A solid cloud CRM

Sales are one of, if not the most important part of any business. They're what make your business tick, so you may be wondering; how many opportunities are slipping through the cracks? What is my sales team doing everyday? How much money will we make this month? Am I doing everything I can to grow my revenue? These are all perfectly valid and important questions that need answers. However, it's imperative to understand that it's ultimately the tools that we use which define our efficiency and productivity for an optimized sales cycle - much like a dull ax versus a sharp ax when chopping lumber.

We are in an age where manual tasks need to be automated to save us time and precious resources. Google's G Suite is an excellent example of a tool that not only improves business IT systems, but permanently removes the need for costly maintenance, frequent upgrades, and hefty equipment. G Suite is what one could call a 'smart' IT system. A tool that's simple to use, and now with machine intelligence, learns user computing patterns to optimize a business for growth. We rave about G Suite because it's the most solid business solution out there. What about a CRM solution at a similar caliber? Enter Copper.

It's a cloud CRM that your team will actually use. It will give them the insights they need to sell more. It will give them a repeatable sales process they can easily follow, and best of all, it will give you full visibility to coach them to success. It's the cloud CRM that was built for automation, enabling users to focus on making the sale.

A competitive product like Salesforce.com was launched in 1999, long before the majority of sales activities revolved around email and web based marketing. It's an expensive product designed for a different time when phone calls and other traditional sales methods were dominant.

Since the majority of your sales team's interactions happen over email today, wouldn't it be great if your CRM was designed to link up with everything in your inbox and save you oodles of time doing data entry of new contacts or copying email content into tasks? This is how Copper is different from the competition. It was designed from the beginning to run on top of G Suite and your email inbox. It provides integration so deep that it feels like just another module of G Suite. It was built when email and web marketing were already dominant sales processes.

Copper runs on Google's own exceptional cloud computing platform for high performance, security, and reliability. It's intuitive like most Google products so businesses can be up and running in no time even with no assistance. Built for the G Suite ecosystem—from Gmail and Calendar to Contacts and Drive, it provides users the unified experience across the tools they use everyday. For instance, sales teams can interact with their customers from within Gmail and Google Hangouts while they work on customer proposals and sales forecasts with Google Docs and Drive. It helps users identify, track, and optimize sales contacts and opportunities. Users can easily manage entire sales pipelines with automated systems that eliminate data entry, allowing them to focus on closing more deals. Among all the amazing things Copper is capable of here's a quick rundown of the basics:

Drive Sales
Forget about data entry and lost emails. Track emails from within, automate and assign tasks, track team activity, and use multiple sales pipelines and VoIP calling. Copper now integrates with RingCentral.

Get Visibility
Get Pipeline reports, lead and sales dashboards, forecast management, and get full visibility on activities and opportunity tracking.

Take Action
Set sales goals, create a competitive environment with leaderboards, help your teams prioritize their day with custom dashboards and much more.

The immediate gain from a CRM is an increased ROI. With Copper, users also reap the benefits of enhanced customer acquisition and retention, sales automation, and a repository of all customer information. It works perfectly from small to medium sized businesses to larger companies like Udacity and Peugeot. It's a scalable solution that helps get the job done simply and beautifully.

Have a feeling your team could be more productive? Click here to try Copper for FREE! Contact us today to learn more about Copper and G Suite for your business.

The Power of Search - Google Cloud Search

Google sees more than one trillion searches each year and that number is growing rapidly. People around the globe use Google Search to access the world's information. As businesses grow, so does their data, and sorting through this data becomes increasingly complex. Google wants to enable businesses to use the power of search to efficiently explore and access the information that's needed at any given time - easily and quickly.

Earlier this month, Google announced Google Cloud Search (formerly known as Springboard). This new product uses machine intelligence to provide a unified search experience across G Suite. 

Users in today's world compute in many different formats of data; from emails and docs to spreadsheets, slides, forms, and internal sites. It can get complicated to know where files are saved and in what format. According to McKinsey, the average worker spends 20% of the workweek searching for and consolidating information. Essentially, your staff may be wasting a lot of time just trying to find the right information needed to simply do their job!

Google Cloud Search helps businesses save time by allowing their staff to summon data immediately. It not only provides detailed search results but also proactively suggests recommendations to help users throughout the day. For instance, opening up the Cloud Search app instantly displays relevant information organized into cards that help keep the user updated. They can help users prepare for an upcoming meeting or even suggest files that may require attention. With machine learning, these cards are designed to increasingly help users be more productive and efficient over a short amount of time.

Google Cloud Search users can also search for people within the company's directory like colleagues' contact details, events, and shared files. Users can even choose to send an email, make a call, or start a Hangout session with just a tap. With all this ease, privacy is still a priority. Cloud Search respects G Suite's file sharing permissions so people can only search and find files that they specifically have permissions to. 

Google Cloud Search is only available to G Suite Business and Enterprise editions. Google intends to add more capabilities in the near future that will include integration with third-party applications. Incremental, yet useful, improvements like this not only make G Suite a long term solution for businesses but also one that keeps up with the increasing complexity of business data and user demands. 

Not using G Suite? What are you waiting for? Contact InterlockIT today to learn more about Google Cloud Search and G Suite! 

G Suite Series: Google Vault

As cloud computing becomes prevalent in the business world, more and more companies demand a solid archiving/backup solution to protect and easily access their precious data.

In mid 2012 Google announced a new archiving solution, Google Vault. It's the ultimate solution for businesses looking to secure their data and here's why:

Simply put, Google Vault allows businesses to easily retain, hold, search, and export their organization's mail and chat messages. Users can also search and export their organization's files in Google Drive. Like other Google solutions, the system is entirely web-based, so there's no need to install or maintain any software. Google Vault was essentially created for businesses in need of the following eDiscovery services:

Email and chat archiving: Set retention rules to control how long email messages and history-on chats are retained before they are removed from user mailboxes and deleted from Google systems. Here's how retention works.

Legal holds: Place legal holds on users to preserve all their emails and on-the-record chats indefinitely in order to meet legal or other retention obligations. You can place legal holds on all content in a user's account, or even target specific content based on dates and terms. Here is how you can create legal holds.

Drive file search: Search your domain’s Google Drive accounts by user account, organizational unit, date, or keyword. Search results include Google file types as well as non-Google file types such as PDF, DOCX, and JPG. Here is how to search Drive for files.

Email and chat search: Search your domain's email, history-on Hangouts, and on-the-record Google Talk chats by user account, date, or keyword. Here is how to search for email and chat messages.

Export: Export specific email, on-the-record chats, and files from Drive to standard formats for additional processing and review. Here is how to export search results.

Audit Reports: Use Vault audit reports to learn about actions Vault users have taken during a specified period of time. Here is how to run a Vault audit report.

Google is one of the safest places to park your data in the cloud, so you may be wondering, if Google Cloud servers are some of the most secure servers on the planet, why would anyone need an additional backup system like Vault? There are two main reasons; compliance and user error. Some organizations are required to archive data instantly to a place where it can't be deleted or tinkered with - they have compliance regulations to follow. On the other hand, as safe as those cloud servers are, they can't protect you from user error or misbehavior. If an employee accidentally or maliciously deletes data, the window of opportunity to recover this data is 25 days before it's permanently gone. Vault resolves both of these nuances to ensure your data is 100 percent secure.

Solutions like Microsoft Archiving have a competitive disadvantage to Google Vault. With Microsoft Archiving, deleted emails are not retained unless the user's mailbox is put on Legal Hold in advance. This is a huge shortcoming for compliance requirements that often companies don't discover until later when they need to recover, for example, emails of a sales rep who announced to customers where he/she was moving to, which could be a violation of their non-solicitation agreement. With Microsoft Archiving, if an employee deletes emails from their mailbox, the business only has 25 days to recover them. With Google Vault, you can always find them because Vault retains all deleted emails without the need to put users on Legal Hold.

Interlock IT has assisted several hundreds of organizations secure their data with Google Vault. Whether it's financial firms, legal teams, or medical facilities, we have helped establish a safer environment for organizations with compliance and sensitive information. With Vault, our customers know their data is securely stored without risk, and it can easily be retrieved in unpredictable situations. It's the assurance many businesses need for safe and secure cloud computing.

Google Vault is included in G Suite Enterprise and G Suite Business or Education editions. You can also purchase Vault separately for an additional $5 per user, per month. Contact us today to learn more about Vault and how it can benefit your business!