TIPS AND TRICKS FOR MICROSOFT TEAMS MASTERY

Tips and Tricks for Microsoft Teams Mastery

Promote uptake and prepare your sales group for the greatest success with their Teams adoption with a few practical tips and tricks:

Use Planner Tabs to Organize Activities

The Tasks application in Teams is a robust way to keep your sales group on top of the activities that need to be performed. Microsoft Teams combines individual task programs such as Microsoft To Do and Outlook with team tasks from Microsoft Planner to ensure every task gets assigned and completed. Owners can see tasks broken down by team or account, while notes around tasks can be assigned to team members.

Create Account Management Teams

Keep all customer information in one place by creating account Teams that include chats such as: customer news and updates; current engagements; new opportunities; and a sales playbook. Teams allows all customer emails to be directly attached to channels, creating a living history of client activity.

Don’t Forget Training, Training and Retraining

The more your group adopts teams the more they will learn to make it work for them, but it’s important to incorporate formal training on the platform into your adoption program. Remember to be patient, everyone picks up new technology at a different rate and it may take multiple training sessions for something to stick.

Have faith that your team will learn the technical skills they need to work with Teams—even if they haven’t worked with similar software before. Studies have shown that having directly transferable skills isn’t as important as we all think. For instance, a LinkedIn study conducted for the World Economic Forum recently found that many employees moving into "emerging roles" like data science and AI are from occupations that don't share similar skills.

Create a Request for Proposal (RFP) Channel

Be ready for new business when it comes by creating a cross-functional RFP channel bringing together sales, technical and legal teams as needed. This shares all relevant links, knowledge and documentation in one place, keeping your team on track with your RFP submission efforts.

Invite Customers to Teams

Even as you move internal communications to Teams, there are great advantages to inviting customers to Teams. You will benefit from the enhanced scheduling, task tracking and meeting lifecycle capabilities of Teams, optimizing account management and improving customer experience by recording conversations and requests.

Integrations and APIs

Connecting Microsoft Teams with the organization’s existing sales tools and CRM applications ensures critical collaborations, meetings and customer chats don’t get lost. The sales group is also working with the most up-to-date customer data. This all makes it easier for sales reps to access customer information and to collaborate with marketing and technical teams.

As mentioned, Microsoft has already partnered with Salesforce to integrate the solution into the Teams platform and has deep integrations with Microsoft 365 Dynamics CRM. To better answer RFPs, sales groups can benefit from integrations with cloud-based RFP response management software from RFPIO.

Conversation threads and notes from outside of Teams can also be linked to create a unified repository of all customer and sales knowledge. In addition, connecting Microsoft Teams’ APIs with other applications improves productivity by saving time and connecting even more workflows.