I manage a small team of sales engineers and am looking for software to help me keep track of their activities and the accounts they're working on. We sell expensive enterprise software that and sales cycles can take many months, or in some cases more than a year, to complete, so each SE will have several accounts that they will potentially work on, but are only active on a handful of them in a given week.<p>What I need is for them to be able to easily enter their weekly activity and then look up activity based on account or person.<p>I've looked at various CRM systems (we use salesforce.com, but access is too expensive to provide to the sales engineers) and most of them have more features than I require and don't really have good activity-oriented capabilities.<p>I've also looked at small-team management software, but they seem to be oriented to task-assignment, prioritization and management, which isn't really what I need either.<p>Any suggestions?
Do you already use Salesforce.com for other sales-related activities? What system your sales people use? Is there a central repository for customer information? If yes, then I will suggest consider using the same system.<p>Do your SE enter or keep information somewhere else too?<p>As a SE, I can only say that don't force them to enter same information multiple times in different systems for different purposes. Nothing bugs me more than wasting my time entering same information multiple times and spending time on admin tasks, instead of spending more time focusing on customer.
I am working on a software, which may fit your needs. Basically it is a twitter + stackoverflow combo for coworkers. I believe it can help you to see what are they doing, and help them share knowledge. What do you think?
Trello is pretty flexible. I love it and my clients find it easy to use. It runs on all devices big and small so they can use it on the road. I wrote a tool (yes I am pimping it, it is what I do these days) called reportsfortrello.com that will show you what they are all up to. Both my site and Trello are free. There are other tools that will track time and tasks with Trello as well. Checkout boardtrail.com and burndownfortrello.com for more solutions.<p>I hope you find what you are looking for.