How the Salesforce Admin Marketing Team uses Quip

Tell me if this sounds familiar- “Oh, that’s a good question. I’m not sure who made that doc.” In a lot of my previous companies, most documents were created and sent out, sometimes uploaded to shared drives or wikis for others to access. They were treated like artifacts in a museum – look but don’t touch. Other documents were the victim of attempts at collaboration, being endowed with ever-changing names like PLANNINGDOC_FINAL_FINAL_V7. That does not give me much confidence in it being the final version, or that a FINAL_FINAL_V8 isn’t out there in the universe somewhere.

As an Admin, I would often see email strings with dozens of versions of attachments as my users attempted to collaborate. Really rather than sharing versions of the doc, they all needed to be working from the same doc at the same time. Documents in my professional career have evolved. They used to be these end-all-be-all business statements. Now they are more like working whiteboards to help you achieve a goal. So let me give you insight into how the Salesforce Admin Marketing & Relations Team uses Quip to be super productive.

Activity Planning

We recently wrapped up a team activity that involved over a 100 people, 3 days worth of topics, and a host of to-do’s. The entire event was planned on Quip docs. It worked perfectly for us because there were many people involved in different parts of the team activity and we were in at least four different time zones. This meant not everyone could attend the planning calls, but all of us were kept up to date.

Five things that Quip helped us accomplish:

1. Edit history management: as an organizer it was easy for me to jump into the doc and see changes despite being gone for a week. It also allowed the team to comment on changes if they missed the meeting.
2. Ownership of tasks: I LOVE creating checkboxes in Quip for tasks that needed to get done. Perhaps even more than that I love it when the box is checked that the line becomes crossed out.
3. Linking of Docs: Because members of the team had different responsibilities- and different ways of planning- they could create different docs based on their needs. Quip made it simple to link the docs because all we had to do was @mention the doc and it created a link.
4. Changes on the fly: Being in different time zones meant responding to comments or changes often when I wasn’t at my desk. Doing it on the phone was so much easier than any other online doc I’ve used.
5. Contextual Collaboration: Because we could comment on specific items in the doc and mention team members I had less emails in my inbox and the conversation stayed where it needed to be – the planning doc.

Content Coordination

Spring ’17 just happened. But for us, we started thinking about content before the holidays. To help the Admin Evangelists get ready for the Spring 17 release video we created a Quip doc. For many of the same reasons listed above, this helped our team get ready for the video. But it also gave a single source of truth to work off of as we honed our ideas, posted links, and quickly brought other team members into the conversation. Once we had our ideas in one doc, it was easy for me to share our video idea doc with leadership by sharing the doc, and mentioning them in comments where I needed their feedback. And because most of us were traveling during the planning it was super easy to update on the phone.

Opportunities for you to seek out

As the business innovator in your organization, you the Salesforce Admin, can look for opportunities to help highly-collaborative teams achieve their goals. Try it for your team meeting notes and see how easy it is to assign tasks, coordinate a project or event. As an Admin I would often have users ask me “What do you use?”, which would lead into a demo for that team.

For Sales Teams: With the ability to pull in Salesforce Data your sales team can now collaborate on a selling strategy to win an account. With the ability to export Salesforce reports into Quip with Live Data. So long the days of exporting .csv files on a daily basis. Export once and the data updates as changes happen in CRM.

For Marketing Teams: Quip is a great way to collaborate around a marketing brief, RFP for a new agency, or ideas around a campaign.
As a team, we have only scratched the surface at the number of ways we can use quip to be super productive. With the ability to pull in Salesforce data I see so many more possibilities. Check out the video below for all of the great features from Quip in Spring ’17