More and more, businesses are seeking out safe and controllable ways to quickly share information and encourage dialogue across their organizations.
There are countless reasons why businesses have identified collaboration as a TOP priority:
- Knowledge and data. Having ready access to it — and being able to ask questions about it — empowers workers to make smart on-the-job decisions.
- Communication. Improving the flow from top to bottom — and across — organizations brings employees into alignment and keeps them focused on what’s important.
- Collaboration. Giving people the freedom to communicate in real-time open forums brings more ideas to the table and makes it easy to evaluate them.
- Control. Making it possible to pass documents around in a fluid, yet controlled, way allows multiple parties to review and edit them while avoiding version control issues. It also helps prevent security breaches.
- Speed. Instantly transferring information among stakeholders helps speed development of proposals.
- Knowledge. Providing training improves skills that transform employees into better workers.
- Service. Having ready access to information helps sales and customer service reps provide prospects and clients with better and faster answers to questions.
- Alignment. Unifying multiple sources of data in one place helps build common understanding.
Businesses turn to online collaboration tools, powered by their sales enablement systems, to accomplish ALL these things. Here are four ways these tools deliver benefits:
1. Enhanced control and security
Organizations that transfer files using email, the cloud or servers are at risk. It’s easy to lose control over documents, making it impossible to know which versions are the latest ones. Even worse, many of these environments aren’t secure and confidential business information could easily get into the hands of the wrong people.
Using a sales enablement system to share files ensures you’re working with the most current documents and that they’re maintained in a safe and secure environment. You can always track users, activity and actions taken on every document.
You can rest assured knowing that nothing will pass you by or will be lost in process.
2. Increased efficiency and accuracy
When it comes to closing business and getting work done, efficiency is of the essence. People don’t have time to scroll through computer folders or emails to find the right documents or files.
Using a sales enablement system to house documents consolidates them in a single place. This allows everyone involved in a sales initiative to find the most recent pieces related to it along with their current status.
This makes managing projects easier and helps prevent costly, time-consuming errors.
3. Simplified processes and procedures
Often, preparing and reviewing documents requires input from many parties, including sales, marketing, product managers, legal, compliance, procurement and more.
A sales enablement system provides an open forum for collaborating on complex projects that help break down silos within organizations.
Most firms that adopt one find they’re able to improve the quality of complex deliverables while getting them done more quickly.
4. Improved transparency
In addition to sharing things with people internally, you can use your sales enablement system as a collaboration tool with external parties, including clients and vendors. You can transfer documents and information to them — and encourage discussion — in the same way you do with internal stakeholders.
This provides the same benefits as internal collaboration, which are outlined above. In addition, it provides partners with a level of transparency into your business and how you work that builds trust.
This makes interactions with external organizations more secure, effective and efficient, building tighter bonds with the businesses you depend on.
Conclusion
If you’re looking for ways to improve communication and collaboration within your organization and among your business partners, you owe it to yourself to find out how a sales enablement system can help. Mobile Locker has developed one that’s proven effective with smaller to mid-sized companies. It can be scaled to encourage collaboration among any number of groups or firms.
You owe it to yourself to check it out.
