It takes a lot more to manage collaborative teams than just telling everyone to work together. Even requiring regular updates isn’t enough to keep everyone on task in a combined effort. Customer Relationship Management software gives you tools to better manage group efforts and to maximize efficiency.
Make a Plan Everyone Can Follow
One of the most important ways a project manager can facilitate collaboration is to make sure expectations are crystal clear. Insightly’s integrated project management makes it easy with a comprehensive pipeline feature. A pipeline is a step-by-step path from start to finish for a project or opportunity. Once you’ve created a pipeline, your Insightly users see the project path as a graphical representation, including completed steps. Each step can have tasks attached and due dates assigned. Pipelines present a simple overview of project status. Everyone on your team will see what’s done, what’s in progress, and what’s left to do.
Link Carefully
It’s important to assign responsible parties to projects in a CRM so they are notified of updates. Related contacts and organizations can be linked to projects, but be wary of doing so unless it’s necessary. It can quickly become confusing for employees to see people linked to projects they aren’t working on. To make the most effective use of linking, consider tasking one person per project to locate and link only the groups and individuals who are collaborating on the project. Encourage all employees to use tags to simplify sorting.
Use One Calendar
Do you have one calendar in your project management program and different calendars for other appointments? Insightly calendar is now expanded to include synchronization with Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange. The days of double-booking meetings are gone. For your teams, this means everyone can work on the same timeline without stepping on each other’s toes. Is your sales team awaiting leads from the marketing group? They can check into the Insightly calendar events, see exactly what day marketing will be sending leads along, and create their schedule based on that date. Employees can also sync their own calendars to pull everything into their Insightly calendar page for quick reference.
Automate Repetitive Processes
Your teams could be spending more of their time working toward a common goal if you free up some of their time. Automating repetitive tasks is one of the best ways to do so. In Insightly, automating repetitive tasks by creating activity sets is easy. Activity sets are groups of tasks and calendar events, each with its own customizable due date. They can be associated with steps in a pipeline or opportunities, and even applied to leads, contacts, organizations, opportunities, and projects. Once you create an activity set, you can apply it anywhere it’s needed.
Upload Pertinent Documents
Rather than expecting your teams to dig around other websites, apps or (gasp) email each other project-specific files, make sure they’re all accessible directly from your CRM. In Insightly, users can link files from Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive, or drag-and-drop them right onto a Files tab. Files can be attached to leads, contacts, organizations, projects, opportunities, and task comments. Once the documents are in the right location, your Insightly users can access them whenever they need to.
When you leverage the best tools to manage collaborative teams, you empower your people to work together toward common goals. Even better, you and your team will all be helping your business function better as a whole.
Insightly CRM includes all the tools your team needs to improve collaboration and get more done effectively. Try out all of Insightly’s features by signing up for a 14-day free trial.
