At first impression, Customer Relationship Managers (CRMs) and project management software seem to have little in common besides being part of business-critical tasks. CRMs provide a centralized interface for ensuring customer success. For this reason, companies implement CRMs for scaling up customer-centered decisions and actions.
Project management, for its part, is the system for meeting the project requirements by using the company resources, including teams, tools, and techniques, and tracking the work done, making it one of the key assets to building software products.
Still, the basic idea behind combining CRM with project management is to prevent data silos between project management and the rest of the organization and, subsequently, democratize project decisions. The combination of CRMs and project management creates a bidirectional information exchange between the teams in contact with the customer and those working on product developers.
In this article, we will take a look at how companies and their different departments can benefit from the information exchange between these two platforms.
Improve customer success
Customer success depends greatly on building products that meet market demands. As such, companies have to overcome the paradigm of keeping product development separated from their other departments.
Nowadays, with information created by anyone from anywhere and tools for tracking various actions, business plans are bound to change as they receive feedback from their customers and the market. Hence, as companies modify their business plans’ assumptions and goals, they have to revise and update their projects. To achieve their goals, companies cannot afford to isolate project management systems from the other information systems within the company.
Boost your sales teams
Sales teams can use project management to their advantage and close more deals. With access to project information, they can have a deeper understanding of the features and requirements of the products they are working with, or use it to provide accurate quotes swiftly. Besides, sales teams can use this information to communicate with customers what the product will offer in the short term for them.
Customers are also prone to require a change in the product for a variety of reasons; moreover, the inclusion of a new product or tendency might change the market. For this reason, project management integration allows sales teams to start projects and add requirements to existing ones while remaining updated about the status and evolution of these projects. Marketing teams, for their part, can use project information to shape marketing campaigns.
Better product development
CRMs helps businesses obtain more and better data about their customers. By using this data, the teams behind product development and delivery can have a better grasp of the customer needs and how they use their product. Consequently, development teams can use what they have learned to plan the development of new products and start projects as soon as they see signs of it in clients’ behavior.
Access to the CRM will also help product development teams identify the business requirements for their projects. For one thing, they get to be in touch with what their clients ask for and have a complete vision of the customers’ behavior during production.
Also, using a single platform avoids double data entry, which is beneficial in two ways: it saves time and also prevents the issues that come with data duplication, such as data inaccuracy or working with outdated data.
Tailored customer service
The idea of improving customer satisfaction is at the core of CRMs. As project development data is made available, customers and stakeholders can have a clear impression of the status of the products the company is currently developing and maintaining and their calendar of future products.
Customer support, for its part, can use project management integration to have a glimpse of the project activity related to each client from a single interface. Similarly, they can provide customers with detailed information about future product versions.
Precise finances
By integrating CRM with project management software, the finance department gets to see firsthand the detailed process of current and future projects. They can use this information to determine the cost of the project, see if it fits the budget, measure the project’s progress, and decide if financial adjustments need to be made. In this regard, it is possible to automate payment releases based on the project’s schedule and track the time of development to bill clients.
Project development teams, in turn, will be able to adjust their work to meet financial goals, and have a more precise idea of the customer before budget meetings and allocations.
Acquire an extra tool for distributed teams
As distributed teams have become more common, information flow within organizations is mandatory. Remote teams are kept together by project management platforms, where they can see as much about the client as what everyone else in the company is busy with. The flow of information will contribute to ensuring no one on your team misses a deadline.
In like manner, connecting both CRM and project management software is a great asset for achieving centralized data management. Granting team members the latest details of customer success and product development will reflect on the quality of their individual work and the team’s overall performance in terms of collaboration, trust, and interdependency between departments.
To ensure secure cross-platform data sharing for distributed teams you can use a solution such as a VPN. There are plenty of providers out there, though one of the main things to look out for is compatibility with your device’s OS. For example, if you use Windows, make sure that the VPN work well with Windows OS.
The bottom line
To wrap up, combine your CRM and project management software to:
- Increase sales
- Outskill your competition’s marketing campaigns
- More dynamic product development
- Offer greater customer support
- Have granular control of your finances
- Improve distributed teams
It is worth mentioning that integration between CRMs and project management software can be achieved in multiple ways. Some CRMs, like Zoho CRM, offer tools for integration.
Lastly, the paradigm change of integrating project management with CRMs has to go in hand with a change of mindset in the organization toward information sharing. Managing customer relations and projects requires more than relying on software. Companies need to incorporate data sharing into their culture.
