Cloud Computing for SMBs – How it Boosts your Sales Team’s Productivity!
Cloud Computing. The Cloud. Moving data to the Cloud. Do these terms sound familiar to you? As many organizations of all sizes get to know about the benefits of Cloud Computing, they move their data from on-premises to the Cloud.
So, what exactly is Cloud Computing? Traditionally, an organization’s data was stored in servers in a server room (i.e., on-premises) and they had to be maintained by your IT team. Migrating to the Cloud means renting a server space from a Cloud service provider such as Microsoft and having Microsoft take care of it for you.
The next question is then why would organizations – especially small to midsize businesses (SMBs) – move their data to the Cloud? What are the specific benefits you and your sales team can enjoy from Cloud Computing? Enhanced collaboration. More client-facing time. Increased productivity. Accommodating different work styles. Reducing costs. Just to give you a handful of benefits. To give you a better sense of how your sales team can benefit from the Cloud, here are 3 major advantages of Cloud Computing that this post will explore in detail:
1. Cloud helps increase your sales team’s productivity 2. Cloud helps your sales team go mobile 3. Cloud helps your sales team with a smarter data management
#1. Cloud helps increase your sales team’s productivity
Competitive markets move fast and SMBs need to as well to stay competitive and rise to the top. To keep up with the pace, your sales team should have access to Cloud-based productivity tools, like Microsoft Office 365, to work efficiently from anywhere and communicate and collaborate more effectively with each other.
Consistent User Experience
Enabling your sales team to easily work anywhere on their preferred devices can lead to greater productivity, especially if the right tool is in place. With Office 365, your sales team can use both personal and business devices to access trusted business applications, benefiting from a consistent experience across the various devices including laptops, smartphones, and tablets.
Collaboration Made Easy
Office 365’s important collaboration feature is real-time co-authoring. Our clients have given us extremely positive feedback on Office 365’s SharePoint, OneDrive, and OneNote, as these tools have made it possible for their sales team to edit and contribute to documents at the same time. When your sales team works together on a Word document, for example, your team members will see each other’s edits to text and formatting as they are made.
Staying Professional
As well as access, storage and capacity becomes easier with the Cloud. The ability to quickly respond to clients while out of the office is creating fast-paced, agile sales that reflect customer expectations. Not being able to send a large file or missing a client email because your storage is at capacity signals to your clients that your organization isn’t professional. If your client is using Office 365’s OneDrive and can send and receive large files with ease, you need to have the same ability at the very least. With Office 365, your sales team can quickly and easily respond to their clients.
#2. Cloud helps your sales team go mobile
Mobile technology will continue to evolve and redefine how and where your sales team works, communicates, and collaborates. Your sales team will require expanded access to business applications and data from mobile devices. Office 365 makes reviewing, editing, analyzing, and presenting possible with a consistent user experience optimized for your team’s preferred mobile devices.
Keeping it Fresh
Put yourself in your sales rep’s shoes for a moment: you’ve been out at meeting after meeting, and by the time you get back to your office, the nuances have left your brain. Trying to parse through the notes you cobbled together during your sales calls after the fact, especially once it’s been a day or two, means that you are missing things, period. With Cloud-based tools like Office 365, you can help your sales team work on their mobile devices to easily make updates to proposals in real time and input information into the CRM system immediately after meetings.
Time is Money
We understand that the only thing SMBs want more of than money is time. It is a precious commodity that is so easily squandered. This is particularly true in Sales, where meetings and client-facing time is so critical to the job. The office has improved since the time of desktops and landlines, but for many businesses the bulk of the work still has to be done in house. Imagine your sales team being able to book a few meetings and not having to worry about trying to dash back and forth to the office to get out a rush proposal? With Cloud Computing tools, these can be efficiently done on mobile devices! Time well spent is money well earned.
#3. Cloud helps your team with a smarter data management
The Cloud promises a smarter and faster way of working. Many cloud applications promise and deliver a simpler, faster, smarter approach to running your business. The access to data at your fingertips drives real time decisions to run your business.
Your Data – Remains Yours and Always Under Your Control
You need to have confidence about where your company’s data resides and who can access it. With the increase use of mobile devices and Cloud Computing tools, data security has been a major concern for many SMBs. With Office 365, you can manage who has access to which data. Blocking access on phones and tablets that fail to meet security and encryption standards can also be easily managed. We help you with your data security to ensure your sales team’s mobility without increasing security risks.
Threats Managed
When you think about your data’s security, email traffic control should be high priority as it is often how malware reaches your company. Attacks are becoming more and more sophisticated. To protect your sales team from advanced threats, we utilize Office 365’s Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to guard your mailboxes in real time. The ATP automatically reviews and evaluates your team’s email attachments and links to detect any suspicious activity.
Data Transformed into Insights = Smart Business Decisions
An increasing number of SMBs are now using a Business Intelligence (BI) tool like Office 365’s Power BI. All SMBs have a large amount of data that can be transformed into insights, and these can be leveraged to make smart business decisions. When the data is simply sitting there, it does not provide your team with any benefits. Sales is only getting more competitive and consumers are the most informed they have ever been. Make your data work for you. By using a BI tool such as Power BI, you can turn an uncut diamond (your raw data) into a refined diamond (business insights). The benefits of using a BI tool? Bottomless! Better business decisions, enhanced data quality, improved customer satisfaction, increased revenue, and reduced external IT costs just to name a few.
Boost your sales team’s productivity with the Cloud!
A sales rep that spends too much time at their desk is not where they are supposed to be – in front of the client. It’s important that the office culture and technology is supportive of a sales process that sees the most closed deals. Implementing Cloud Computing is one of the most effective ways that SMBs can help their sales team increase productivity, while also protecting the company’s interests from data and security threats. Do you want to improve your sales team’s productivity? Get in touch with us today! We are here to help improve your sales processes with the best Cloud Computing practices!
This blog post is co-authored by Change Connect and ProServeIT.
About Change Connect
Change Connect specializes in helping clients to work more efficiently and effectively in pursuit of their revenue goals. We offer customized solutions for small to midsized businesses with a focus on Sales Transformation, which includes adapting the sales process to new technologies such as Cloud Computing. Whatever stage your business is at, whether you’re a sta