ShareMethods helps sales teams seal the deal

Sales teams are constantly challenged to be more productive and increase revenues. SFA applications help users track leads, but they typically lack an important function needed in the sales cycle: managing the documents required, say, to produce presentations and proposals.

ShareMethods’s well-executed collaboration service fills this gap. Small and midsize businesses are likely to find that this easy-to-use hosted offering saves sales staff considerable time and helps them close more deals. Plus the ShareMethods integrates nicely with CRM services such as Salesforce.com.

The portal-like ShareMethods design caters to sales and marketing staff; people who don’t have time to set up an application or attend training. Out of the box, the tabbed interface is prepopulated, automatically supplying a best practice for organizing material. For example, the marketing tab includes areas for advertising material, market research, and promotions. Browsing through any category, you’ll find lists of available documents along with the options to take actions such as adding, editing, searching, and sharing material.

The service’s remaining document management functions are equally strong. For instance, when uploading material, I easily attached metainformation to help in searches. Similarly, version control tracked every revision along with author comments.

An integrated feedback system allows users to rate documents on a five-point scale or to add commentary. This unusual feature is designed to help marketing staff improve document quality; in many organizations, there’s no convenient way for marketers to know whether material they produce hits the mark.

Version 3.0 of ShareMethods adds important document analytics and reporting features that provide even greater insight into document use. For instance, I quickly downloaded reports (in Excel or CSV format) showing document access and download statistics.

In keeping with the service’s overall ease-of-use, document distribution is straightforward. ShareMethods let me easily e-mail a collection of documents (either as links or attachments) both to system users and non-ShareMethods recipients. My only gripe here is that marking a document for external access requires taking the extra step of creating a separate document-edit form.

Beyond getting documents into the hands of users, ShareMethods includes basic workflow. Using a slight variation of the e-mail distribution process, I quickly sent documents to various users soliciting their approval or comments. Links in the resulting message take users directly to the ShareMethods approval form, making the whole process swift and effortless.

Although the ShareMethods service alone is valuable, perhaps the most significant capability is the seamless way it integrates with hosted CRM systems, including Salesforce.com, Salesnet, and Siebel CRM OnDemand.

I tested ShareMethods with Salesforce.com, a combination that offers single sign-on. After logging in to sforce, an additional ShareMethods tab provided immediate access to all the documents I’d previously added using the ShareMethods service. Further, ShareMethods actions (such as adding documents) were also exposed within sforce. This tight knitting may help sales people interact with relevant documents while having key account information at hand, without needing to switch between applications.

ShareMethods requires hardly any maintenance. When I wanted to tweak settings, however, the admin area provided simple Web forms to manage tabs, users, and groups, along with assigning group permissions for document access.

Moreover, developers have access to a Web services API, which can be handy. Case in point: I employed this function to permit document upload from a public Web site directly into ShareMethods. This is a nice self-service function if you need to accept registration documents from prospective partners or to code similar capabilities.

ShareMethods lets you build a collaborative network economically that not only connects employees, but marketing agencies, channel partners, distributors, and resellers, as well. This on-demand service’s document management and distribution functions work very well alone. Furthermore, CRM integration gives needed document management functions to the leading hosted SFA applications.

Like most ASP offerings, ShareMethods rolls out improvements often. The company added file-level access control in January 2005. Without this capability, it was possible for anyone in a group to get at all files in an area, which is often not ideal.

In February, plans call for improved document notification so users will be alerted when they have a document awaiting their approval; currently, users are only notified of changes to live documents.

Although there are certainly other fine hosted collaborative solutions, including Intranets.com, ShareMethods’ focus on sales and marketing is unique. When you add on the low cost, planned improvements, and open architecture, it’s well worth the investment.