5 Essential Collaboration Tools For Sales & Marketing Teams In 2022

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If you’re a business owner, or a project manager striving to increase sales and annual revenue of your business, the seamless collaboration between the marketing and sales team becomes an absolute necessity. 

Marketing and sales professionals cannot operate in silos. Every team member from both departments needs to be on the same page, not just for enhanced collaboration but also to ensure more productivity at work. 

Above all, both sales and marketing teams need to be aligned.

For instance, imagine your business as a cart that is being pulled by two horses. One horse is the sales team and the other horse is the marketing team. Now, if you want your cart (business) to head in the right direction, you’ll have to depend on both your horses (sales team & marketing team) to go together in the right direction.

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What happens if both horses pull in different directions, or one of them struggles to keep up the speed with the other one?

Well, the answer is not difficult to guess. Your cart (business) would end up nowhere. Worse, it can lose balance and topple over. Surely, you would not want it to happen in any case. 

The point of mentioning this short story is to highlight how crucial it is for both departments to be perfectly aligned to achieve common organizational goals. 

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Now, it’s easier said than done. Today’s marketing and sales teams have to juggle a plethora of tasks; tracking various campaigns, projects, and every member’s workloads can be overwhelming for even the most seasoned and efficient project managers. 

A survey by Salesforce discovered that a conflicting relationship between the two departments will reduce the bottom line and set off productivity inefficiencies that cost companies around $1 trillion per year. 

A whopping amount indeed. 

Let’s find out about some common areas of conflict between sales and marketing teams.

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What Leads To Friction Between Sales Teams And Marketing Teams? 

• Poor communication not only tends to fuel mistrust and misunderstanding between both departments but also leads to a significant decline in productivity. 
• Confusion surrounding roles and responsibilities can take place due to vague stereotyping. For example, some sales professionals may undermine the value of complicated marketing campaigns while some marketing professionals may tend to think that sales teams have a short-sighted view of the company. 
• Cultural differences and personality clashes are common causes of friction between sales and marketing teams. Differences of opinion, ego clashes, and diverse working styles can create a rift between some team members of both teams. 
• Since budget is limited, the tussle over budget allocation is one of the most common causes of conflict between both teams. While marketing teams seek more budget to cover long-term social media campaigns, sales teams want a higher budget to cover training programs and additional recruitment. 
• And those blame games seem like a never-ending phenomenon in the corporate world. When low sales and low revenue happen, both teams blame each other. For example, marketing teams blame sales teams for the poor execution of lead generation campaigns while the latter blames the former for not providing engaging marketing content. 

And The Solution Is Nearby

Even though aligning both departments can be a seemingly daunting task, it is not impossible. In the days when remote work and hybrid work are prevalent, the use of top-rated collaboration tools can bring both departments together on a common platform.  

Collaboration tools further promote mutual trust between both teams as well add clarity regarding job roles and responsibilities of both departments. 

Let’s take a look at some of the most widely used and popular collaboration tools that are used by a large number of sales and marketing teams across the globe to achieve streamlined collaboration.

5 Astounding Cross-Team Collaboration Tools In 2022

• ProofHub

ProofHub is a feature-rich team collaboration and project management software that is designed to promote both intra-team and cross-team collaboration. This simple-to-learn tool offers a broad range of features. 

It enables sales teams and marketing teams to coordinate better and stay updated on all activities across both departments. 

Both teams can create separate projects for marketing and sales on the dashboard, and manage all their work in a centralized location. Thoughtful features like File Management and Online Proofing enable both teams to easily access, collaborate, and share feedback on important files & documents. 

Then there are features like Group Chat, Discussions, @Mentions, Announcements, and Notifications that ensure swift communication across both departments. 

Through ProofHub, both marketing and sales teams can be on the same platform, which helps to keep all team members in the loop and promotes transparency across teams. 

Main Collaboration Features Are: 

• Online proofing
• Discussions
• Group chat
• Scheduling calendar
• File management 
• Real-time updates
• App integrations 

Pricing: The Ultimate Control plan is priced at $89/month, billed annually. 

• Trello

Trello is a top-rated collaborative work management app that enables teams across various departments to manage and collaborate on projects into Trello boards. Marketing teams and sales teams can accomplish tasks efficiently and faster besides coordinating with each other to exchange creative ideas. A simple and easy-to-use tool, Trello enables users to see all project-related information on one page. 

Image Source: Trello

From meetings to projects, events, and goal-setting, Trello’s intuitive features enable every team to quickly set up and customize workflows as per their requirements. Every single part of your task can be tracked, organized, and shared with our teammates. Tasks can contain useful information, like images, notes, and file attachments. Also, tasks can be assigned deadlines and other status tracking data.  

Main Collaboration Features Are: 

• Easy, drag-and-drop editing
• Easy Organization with Labeling, Tags, and Comments
• Card records archive
• Progress meter checklist
• In-line editing
• Activity logs
• Discussions

Pricing: The Paid plan starts from $5/user/month. 

• Podio

Podio is a powerful, web-based project management software for businesses and teams of every size across various industry verticals. The solution also helps to improve coordination among different departments and is available for Android and iOS devices. Podio provides companies and teams with automated task scheduling that is visible to all the involved team members. An integrated CRM application stores customers’ and potential clients’ information, which you can use to create successful marketing campaigns and advertisements. 

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Image Source: Podio

Podio has a built-in chat feature that allows team members from different departments to send instant messages to other team members. The events-type feature connects your external calendar to the system’s timetable to streamline meetings and interviews. A unified calendar view in Podio enables users to have a single view of all tasks and projects in a single place. 

Main Collaboration Features Include: 

• File sharing
• Task management 
• Data visualization
• Podio Apps
• Reporting
• Workflows
• Integrations 

Pricing: The Paid plan starts from $7.20/month/user. 

• Ryver 

Ryver is quite similar to Slack in terms of functionality. It is designed to enable seamless communication within your organization in a simple and easy way. Using this product, teams from various departments can exchange and share crucial information through voice calls, video calls, and group messaging. 

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Image Source: Ryver

Accessible on any device, Ryver offers app integrations with other tools your sales and marketing teams are using. The main benefits of are its cost-effectiveness, its potential to replace emails for internal communication, leverage to create an unlimited number of groups and teams, and its robust API integration capabilities.

Main Collaboration Features Include: 

• Public and private chats
• Post reminders
• Post stream
• Custom conversation channels
• Collaboration spaces
• Faster data access
• Robust encryption 

Pricing: The Paid plan starts at $49 per month for up to 12 users. 

• LiquidPlanner

LiquidPlanner is a powerful and impressive collaboration tool that helps teams across various departments with effortless management of projects, workloads, tasks, and more. The tool automatically and dynamically schedules work for your entire team, even as factors change. Using LiquidPlanner, you can not only track and schedule your work but other resources like external partners, staff, equipment, etc. 

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Image Source: LiquidPlanner

With LiquidPlanner Planning Intelligence, you can align people, priorities, and projects. The Predictive scheduling engine enables teams to forecast when work will be done and as it continuously adapts to change. Data-driven, intelligent insights help teams to improve their performance and make well-researched decisions, timely decisions for successful project completion and delivery. 

Main Collaboration Features Include:

• Planning intelligence
• Time management
• Aligned priorities
• Smart estimation
• Predictive scheduling
• Balanced workload
• Intelligent insights

Pricing: The Paid plan starts from $15/user/month, annual billing. 

Data and Graphic provided by Crazy Egg

Summing It Up 

Remote work has made it a challenging task for project managers and business owners to align sales teams and marketing teams. However, there are some highly functional collaboration tools that offer the right features to bring cross-departmental teams on the same platform for improved coordination and transparency. 

The tools mentioned above are being used by a large number of businesses and teams to reap the benefits of high collaboration between marketing and sales teams. Why are you left behind? Go ahead and pick your choice.