Bridge the gap between sales and operations.






Author: Matt Irving

Published: 4/12/2021


CRM tools for collaboration

Your CRM is not only a significant business investment but one of the most valuable tools your company has at its disposal. A CRM can be used for more than just sales. Your operations team can benefit tremendously from this type of software as well. In fact, having your operations team and your sales team use the same software fosters comradery across the two very distinct departments as it enables them to collaborate seamlessly with one another. The beginning of a customer’s life cycle with a company typically starts in sales with a lead. This lead gets sold and that customer is then transitioned over to the operations team for retention.



Image courtesy of supereasycrm.com’s ‘Job Aid Management’ module

With your CRM your operations team can see exactly when and what a customer was sold so they are able to better address their needs. A common cause of disconnect between sales and operations is their lack of understand/appreciation for what one another are doing. This often results in bickering and general disdain between members of the two departments. Sales will blame operations for messing up a customer’s order and then operations will in turn blame sales for over promising on the delivery in the first place. Providing insight into the departmental workloads, pipelines and meetings allows for a deeper understanding of what each party contributes to the company.

Although a sales rep and an operations person’s job roles are vastly different, their main objective should always be the same…make the customers happy! In addition to task and workday visibility, a CRM can allow for interdepartmental collaboration at a much greater depth than shared folders or long e-mail chains could ever do.

Let us pretend you are a saleswoman who just sold website development services to an important client. Things are going well until you get a call from the client saying that when they go to visit their website they get one of these:



You panic and frantically fire off an e-mail to the developers in hopes they can this resolved quickly. Unbeknownst to you (probably because you do not have a proper CRM 😊) the developers are undergoing an IT security audit and have been exchanging e-mails with multiple vendors.

This means your e-mail may end up lost and your customer may end up going elsewhere. However, if you had instead created a ticket for the developers and assessed it a priority, it would have fallen into a queue. From here, the team lead could review the ticket, assign it, and provide you and the client with status updates via the ticket.



Image courtesy of supereasycrm.com’s ‘Ticket Management’ module

This will allow the sales team real time updates that they can provide to the client. Alternatively, you can opt to have the client receive these updates directly.



As you can see, a CRM can increase interdepartmental collaboration and improve the customer experience at your organization. Sales and operations are really two sides of the same coin. Both should always be working toward the same end goal…even if the roads they travel to get there are very different. A great CRM, like Super Easy CRM will have sales and operations living harmoniously for years to come.