David McLeary is Operations Director at Cambridge Software and is part of the team working on RealtimeCRM which recommends Insync for document syncronisation. You can find out more about RealtimeCRM and sign up for a free account at https://realtimecrm.co.uk/

When working in a business, especially sales, the ability to multitask is important. To maximise your day and productivity, you’ll need to be able to work from various platforms and devices: desktop at the office, a laptop on a train or maybe on a mobile phone in-between meetings.

What’s the easiest way to work productively and efficiently in multiple platforms, while keeping personal information secure and separate?

The tools of the trade

As a sales professional, you or your company may probably have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system -- which serves both as a a customer database and a tracker of customer interactions.

In addition, you will need storage for marketing literature, quotations, contracts and more. You’ll also need the appropriate software to open and edit these documents or files.

So what’s the optimal way to get yourself set up for productivity and mobility in this kind of field and working environment?

Staying productive

The problem that many people face when mobile or remote is the lack of immediate access to critical or important information. There needs to be a way for data and software needed to be available in whatever platform that you’re using - desktop, laptop or mobile.

For business developers or sales officers, you can try these steps:

1. Activate your Google Drive account which gives you 15GB of free storage (you can pay for more space, if needed.) This should be enough for you to store the documents that you need for your day to day business and more.
2. Get cloud CRM software such as RealtimeCRM to allow you to access your customer data, sales leads and more from whatever device you are on.

Getting synchronised

You have to set-up your workflow so that it allows you to synchronize your data across devices, ensuring that you always have access to the latest versions of all of your documents.

You can try using Insync, an app that ensures your files and folders are accessible between your Google Drive and your desktop. It’s also a great backup tool.

In multiple desktop and laptop environments, the key is to make sure that you install Insync on each of the device that you use (may it be the Mac at home, the Windows PC at work or the company issued Linux laptop.)

When a file gets saved to one of your machines, Insync will synchronize it with your Google Drive. The magic happens when you power up your other devices: Insync will grab the new or updated file and update it on that device too.

One more thing about Insync is that it allows you to select a specific folder to be synchronised (eg “Work”) and allows you to synchronize more than one account. So you can backup your personal items to a different Google Drive accounts and different machines. Great!

Going mobile

So we’ve got our documents syncing across our main machines. But what about our mobile devices? Those devices might not have the necessary software to view or edit our files and documents.

Well, this is where Insync and Google Drive work well together. You can access your drive account and use the Google Drive viewer to read and manage a whole range of common documents including Word, Excel and PDF files through your your mobile browser or Drive mobile app.

To make it even easier to work with your mobile device, you can link specific Google Drive folders or documents to each RealtimeCRM company, contact or sales lead record -- so calling up that quotation from last month while between meetings is a breeze.

Conclusion

By leveraging the combined power of Insync, RealtimeCRM and Google Drive, you’ll be able to significantly increase your productivity while out and about and in-between home and office environments, all while retaining the ability to work locally.