The BizCATS on BizTech: TeamBox Review
There are a ton of online project management and team collaboration tools available today and they’re all pretty good; that is, they let you share tasks, goals, files, and more as you manage a project to completion. I never found one that I thought was a fit for a sales team, however, until I came across TEAMBOX.
One caveat before we go further: Teambox is a great tool if you have a team approach to selling. If each of your sales reps works pretty independently then it might not be of that much value. But if you have a team of several sales reps or sales and product specialists who work together on a sales opportunity or customer project and need to coordinate, communicate and report more effectively, then this is a great solution. Maybe your company sells to large, complex accounts; or maybe your customer has multiple sales locations each covered by a different rep on your team.
Simply put, Teambox is an online tool accessible by any computer – or smartphone – in which you can set up an unlimited number of projects (e.g., sales opportunities), assign project members, tasks, milestones, share files and track progress, among other things. What I like best, however, are the “status updates” – each team member can easily post updates on their activity, comments, or any information relevant for the team, online or from their phone!. What’s maybe even better is that members don’t have to go online to find out what’s new – status updates can be delivered via email (real time or on a set schedule) or accessed via blackberry or smartphone.
From a management standpoint, the email updates are a godsend. Imagine you’re a sales manager, business owner or Key Account Manager and you receive daily updates on the progress of each sales project. You can even coach the project by entering “status update” comments that will be delivered only to the team for that opportunity. It’s not a CRM system, per se, but it can be a phenomenal “Opportunity Management” system!
Although we’re talking about sales, clearly there are no limits to what you can do with Teambox to manage any kind of company project.
TEAMBOX is open source. If you’re a small business with a small number of projects going on at one time it can be free forever; the “Professional” and “Corporate” versions offer more concurrent projects, storage, and support and are very reasonably priced. And if you’re concerned about having your data on the web, you can even install it on your own server and run it 100% internally.
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