Benefits of CRM with Project Management
Charlie Spaneas
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) with Project Management (PM) gives you the tools to manage your projects successfully. Your integrated CRM and Project Management solution gives you a completely accessible solution. It’s a solution to assign tasks, track time, and view all contact details related to your customers.
Do you have frequently used processes in your organization? Are these processes time-sensitive and need to be managed and tracked? Have you looked at a task management solution but don’t want to invest the time, training, or budget? Consider a CRM application with seamless integration into project management tools.
What is Project Management?
Project management initiates, plans, and completes a team’s work (“project”). The projects must meet objectives and specific criteria for a given time. Achieving these goals involves constraints like time tracking, quality, and budget.
Key Project Management Features
- Scheduling and planning
- Task Management
- Activity monitoring
- Reporting (including Gantt Charts)
- Budget tracking
- Notification of deadlines and important information
- Accessibility/Mobility
Why Have a CRM with Project Management
PM tools native to your CRM allow you to track leads, manage sales, and deliver projects within one software system. Imagine moving seamlessly from closing a deal to delivery of the project. Your data is shared and stored within the same system.
Create custom templates for repeatable projects, and your dashboards show performance across teams. Your customer projects and tasks will sit alongside your customers, contacts, and deals.
Benefits of CRM with Project Management
Visibility – Combined information from a CRM provides a complete overview of the customer lifecycle. Team members can view real-time details of an account in one central location. Data is collected from sales pipelines, marketing campaigns, customer service, and project management.
Streamlined Processes – Removing the organizational silos makes the data more accessible across the company. Your teams have combined information, which creates a more streamlined process. Teams collaborate on client initiatives with task dependencies, project pipelines, budgeting, and reporting.
Increased Customer Service – Evaluating data collected from your CRM and projects can improve customer communication. Analyzing patterns of past and current customer behavior helps build better relationships.
Cost Effective – An all-in-one solution provides higher ROI while removing the need to manage two separate systems. CRM and PM software regulate inventory and production costs and avoid unneeded expenditures.
The C2CRM system has an optional Project Management module native to the software. Our CRM leverages and links projects to all the other modules in the system. It can include associated opportunities, emails, tasks, time tracking, percent completion, and more.
Project Templates – For frequent projects, templates will assign users to milestones and set due dates for completion. Roles can be pre-assigned and mapped to milestones. A completed template can generate a new project quickly and efficiently. Users can create unlimited project templates with team members and milestone drop-down lists.
Project Roles – Having users with multiple roles in a project can complicate managing everyone’s contributions. With project management, roles are defined and use the tracking capabilities in the C2CRM software.
Project – Each project form is customizable. Users can add contacts, vendors, opportunities, and quotes to a project. The record contains a 360-degree view of all customer “touches” related to the project.
Examples:
- Project Tasks
- Opportunities
- Project Companies
- Contact Management
- Project Emails
- Project Gantt Charts
Task Management – To keep a project focused, milestones provide teams with achievable goals to target. Users select milestones, give a description, assign tasks, and a start and target end date.
Each milestone generates a task for the owner. A notification is sent to the owner, informing them of their assigned task. Once the task is completed, the system closes the milestone, inputs the actual completion date, and triggers the next milestone. The system can also include outside companies as project team members and assign email tasks.
Workflows – Automating elements of your project management platform keeps projects on track, on time, and within budget. It begins early in the project with initiation and planning and ends with completion and review.
C2CRM’s Workflow automatically creates tasks and sends emails to team members. The automation happens in parallel or sequentially to the next milestone (step). Our solution sends task reminders and provides escalation if due dates are unmet. Workflow can create a project when an opportunity is closed/won using a menu of product/service project templates.
Performance – Users can generate reports and deliver them to the project manager at specific intervals. Management uses reports and dashboards to track the progress of single & multiple projects.
Standard banded and graphical reports available:
- Open Projects
- Projects by Business Stream
- Project Pipeline
- Project Activities By Performer.
- Custom Dashboards with Gantt charts
Mobility – C2CRM’s mobile app can track project milestones and allow for task follow-up while on the go. The entire project record with the associated milestones can be accessed. Each project’s linked documents are also available for viewing and editing.
Examples of CRM Project Management Usage:
- Pre-Sales
- Projects are great for managing activities that occur across many locations.
- Marketing can plan and track the necessary steps to attend a trade show and meet with customers.
- Track and manage complex processes
- Stage-Gate Process for New Product Development
- Provide customer information across many organizations
- Development
- Marketing
- Sales Teams
- Supply Chain
- Engineering
Post-Sales – CRM Projects provide an excellent tool for any standardized post-implementation process. Many companies have products that require installation in the field. Each product type may have its own set of requirements. Once an opportunity and sale are closed, users can create a new project for the installation.
Conclusion
Some projects include complex tasks, people, resources, and budget management. However, many projects have standard processes managed, tracked, and linked to your customers. CRM project management is a streamlined, efficient solution optimized for a customer-focused project.