To tools or not to tools

Tools, tools and more tools. How many can identify that in this day and age, we have a tool for everything. It starts off with our daily lives. Walk into the kitchen, there is a tool for everything from peeling garlic, de-coring an apple, de-seeding the cherry, ice cream maker, bagel cutter, yogurt maker, if you can dream of it, its probably available.  Tools were there originally to solve a problem, it still does, but tools are only there to assist, it is a means to an end, it cannot be an end in itself. How many of us have purchased tools that is now a white elephant in the house? My wife is an avid baker, when she started with the bread maker, many friends thought that was a great innovation and was sold to the idea of having fresh baked bread in the house every day. Most went out and bought a bread maker. Fast forward few years, now my wife has moved from using bread maker to hand made bread and most of those we know who loved the idea of fresh bake bread with a bread maker has gone back to buying bread.

Unfortunately, we have taken this mentality to the workplace. What tools can we acquire to solve our business problems? Do get me wrong, I have nothing against tools, but it cannot be the starting and ending point of a discussion.

As a company, Virtual Team is well known for a few key areas that customers use us for, and yet whenever we head out to work with organizations, the conversation of tools will frequently take the lead. This is partly caused by the advertisements that we are exposed to.  

Social selling is not LinkedIn training. Team collaboration is not SharePoint/ Microsoft Teams training. Customer Relation management is not Salesforce or Dynamics training, Change Management is not Office 365 training. Data privacy and protection is not a tools training. It is much more than that. It goes beyond the tools

Having the tools, it’s only the first step. The next step is how to get my users to use it effectively, how to rally my organization behind the tools. Or simply put “how to put all the wood behind the arrow head”.

Most of the things we do in Virtual Team is to bring businesses on a journey toward a destination and tools is only part of that discussion. Social Selling, Customer relationship management, data privacy & protection, Solution selling they are all a journey. We measure them by milestones. It is how we can continuously improve to ensure that we are better than our competitors in servicing our customers and in gaining market share.