Help us organize all this info

July 6, 2007 10:18 AM

How do we organize status reports from our sales reps? I'd like to find a happy compromise between not making it too onerous to the reporter and not making it too onerous for the people reading the reports. More inside...

Currently, we get weekly status reports on customers/projects from various people. The reports are in the form of a long-*ss e-mail that goes something like this:

1. project 1: blah blah blah
6/30: I called client and discussed blah blah
7/2: client asked for samples
7/3: we did artwork to show the client

2. Acme customer: blah blah blah
5/20: we did this
6/7: followed up

etc.

The people doing the reports keep adding on to each section, and it's getting really unwiedly. Lots and lots of scrolling to wade all the info.

Any ideas on how to make these easier to digest? Maybe an open-source project manager web site or something? Maybe just have people do the report in some sort of outline-form in Word? Or maybe even some sort of blog set up or something?

Ideally what I'd like to do is:
1. see each project title and the summary. e.g. "project a: we're trying to do this and this" or "customer x: they sell this and that in new york"

2. See *only* the most current update

3. Have the option of going back and reviewing past updates to see what's gone on before.

Now that I think about it...something similar to a RSS reader would work. That is, let's say I had a subscription to 20 "blogs"...I could see which postings I haven't read yet, and I would want the option to go back and look at previous postings. Substitute "project/custom" for "blogs" and that just might be our solution.

posted by edjusted to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Status reports inherently suck. They're biased, incomplete, and often too late to act on effectively. What you want is crm/activity tracking software, so that this data is collected in real time rather than in arbitrary intervals. You then just run reports off of it. (disclaimer: I build this kind of software for a living, for a specific niche outside of sales)

You don't say what your budget is. I'd start by looking at salesforce.com.
posted by mkultra at 10:33 AM on July 6, 2007

It costs a few bucks, but check out highrise, it could potentially do what you want, also check out salesforce.com. It sounds like you need a CRM system of some sort.
posted by cschneid at 10:34 AM on July 6, 2007

I think you're right that a blog would probably be the simplest solution. You don't really need to set up a separate blog for each project; most blog publishing systems have a concept of categories, so you could just make each project a category. I think the main issue would be finding something that makes category summaries as visible as you want. That's certainly possible, but you may need to pay someone a few bucks to customize something like WordPress a bit for you.
posted by scottreynen at 11:00 AM on July 6, 2007

Response by poster: mkultra & eschneid: yeah, ideally I think we should have some sort of CRM. But I think it's a bit overkill for our needs (and budget), which is why I was throwing out the idea of even just a Word document in outline form.

I'll check out highrise though. Thanks!
posted by edjusted at 11:20 AM on July 6, 2007

Response by poster: scottreynen: one of our original ideas was to do some sort of blog, but we couldn't wrap our heads around how to organize that.

hmm...on second though...maybe we could give each rep their own blog instead of trying to do it all in *one* blog...and the categories would be defined as the customers/projects...
posted by edjusted at 11:22 AM on July 6, 2007

If you want to go really simple, you can turn on change tracking in MS Word.
posted by scottreynen at 11:24 AM on July 6, 2007

Response by poster: Ah, that's not a bad idea. Thanks!
posted by edjusted at 12:39 PM on July 6, 2007