They say money makes the world go round. Whether that’s true or not, revenue keeps your business afloat, keeps your teams well-paid, and is what grows your organization into a big player. But when you’re managing a team that isn’t directly tied to bringing that money in, it can seem like the teams that do operate in an impenetrable silo. That disconnect can make collaborating with them tricky — but no less crucial to your business.
Here’s a breakdown of why this kind of collaboration can be so challenging — as well as three simple tips to make it work.
What is a revenue team?
The term “revenue team” usually refers to sales and marketing teams, which are the groups most directly responsible for bringing in revenue. Go up the organizational hierarchy enough, and you’ll find a common leader overseeing both teams, usually with a title like “Head of Revenue.” But for many organizations — usually smaller ones — customer support and customer success fall under revenue as well, since preventing churn and keeping existing customers are a huge part of growing the company’s bottom line.
While these teams can often work in silos, it’s important to actively look for ways to work with them. Whenever you’re trying to increase revenue, grow your profit margins, or reduce customer churn, that collaboration becomes essential. Of course, you could always ask them to produce reports to get the insights you need, but it’s usually a better idea to get that information directly from the source over the course of your project.
Why a CRM?
Your team might operate mostly in Wrike, but that’s not always the case for revenue teams. Salespeople spend most of their time in a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, managing their pipeline, handling communications with prospects, and tracking their progress toward sales goals. Often, they’ll only check into a project management (PM) tool to get updates on cross-team projects or communicate updates on sales-specific work.
Some marketers are more PM tool-savvy, and they might track their work in Wrike. But many of them will spend most of their time in a platform like HubSpot because it provides a ton of marketing-specific features on top of its CRM base.
Customer support teams spend even more time in their CRM tool because the vast majority of their work is happening in there. Answering support tickets, collaborating among themselves, and even escalating tickets to other teams can all happen without leaving that CRM tool.
So if you’re going to collaborate with these teams — and you should be — you need to be ready to cross the divide between your tool of choice and theirs.
Three tips for collaborating with revenue teams
Now that you know how revenue teams work — and why they use CRM platforms — let’s cover some tips for collaborating with them more effectively.
1. Use Wrike Sync by Unito
Wrike Sync by Unito is an add-on for Wrike that can integrate your favorite project management tool with 13+ of the most popular software tools on the market, including a range of CRM platforms. With this add-on, you can push data to and from Wrike and keep everything in sync in both directions. That means Wrike tasks can become work items in these other tools, and you can work on them in Wrike knowing that every task will be up to date in all your tools.
With Wrike Sync, you can work seamlessly with revenue teams in Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk. That means no one has to jump into someone else’s tool, copy and paste data, or even export tasks to get their work done.
2. Work transparently and asynchronously
One of the toughest parts of working across teams is piercing through opaque workflows and processes. Each team has its own way of doing things, perfected over multiple iterations, that doesn’t necessarily match up with how other teams work. These differing ways of working can lead to difficulties when those teams need to collaborate.
That’s where transparency and asynchronous work come in.
Transparency means surfacing all of your team’s work through your PM tool of choice, your chat app, and whatever other channels you can use to keep a written record. That means long-term goals and roadmaps, daily work, processes, and more. It can seem intimidating at first, but having all that information out there will help everyone work together seamlessly.
And asynchronous work? That just means prioritizing communication and work styles that don’t require everyone to be in the same place at the same time. This can look like limiting meetings in favor of sharing updates in a PM tool or chat app and generally making sure all the work you’re doing is reflected in some kind of asynchronous channel.
3. Schedule regular feedback loops
While you should try and limit meetings when collaborating with revenue teams, there’s one meeting you should definitely be having regularly: a feedback loop.
A feedback loop is a meeting dedicated to getting feedback from one team to the other. It’s particularly useful for software as a service (SaaS) companies working on an evolving product, but every company can benefit from this, too.
Revenue teams are your company’s front line. They’re the ones selling your product, dealing with unhappy customers, and creating marketing materials that bring awareness to the company. Whether you’re managing the team that builds the product or you’re an executive deciding how to steer the organization through coming storms, getting that feedback from revenue teams is crucial for knowing the way forward. So make sure it’s part of your cross-team collaboration process.
Raking it in
Collaborating with revenue teams is essential to growing your business. Sales, marketing, and customer support teams are most in tune with your customers’ needs, gripes, and struggles, meaning that everyone else can benefit from what these teams have learned. Just remember to keep your activities transparent, prioritize asynchronous work, schedule regular feedback loops, and use Wrike Sync by Unito to bridge the gap between your favorite PM tool and their CRM platform.
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