Successful teamwork is behind every successful business, big and small. But how can a modern business, relying on a mixture of full-time employees, contractors and remote staff encourage a culture of team work? The new breed of All-in-One CRM platforms may well just hold the answer.
The success of your company lies with your employees. By working as a team your business can reach great heights and make a measurable impact in your industry. As a business owner it is not only important to hire the right talent, but you must facilitate collaboration across your team.
Henry Ford once said,
Coming together is a beginning.
Keeping together is progress.
Working together is success.
One surefire way to keep the teamwork continuing and progressing throughout your organization is with CRM Software that is not just focused on managing customer relationships, but also managing employee relationships.
These all-in-one CRM platforms not only help you better manage your entire business, but also keep teams, divisions and remote offices working together for success. Here is how you can position your business to benefit from better collaboration.
1. Improved Communication
Your all-in-one CRM gives your employees, partners and customers one hub for all your ongoing communications to take place. By consolidating all conversations, your team is able to clearly discuss their needs with one another, refer to past conversations as a point of reference and not waste time discussing the same issues or topics already addressed.
By having all communication on record within the same platform, employees are able to spend less time sifting through email to find a conversation and more time achieving goals and solving problems.
Actionable advice:
- Use CRM-based email so all correspondence is kept in a central visible location to enable quicker customer response times.
- Encourage compliance to ensure all employee communication occurs through the CRM.
- Add an agenda item to team meetings to discuss whether topics are being effectively communicated within the CRM.
2. Transparent Accountability
Teamwork is achieved through complete transparency on how each individual plans to contribute to the overall team. An all-in-one CRM achieves this by offering clear visibility on each member’s role on a project or group of projects. With less time spent repeating project details and bickering over the ownership of each part, more time will be spent on executing on each person’s strengths and interests.
With an all-in-one CRM, the communication surrounding an entire project is visible for everyone within the company. This makes it much easier to identify any problem areas or a department or person that is excelling. Reward the true champions at your company and work with others to understand how problems can be resolved.
Actionable advice:
- Conduct quarterly audits to identify growth opportunities and problem areas. These are made easy with clear visibility of what team members work on what areas of the business.
- Setup the command structure per project from the beginning, using the CRM to communicate this and ensure everyone involved with the project is on the same page.
- Encourage transparency throughout all areas of the company by acknowledging the success of visible accountability. Highlight the employee benefits of knowing what campaigns are working and which aren’t.
3. Clarified Team Goals
When employees share similar goals, they are more likely to succeed due to the dedication of joint manpower and resources. If employees work in silos on their own with individual goals they are less likely to benefit the business as a whole. Individual goals are far less likely to have a tangible impact if they’re not supported by other goals within the company.
Using a CRM can help spur collaboration by clearly showing how the goals of the organization, department and individuals tie together. This will assist in identifying what needs to occur in order to achieve those key milestones. If your sales, project, operations, finance, support and management teams are all synced; they are far more likely to succeed in achieving the overall business goals.
Actionable advice:
- Set three, six and twelve month goals in your CRM for each department and for the organization as whole to outline the company’s trajectory.
- Attach attainable goals to each customer with a robust execution plan. Re-assess these benchmarks during and after the completion of a client engagement. Analyze the outcomes for future projects.
- Link each aspect of client projects with your organizational goals to act as a constant reminder to remain within the right scope of the project. Set alerts and triggers when goals are met or if the project is creeping away from the original parameters of the engagement.
Using WORKetc CRM to bring your teams together in the Cloud
- Integrate your email accounts, install the Outlook Add-on or the Gmail CRM Widget to ensure all (important!) customer emails are captured against a contact record.
- Encourage compliance between your team by book-marking each employee’s Activity History. Then simply review each employee’s history, keeping an eye out for poor-quality communication with your customers.
- Use the Team Discussion Tool and place the meeting agenda as the first item. Then, simply attach that discussion to a project, sales lead, support case or simply a client to keep a permanent record of everyone’s ideas and issues.
- Encourage transparency by including sales people as observers on a project or support people as contributors on key customer accounts.