No one is a bigger fan of collaboration than Kathleen Gilroy. Her Cambridge, Massachusetts, consulting company teaches client employees how to work together and swap information using blogs, audiocasts, and wikis. So it gave her pause one day when, during a six-week training session for members of a professional association, she perused a heated debate on one of the association's newly set-up blogs—only to find it was her methods that were the subject of dispute.

The discovery surprised Gilroy. But the spirit of openness energized the client organization. Armed with new ways of working together and a renewed level of productivity, the group's newly acquired collaboration and content skills have become "the catalyst for a whole new set of operations that the organization is very excited about," says Gilroy, CEO of The Otter Group.

Collecting information has never been a problem for companies. But assembling it in a meaningful way so employees can act on it has. Fortunately, new tools to speed information access and boost worker productivity are becoming widely available. Not only do they empower employees by enabling them to collaborate and make decisions, but they can also enrich the bottom line.

What makes for smart collaboration? The first step is to make sure authors and contributors have ready access to the right kinds of content, according to research by The Gilbane Group, a consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In many cases, that means using content management software that sees beyond a single repository or data type and provides access to distributed content assets. Content authors should have a simple, unified view of all content assets, regardless of where they reside or in what format they are stored.

"Marketing's job had been to go out and say 'here's why our products are better than the other companies,'" says Greenberg. "Now they have to become the front line for customer engagement. It's their job to say 'We want to work and collaborate with you so you have the appropriate tools to stay with us.'"

At the same time, executive teams are demanding a much greater level of accountability from marketing people. This is especially true in the consumer packaged goods sector, where according to Rob Bois, research director for Boston-based AMR Research, as much as 20 percent of revenues are used to drive marketing programs. That new scrutiny is an important driver in CRM's resurgence.

"Marketing has been more art than science. CRM is bucking that trend by introducing more science into the equation," says Bois. "The question now is did a campaign influence a lift in sales? And was it a profitable lift? Marketing managers are coming to the realization that they need to prove their effectiveness."

Sales, on the other hand, has always been a numbers game. Reps run their campaigns, calculate proposals, tweak numbers, and if all goes well, happily exceed their quotas. Right? Only partly. Sales reps, like their brethren in marketing, have traditionally been content to use software they're familiar with, which has meant standalone desktop tools. The sales pipeline's visibility has often been limited to information shared by e-mail messages and attachments.

Altering those work habits has proven a challenge. "How do you get a sales rep to reliably enter information about opportunities, close dates, and who they're talking to as a normal part of their work?" asks Brad Wilson, general manager for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. "CRM has struggled with that because people had to stop what they're doing and call up the CRM program. I call it 'Alt-Tab-CRM.'"

The newest generation of CRM changes all that. Rather than require sales and marketing to learn new software, it quietly ferries information that has been entered into favorite software programs and deposits it in CRM databases and applications. From there, the information benefits not only sales, but many other people throughout the organization, including customer support, product development, and marketing.

Perhaps most important, these more friendly and familiar CRM tools help sales and marketing people to work together. "Bringing collaboration into CRM is something we're seeing more, pushing the sales lead to the next stage of the pipeline," says Rebecca Wettemann, vice president for Nucleus Research, Wellesley, Massachusetts. "We're also seeing more innovation in analytics in CRM. Marketing can say 'this is the campaign I'm sending out because I've run the numbers.'"

Field reps and marketing coordinators, for example, share real-time information on the sales pipeline. Not only does everyone have visibility into where prospects are in the sales cycle, but predictive modeling features help by flagging at-risk accounts. For example, predictive modeling can identify which customers with soon-to-expire contracts have shown little activity in the last six months and may be planning to leave.

Kent says Cineplex Entertainment plans to roll out the CRM application to other departments of the company "so we can share the information and understand the whole company's relationship with customers instead of each department understanding only their part of it."

Now that's a blockbuster hit.

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