The sales landscape for manufacturing and furniture brands is increasingly complex, requiring seamless workflow, fast decision-making, and customer-centric strategies. Thus, sales collaboration tools are a must-have in most business operational processes. They are designed to improve communication among sales teams and facilitate better alignment with marketing, production, and design departments to drive sales effectively.
In this blog, we will explore the significance of sales collaboration in manufacturing and furniture businesses and the 10 best software or apps that can support this perspective. Right now, keep scrolling for more details and insights with our VividWorks professionals!
Why Sales Collaboration Tools Are Essential for Manufacturing/ Furniture Brands
Improving Team Communication Across Departments
Disconnected teams often cause miscommunication and delayed operational responses. These consequences might be more detrimental to manufacturing or furniture brands, where product configuration, design iterations, and logistic phases are non-negotiable. That’s also when you need sales collaboration tools to ensure your business productivity.
Communication tools for sales can create a shared workspace and allow users to assign goals, timelines, and responsibilities across departments. You can access typical features like real-time chat, notifications, prices, visualizations of products, and even file sharing. This helps everyone stay on top of the sales steps, which is especially crucial for urgent customer updates or order changes. From that, brands can enable an effective pipeline.
Enhanced Customer Relationship Management
Both B2B and B2C customers highly recommend fast, precise, and personalized services. That’s why any delay in responding to inquiries, design confirmation, or just quoting might make customers feel annoyed, further losing your sales opportunities to the competitors.
When you work with sales collaboration platforms, you will have a chance to work with a unified hub for all customer or product information. For example, CRM systems can store shoppers’ previous interactions, order histories, and interests to offer tailored solutions.
Even Visual Configure, Price, Quote (Visual CPQ), an emerging but powerful visual sales collaboration tool, can empower real-time product visualizations, pricing, and quoting. This is key to reducing shoppers' hesitation when ordering complex pieces like furniture. Ultimately, this enhanced engagement with your products and services can effectively boost the brand’s sales performance, driving long-term customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Streamlined Sales Processes
Manufacturing and furniture brands traditionally suffer from manual and repetitive tasks like data entry, quote generation, and document approvals, especially for bespoke items. This apparently slows down the sales processes and even leads to unexpected mistakes.
Sales collaboration tools can automate these tasks, helping brands save time and effort, minimize human errors, and free up salespeople to focus on establishing relationships. However, you need to have seamless integrations across tools to maximize their impacts.
Better Data Insights and Reporting
Most sales collaboration software allows users to track sales activities, campaign performance, and overall team progress. With real-time insights and advanced analytics, sales leaders can identify trends, spot bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions. Brands can then enhance sales forecasting accuracy and optimize resource allocations.
Top 10 Sales Collaboration Tools to Consider
#1. Visual CPQ (Visual Configurator): VividWorks
- Website: https://www.vividworks.com/
VividWorks offers a cutting-edge, precise Visual CPQ solution that allows salespeople to visualize complex, high-modular furniture to their shoppers easily, with real-time prices.
In fact, shoppers can directly build, customize and price their selected options with 3D and Augmented Reality (AR) previews for a deeper understanding of the final products. This also ensures shoppers can feel more active in their discovery without the support of sales teams or waiting for back-and-forth confirmation or rework for every configuration. From that, manufacturing or furniture brands offer a personalized, engaging shopping journey, enhance customer satisfaction, and reduce the lead time for higher conversions.
All of these capabilities apparently explain Visual CPQ's positive impacts on online sales. Integrating seamlessly with eCommerce platforms like Shopify or WooCommerce, as well as ERM and CRM systems, also helps brands to simplify their product management.
However, strategic implementation based on product complexity and your demands is essential to achieving the best results. To launch this Visual CPQ successfully, you should inspire case studies of using visual sales collaboration tools empowered by VividWorks. They might include diverse industries: furniture, fixtures, modular buildings, and kitchens.
Key features:
- Real-time 3D product configuration and visualization
- Integration with eCommerce platforms, CRMs, and ERPs
- Dynamic real-time pricing
- Instant 100% error-free prices and quotes
- True-to-life experiences with AR
- Ready-made logics for modular products and rule-based configuration
- 3D space planning and mobile responsiveness
- Multi-language and multi-currency support.
What makes it ideal:
VividWorks Visual CPQ helps sales teams enhance customer interactions with complex, bespoke products by configuring and visualizing designs in 3D views. Dynamic pricing reduces customers' surprises at the checkout for faster deal closures. And rule-based configuration ensures that the finalized designs are manufacturable.
#2. Enterprise CRM: Salesforce
Salesforce is the second collaboration tool for the sales team. It is currently the leading cloud-based CRM platform, offering numerous robust sales team collaboration features, such as lead management, sales automation, customer service, and even CRM analytics. All of these are displayed in a well-structured, intuitive dashboard, making it easier to control the process of sales collaboration and operational transformation across teams.
Key features:
- Responsive cloud-based and mobile CRM
- Single source of truth and contact & campaign management
- Sales reporting, analytics, and forecasting
- AI and omni-channel support.
What makes it ideal:
Salesforce allows users to control vast buyer bases and track complex sales cycles. It also works well with various other business tools, which are crucial for varied operations.
#3. Internal Communications for Sales Teams: Slack
Slack is a widely used messaging application designed for workplace communication and collaboration. It helps manufacturing and furniture brands easily centralize projects, data, and information in channels, providing a secure and searchable environment. Moreover, 2,600 enterprise-ready apps in the Marketplace pave the way for scalability, making it a powerful and worthwhile sales team collaboration tool for most businesses.
Key features:
- Channel-based messaging for organized conversations
- Direct messaging and group chats
- Extensive app integrations and API for automation.
What makes it ideal:
Slack facilitates quick communication between sales, design, production, and marketing departments, ensuring instant updates and tailored solutions during the sales process.
#4. Workflow and Project Management: Trello
Trello is a sales collaboration tool that is highly evaluated for helping individuals organize and prioritize tasks using a Kanban-style interface. Users will have a chance to work with its intuitive boards, lists, and cards to track progress, assign tasks, and control workflows.
Key features:
- Visual Kanban boards for task organization
- Cards with checklists, due dates, and attachments
- Seamless team collaboration with comments and mentions.
What makes it ideal:
Sales teams can use Trello to manage complex product timelines for furniture sales and track custom order progress, ensuring clear visibility and updates for all team members.
#5. Sales Enablement & Content Sharing: Showpad
This is a notable marketing and sales collaboration tool, serving as a single source of content-focused truth, enabling salespeople to engage customers effectively. Moreover, it also generates insights to empower internal teams to work smarter and achieve more. From that, manufacturing and furniture businesses can lead to a higher conversion rate.
Key features:
- Centralized content enablement
- AI-powered functionalities for personalization
- MeetingIQ tool for coaching and training
- Integration with top platforms like Google Drive, LMS, etc.
What makes it ideal:
Showpad optimizes your sales and content enablement within six steps, along with AI.
#6. B2B Partnership Management: PartnerStack
PartnerStack is tailored to simplify and automate B2B partnership management easily. This tool enables salespeople and marketing teams to run different programs, such as affiliate, co-sell, and influencer, with precise tracking, activations, and commissions. Currently, over 120,000 active partners with PartnerStack also indicate its future potential.
Key feature:
- Automated partner onboarding and commission payments
- Access to a large B2B partner marketplace
- Detailed performance analytics and optimization tools.
What makes it ideal:
PartnerStack is a top-of-mind choice for brands using reseller networks or distributors.
#7. Selling and Revenue Automation: DealHub
DealHub is the next sales collaboration option, designed to streamline the sales process from the Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) with product catalog to contract management. This means that it can automate quote generation, contract creation, and billing, which is essential to reduce manual work. DealHub is also recommended for brands of all sizes.
Key features:
- CPQ and CLM functionalities
- Automated contract management and dynamic document generation.
What makes it ideal:
DealHub helps simplify quoting and contracting for custom manufacturing or furniture.
#8. Compliance & Sales Risk Management: AuditBoard
AuditBoard is an AI-first GRC (Governance, Risk, and Compliance) software that allows everyone to unify audit, risk, and compliance management to mitigate illegal issues. From that, manufacturing and furniture brands can ensure adherence to the highest standards across various business functions, including those relevant to sales activities.
Key features:
- AI-powered analytics, insights, and recommendations
- Unified dashboard for audit, risk, and compliance
- Dynamic reporting with real-time updates.
What makes it ideal:
When working with complex supply chains on furniture or other products, AuditBoard ensures higher adherence in sales contracts and processes to reduce ethical mistakes.
#9. Unified Communication: Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is an established communication and collaboration platform powered by Microsoft that includes workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and applications. It is known as a central hub for teamwork within Microsoft 365 for real-time exchanges. As a result, sales teams can exchange securely, making it perfect for varied work models.
Key features:
- Integrated chat, video conferencing, and file sharing
- Real-time collaboration on Microsoft 365 documents
- Extensive app integrations and robust security features.
What makes it ideal:
Microsoft Teams takes a familiar approach to Microsoft Office solutions while enabling robust features for all internal communications, from sales to production discussions.
#10. AI-Powered Professional Documentation: Bit AI
The final sales collaboration tool is Bit AI, which can help sales teams efficiently create, manage, and share professional documents. Users can ultilize it to centralize sales documents, offer real-time collaboration, and leverage AI for their personalized pitches. Even Bit AI can work well with 100+ sales and marketing tools for a frictionless workflow.
Key features:
- AI-powered content generation and smart templates
- Real-time collaborative editing and tracking
- Extensive integrations with third-party apps.
What makes it ideal:
Bit AI helps users issue professional sales proposals or specs documentation quickly.
Choosing the Right Sales Collaboration Tool
Before deciding on any sales collaboration tools, manufacturing and furniture brands need to evaluate their features, UX, integrations, and pricing for the best preparation. Moreover, look for a reliable provider for each sales and marketing collaboration solution to have successful implementation and dedicated support. And don’t forget to be aware of employee training and ensure all of your team members work well with these tools.
Now, book a demo to discover how VividWorks Visual CPQ transforms the sales cycle!
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