How Quip makes sales teams more agile: Part 1
For many companies, the biggest success factor is how well its sales team can execute. And sales people have a tough job with unique challenges. They travel frequently to meet with prospects and customers, attend industry events, and represent their companies at conferences and trade shows. Most of their work happens away from the office, and away from their teammates — so how can these road warriors keep deals moving, information flowing, and team camaraderie solid?
Sales leaders should focus on agility
Sales teams work best when they combine forces: sharing tips and wins, pooling resources, and working together on the same tools. By streamlining the flow of information and collaboration, sales teams can become more agile — a concept and methodology popular in the software and IT fields. Agile teams break work down into smaller chunks, and then review, provide feedback, and course-correct when needed.
An agile team is a higher-performing team. They share information frequently, which enables them to adjust their techniques and approaches, thereby optimizing for what's working (and ditching what's not). With this increased communication and transparency, teams will get other benefits as well. Sales reps can begin providing each other with more feedback and coaching to become more effective leaders. Plus, tools or processes that are slowing the team down will reveal themselves, giving teams a chance to adjust there, as well.
How to become more agile with Quip
Quip is an all-in-one collaboration tool that's perfect for sales teams. It has documents, spreadsheets, checklists, and chat all in the same app. Plus, it's natively integrated with Salesforce which means your teams can work with live CRM data in their docs and spreadsheets. Quip is the one tool that can make your sales team more connected, productive, and agile. Here's how.
Better access to information
When traveling, getting the right information when it's needed can be a challenge. When demo materials, customer presentations, and even active conversations live in different places, sales reps get slowed down when trying to find what they need.
This is especially problematic as each customer's unique needs change throughout the sales cycle. Being able to find and iterate on documents is critical to staying agile — and so is the ability to communicate with those customers in real time. Reps need a way to quickly and easily access relevant materials, not obsolete files on a shared drive behind a VPN. And they need to be able to share those same materials amongst each other — and with customers.
Quip tackles these problems head-on by giving teams a fast, simple way to access exactly what they need, when they need it. Documents and materials are always up to date because there's only one version that evolves as needed. For example, when a sales team is hunkering down to work on a mutual success plan — writing and revising on the fly — being disconnected is a huge disadvantage. With Quip, everyone is working on the same version collaboratively, and the conversation is happening in real time right alongside the work.
Get real work done on the road (or the plane)
It goes without saying that some sales people don't spend a lot of time at their desks. And sometimes, laptops don't fit the bill either. If you can get everything done without lugging a computer around at all, why wouldn't you? Quip enables sales teams to do just that, because it's the best mobile collaboration tool available. One of the fundamental ideas behind Quip is that you should never lose the ability to be productive because of the device you're using. With our mobile app, virtually anything you could do on a computer, you can also do on a smartphone or tablet: create and edit spreadsheets and documents, chat with colleagues or customers, search for information, and more.
It even works without a data connection. Type up your notes and share them, update spreadsheets, and edit your sales materials — all while offline, either from your phone or your laptop. When you reconnect to the internet, all the work you did while offline will sync automatically.
Next week: Part 2. In the meantime? Get started!
Part 2 of this post will focus on cross collaboration, support structures for your sales team, and the integrations that make Quip a powerhouse (spoiler alert: It's Salesforce).
You don't have to wait, though; create a Quip site for your team today.
