Have you ever felt like you could make more money if you just got things done faster? The truth is there’s a high probability that you’re right. One key to efficiency is collaboration. When you have a team, or even just an individual you work with; effectively collaborating on a project can greatly increase the speed at which it is accomplished.
Let’s say for example that you have several campaigns at various levels of completion. One campaign needs banner variations created, one campaign needs landing pages, and one campaign just needs materials uploaded to the server. How much faster would this get done if everything was labeled, easily searchable, and under one centralized location?
Sure you could continue to try and get it done over Skype and email (because that’s the way you’ve always done it). But how has that been working out for you? It may be getting done, but is it getting done quickly? I know from hours of excruciating experience that Skype conversations become muddled and confusing very quickly. This happens even faster when trying to delegate multiple jobs to one employee.
Skype is a communication tool. Email is a communication tool. Neither were built specifically for company collaborations or project management. Below you’ll find a few tools that do fit that bill. Use them to achieve greater business efficiency and ultimately greater revenue.
#1 Active Collab – http://www.activecollab.com
This is a classic project management system. It’s self hosted and a one time fee for unlimited users. There’s a lot to like about this system. Here are a few highlights:
- Manage user roles – client, project leader, etc
- Easily view projects by category, label, milestones, etc – stay on top of everything going on in your company
- Invoice system from within your active collab install
- Time Widget – track and monitor time spent on specific tasks
#2 Yammer – https://www.yammer.com/
Yammer is a new twist on collaborating in the work place. They call themselves an enterprise social network. They take cues from Facebook in terms of socially connecting with coworkers and sharing content. They add business twists to make it a formidable collaboration and management tool.
- Create, share, and collaborate on content with coworkers
- Post documents to team workplaces
- Deep search functions
- Admins get access to analytics and company data
- User Yammer on the desktop or mobile devices
#3 Chatter – http://www.salesforce.com/chatter/overview/
Chatter was brought to the market by the software juggernaut Salesforce.com. They’re uniquely qualified to create a social collaboration tool. Chatter is a direct competitor to Yammer. They both take their social aspects from Facebook while adding business tools to help improve collaboration. Below you’ll find Chatter’s overview video. You can see the tool in action.
Conclusion
These tools are all powerful in their own right. Each have their own unique features that make them desirable to business owners. I have a feeling that smaller organizations may find Yammer and Chatter a bit too expansive and feature rich. But I’ve been wrong before.
The great thing about all 3 is that they have free trials. Get your hands dirty with a free trial and see what’s right for your business. Even if you don’t have regular full time employees you can benefit from the precision one of these tools could bring to your daily operations.
