Increasing communications transparency within a business is one of the best ways to reduce friction and improve productivity. Your team is aware of what’s going on inside your company. This enables them to better pull together towards your collective goals.
An added benefit to company-wide transparency is that you encourage input from colleagues in different roles. Product development input from customer success teams leads to more useful customer features. Sales teams can get support from wider teams to provide a more bespoke experience for prospects. This helps to raise the chances of completing a sale.
In a time where remote working is becoming increasingly popular, it’s not always possible to be brought up to speed on issues around the water cooler.
Therefore, what SaaS tools are there available to encourage and foster transparency within your organisation? How can you make them even more powerful through automation?
Messaging Systems
One of the first SaaS tools to lift conversation amongst your colleagues is an instant messaging platform. Microsoft Teams and Slack are market leaders in this field. They provide an intuitive way to organise and keep in contact with your team.
As heavy Slack users ourselves, the ability to have a wide range of open channels to talk about specific topics, issues, customers, developments…and biscuits, provides us with a centralised place to get our messages across to our teammates. We don’t have to rely on long, fragmented email chains.
Add automation into the mix and you’ve got another huge reason to get messages. Slack enables you to automatically trigger messages from external events (something we’ve extended ourselves using Cyclr). As a result, relevant teams get information on the latest support tickets, sales, meetings and even chat messages. When something of import happens, the relevant staff in our organisation are immediately aware. It is even possible to trigger actions in external SaaS tools by the response. This means you don’t even need to leave your messaging client to get work done.
CRM
Long gone are the days of sifting through and updating sales lead spreadsheets. Hurrah! With data held in multiple, siloed, locations it was a nightmare to keep useful and up-to-date customer records.
Luckily CRM (Customer Relationship Management) applications provide a solution for long-suffering salespeople. They provide flexible ways to consolidate your customer data. As a result, this helps to streamline your sales process and provide greater top-down visibility of how your deals are maturing.
Enterprises like Salesforce lead the way in the CRM market. They have built their platform out to be more than just a place to manage your sales leads; you can manage processes throughout your business on it.
Lighter CRMs, such as Pipedrive, CapsuleCRM and Insightly are more focused on the sales side. They all allow your teams to better organise themselves and collaborate for the best of your business. Getting a grip on your pipeline has never been easier.
Why leave data input to be a manual task? CRMs can be configured to be automatically updated when emails are sent or received, invoices are paid (or not), and chats are handled on Intercom or other web chat channels….. the potential is endless. While some CRMs offer ‘in-built’ integrations, others can be readily enhanced using an iPaaS platform.
Automated Deal Machine SaaS Tool
Using an iPaaS solution can transform your CRM from being a static ledger of customer details and deals to a fully automated deal machine.
Take Pipedrive as an example, using an “Updated Deal” webhook trigger inside Cyclr will send a notification whenever a deal is updated. Follow this with logical steps to determine what stage of your pipeline the deal was in and has now been moved to. Then you can trigger your own processes in whichever SaaS tool you like.
For example, you can automate when your customer success team get involved in a deal. By automatically setting up any necessary assets (pre-filled with information from the CRM deal) to kick-start onboarding.
This makes working across teams easier than ever, creating workflows to trigger sub-processes within your sales process.
Integration Platform To Enable Free Choice
I would be remiss not to include integration as an aid to transparent communication and to provide a free choice of SaaS tools to your teams.
It’s ever so easy to have team members perform tasks in the software that they prefer. If they work best in their preferred solution what’s the harm? Well…… data silos.
Connect all of your SaaS tools
If you have data isolated in individual systems you’ll never get a clear picture of what’s fully going on in your business. Where you may have had to insist on all employees using a standard stack of applications to avoid this, it is now not the case.
By embracing integration you can allow your team members to work in whatever platform they are most comfortable/productive. You can automatically sync their data to your company’s main systems via integration. Automation can mean (should you choose) your support team can use CRM A designed for support teams, whilst your Sales team use CRM B designed for sales teams – yet the same data can be available within each.
Subscription Management Platforms
It’s all too easy to rack up an enormous stack of SaaS tools across your business. And even easier to forget about the ones you no longer use.
As well as being an unnecessary waste of your company’s spending it’s hard to see who is using what. This has led to the emergence of subscription management platforms such as Intello, G2 Track and Torii to cut down on SaaS sprawl and wasted cash.
These applications allow you to analyse your spending and usage data in a more granular way. So you can make sure you’re just using the necessary SaaS tools your teams need.
Automation can mean that you are Slack messaged about renewal events at T-30. Or you can regularly receive summaries of amendments to subscriptions so you can track changes as they happen.
Dashboarding
If you’re also part of a SaaS team you’ll appreciate that most of the time we deal with data. There are no ifs or buts around data (when modelled and collected correctly!). Good data is increasingly necessary for making informed decisions. However, for the visually minded it can take a lot of effort to get significant information out of never-ending data sets.
This is why dashboarding applications have boomed in recent times. Because they give you the ability to display and analyse data in far more visually appealing ways.
An iPaaS platform can help you connect multiple, disparate, data sources and point them at the dashboarding application. Relevant data summaries can be shared, or events highlighted using smart automation. Make success (or issues) a company-wide awareness initiative.
In Summary
There is an endless list of SaaS tools available to the smart enterprise to help them improve their communications processes within, and across, their teams. Smart applications, enhanced by smart automation, mean that everyone everywhere can have an understanding of critical events and critical information.
Chat with us today and we will share our thoughts on ways to help you integrate your comms eco-system and improve your transparency.
