Collaborate To Close: How Sales Teams Are Winning With Collaboration Tools

Adapting to an increasingly remote sales environment challenges even the most experienced and adept sales professionals. Disjointed sales teams cause confusion and miscommunications that often lead to lost conversions.

Maybe you noticed that your sales presentations fall flat and fail to excite your buyers, causing them to drop out. Those lost conversions lead to overall frustration and poor conversion rates, significantly impacting the bottom line.

You need a project management tool to unite everyone and deliver presentations that wow your buyers. Using the right collaboration and sales demo tools can boost buyer engagement, increasing conversion rates.

How Teamwork Gives B2B Companies the Edge

B2B buyers have several stakeholders involved in the decision-making process, so your entire team must convince them all. Addressing each party’s unique concerns and questions requires teamwork within your company. 

Developing a sales pod represents one of the most successful approaches to establishing this level of teamwork. Sales pods pull together a team to handle a prospect, ensuring that all needs are met and every stakeholder addressed. 

This approach creates a more cohesive customer experience by streamlining the sales funnel and making it easier to spot shortcomings and problems. Additional benefits to the sales pod approach include:

• More effective communication between teams.
• Standardised workflows with everyone aware of expectations and roles.
• Increased innovation as teams work together and refine processes.
• Flexibility to adapt to better meet buyer needs.

Building successful sales pods requires technological support, namely collaboration and sales demo tools. Effective sales pods have means to communicate openly, even from remote locations, and software to create engaging, interactive sales demos and presentations.

Collaboration Tools for Sales Teams

The first consideration when building teamwork in B2B sales involves bringing everyone on the same page, including sales and marketing teams, legal, and finance. Sales collaboration tools allow all teams to communicate openly to ensure they address every buyer concern.

As teams dial in from different locations and across multiple time zones, creating a functional collaborative environment can be tricky. 

However, the right tools can overcome those project management challenges. For example, Slack allows teams to chat and share documents, images, and more. If you need something closer to a face-to-face, Zoom offers a viable option for people to set video calls that work for all parties.

You might be worried about juggling many platforms, but Forward simplifies things. Seamless integrations allow pulling all your sales collaboration tools together under one dashboard. Accessing everything from a centralised location supports a marketing team in boosting buyer engagement and converting more prospects.

Customer Relationship Management Platforms

Customer relationship management software (CRM) is one of the top collaboration tools sales teams require to collect and organise customer data. Fellow sales team members can notate client entries with key points from every encounter, providing insights into the buyer's wants or needs.

An appropriate CRM offers substantial support for B2B sales teams:

• Gain better insights into buyer details and engagement to better understand their needs and what they require to commit.
• Track communications with buyers and where they are in the sales funnel.
• Automation of things like reminders and email campaigns.
• Support more accurate forecasting so teams follow up promptly.

B2B firms have several options that cover the bases and provide a plethora of tools, including Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho, and Monday.com.

Company Communication Platforms

As noted previously, sales team collaboration with team members in other locations is a challenge to overcome for a successful sales pod. Choosing a platform that allows teams to chat in real-time, drop follow-ups and reminders, and share crucial information, like proposals, is necessary. 

Look for platforms allowing team members to collaborate via chat and video conferencing in real time. Having some scheduling options is helpful so teams can set reminders and meetings. Some popular options that check all the boxes include Asana and Slack.

Document Management Platforms

Moving to a virtual environment requires space to collect and organise sales materials, like proposals and contracts. Successful sales pods have centralised storage that’s accessible to every member team member and all buyer stakeholders. Having a central location makes it easier to keep tabs on everything and creates more transparency throughout the process.

Functional document management platforms should have:

• Plenty of space to accommodate all sales materials.
• Meet all global compliance requirements, like GDPR. 
• Security and privacy are top concerns, especially for documents containing sensitive information. 
• Backups, archive options, and set retention policies that work for you and your buyers.

Some popular platforms include Dropbox, Google Workspace, PandaDoc, and Microsoft Sharepoint.

Task Management Platforms

Task management platforms, like ClickUp, Trello, and Airtable, provide teams with ways to keep tabs on each sales funnel stage. Having everything organised in a central location keeps deals on track by preventing missed follow-ups and critical dates. Useful platforms allow teams to:

• Schedule important tasks
• Track the status of tasks
• Prioritise tasks with a rank system 
• Time-based tracking options

Setting tasks management in a centralised dashboard provides better visibility throughout the pipeline. It’s the best way to hold individuals and teams accountable and ensure everyone is on the same page.

Top B2B Sales Demo Tools

Setting your team up for seamless collaboration is only half of the solution to closing deals. Crafting a stellar sales demo is necessary to boost buyer engagement and convert prospects to paid customers.

Choosing the right sales demo tools can be a challenge because you need something comprehensive that offers: 

• A full suite of tools
• Room for customisation options because personalisation is key
• The right pricing for your budget
• Integrations with your existing tools and software

To save you time, we’ve researched and narrowed the field to provide some of the top sales demo tools for B2B sales teams. Whatever your budget and technical expertise, there’s something on this list to help your team build more engaging presentations.

Canva

Canva is a popular, user-friendly choice for creating documents, branding, social media posts, and presentations. Since it’s so diverse, you can copy branding across multiple mediums so that your social, documents, videos, and presentations match. 

Pros:

• Robust library of templates, clip art, and additional elements to create custom pieces.
• Drag-and-drop features make it user-friendly.
• The paid plans are some of the most affordable on the market.

Cons:

• The free version has limitations on what templates and elements you can use.
• You can’t build your elements; you must manipulate something from the existing library.
• There’s no analytics involved, you would have to find a way to track buyer engagement.

Canva is ideal for entrepreneurs and small businesses that seek an affordable option with room to scale. Start with the free version and upgrade as you grow to access more options, like additional elements and templates.

To access more robust tools and options, like a content calendar, you might upgrade to Canva for Teams. This package offers larger teams the right collaboration tools for design and access to all platform elements.

Walnut

Walnut’s sole focus is helping teams create and share interactive product demos. The platform promises extensive creative freedom and collaboration. Teams can also tap into analytics to track buyer engagement and refine demos to meet their needs.

Pros:

• You don’t require coding prowess to build stunning, engaging demos.
• Features analytics to track buyer engagement with demos.
• Responsive customer support team.

Cons:

• There is a learning curve with the platform. It takes time and experimentation to learn how to leverage all features.
• The platform could use some additional knowledge base or FAQs to support users.
• There’s no free trial or free version.

Walnut is a solid option for mid-sized and established firms seeking to improve their demo game. The platform doesn’t offer a free trial or list pricing on the website, so it’s likely out of the budget for brands with limited budgets. 

Demostack

Demostack allows teams to collaborate on demos and deliver engaging presentations when and where your buyer needs them. There’s even an option to deliver live demos as needed. 

Pros:

• It makes collaboration easy since everyone can access the same dashboards and presentations.
• Integrates with top sales tools, like Salesforce and HubSpot.
• Offers analytics to track key metrics, like number of visits, average time spent viewing the demo, and more.

Cons:

• The tool is new and still growing, so some features are in the beta stages, while others are unavailable.
• It is one of the priciest options with packages starting at $15,000. 

Demostack is frequently listed as one of the easiest interactive demo tools to use. However, the price tag might be steep for startups and entrepreneurs. A demo allows you to test some of the key features before committing.

Storylane

Storylane is one of the few products backing its claims with analytics. The platform notes that its customers report double buyer engagement and a 30% increase in sales velocity. Storylane also cites several testimonials from existing customers as shared across social media.

Pros:

• Several plans to accommodate firms of varying sizes, starting with a free version.
• Robust help centre with many resources to support users.
• Detailed analytics and insights that you can dial down to individual pages.

Cons:

• The free version is extremely limited and will not work well for teams.
• It might be difficult for complex products that require extensive explanation and dozens of slides.

Teams of any size can get a handle on their storytelling approach with Storylane. The platform makes it easy to develop personalised demos that highlight your top selling points and track buyer engagement. 

Arcade

Arcade might be one of the more original sales demo tools because of the gamification feature. Aside from building engaging, interactive product demos, teams can motivate sellers to reach goals with custom incentives.

Pros:

• The gamification approach encourages sales reps to do more to close deals.
• Choose between several pricing tiers, including a free option.
• Integrates with popular collaboration tools, like HubSpot and Google Sheets.

Cons:

• It may not be the best demo creator available.
• This platform focuses more on what sales professionals are doing instead of how buyers react to demos.

Companies needing help inspiring and motivating sales teams might consider Arcade. It encourages reps to pursue sales, boost sales pipeline visibility, and track progress at every stage. Create interactive demos with an added feature for sales teams to compete internally.

Navattic

Navattic provides teams with the opportunity to craft interactive product demos while empowering them to succeed. The platform integrates with top sales tools, encourages sales enablement, and helps teams track engagement with their demos.

Pros:

• Create self-guided demos to walk buyers through your product step by step.
• User-friendly platform with excellent customer support and knowledge base.
• Custom onboarding process for every customer to ensure you know how to use the platform.

Cons:

• May not be viable for startups and small to mid-sized firms.
• Not as personalised as some of the other options.

Navattic caters to larger firms and enterprise-level teams that have at least 100 employees contributing to product demos. Smaller teams can reach out to the sales team for potential partnering, but you have to meet certain parameters to qualify as a startup.

Cohesive Sales Teams Use Forward

Sales pods represent the goal for successful teams regarding collaborative tools and buyer engagement. Cross-team collaboration at every sales funnel stage boosts buyer engagement and increases conversion rates.

Choosing the right communication and sales demo tools is necessary for providing teams with the resources they need to succeed. Forward’s Digital Sales Room creates the ultimate collaborative environment for any sales team by providing: 

• Opportunities to engage in real-time - between teams and with buyers - to ensure a seamless buying experience, from first contact through onboarding and beyond.
• Centralised deal hubs create transparency and joint success because everyone can access the same sales material in a single dedicated space.
• Interactive Mutual Action Plans (MAPs) create a structured sales journey to hold everyone accountable, establish deadlines, and simplify complex deals for better buyer engagement.
• Seamless integrations with your favourite tools mean you don’t have to start from scratch.
• Monitor buyer engagement in real-time to gain insight into buyer intent so you can react faster and more efficiently.

Create a cohesive sales pod to boost buyer engagement and drive joint success with Forward’s powerful digital sales room. Try Forward for free and see how it can revolutionise your sales process.