TakeTurns is an external collaboration tool that’s designed to improve how you work with people outside your organization or external parties (e.g., prospects, customers, partners, suppliers, vendors, or investors). TakeTurns is based on the simple idea of collaborating turn-by-turn.

Using TakeTurns, you can share, request, review, and revise files and documents with any external party in a simple, secure, and structured way.

How to use Take Turns

Using TakeTurns is easy:

  1. You begin by creating a collaboration.

  2. You and your counterparty trade control over the collaboration or work turn-by-turn

    1. When it’s your turn, you can: Share or revise the files and documents the team is collaborating on or make requests.

    2. When it’s not your turn, you can recall your previous turn.

  3. When you’re done, you can wrap up and download a complete archive of the collaboration.

At any time, you can

Why we created TakeTurns

We all have multiple tools that help us collaborate with our internal teams. But when it comes to working with people outside our organizations—customers, partners, vendors—we still fall back on email.

While email is useful for messaging, it’s not a collaboration tool. Everyone always ends up with those messy, unsearchable, email threads. And there’s always confusion around the requests, documents, changes, and next steps. Email just doesn’t work when trying to coordinate everyone’s efforts.

Addressing that confusion is why we decided to create TakeTurns. It’s a turn-by-turn collaboration app that brings trust and clarity to both parties. We designed TakeTurns to be simple so as not to impact your existing tools and workflow.

How TakeTurns Works

Background

In TakeTurns, parties work together in a Collaboration.

Collaborations have the following characteristics:

  • There are always two parties. Each party has one or more members.

  • They contain content (files, documents, requests) that’s shared between the parties.

  • They’re structured into a series of Turns. A turn is when one of the parties does their work, for example adding files, uploading file revisions or adding requests.

  • The parties take turns until the collaboration is complete. There’s no limit to the number of turns in a collaboration

  • Once the collaboration is complete, one of the parties can wrap it up. Participants will keep access to its content until it expires.

Keep in mind that with TakeTurns, each party continues to use their own existing tools and processes to complete their work. We’re replacing all the headaches created by email-driven coordination!

How it typically works

To walk through how TakeTurns typically works, let’s use an example.

Imagine you are negotiating a new customer agreement. The two parties, in this case, are your organization and your customer.

  • First, you create a collaboration: inviting the people from your customer who need to participate, sharing your version of the agreement, and adding any relevant requests. With everything set up, you start the collaboration. This ends your turn, and control passes to your customer.

  • Your customer reviews your agreement, uploads a new version (revision) that includes their redlines, and responds to any open requests. With all their to-dos out the way, they end their turn, and control passes back to you.

  • This back and forth (or turn by turn) activity continues until at least one party feels comfortable closing the collaboration.

⭐️ Why use a turn-by-turn structure?

Collaborations require structure to help keep everyone on the same page. When working with people outside your organization, it’s nearly impossible to impose your internal processes or systems upon them. This is why everyone ends up using email--everyone has it and knows how to use it.

Finding something that was both familiar and structured is how we ended up designing TakeTurns around a turn-by-turn process. Collaborating in a turn-by-turn fashion is all at once friendly and structured. We all learned how to take turns when we were children. And when we take turns, everyone always knows who’s turn it is to work. That clarity around who has control reduces the confusion we see in email-driven collaboration. Finally, it’s eminently flexible – you and your external parties can keep taking turns until you’re done.

How can you use TakeTurns?

TakeTurns can be used in a wide array of ways across multiple roles; here are a few ideas:

  • Accounting Professionals - Collaborating with clients on their tax filings and reports.

  • Consultants - Reviewing SOWs and other client facing documents with your customers.

  • Freelancers - Teaming up with marketing teams to create articles, blog posts, ebooks, and social media updates.

  • Investment Professionals - Working with with founders, boards, and LPs on deal term sheets, and financial reviews.

  • Legal Professionals - Reviewing documents, such as contracts and agreements, for clients.

  • Marketing Professionals - Teaming up with agencies, freelancers, consultants, and creators to work on marketing campaigns.

  • Purchasing Professionals - Work in concert with suppliers and vendors on RFIs/RFPs, contracts and agreements, and onboarding.

  • Sales Professionals - Collaborate with prospects, customers and partners to follow-up on leads and RFPs, send quotes, and negotiate agreements