collaboration – AppiVa Software Pvt Ltd

November 18, 2021

What is collaborative selling and why it’s important now?

Sale is not easy and it needs a continuous work and follow ups. And its getting tougher day by day. Modern tool sets are intended to help in simplifying the sales process, however repetitive tasks like continuous data entry makes it more complicated. Just because the tool is there, doesn’t mean that they feel the need to use it. If data isn’t put in, and records are updated, the return on investment is poor.

Some of the factors that a CRM system provider should keep in mind:

Make sure goals for CRM are communicated with your sales team
Give salespeople an incentive for buying into new tech
Provide sales-related context for CRM use
Collect and act on feedback from your sales team
Encourage leadership to set a good example
Keep the CRM system as simple as possible

Especially now that most sales teams have moved to a remote selling model, CRM systems need to be both powerful and easy to use.

Another important thing that a CRM system should aid collaborative selling. Collaborative selling is not new, but its a age old sales process which is achieved by a team.

What is collaborative selling?

Collaborative selling involves collaboration not between sales team members, but between your salespeople and your customers. Working together, sales professionals and customers can find the right solutions for individual clients, while driving more sales success for your team.

Collaborative CRMs are a great tool for team-based environments where data or customer interactions are shared across the organization.

Collaborative CRM is a method in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) where various departments (like Sales, Marketing, Service, Finance) within an organization share customer information to maximize profitability, increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Example: Feedback from a customer, gathered by technical support team could help marketing team to suggest more suitable products or services to the customer.

Advantages of collaborative CRM

– Improves customer interactions across channels
– Reduces service cost by using web or online collaborations
– Synchronizes customer data with call centre to allow multi channel interactions

May 6, 2020January 17, 2022

Why you should avoid excel sheet for sales activities

Its a common practice among sales team to use excel sheet to manage all sales related activities. Excel is a very nice tool, it provides lots of inbuilt features and powerful macro to help in complex and frequent calculations. Early days, there was no alternative to excel for doing sales activities. But it was made for one purpose: managing numbers. Using it to do anything beyond this capacity like as a sales automation tool for managing sales well, with all the other options out there, Excel just isn’t the answer, and it can brings a lot of problems with new businesses.

If you are using excel as a Customer Relationship management tool then I would request to look at following points, please ensure its not hurting you and your business than the help you are getting by using excel as sales automation tool.

Excel is not secure: First of all excel is not secure. If you are a sales leader then you must be knowing how important it is to keep your estimation secret and not to share with your team. A company’s financial information shouldn’t be visible to just anyone who works there—there needs to be measures in place to secure this data to only a select few employees to prevent it from getting leaked. You can though password protect an excel sheet, but you cant share with anybody and all it takes is your password to get insight of your sensitive sales data.

At the same time also you need to share portion of your sales data with your team, that means you cannot password protect your whole excel document. You need to maintain multiple excel sheet.

And imagine how much work it needs for a medium sized team.

Excel is not scalable: Your customer base keeps increasing day by day, so it’s important they’re well taken care of. If your company’s just starting out, then sure, you may be able to get away with using Excel to organize lead and customer details and sales data. Once you start adding more customers and salespeople to the equation, however, your Excel tracking system will get messy, fast. Messy data means it’ll be harder to effectively take care your prospects, inevitably leading to lost sales.

Excel can’t contain all your data: Your data is spread out throughout your emails, your computer (which you’ve been meaning to organize), physical sheets of paper scattered around the office. Wouldn’t it be nice if all this data was in one place?

You could try consolidating it all into a spreadsheet but you need to do all manual data entry to keep all data, then maintenance is a nightmare.

Excel isn’t mobile-friendly: You need your data to be ready, at your fingertips, for whenever you may need it. So, having it sit on your computer’s desktop or in a shared folder only accessible via VPN isn’t going to help you much when you’re working remotely or anywhere besides sitting at your desk.

Difficult to collaborate: The same spreadsheet has been emailed back and forth so many times, it’s hard to know which one is the most up-to-date version.

UX and Intuitiveness: You need to view all your data in a proper format, some time generate report on demand.

This is not how collaboration should be done.

Excel doesn’t let multiple people work on the same file at once. If the spreadsheet is located in a shared folder, multiple people may open it, but only one person can make edits at a time.

Passing a spreadsheet on from one person to another to make edits is a slow way of doing things. Plus, there’s no version control, so you can’t tell who made what changes when edits are made.

September 20, 2019

Task Management and WhatsApp

Effective Task Management Process and WhatsApp

Recently there is a growing trend to use whatsapp collaboration as a task management app. I was talking to one startup that deals in delivery services, they have around 40 employees and they have 20 whatsapp groups to manage coordination among employees and delivery persons for successful delivery of products to consumers. I asked them how do you manage such big number of groups? They said, though they have problems in managing all groups but they don’t have any alternative. Hence, the problem is can WhatsApp be used for managing tasks? This is not the problem with this company but others too.

A task management needs to have a todo with time, a task and then a supervisor and owner who needs to see if task is completed. A task also need to remind the owner just before task started. For a group task, it needs to remind all participants and help them communicate with each other like whatsapp does. Whatsapp is a communication platform and it used to communicate between people. And one part of task management process is to have an effective communication and thats where whatsapp comes into but the core of an effective task management process is not only communication but also timely reminder, monitoring too. The good part with whatsapp is that number of people using whatsapp quite quite large, that makes it a de facto way of communication and collaboration. You can communicate with people immediately who is on whatsapp and has net connection. It does not give you reminder or snoozing the task. It also does not give you freedom to repeat the task. With growing trend of using for a task collaboration among people is self detrimental, it makes more complex. Objective of any task manager app is to save time, collaboration effectively and timely reminder. It needs a specialized application that would help on these activities. Whatsapp would be solving on portion i.e. communication, but other factors those are more important in execution are completely missing. In fact by using WhatsApp for team collaboration is not going to help in long run. Instead of optimizing time, it would lead to spending more time managing tasks. If any communication has some important information then user need to search and there is a high chance that you miss it giving the volume of data exchanged in whatsapp.

The other important factor that I feel which is missing from whatsapp’s feature list is real time status update and push notification whether a task is completed or not. If a task has multiple subtasks and you have shared the task with your peer and need to get real time status update on sub tasks then you need to better use a task manager that would help you on this. And planning is completely missing.

In summary, for a better planning, collaboration, communication and execution you need to use a task manager that gives you these features, instead of using a communication tool like whatsapp.

June 12, 2019August 13, 2019

A tale of two trees

This post will tell you how the environment and your immediate surroundings have great impact on your growth and well being. Many times, we think that we are independent and we are not bothered about happenings in our surroundings. But this is not true, we are nurtured by our environment, friends, neighbors and surroundings. My office at Diamond district, Bangalore is almost 500 mts from the place where I park my car. I have to walk through a busy surrounding of offices, footpath vendors to my office.

Recently BBMP or some local people, not sure has planted some saplings in the footpath. This is indeed a noble work. The green cover of Bangalore is depleting in a alarming rate and such initiatives in large scale would definitely help in bringing back lost glory of beautiful weather of Bangalore. I everyday cross two cassia sapling on my way. One of the cassia sapling was planted opposite to a wine shop- top left side plant and another cassia sapling was planted opposite to a tea stall where people from nearby offices come, spent time smoking, gossiping. In the beginning two plants were growing properly, and we quite healthy – for first 2 weeks. The plant opposite to tea stall is always poured with water, no litigation, grows properly. As you can see the plant opposite to wine shop, neither there are water and people also took out the remaining leafs. Some other day, some one has broken its branch. So the point is our growth and wellness is heavily influenced by our surroundings. Most people come to wine shop – an open bar are mostly daily workers, rickshaw pullers and I can see some time there are altercations, some people even out of sense lying in the footpath. They might have broke the plant, plucked leafs. Where as, the other tea stall has people from nearby offices, blue collar/ white collar executives. They understand the importance of a tree at current situation, that helps to pour some water and the plat grows. Similarly, One need to be with good people. That not only increases the effectiveness of your collaboration with your surroundings but your growth too. Collaboration is always two sided and equally participated by both. If you cannot take care of a poor plant why should you expect anything in return be it oxygen or shed from sun.

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November 14, 2016

Why collaboration is rewarding

Almost all of the recent books, blogs, and papers supporting innovation highlight the importance of collaboration. Why? For many years, the sole inventor was told that people working together can lead to groupthink–too much consensus and convergent thinking.

I came across an article Why Collaboration Is Essential to Entrepreneurship. This is not only applicable for entrepreneurs rather for everybody in this competitive world. With increasing hustle bustle in city, managing our work is most important thing with respect to our surroundings. While going to office, we are not sure if any sudden traffic jam happens, we don’t know what is the quality of new paying guest accommodation service, the quality of momo near to our house is good but we have no idea, we are not sure the specific fish is available in the sunday marker which is 10kms from my home etc etc. How can we engage ourself to manage such difficulties, can we ask govt to provide us information, can we ask service providers to contact us about the stock, can we insist traffic cop to intimate us about sudden traffic jam??? No, this can not be possible. So what is the solution? Collaboration. In collaboration, there is an increase in the understanding of diverse perspectives with the development of higher-level thinking as one of the important results. The coordinated efforts of many can accomplish more than the efforts of one or a few separately, that means its the power of “we” much more that power of an individual. Recent modernization and evolution of technology had made this a new world digitally. We are in a better position now technologically to share information with friends, relatives than never before. That means, its technology that makes us collaborate with others for successful out come. If any traffic jam occurs in our way, we immediately share with friends, any important happenings etc can be shared in realtime that makes us more dependent on each other and the return is rewarding. Time for more collaboration.