To paraphrase the ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus, “You can never step into the same river twice.”

Although he lived in the 5th century BCE, Heraclitus might as well have been talking about sales. Everything in sales changes: products, comp plans, competitors, team members, customers, technology. The river your sales team steps into today might look like the one they waded into yesterday, but it’s always changing. Some days, the river is calm and peaceful. Other days, it’s a raging torrent with dangerous rocks lying just below the surface.

White water rafting on the river of sales

When the river of sales gets rough, it can be tough to navigate. Like a team of white water rafters, everyone on the selling team needs to be in synch, pulling in the same direction, and understanding the role they play. This takes teamwork, or in the parlance of sales, collaboration.

Unlike the team of white water rafters who are all huddled together on the same piece of waterproofed nylon, your selling team may not see one another during the course of the sales cycle. The sales professional in the field may need to connect with industry and technology specialists spread out across the country or around the globe. At other times, they will need to bring in people from the home office: executive management, accounting, shipping, etc.

Few sales organizations selling in a complex B2B environment would dare to dismiss the importance of collaboration. But as vital as collaboration is, you can’t just will it to happen. Email and mobile phones help, but they aren’t enough. While you’re wasting time with phone tag, cryptic text messages, and never-ending email threads, your competition is talking to your customers.

Tools of the trade

Here are six tools that improve collaboration across organizations by making it more efficient and effective.

#1 Customer Relationship Management (CRM): By now, just about every sales professional has access to a CRM system. But that’s only half the battle. To collaborate effectively on an opportunity, everyone on the selling team needs to have access. Thankfully, some of the new CRM delivery models such as SaaS (Software as a Service) and limited user licenses have made it affordable to expand the use of CRM beyond the sales team.

#2 Social Media: Studies are starting to show that a growing (if still small) percentage of people prefer to communicate via social media. There are tools available that will monitor social media platforms and pull everything together for you. A growing number of CRM providers are building these tools into their applications.

#3 Knowledgebase: Looking for materials such as the latest customer presentation has to be one of the biggest time-wasters in sales organizations today. Most of the time, sales professional won’t even bother to search their own laptop. It’s just faster to ask someone in marketing to track it down and send it (again) via email. Stop wasting everybody’s time by maintaining a well-organized and easy-to-use knowledgebase system.

#4 Collaboration platforms: CRM systems and social media set the stage for collaboration, but tools like Yammer are the opening act. These private social networking platforms improve collaboration internally and with customers. Some of the new CRM systems integrate with Yammer, again pulling all the information you need for opportunity management into one system.

#5 Mobility: All of the tools of the trade I’ve mentioned so far are useless if the sales team has to go back to the office to use them. Although there are drawbacks, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies are more feasible than ever thanks to the interoperability of technology and the ease at which application designers can produce apps that work across platforms.

#6 Apps: Speaking of apps, they are everywhere and multiplying—fast. Chances are there is an app available, or will be one soon, for nearly every challenge you encounter. Companies like Microsoft and Salesforce.com even have their own app stores featuring a plethora of apps designed for their platforms.

Don’t let your sales professionals drown in the river of sales. Equip them with the technologies they need to work together and make it to the final destination—a successful sale.

Join me at ASTD 2014 for State of the Selling Landscape on Wednesday morning, May 7. This session will include a look at the trends that are helping to shape training and development programs that will enable the sales team to be successful in the current market conditions. This session will look at the marketplace from a sales leader’s perspective to help ensure your sales programs are aligned with the current needs of your sales team and support you being a strategic resource to your sales organization.