Salespeople are the ultimate revenue drivers in most businesses. However, the best sales teams aren’t made up of lone wolves; instead, they act as a pack. And that extends to other teams, from marketing to customer service and product, which all play a crucial role in setting sales up for success.

That’s because whether it’s chasing up marketing qualified leads, adapting a new strategy that’s been drawn up by the CEO or reporting back to finance on revenue, impactful selling requires effective cross-functional teamwork.

Yet, too often, cumbersome tools and an overload of admin are bogging these cross-functional teams down. With greater pressure to drive productivity and revenue while exceeding growing customer expectations, this has to change. Salespeople and their collaborators across the business need platforms and practices that will keep them connected, engaged and ultimately able to close deals faster.

Cross-functional teams need cross-functional tools

Without the right strategy and tools in place, sales teams can’t tap into the essential pockets of information across the business that they need to secure customers. For example, if marketing is creating incredible content to engage prospects with, and qualifying a set of new leads, sales needs to be able to access and activate those assets with ease. They can’t do so if the only thread linking everyone together is an ancient email system.

Too often, instead of laying the groundwork for agile and impactful sales, the tools and practices in place are slowing teams down. With a growing number of apps to keep track of and weak collaboration between departments, research shows that, more than 70% of salespeople’s time is spent on non-selling tasks. So, what does a better approach look like?

To start selling more effectively, businesses need tools that enable everyone - regardless of department - to easily search and share knowledge and data. That means having a united productivity platform that keeps teams like sales, finance, marketing, procurement, product and more all connected.

Whether that’s problem solving with their immediate teammate Tanya, sharing reports with Femi from finance or hopping on video huddles with Hardeep in HR, in this single space a seller can collaborate with whoever they need to, with the right information, like customer details, always accessible.

Crucially, this platform isn’t just connecting individuals, but also tools. With tight integrations across CRM platforms and automations, sellers can save time, access the right people and surface data to make better decisions.

In a single space they can check out the numbers on their Q3 pipeline deals, kick-off an automated process to onboard a teammate and chat with marketing about a new campaign.

By keeping both teams and apps connected, productivity and collaboration skyrockets while the time swapping apps or hunting for information plummets: win-win.

Laying foundations for AI-empowered selling 

By choosing the right platform to drive cross-functional collaboration, sales teams will also position themselves to take advantage of AI-powered workflows, automation and scalable processes.

With AI, sales teams can further cut the admin that comes as part and parcel of collaborative work. Take a typical deal workflow, for example. As contracts are finalised and onboarding of a customer begins, countless forms, approvals, support requests and more need to be shared.

With AI-powered workflows, each of these steps can automatically generate a notification with a clear action item directed to the right people and teams so that it can be dealt with instantly.

Or, in another scenario, imagine the typical processes beyond selling that salespeople have to engage with, like executive briefings or quarterly reports. Using out-of-the-box templates built into their productivity platform for these processes, every salesperson can access a best-practice example, get it updated instantly with their sales data and ship it to their cross-functional partners without losing time building a new report from scratch.

Over at Deloitte Digital, the team has embraced this approach to technology, empowering them to deliver a better experience for customers. By using automated workflows in Slack and integrations with business intelligence from Tableau, the team can maximise efficiency by always having the right data to hand, without losing time to repetitive processes. In the meantime, this approach has helped them build a platform that employees - and customers - can keep adapting to make essential everyday processes simpler.

With this winning combination of closely integrated systems and the seamless automation of manual tasks, Deloitte Digital’s critical work can move faster than ever.

Simplifying complex collaboration in sales teams

Customer-facing roles like sales are evolving, and so are the platforms that can power them. Automations and AI can accelerate repetitive processes, video or audio huddles offer new ways for partners to connect and engage while templates and integrations enable teams to easily share knowledge without losing precious selling time.

Even as complexity grows, with the right tools to support them, sales teams can stay a step ahead - keeping themselves, their teammates, and their data connected in a way that allows them to drive revenue and success for their team and the wider business.

Deirdre Byrne is Head of UK & Ireland at Slack.