The Ultimate Coda Handbook for Sales Teams
The selling environment has changed over the years but amongst all of that change a few things remain the same: teams you want to hire and develop top talent, accelerate your team’s productivity, and maximize value for your company and customers.
At Coda, we’re often struck by how similar sales teams’ needs are. Whether they’re at an established organization or a fast-scaling startup, their goals include driving alignment and accountability, accelerating sales cycles, increasing execution, and decreasing time to ramp.
In fact, sales leaders are more similar than not, regardless of their industry, company size, or target customer profile. Recently, I came to the conclusion that sales leaders are more relatable than not, regardless of their industry, company size, or target customer profile. They often tell us, I often hear “Absolutely, we’re trying to solve for the same thing. How do you handle it?”
I’ve had the pleasure of working with and selling to sales leaders for most of my two decades in sales. I spent 13 years at Salesforce helping the company grow from a single product to the industry leader that they are today. At Coda, I’m struck with how similar the needs are whether you are at an established organization or a fast-scaling startup: drive alignment and accountability, accelerate sales cycles, increase execution, and decrease time to ramp.
While I’ve had a few original ideas, I’m not ashamed to admit that I stole the majority of my playbook from others. Steve Jobs said that, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Why reinvent the wheel when someone has already done this? That’s what led us to create Coda’s Ultimate Handbook for Sales. It’s a collection of frameworks to solve some of the perennial challenges facing any sales team. Anyone can copy, steal, or modify these to perfectly fit their needs.
So, what does this mean for sales teams that leverage Coda?
- Better team selling
- Improved sales execution
- Increased sales team productivity that leads to more wins
Coda is the new operating system that evolves sales productivity.
“Our CRO has no idea where all the docs are or what’s in them. It takes hours to get an update on anything. Coda gives us centralized accountability and peace of mind. This is our one-stop shop that helps us all stay on the same page.”
Just about every sales org we’ve worked with has observed these challenges:
Leaders lack real-time account strategy clarity
With higher pressure on sales targets, real-time understanding of the current state and strategy for a given book of business is no longer a luxury. Yet leaders are mired in Slacks, emails, calls, and hacked-together slides, sheets and reports to understand how they’ll hit their revenue target.
Reps spend more time on updates than actual selling
On top of leadership pings, reps are at the center of a much larger list of stakeholders — from their deal team, to their new prospects, to their current accounts — and are stuck between the tools that each of these groups depend on. The result?: Less time selling, more time coordinating.
Sales Ops lack consistency and accountability
From forecasting, to enablement, ops teams are increasingly left firefighting a growing list of ad hoc requests, disconnected tools, and fragile systems — instead of building well-designed strategies to help the business succeed in their goals. Reactivity has become the norm.
You have your CRM. You have all of your sales & productivity tools. But there is no platform that can bring them all together, so teams default to a web of docs, sheets, and slides. At the end of the day, while software isn’t the only reason these challenges exist, the refrain I’ve heard from sales teams is clear: where you work together determines how you work together. Once upon a time the CRM felt like a step-change for sellers. Now, with the addition of thousands of other connected sales tools, it increasingly feels like we’ve created a new set of information silos instead of a harmonious “single source of truth.” In a world where sales productivity has taken center stage, accepting the status quo is no longer an option.
That’s where Coda fits in. Coda is an all-in-one solution, which means at its core it can enhance, reduce, and ultimately replace many parts of the existing sales tool stack. But more importantly, Coda is both a familiar tool that individual reps will embrace in the same way they embrace docs and sheets for their plans and forecasts, and a connected tool that creates synchronized clarity for every team involved in the sale.
Start connecting your team, data, and processes with these Coda solutions built by sales teams, for sales teams:
1. Sales Team Hubs: Drive better alignment and keep your team organized.
Information you share with your team sprawls across email, messaging, docs, sheets, slides, CRM, enablement system, etc. What is the one link your team goes to for everything they need to perform their role effectively? It’s a Coda Team Hub.
Why create Team Hubs in Coda?
Problem Let’s start with the core thesis: where you work together determines how you work together. Team selling is how deals get done, especially as sales cycles get more complicated. Yet, as we’ve worked with hundreds of sales teams, it’s striking just how few (if any) sales teams have a true “team hub” — a place where they can congregate to share progress, enable each other, and drive momentum across the year and quarter.
Solution The simplest (and often most delightful) way to start with Coda is setting up your Sales Team Hub — a place to organize people, information, meetings, metrics, and rituals that keep your sales teams connected and collaborative throughout the year.
2. Account Planning: Improve team selling and increase close rates.
Selling is a team sport. But each team has their own system, playbook, and process that usually don’t connect. What is the one link you will use to build and execute your account strategy? It’s the Coda Account Plan.
Why should your team account plan in Coda?
Problem The core of sales team technology challenges tie back to its beating heart — the CRM. These products have been built around the concept of a single source of truth, storing all activity from account to company forecast in one structured place. The lack of consistency in these approaches creates a huge headache for leaders and Ops alike — if no two account teams work the same way, how can you possibly understand rep efficiency?
Solution Coda’s Account Plans (aka Account Hubs) are an extension of your CRM — intentionally designed to drive daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly rituals around your accounts while staying fully synchronized with your CRM source of truth.
3. Mutual Action Plans: Improve deal execution and accelerate speed to closure.
You have a timeline that you shared with your prospect. But you also shared other documents, slides, assets, videos, and information that is hard for everyone involved to keep track of. What is the one link you share with your prospect to stay aligned? It’s Coda Mutual Action Plan.
Why should your team use Coda for mutual action plans?
Problem You have your account strategy perfectly laid out with your deal team. But how do you make it actionable for your prospect? The traditional model is sharing something familiar — a doc, a spreadsheet, a folder in your Google Drive, or an email thread. In the best case, reps are relegated to managing deal progress through ad hoc comms channels.
Solution With mutual action plans in Coda, you get all of the benefits of flexible, familiar, and shareable doc and spreadsheet surfaces, with delightful features that make mutual action plans feel complete, well designed, and engaging.
4. Bonus: your new Sales Operating System.
Reimagine your sales tech tool stack. Enhance tools you need to run the business, reduce unnecessary licenses for tools you only use a percentage of, and replace unnecessary tools. Coda can solve hundreds of ad hoc use cases with simple, reusable templates.
Why adopt Coda as your sales team’s OS?
Problem The sales tool stack is large, and grows on what feels like a daily basis. From email automation to prospecting tools, sales teams are constantly looking for a way to get an edge over the competition.
Solution While Coda appears to be the familiar doc and sheet surface of your dreams, it’s more. Coda’s building blocks enable makers to build micro-apps, integrating, automating, and enhancing dozens of workflows.