With social distancing measures in place indefinitely, companies around the world are turning to remote working and teleconferencing.

This represents a fundamental disruption to most businesses, but a cutting edge technology stack can hopefully lead to some semblance of “business as usual.”

Communications tools like the instant messaging service Slack and the videoconferencing platform Zoom are already office staples. 

The utility of such platforms gets to the heart of one of the problems organizations of all sizes face now that the bulk of U.S. workers — some 90% are currently under a form of stay-at-home order — are fully remote: Maintaining a collaborative work environment.

A tech stack built around collaboration has never been more vital. Consider a recent Harvard Business Review article — The Truth About Open Offices. An HBR study conducted on the campus of a Fortune 500 retailer found that distance was a huge factor in sustained communication, or lack thereof.

In fact, communication between employees whose desks were separated by more than 500 meters was found to comprise just 10% of the company’s total communications.

The miles currently separating many coworkers, then, are seemingly cause for concern.

Fortunately, the same principles that fueled the adoption of Slack and Zoom can be applied to the pain points faced by sales reps and marketers as well.

Just as companies are integrating communications tools more fully into their technology stacks to facilitate remote working, an online presentation and collaboration platform can provide a critical solution for sales and marketing teams looking to stay on the same page during this unprecedented disruption.

Fortunately, a variety of options exist that solve for many of these pain points, from free solutions to more sophisticated platforms  suitable for creating a modern pitch deck or recap.

For example, Sportsdigita’s platform Digideck — a staple in the sports space — revolves around a singular template built by Sportsdigita’s designers that incorporates various aspects of a client’s brand and accelerates the creation of presentations. Meanwhile, a built-in content library helps keep teams on brand.

A salesperson or marketing professional using a cloud-based presentation platform would not, for example, need to wait around downloading large files over a slow home internet connection.

Brand control, a critical pain point in even the most collaborative offices, stands to become even more cumbersome in the current environment. And while maintaining updated logos and other branding in a cloud-based filing system is certainly an option, distorted logos and incorrect color schemes remain a headache for marketing teams.

Maintaining an updated content library — whether in an online storage service like Dropbox or, ideally, within the presentation platform itself — should help alleviate the issue.

Businesses have been quick to adopt surface-level communications tools, but as the current crisis continues to necessitate work from home measures, tools like these that enable greater levels of collaboration stand to become just as important.