David Waring, editor at Fitsmallbusiness.com , is totally a CRM Project Management fan basically due to their low cost and simplicity: “Having everything in onesystem allows me to manage the deal both before and after it’s closed from one system. This saves me from having to renter a lot of information from my CRM into my project management system once the deal is closed.”Simon Ensor, managing director of Yellowball, addressed the issue of having to log into different applications for CRM, Project Management or to communicate with his colleagues by migrating Yellowball’s processes over to a more comprehensive system with one login, therefore reducing wasted time and potential mistakes that occur with double data entry.

Kelly Fallis, CEO of Remote Stylist, deals daily with the problems remote collaboration has, so finding the right software that makes distance team working easier is more than a necessity. However, it seems that she has made her choice, selecting a CRM Project Management tool that enables her team and herself to operate from the same system, being able to see the same info in real time. She actually gives us the following example: “If a client happens to call and whoever answers the phone updates a file, whoever is working on that file sees instant updates etc., not to mention that they can pass tasks from one to other easily.” A system like that is totally the backbone of any Small Medium Business in order to stay organized, manage operations and sales, as Kelly emphasizes.

It’s a fact that the evolution of enterprise Project Management and CRM field has created a new business environment where CRM Project Management Methodologies and Software are used extensively. The CRM and PM trends for 2015 pave the way to cloud solutions that integrate Agile Project Management and CRM, providing communication and collaboration functionalities such as emails, campaigns, tasks management, productivity measurement, social media integration for engaging customers and Business Intelligence reports for data-driven decision making.

On the other hand, some people who totally disagree with all the different CRM combinations phenomenon and prefer to continue using different software for each process. Michelle Salomon, marketing director at Mobilize , prefers separate apps “because sales has completely different needs than marketing and product” and Ben Hoehn, Marketing manager at The Predictive Policing Company, seems to agree with this, as they use various applications for all different business processes. Salesforce for CRM, Leadsius for contact gathering and marketing automation or Google Analytics and Mailchimp for analytics and reporting.

To sum up, whether you are a Swiss army knife application fan wanting to remember only one password for your business app, or prefer to have the full potential of a CRM stand-alone system or even an independent Project Management software, your actual business methodology and processes are going to show you the best solution. So, all you have to do is sit down, specify what your business needs are and start getting advantage of the softwares’ free trials!

The post CRM and Project Management: better together or…not? appeared first on Comidor Low-code Automation Platform.

The result? You cannot keep your clients in the loop and up to date on their projects and deliverables as there is no cross departmental connectivity and visibility. And if you (the CTO) thing that you’re going to remedy this by building a third custom in-house app able to connect the two systems then you are flirting with money and resources loss. You have to comprehend once and for all that this is not a problem of systems interconnectivity per se but of data incompatibility which leads to misinformation and high response times.

No wonder, many CTOs are finding peace of mind in new cloud CRM Project Management and Business Intelligence capabilities and vice versa, as by having an all-in-one software (and I repeat here ONE) you force the necessary visibility across depts and teams. The benefits are:

• All customer strategic information from lead approach to project completion in ONE system
• Once separated teams are forced to collaborate as they handle tasks such as customer follow ups, budgeting, planning and reporting
• No key customer-project information is lost
• Productivity can easily be measured
• And obviously, you pay and maintain one instead of two+ systems!

Dave Kramer, Founder of AllProWebTools, simply highlights the obvious: “Combining a project management app with CRM works because it recognizes that the projects you work on for a customer are part of your developing relationship with them. For example, at AllProWebTools, we work on a lot of diverse projects for our clients. One client might have one of us working on writing a blog post, another working on his website, and a third developing a marketing campaign for him. Our software combines project management tools and CRM, so when we clock into that client, we leave notes about what we got done in the CRM. Our CRM vendor has a feature called the Workflow Timeline, which is a live feed of updates: new orders, client notes, and project notes.

The status of each individual project is clearly shown on that client’s page of the CRM. It’s great for transparency with the client – who can request a copy of their relationship timeline – but it’s also great for project managers and account managers, who can make sure everything is getting done according to schedule.”

Alessandra Ceresa, marketing director of GreenRop, advocates that project management and CRM software are a match made in heaven. She backs up her argument with the following two great points:

1. Be able to associate projects and tasks with particular contacts. People are responsible for completing the tasks within a project, correct? So, why wouldn’t you be able to associate your projects with people within your CRM. You can assign tasks to them, track their progress with these tasks. This is a great way to measure hours, progress, and more if you integrate the two

2. Be able to accurately relay project information to a customer. When you associate your projects with customers you can efficiently show them the progress of the project, as well as the team members associated with the project. It is also important for people assigned to that project to be able to view the contacts behaviors and activities, and see if any of those actions affect the outcome or progress of the project.

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