What should your CRM have in common with Uber and Airbnb? These emerging businesses operate on the idea of the "shared economy," which leverages technology to empower individuals and businesses with information to efficiently distribute and share the use of their goods and services at a maximum capacity. These business are taking what's considered "idle capital" – whether it is an unused car or an empty bedroom – and turning them into a revenue opportunity.

Now what does the sharing economy have to do with your CRM? CRM data relies heavily on personal communications and email exchanges. Even when this information is diligently maintained in a CRM system, much of the data is typically hidden or restricted by privacy permissions, intentional or not. In this environment, idle capital is actively being created by your business on one of its most important assets – your relationship capital. Much of your relationship data is sitting idly and untapped for new business potential.

To really make the most out of business tools, businesses should be capitalizing on shared information to put their customer data to work. By allowing the entire team visibility into the activity data of a customer/account, it will be easier to:

1. Grow new business by leveraging your company's shared data and professional network to get the in on a new lead
2. Increase up/cross sell revenues by identifying and leveraging the strongest connections/relationship to the customer to gain the competitive edge in the deal
3. Eliminate missed opportunities when everyone has visibility on the activities of a customer history, there's greater potential to identify new opportunities along with concurrent deals that are taking place to add incremental revenue to the sale
4. Reduce time to close by having all the customer activities in one view and across the account so that the team knows the status of the deal and is ready to help close at any given moment
5. Reduce costs as you find new business opportunities within existing customer relationships and referrals, rather than investing in buying new leads

While sharing information may not be first nature for most sales teams, it really should start to be; the business gains are multifold and growing businesses cannot afford to lose out from improving team collaboration. So, are you ready to start sharing as a business?