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Ask HN: Good software for managing a small team of sales engineers

1 points by TWAndrews ↗ HN
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.

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.

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.

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.

Any suggestions?

9 comments

[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 33.3 ms ] thread
chrislusf
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?
TWAndrews
I'd definitely willing to have a look. Is there somewhere I can get a demo?
akg_67
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.

Do your SE enter or keep information somewhere else too?

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.

TWAndrews
Yes, we already use salesforce.com, but the SEs don't have access to it--too expensive.

I've worked as an SE as well, and I'm definitely not looking to add to the team's workload. Right now they're filling out a weekly spreadsheet and sending it to me, which sucks for them and for me. I'm looking for some way to make it easier for them to enter their time and for me to look at the data across multiple weeks, either by account or by SE.

akg_67
Why does weekly spreadsheet suck for them? Are you interested in tracking time or the specific activities SE did with an account?

Any software replacement for spreadsheet for SE will be swapping time spent on filling spreadsheet to filling online form unless software pulls information automatically from what SE already doing in other repositories.

If spreadsheet has standard format, it may be of help to have a file upload tool that imports the data from uploaded spreadsheet to a database. And, if you have database expertise, you can manipulate the data in database whichever way you prefer for reporting purposes or have a few standard reports developed for you.

TWAndrews
The spreadsheet has a standard format, but using it means that they need to sit down at their computer rather than being able to do it on their phone (i.e. right after a meeting), and that they overwrite a previous instance of the spreadsheet, which leads to mismatches between accounts and activities, which requires me to go back to them and reconcile things wasting time for both of us.

It's possible to use the spreadsheet as basis for upload, but if I'm going to do that, I'll build my own front end too. I'm hoping to find something that will work rather than roll my own.

ibstudios
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.

I hope you find what you are looking for.

TWAndrews
I'll have a look--I had a quick view of trello, but it seemed like it was more task oriented than what I wanted--I really need something that lets the SEs efficiently enter after-activity reports, and provide a quick holistic description of the state of an account on a periodic basis. I'll have a look at the two solutions you mention, thanks!