Email is the lifeline of modern business and one of the main tools we use daily in our personal and professional lives to help us communicate. But, let’s be honest; email is no longer helping us communicate. You may have noticed that email lacks a team element and fosters a space around the individual. The privacy that email enables hinders the ability for a team to tap in and access important client-related communications and creates a dysfunctional team. This growing problem with our technology isn’t isolated to email - it also occurs within our customer relationship management systems (CRMs).
Like email, saless are meant to be used by teams to build and manage customer relationships. However, these tools that are intended to facilitate the collaboration within a team are most often used as personal tools, and the ‘’team’’ element ends up lacking or nonexistent. With the lack of transparency and access to archived client-related communication within saless, building client relationships amongst the team is limited, and relies solely on human entry. But imagine how efficient your team could be if transparency and client communication were attainable. If your sales and your email were synced and shared across your team, the problems of transparency and lack of team communication by both email and sales would disappear.
Today, the technology is available, and it holds the key to the modern inbox. It creates a unified front that integrates your sales with your email to give your team complete visibility into the inner workings of your client relationships.
A truly synchronized sales with email integration eliminates the need for manual labor. Imagine this scenario: It’s Friday afternoon, and you’re closing up a three-day conference where you’ve met hundreds of people and handed out your business card to countless leads. It’s been so hectic at your booth that you barely had a chance to look at your phone. When you finally take it out, you notice it's blown up with leads. It’s truly been a successful event, and you couldn’t be more thrilled. But before you can celebrate your success and start contacting your leads, you have to manually input all your leads into your sales. If only you had a system that would automatically do that for you, you could avoid having to remember to do it later, and you could start contacting your leads immediately, instead of wasting precious time on administrative work. Your sales would simplify your life instead of complicating it.
A sales platform that is synced to your address book and works on mobile devices could store and update your client contact details automatically. It could provide you and your team with a synchronized database of clients, immediately. So when you receive an email from a new contact, they would be added to your sales instantly. Or, if a new person from an already existing client contacted you, your sales would recognize the domain and would add the new contact under the matching company profile. No more waiting until you're back in the office to update your leads - your email will do it for you.
It’s not just about making sure your email and sales are synced; it’s also about making sure your sales aids in organizational transparency. Unless you’re living under a rock, your team is probably thinking about or has tried to establish company-wide transparency. You know the scenario - the let’s try to CC or BCC everyone on every piece of communication, ever. If you’ve tried this approach, you know very well that it does not work. Soon after implementation, you probably will start to notice an inundation of emails that simply do not pertain to you. The effectiveness of the CC and BCC will inevitably start to decline with each consecutive email, as people within your organization will not be able to pinpoint their own relevance within the email chain. And the chance for human error is rampant. Someone is bound to be left out of the conversation, either by forgetting to put them in the original chain or by accidentally not replying all. The transparency becomes compromised, and a system intended to aid and simplify consequently creates chaos.
Say goodbye to CC and BCC for good - and say hello to a system that gives you instant, company-wide transparency. Now you won’t have to worry if one of your team members is on vacation or on maternity leave; you can have a shared client email that archives all client-related communication, and allows for easily searchable insight into what has been communicated to the client. You can continue using email exactly the way you do, and automatically have all client-related communication stored and shared amongst your team. Your sales will be easily searchable for any client-related communication, making it easy for your entire team to stay informed, be proactive, and lend a helping hand where possible.
A shared and searchable inbox also relieves one of the most common problems organizations face - the micromanager. No one really wants to be a micromanager, but what are you supposed to do? You need to know what your team is doing and what needs to get done. As a manager, your priority above all is to make sure your ducks are in a row. Unfortunately, the more you harass your team, the more resentment they have towards you, and the more you start to feel the boiling tension among your staff. They do not feel trusted or respected, and the work environment is awful. That’s when you start to panic, and spend all your time on your team, leaving your own work untouched. This is an unsustainable environment, and you need something that can help you hold your team accountable and give you the visibility to know what is happening.
Let go of the micromanager within. With the right technology, you can have the overview and visibility you need to hold your team accountable, manage daily activities, assign work, and generate necessary reports. A sales that is integrated with your email and gives you the tools and task board you need to know what is going on with your staff will give you the ability to hold the team accountable for the work they should be doing and allow you to focus on your own work. As Head of Business Development, you can cut out the vague conversations with your team (“I think I said this” or “Oh yeah, they gave me a verbal”) by pointing to specific emails to praise or to suggest improvement.
When you get rid of the micromanager, you can finally create a united front. Unify your displaced team by adopting a shared email that liberates all important client-related communications from individual inboxes and fosters a collaborative environment. With a shared email, you do not have to worry about a proper handover when your colleagues are out of the office. All client-related communications are archived and stored, and easily accessible. It means that your team can finally establish real relationships with clients, because they are informed of all pertinent content. Since all communication is easily searchable, it removes the disconnect between what different people communicate to the clients, and it establishes one unified voice. Collaboration becomes innate, and team efficiency becomes prominent. Facilitate the way your team works as a team, and adopt a sales that was built for relationships.
Whatever you do, do not assume that all sales email syncs work the same way. Many saless will advertise the fact that they integrate with email, but in reality it’s not a smooth integration. You may have to add something to the BCC line, and of course, if you forget to add it in, then that particular chain of communication does not get added to your sales. Also, make sure that it is a two-way sync; this automates much of what you normally have to do manually. Lastly, remember that your sales email sync should do more than just capture email. It should provide you with an easy solution to automatically input your new contacts, capture your meetings and sync with your Google Apps (versus just Gmail) or Office365 (versus just Mail). In the end, make sure your sales makes your life easier.
