Eliminate information sprawl from all corners of your sales teams.
How Coda will align your team across email, messaging, docs, sheets, slides, CRM, and other systems.
The Coda team
Eliminate information sprawl from all corners of your sales teams.
By The Coda team
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According to Deloitte’s 2022 Global Marketing Trends, high-growth teams are more likely to have processes that allow creativity to flourish. However, in sales, creativity can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, creativity allows sales teams to see challenges in a new light and to look for solutions that are “outside the box.” On the other hand, in a team setting, creativity needs organization so that AEs, sales team members, and other stakeholders are always aligned, no matter how often the goalposts are moved. Having creative bandwidth while maintaining structure for the team can be a tricky balancing act. Coda’s Head of Sales, Brian Lederman, is tapped into the approach that merges alignment and creative freedom. And after interviewing several account executives about how they’ve fostered their workflows, he created The Ultimate Coda Handbook for Sales Teams to coalesce these approaches. In his handbook, Brian shares the best tips and insights he’s gathered that allow teams to tap into their creative spark while using Coda. In this post, we’re giving you a sneak peek into templates that give you focus and flexibility—read the handbook for more. Most account plans are doomed from the jump. They involve complex, moving targets with a lot of data and stakeholders, while also including CRM data. This environment alone means that the necessary information sprawls across docs, sheets, slides, messages, emails, and apps. Account hubs in Coda efficiently organize everything you need to close more deals—your team, notes, research, and plans. And because they connect to your stakeholders and data, they don’t go stale. Coda brings in data from your CRM so it’s clear that it’s integrated and more than a doc. After using Coda’s account hubs, AEs say that these were the key reasons they prefer them:
1. Coda is familiar, but more efficient than Google Drive.
At this point, everyone is familiar with the wall of tabs which open up to endless docs and sheets. Rushed note-taking or generating a new account plan can lead to an errant tab or, even worse, a brand new tab…the mess grows bigger by the minute. With Coda, you’re getting a familiar doc surface, but you’re also using a structure designed precisely to prevent the tab pile-ups. This keeps sales more productive while minimizing the time spent chasing sprawl.2. Coda’s account hubs incorporate CRM, tools, and the team all into one place.
Endlessly switching between your CRM and the work surface…that’s one way to run an account hub. A better way is to take advantage of Coda’s ability to import customer data right into your account hub. You’ll be updated with the most current data from Salesforce or HubSpot, and you’ll be able to log notes or make changes directly from your doc. No more hunting through fields or never-ending clicks just to update Salesforce. These hubs are also a great collaborative space where sales can track tasks, view Gong calls, leave comments, and send Slack reminders. That transforms account plans into active hubs that work like a “second brain.”3. AI and automation do the dirty work.
Keeping a sales team aligned can require constant maintenance. What AEs love about Coda is that it cuts down on these actions by using our AI summaries, Slack notifications, and automated email updates. This seriously reduces busywork so they can focus on what matters: working with customers and closing sales. Our account planning hubs are great for keeping the sales team aligned, but there’s a key part of the sales equation that AEs use Coda for: customers. A ton of information is relayed to the customer through these processes, and it can be quite a burden for them to track. Coda helps with this in a couple of ways:1. Using mutual planning hubs to keep timelines and information organized.
Mutual Action Plans tend to be noisy because they bring everything together: timelines, activities, owners, PDFs and videos, meeting notes, and all of the relevant information. Coda’s mutual action hubs reduce noise and boost alignment in the following ways:- Your team members and the customers will literally be on the same page. Through the course of a sales cycle and partnership, you send a lot of information to your customers. This places a burden on them to keep it together and organized. No more hoping they can find everything, since they can just open the Mutual Action Hub.
- Templates create consistency across your team. Coda allows you to create a standardized template so that you can create consistency for how your teams operate, allowing you to take the best practices from your highest-performing teams and make sure everyone is utilizing them.
- Integrate with all of the tools you need. A major underlying reason for the sprawl of information is that the many products that you need to use don’t seamlessly integrate. Coda integrates over 600 tools and also allows you to embed any third-party tool directly in Coda. It is the true all-in-one platform.
2. Coda is hundreds of app features in one tool.
Sales teams that have assembled a team of experienced pros will find that each member has specific habits for accessing enablement content, keeping track of customer data in a spreadsheet, and copying/pasting between slide decks. In other words, a total scattershot of SaaS features, while the full price is paid for the tool stack. Here’s where Coda delivers the features your team uses at a fraction of the cost:- Augment or replace your CRM. A huge consolidation pivot is taking advantage of Coda’s ability to filter, tag, and sort data with the flexibility of a spreadsheet.
- Content and training are organized into one place. Reps will no longer have to log into multiple tools and they’ll have the control to organize the content in a way that makes sense for them.
- Utilize the top 3 enablement features and ditch the rest. Focus on the 20% of features from Seismic that accomplish 80% of what your reps need. This will spare you from paying for extra licenses and embed tools where people just need “view” access.