teamwave

Every “services” business that is required to manage client projects, must have a holistic view of customer lifecycle. Important aspects include: tracking leads, managing sales activities, creating new projects and managing existing deliverables associated with clients.

Traditionally, organisations have taken a siloed approach to business management. Applications are developed to handle only one function of the business. These applications are not “designed” to connect the dots between closely associated business functions because they start with a fundamentally flawed premise. So, many interlinked departments such as Project Management, HR and CRM need manual data entry to close the gap.

Benefits of Project Management and CRM apps

TeamWave Project management is quite straightforward — the app is supposed to streamline the process of delivering tasks from start to finish, leading to completion of project. Project management software helps companies keep track of resources, manage personnel, arrange meetings, and keep up with deadlines (among other things). CRM apps help companies build and maintain relationships with potential and existing customers. A mature CRM app combines customer relations, marketing, and sales functions. The ultimate goal is to increase the revenue from the clients via various modes of account expansion.

Features of Project Management and CRM apps

Very few vendors provide an integrated CRM and project management software. Primarily because these two types of apps have different goals.

Let’s look at some unique features CRM software offers:

Managing sales pipeline

Tracking Q&A

Tracking interactions

Follow-up tracking support

Tracking customer referrals

Tools to offer quotes or proposals

Managing client engagement

Here are the things project management software offer:

Tracking goals and meeting deadlines

Tools for more effective collaboration and communication between team members

Support

Managing project portfolio

Managing finances and budget

Tools to plan the project

Gantt charts

Generating reports

There is no overlap between CRM and PM software. The key difference between CRM and project management software is the timeline. CRM is a perpetually ongoing process to any business. Project management, on the other hand, happens with specific timeline (with some exceptions). At first, it might make sense to keep the two separate. But, there is actually a lot of value in combining both apps:

Why Opt for an Integrated CRM and Project Management System

In a typical business setting project managers, marketers and customer support teams have to continuously exchange information between departments. If this exchange of information would rely on the individual apps built for specfic function, this can become inefficient and error-prone.

Integrating CRM and project management systems thus eliminates silos and gives visibility to these departments that exchange information. Let’s consider a scenario, a marketing agency company is building websites for its clients. The data for this project, such as budget, progress, deadlines, are kept in a project management database. The other needed data about customer orders, sales, contact info and such are kept in a different CRM system.

And different people will have access to these systems.

The sales reps will have access to the CRM system, while only the project managers and relevant team members might have access to the project management system. So, if the sales team wants to plan for cross-selling a solution (example: SEO service) to the clients who are at the end of development project, they will have to be constantly in touch with the Project team to track the progress of various projects and create sales activities accordingly. But, wouldn’t it be great if all the departments would have access to key information at a central location! Smoothly moving from a won deal to delivery of the project in the same app without re-entering any data and avoiding data loss.

Key advantages of integrating CRM and Project Management apps

Increase collaboration between separate teams

Unify task completion based on client initiatives

Better manage the workforce by having access to deadlines and reminders

Gather customer related data for better customer service

Connect customer feedback to project managers

Cost effectiveness by eliminating additional fees associated with managing separate systems

Manage customer lifestyle in a single system

Higher ROI

Ultimately, a business can focus on business growth by retaining data in one place.