Sales performance largely determines the success or failure of a business. You’ll have difficulty acquiring new customers and driving revenue if you do not have granular insights into market trends, demographics, and prior campaign performance. All this data must be easily accessible to your sales team so they can better understand the target audience and make more effective decisions. With cloud-based storage solutions like Microsoft OneDrive, you’ll be able to achieve this and more.
What are the benefits of using OneDrive?
OneDrive gives you the flexibility to access your data anytime, anywhere. Whether you’re in the office or on the go, you can collaborate on files with your team as long as you have an internet connection. Sharing documents is also as easy as sharing a link.
If you’re in an area with an unreliable internet connection, you can still access your files offline and sync them with your cloud storage once you’re back online. This feature is even more helpful today since hybrid working arrangements are becoming the norm.
What’s more, OneDrive offers enterprise-grade data security. To protect your files, OneDrive uses advanced encryption standards, strict access control systems, and intelligent threat prevention systems. It also regularly backs up your data across multiple servers to ensure redundancy and fast data recovery.
How can OneDrive impact sales performance?
OneDrive’s features and capabilities allow your sales team to do the following:
1. Centralise the sales database
OneDrive lets you consolidate files related to sales campaigns, customers, and product inventories in one place. OneDrive files are immediately indexed and tagged, making them easy to find. If salespeople need to retrieve certain records, they only need to enter a keyword on OneDrive’s search bar and the relevant results will instantly appear. This is a major time-saver, as sales teams no longer have to sift through mountains of paperwork and emails to find specific customer records, receipts, and other data.
2. Establish paperless processes
Carrying around a binder of sales documents during a meeting or trade show can be cumbersome. For one, it’s incredibly inefficient to flip through pages to find the right document. It’s also easy to lose track of physical paperwork, which can lead to costly delays.
With OneDrive, you can ditch the paper and use digital files instead. Since OneDrive is in the cloud, sales reps can pull up the latest product catalogue, price list, or inventory report and present it to clients on their tablets or smartphones. You can even automatically route completed web forms and scanned invoices to OneDrive folders, making data entry effortless.
3. Improve customer experiences
When you have up-to-date reports and customer information in OneDrive, it’s much easier to give prospects the tailored experience they crave. You can quickly check stock counts, order statuses, and warranty details without having to put the customer on hold. You can also reference all the information you’ve gathered from a potential client so far to make personalised sales pitches and recommendations. For example, if a prospect has previously shown interest in a certain product, you can suggest items that would go well with their purchase.
4. Boost collaboration
OneDrive users can comment on and co-author documents, making it ideal for working on team proposals, presentations, and other projects. Users can share files through a link, so there’s no need to attach large files to emails. Documents are also updated in real time, and users can see who else is working on a file and what changes have been made. This level of transparency fosters collaboration and helps prevent version control issues.
5. Safeguard sensitive information and trade secrets
Sales teams have access to highly sensitive information like customer records, budget details, and company sales tactics. Hence, it is important to filter the right staff members who can access the files. On the surface, clients get the basic Microsoft platform securities such as two-factor authentication and identity confirmation. However, to take the security up a notch, Microsoft OneDrive has sharing policies that can be configured to limit access to only pre-approved parties within the organisation. Also, companies can opt for a time-bound link sharing option that expires the link within a certain number of days.
By storing your files in OneDrive, you can be confident that your data is accessible anywhere. However, with cloud accessibility, there is also a rising threat of cyber attacks. Talk to us about how your organisation can implement better and more secure file sharing through OneDrive.
If you want to level up your sales documentation, then OneDrive is the storage solution for you. Empower IT is a managed IT services provider that can help you seamlessly migrate your data to OneDrive so you can immediately start reaping its benefits. Contact us today to get started.
