Using Salesforce for project management may not be the first thing that comes to mind for many users of the world’s leading CRM. Here, we explore the value of Salesforce as a project management tool when paired with the right integrations.
Plenty of companies use Salesforce for sales pipelines, but it also offers exceptional capabilities when it comes to onboarding customers and managing projects (particularly when you invest in the right Salesforce project management app).
Drawing on insights from leaders in the field, this post outlines how you can use Salesforce for project management and get the most out of the CRM. Along the way, we’ll consider how to manage projects in Salesforce from the onboarding phase right through to completion.
A key part of doing this is having the right Salesforce-native integrations and apps in place. To that end, this guide also addresses the practicalities of managing projects on Salesforce and offers tips on choosing the most effective project management integrations for your setup.
Use the links below to zoom ahead to the sections you’d like to hear more about:
Allocating resources with a Salesforce project management app
Setting up tasks and managing task dependencies in Salesforce project management tools
Forecasting project demand and monitoring project financials in Salesforce
The practicalities of using Salesforce for project management
Choosing the right Salesforce-native solutions for project management.
Want to see Precursive’s Salesforce project management app in action? Book a demo today by clicking the button below.
WHAT DOES SALESFORCE OFFER FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENT?
Best known as the world’s favorite CRM, the project management capabilities of Salesforce are often overlooked. A basic out-of-the-box Salesforce setup offers some fundamental features that are actually pretty critical for managing projects, including:
Tracking tasks and project progress
Collaborating within teams
Basic messaging for comms between project team members and clients.
On its own, the platform is fairly limited in terms of its scope for project managers. When combined with integrations and dedicated Salesforce-native project management apps, however, you’ll find it has a whole lot more to offer.
Organizations that want to keep their systems in one place and integrate project management into their Salesforce setup can benefit from tools for:
Time management (with Salesforce Lightning)
Real-time communication and file sharing (with Salesforce Chatter).
With the right tools and integrations in place, Salesforce can be transformed from a simple pipeline management system into a fully-fledged all-in-one project management platform.
ONBOARDING PROJECTS IN SALESFORCE
A smooth onboarding process is vital to the success of any project or client relationship. When managing projects in Salesforce, integrating your onboarding system into the platform helps to keep teams and clients on the same page, with all of the key information available in one place.
There are a lot of features that come with an Onboarding Project Management app, but when it comes to managing team continuity, there’s one feature that really needs highlighting as the one that is going to count: that’s the board view.
This is a visual kanban-style ‘board’ that everyone works from. It’s likely you already use some Agile tools that incorporate a kanban view, for example, Trello or Jira.
In separate race-lanes you can see exactly what your project status is at a glance. There’s a column for what’s coming up next, in progress and still to be completed. The real advantage here is that anyone can log in and pick up someone else’s tasks exactly where they were left off.
The board view is at the heart of Precursive’s OBX onboarding app for Salesforce. Other key features for onboarding clients within your CRM include:
The ability to create customized customer onboarding playbooks that guide the handover from sales to services delivery
Customer collaboration functions like shared project plans – and automatic rescheduling of tasks if plans change
Onboarding analytics, with advanced reporting dashboards and forecasting.
Book a demo using the button below to see all of this in action.
It's tough sometimes when someone has all that knowledge in their head. What if someone is out sick? At least we can look at a board and think, ‘OK, what does ABC have to do?’ and then we can pick it up.
Stephanie Schapero
/ Project Manager, Scout
WHY NOT JUST USE TRELLO THEN?
Certainly you can, and in fact, this would definitely be sufficient for many smaller businesses (or smaller departments within larger organizations). However, as soon as you start trying to scale Trello, across many different customers on many different products and services, it all becomes unmanageable very quickly.
With the power to create customized onboarding playbooks and automate project plans, Salesforce-native project management apps are a cut above standalone platforms that are dedicated to the same purpose. All of this makes scaling much more achievable.
What’s more, these tools are not native to Salesforce (we’ll come back to that), that’s to say that while there are integrations available, they have not been designed and built specifically for this purpose.
And then, of course, certain simple-kanban tools don't have repeatable Playbooks...
WHAT'S A REPEATABLE PLAYBOOK AND WHY DO I NEED ONE?
When it comes to onboarding customers to your