Sales teams differ from most departments in an organisation because members are often out on the road, visiting prospects and clients, usually accessing email and documents on the go.

But despite being far-flung, the teams still need to regularly communicate and collaborate with their colleagues – especially when issues crop up or decisions have to be made.

Microsoft Teams is great for any team, but it’s almost purpose-built for geographically dispersed sales teams. Its chat-based workspace enables teams to chat, collaborate and plan – from anywhere, at any time, on any device.

To establish foundational knowledge of a Team Leader’s role when using Microsoft Teams, read our first article in this series. This article is a follow up specifically for sales professionals and contains just a few examples of how Teams can be used to benefit your sales team.

Account Management team activities

Account management team activities can easily be planned and coordinated using Teams.

The first step is to create your account management team in Teams. From there, you can add new channels, for example:

• Customer news and updates
• Current engagements
• New opportunities
• Sales Playbooks

Tip: When creating channels, it’s important to include some engaging content so team members don’t just see a blank page the first time they log in.

Account managers need to be across any changes or updates affecting the industry and individual customers, so the customer news and updates channel could include news articles or even links to a customer’s tweets or LinkedIn page.

The current engagement channel might include information or issues directly affecting particular customers, so that the account manager is always up-to-date with what’s going on.

Tip: Potential opportunities can be given to team members via the new opportunities channel, while the sales playbook channel can give teams the opportunity to discuss competitor strategies or to share tips.

Requests for Proposals team activities

Requests for Proposals (RFPs), whether generated by your organisation or from prospective customers, involve inter-department collaboration and tight deadlines.

Microsoft Teams enables departments to work collaboratively and efficiently together.

After creating your RFP/proposal generation team in Teams, you can add channels. These might include:

• Project management
• Proposal deliverables
• Budget

A project management channel can keep the various departments collaborating via functions like the ‘Planner’ tab, which assigns and tracks tasks, so everyone in the team is aware of their responsibilities. A responsibility assignment matrix can be added under ‘Files’.

A proposal deliverables channel can be used to list deliverables required, and relevant documents – such as legal and insurance documents, case studies and customer success stories – which can be added under ‘Files’.

The budget channel can be used for all budgeting activities. Team members can use the ‘conversations’ function to discuss necessary tasks and resources, along with pricing information. A budget spreadsheet can also be added, along with budget information for similar, completed projects.

Sales planning team activities

Sales planning doesn’t only involve account managers and sales leaders. It can include product/technical engineers, product specialists, research and development, and marketing as well.

Microsoft Teams enables all parties to collaborate in an effective and transparent way.

After creating your sales planning team in Teams, you can add some new channels – don’t forget to include some engaging content for your team to see the first time they log in.

Sales planning team channels might include:

• Annual sales meeting
• Quarterly business review
• Monthly sales pipeline review

The annual sales meeting channel is useful for planning, coordinating and tracking the annual sales meeting. The annual sales meeting involves simultaneous events taking place, so real-time collaboration between team members is key to success.

Tip: The ‘Chat’ function in Teams enables team members to communicate rapidly and effectively, and ‘Files’ offers easy access to meeting agendas, presentations, meeting materials and vendor information.

The quarterly business review channel can enable team members to supply opportunity information and deal closures right up to the last moment during the quarterly business review.

Tip: A PowerBI dashboard tab can provide a forecast to actual sales information, and team sales reports can be accessed via the ‘files’ tab.

The monthly sales pipeline review channel can track, plan and review monthly sales activity resulting from leads and opportunities. Sales team members can quickly update each other on customer information and lead status changes in ‘conversations’ and access the previous month’s sales via the PowerBI dashboard tab.

If setting up Microsoft Teams for your sales team seems too overwhelming, MWA can help. Through our events and workshops, we work with your overall organisation or specific team to set you on the right path to a Modern Workplace.

Contact us to find out more about our Modern Workplace Accelerator workshop.