What’s a great Sales team without the right set of collaboration tools! Nothing. From our various SalesTech interviews with the CIOs, CEOs, and CMOs, we have inferred that a great Sales team relies on a variety of MarTech, SalesTech and Customer Support tools to focus on their key activities. While they extensively depend on CRMs, Email Marketing, Customer Analytics, and Chat platforms to build relationships and close deals, only a handful of teams actually divulge about what collaboration tools and platforms they use for internal communications and messaging. Reason – that’s their secret recipe.
If you are sick of falling behind the Sales pipeline or losing your hand in the Sales deals due to lack of collaboration within your Sales teams, you ought to re-look into your current communications channels.
To help Sales teams of newly-formed start-ups, we decided to look into some of the best collaboration tools that can help your internal communications and workflow integration across various locations.
RingCentral Glip and Trello
RingCentral Glip is a great internal messaging and file sharing platform for any Sales team. It allows a trusted internal employee experience to users that can be controlled centrally by one or more than one admins.
RingCentral Trello, on the other hand, is a workflow management tool that is more of a deck with a card-sharing interface. Each Sales rep could add a card and allow other reps to see where the Sales process is heading.
For those Sales teams that are not willing to experiment too much with high-end Collaboration tools, RingCentral Glip and Trello are great starting points. It integrates with over 50 other technology platforms, including Salesforce, Asana, Zapier, Google Drive, Dropbox, Zendesk, MailChimp, Heroku, and Marketo, just to name a few!
PROS
- Free version available for desktop up to a limited number of monthly users. Paid versions available at less than $10 per user per month
- Mobile Glip and Trello versions available in the Google Play Store.
- Extensive features include RingCentral Video sharing, file-sharing, and drag-and-drop collaboration
- UI UX Experience is good with features like GIF, and Emojis available for fun-collaboration
- Excellent tech-support and extended customer service
CONS
- The dashboard might feel a bit sluggish at times.
- Mobile app experience for both platforms could be improved given modern-day CX standards.
Zendesk Sunshine Conversations
Smooch’s acquisition followed by Zendesk’s integration with WhatsApp has spelled new excitement in the Sales Collaboration ecosystem.
Zendesk Sunshine Conversations is a unique collaboration tool that can be used for both internal and external messaging and supporting activities. It is packaged as part of Zendesk Sunshine, an open CRM platform. Built to deliver an enriching messaging experience natively integrated with website and mobile, Sunshine Conversations is already powering communications for some of the world’s leading brands.
Earlier called the Smooch before it was acquired by the company, Zendesk Sunshine Conversation allows the Sales teams to build interactive experiences for conversational businesses within and outside their company.
PROS
- Pinnacle of AI-based chat experience
- Free trial for 14 days with 500 conversations
- Embeddable chat applications and features for iOS, Android and the web
- Universal channel access
- Omnichannel collaboration experiences
CONS
Nothing that we could point now.
Slack
A fun app for all-in-one enterprise communication, Slack is regularly featured among the leading collaboration tools. Sales teams rely on Slack collaboration for instant communications across channels, apps, and services. According to independent research in 2017, Sales teams using Slack for collaboration have experienced a 25% increase in potential deals won per year per Sales team member.
PROS
- Best UI UX for new Sales teams
- Slack has mastered the art of the Subscription Economy. It offers Slack collaboration at a price customized to size, scale, and business needs.
- External collaboration with partners, customers, and individuals outside the Slack community possible
- Best-in-class security assured with reporting and analytics
- Automated workflow for anniversaries, Sales deal closures, transactions, and achievements shared with Community and Account Managers
- Reduce noise in the group with specific mutes, DNDs and other interesting features that Managers can administer to stay make relevant conversations stick out.
CONS
- Complex workflow can be managed but needs extensive training. The Slack customer support team can help with further collaboration.
Microsoft Teams
Earlier this year, we weren’t surprised at all when Microsoft confirmed about phasing out Slack for Business with Microsoft Teams. The core of business decision-making still involves extensive collaboration between Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams. That’s where Microsoft Teams expands on the capabilities in Skype for Business Online.
Working within Microsoft 365 provides business groups with a unique level of comfort. Most people that I have worked with prefer to leverage every app that Microsoft 365 offers. It includes the Teams. It provides an extensive list of chatbot-based features including file-sharing, screen-sharing, video and meeting-recording. Sales teams can significantly benefit from Teams by virtue of seamless collaboration between Email, OneDrive, SharePoint, Planner, Yammer, and more Office 365 services.
Trivia: Microsoft plans to support the Skype for Business Online and client through the July 31, 2021 retirement date.
PROS
- Demo to get you started — it was fun!!!
- Pricing suits business needs. Just go for the one that you think will help you make Sales teams more enterprising in their activities.
- 140+ App integrations — highest in this use case scenario
- Automatic updates to all features
- Extensive security and enhanced IT management services
- Global availability in 40+ international languages — Microsoft also thinks local for sure.
CONS
If you are facing any, let us know!!!
Workplace by Facebook
Social media messaging styles can disrupt B2B ecosystems. That’s the exact idea behind the launching of Workplace by Facebook. For the millennial workforce, Workplace provides a fun-to-chat interface that also comes with relatively high-end integration to make Sales messaging easier.
The pricing is competitive and almost fits the daily Sales goals of any mid-sized and large enterprise. It has nearly 30,000 customers and as many connected workplaces working on Facebook-backed collaboration platform.
Genesys Pure Cloud
Genesys Sales Engagement platform runs on one undiluted mission – save time for all the salespeople. A Contact Center for omnichannel communications, Genesys Pure Cloud allows Sales reps to handle all assisted consumer interactions through contextual communications and optimized experiences.
Genesys customers use the contact center for Sales process to gain instant access to customer contact profiles, current case information and interaction journey history, including notes—as well as other business systems, knowledge bases and standard response libraries.
Small companies can lay their hands on AI and Machine Learning applications for their Omnichannel communications. Genesys’ AI applications for customer and employee journeys delivered through the PureCloud® and PureEngage Cloud™ are helping customers make instant sales pitch, save time in closing deals, optimize sales resources and costs.
Jive
Driven by the mission to transform every company, every department into an ideal connected workplace of the future, Jive by Aurea finds an automatic listing in our collaboration tools review. Marked by a compelling user dashboard and task management tools for Sales teams, Jive users find themselves work cohesively at remote and colocation desks. Top-end features include working with People Directory, Social Networking to find your peers and partners, Sales teams would find it “100% frictionless” in messaging and meeting online.
PROS
- Simplified IT collaboration with ready-made integrations for Box, Gmail, Microsoft Office, and Salesforce users.
- Solutions extend to Corporate Communications, Intranet, and Enterprise Social Network
- Sales teams can effectively collaborate through Intelligent Recommendations, Search Intelligence, and Ideation – a novel content-based innovation for those reps that don’t want to spend too much time sharing their Voice in teams.
CONS
It might get trickier for small-sized companies that don’t have an experienced IT manager to handle challenges.
The Future of Salesforce Messaging
There are tons of collaboration tools and services available for Sales teams. However, only a handful have actually managed to deliver on what they promise. By 2024, 97% of the workplace collaboration tools would be either chat or mobile-app based — which means, the collaboration tools that we reviewed here already have a headstart in the ecosystem.
If you are working on a collaboration platform for your Sales team, or have a SalesTech product that can improve communication within teams, share your story with us!
