We might differ in how we define productivity for ourselves: you might treat it as a goal (working all the time to be smarter and better), I might treat it as an approach (“I have a goal and I’m working towards it”) but the one thing I think we can both agree on is that communication is a big part of it.
When it comes to sales (where every deal requires a village and it’s all about collaborative selling), tasks often necessitate working closely with a bunch of people which means a lot of back and forth before you can mark something as done and dusted. To be productive, you need to make sure that communication also happens at a conducive pace.
This sounds easy enough in theory but when you’re working on multiple deals across regions with multiple people, it can be difficult to keep everyone on the same page and work efficiently, especially if technology isn’t on your side.
Everyone else and you
All of your customer communication is in one place – the CRM – so you’ll have no trouble accessing specific information when you need it but internal communication, for most companies, is all over the place.
With most companies, you have your traditional communication channels like email and phone, and then you have your team collaboration channels like Slack or Workplace or Monday.com. Multiple channels of communication which means that you have to spend a lot of time in the act of communicating or receiving information, switching between software and trying to figure out what’s the right channel for quick responses, rather than acting on said information.
Multiple channels of communication which also mean that information is often scattered across these tools and it can be quite difficult to find that one piece of information that Hazel from the Billing team told you two weeks ago that you needed 5 minutes ago when the customer asked for it.
Me trying to find the right email
Some companies try to circumvent this communication madness with rules (sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit) for internal communication like:
- Email for information transfer, to-dos and reference
- Chat for quick clarification and small tasks
- Calls for really really urgent situations
This does speed up the process a little bit because it answers the “what channel do I use to get fast responses” question but it doesn’t really do anything to consolidate communication and make it easily accessible or searchable. You still have to spend a lot of time relaying context and waiting for input. You still have to forward emails and copy-past chats to catch people up so you can get their input and just finish the task already. Finding information is still a messy problem that makes everything else, including Harry’s problems, look alarming.
If you think about it, collaboration is a two-step process. You relay the context people need to understand the problem and then you discuss to find a solution.
As much as I want robot overlords that can accept information and process it to make a decision on my behalf, we’re still a little a ways from that so regrettably let’s focus on the second part: reducing effort in relaying context. Specifically, reducing effort in relaying context.
Enter Freshconnect! Freshconnect is a contextual collaboration software, integrated with your Freshsales CRM. Using Freshconnect, you can collaborate with teammates, and third party vendors, on deals inside your CRM.
This means you don’t have to spend time relaying context to people – when invited to a discussion, they can see for themselves, everything that preceded it, and just act. This makes information recall a less complex and messy process as well – you can just go to a particular deal to see all the discussions that happened around it and easily find the tidbit that Hazel from the billing team told you two weeks ago.
Take that, Hazel!
Agents can use Freshconnect to collaborate with and discuss deals with just about anyone (they do not have to be an agent on Freshsales). To hold a discussion, all they have to do is hit “Discuss” inside a deal, invite your team and start talking.
Using Freshconnect to collaborate
You can invite any user on your Freshsales account to a discussion by simply typing “@” and then selecting them on the list that pops up. If you want to invite someone who’s not on your Freshsales account, like an engineer or a billing representative or even a third-party partner, you can add them by typing “@” and then their full email address.
When they click on their invitation, they’ll be able to view and participate in the discussion in the Freshconnect app. The app is available, for free, to anyone who’s invited to a discussion and shows read-only context from the deal like the pipeline, source, notes, age etc. to the collaborator.
Unable to see the discuss button on your deal page?
We are still in the process of migrating this feature for our entire customer base. However, we are doing it on demand for anybody who writes to us. If you don’t have the feature yet and want to get it enabled for your account, go ahead and give us your details on this form.
