permit or restrict what information is visible amongst their employees and teams.
Email blocklist
For this reason, Nutshell provides both a personal and account-wide email address blocklist. Nutshell prevents emails sent to or received from the email addresses on the blocklist from syncing into and being visible in Nutshell. The account-wide blocklist ensures emails from your organization’s lawyer or finance department don’t make it into your CRM, while you and your colleagues can use the personal blocklist to keep out emails from your bank, doctor, or mother.
Information visibility
You can also restrict contact and lead information visibility. You may have a selection of contacts who are vendors and partners with your organization. It may be necessary for your marketing and executive teams to have access to their information and stay in contact with them. But, it may not be essential for any other departments to have access to this information. Plus, you don’t want these contacts to get lost in the shuffle with the customers your sales and support teams should focus on.
Nutshell allows administrators to restrict selected non-administrators from viewing specific data through team member settings and ‘Admin only’ permission selections.
You can place teams and team members on three levels of permissions:
The employee can see all data in Nutshell (you would use this when someone is not an administrator but should still have access to any information on all of your companies, people, and leads)
The employee can see all data in their team (this setting is helpful for employees who need to work collaboratively on their projects but don’t want to be distracted by information that isn’t useful to their work)
The employee can see only their own data (you can add employees to this level when you need to keep everything private except the companies, people, or leads that these employees are working with)
Administrators within Nutshell have access to all data and settings. Non-administrators can create new contact and sales information but cannot access overall account set-up and settings.
Nutshell Campaigns
With the addition of our Nutshell Campaigns platform, we firmly believe that revenue growth is the shared goal at the intersection of marketing and sales. Nutshell Campaigns allows anyone with administrative permissions within your organization to simultaneously create and send beautifully designed outreach campaigns to thousands of contacts.
Anyone within your CRM can access Nutshell Campaigns engagement metrics and paint a clear picture of your contact’s engagement with your organization’s outreach. Engagement information can help direct your sales team toward warmer leads or inform your success teams of who’s most likely interested in a follow-up session or secondary service.
ONE TEAM. ONE TOOL.
Powerful email marketing, minus the headaches
Nutshell Campaigns plugs directly into your CRM data, so you can create highly targeted audience segments, track the impact of your emails in real-time, and manage all your communications out of a single tool. Get started for free!
A thorough sales process pipeline is one of the most critical components to ensure collaboration within Nutshell. With the correct setup and automation, team members from different departments can be informed of when the ball is in their court and what’s needed to get closer to closing a deal at all times.
App integrations
Integrating your team’s tech stack into one central system can make communication across teams far easier. Nutshell makes that possible, offering integrations with hundreds of apps, including Zapier, which facilitates almost any integration.
Bring your team’s essential apps, including communication, marketing, automation, calendar, lead generation, social, and others together through your CRM. Streamline your workflow and improve team collaboration, hassle-free.
Internal collaboration
Apart from integrating Slack, Teamwork, Wrike, and other collaborative tools, Nutshell includes native tools ideal for team collaboration. Your team members can stay in the loop with them and never miss an important message.
Organize and share customer data, tag colleagues, communicate via email and notes, and receive alerts through the Nutshell mobile app. Ensure you’re on top of everything your fellow teammates are busy with and when they need your input with Nutshell.
Reporting and analytics
With Nutshell’s advanced analytics and reporting capabilities, all team members can access the same accurate figures. They’ll have a clear overview of KPIs and metrics over any given period to share and discuss.
Team members can also use this data to track their performance, adapt sales tactics, and develop new strategies to improve their processes.
Automated tasks
Sales team collaboration is that much easier with automation in the mix. Nutshell delivers the latest in automated activities, ensuring essential tasks are completed without additional action required from the team.
This way, the workflow remains uninterrupted, and team members have more time to focus on sales-critical tasks. With everything happening on one CRM platform, this increased efficiency impacts the entire team and enhances the ability to collaborate effectively.
How to use Nutshell’s automated pipelines to close deals faster
Using Nutshell’s automated pipelines to expedite your sales cycle and garner more wins is easy if you follow this straightforward process.
Pipeline stages and task assignments
Nutshell’s pipelines comprise standardized milestones called “stages” that form the roadmap for closing a deal. Stage features include automated goals for lead progression, task lists, automated emails, and more.
Stages can also determine when leads change ownership between individuals and teams. You can create user assignment rules to assign leads to individuals or teams at any point in your sales process.
Assigning leads to specific users or teams ensures that your members know exactly which leads they’re responsible for and what tasks they need to complete to move the lead through the sales pipeline.
Automatic lead distribution
Distribution rules can be created to segment new and incoming leads into specific pipelines upon creation or to move existing leads to other pipelines based on their criteria.
Whether you’re manually creating your leads inside of Nutshell or receiving them from a web form on your company homepage, Nutshell will distribute them to the correct pipeline, getting them into the hands of the right team members.
For example, maybe your leads are collected through a web form that potential customers can fill out on your homepage. Your web form is integrated with your Nutshell account, and your leads funnel into your pipeline and are auto-assigned to your sales team. (Psst!—We can round-robin those new leads for you!)
Sales and marketing collaboration
After the sales team has reached out to all prospects by phone and email and has established which leads are really warm and interested, it may be time to assign the leads to your marketing team.
Your marketing team takes your engaged lead list and sends them your newest product catalog. As soon as your team sends the outreach emails, the leads who’ve received the catalog are assigned back to the sales team, who Nutshell notifies, and swoops back in to close the deals!
Here’s the scenario played out in a Nutshell pipeline!
Customer relationship nurturing
Now that these leads are actual customers, you’ll want to ensure you stay connected with them, right? Nutshell’s follow-through pipelines provide a secondary roadmap to manage leads after closing the deal.
In the follow-through pipeline, tasks can again be auto-assigned so your success teams can follow up with and continue to nurture the relationship with won leads. You can put a notification in place for your sales team to set up a re-engagement call with lost leads who may not have been ready to buy at the time
A follow-through pipeline to illustrate this example!
Whether the intention of the process is for a quick sale of a retail product or relationship building for long-term subscribers, Nutshell can assist in ensuring your teams are aware of every sale and its current position in your process, as well as team members’ individual responsibilities to the sale.
With a collaborative CRM, your teams will not only have the tools they need to work more effectively together, but you’ll be able to see the proof of their efforts within the same system.
Give Nutshell a try and discover why sales and marketing teams across the globe rate our CRM as one of the best sales collaboration software platforms. Start your 14-day free trial today—it’s obligation-free, and no credit card is required.
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