VIDEO: CRMs with Integrated Project Management

CRMs with Integrated Project Management: Good or Great Idea? For service providers and project-focused companies, it’s often tough to track the client lifecycle. Keeping clients up to date on their projects and deliverables has required a continuous passing of the baton between multiple systems and departments that often have limited visibility into each other’s work. Many companies are finding a solution in CRM products with integrated project management.

By bridging the two systems together, the software gives visibility to sales, marketing, service, and operations teams alike. Some offerings are CRMs with prebuilt PM integration, whereas others are with separately purchased PM add-ons. We’ll profile a few for you now! Insightly Although its features are less elaborate than some competitors, Insightly is one of the few products that offers integrated CRM and project management significantly below market price.

Because of its low cost and high flexibility, Insightly is a great choice for small businesses in any industry. Insightly’s project management features let users create milestones, pipelines, and project tasks as well as countless other features typically seen in full project management software. And, of course, you’ll have access to traditional CRM functions like address books, email integration, calendars, notes, and web forms. Zoho (Projects Add-On for CRM) In quite a different class than Insightly, Zoho is designed for businesses with more intensive software needs.

Their Projects module is an add-on available for free with Professional and Enterprise editions of Zoho CRM. The Projects add-on will give you access to some powerful abilities, including traditional PM tools like Gantt charts, time-tracking, and milestones, but also a few more innovative ones, like Kanban boards for agile planning. All of these features are directly tied to the CRM, which will give your team better visibility and control. Sugar CRM Sugar CRM is well known for its open-source platform that combines innovative and user-friendly functionality into a flexible package.

Similar to Zoho, Sugar CRM started offering integrated project management in 2007 with its Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise product lines. While the core product addresses the most important aspects of a CRM, the project management features help to manage projects directly connected to campaigns, opportunities, customer accounts, and cases. Users can share files, access project templates, view Gannt charts, collaboration history, and even export project data to external programs like Microsoft Project.

AbleBridge (integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM) AbleBridge is a separately-purchased add-on that brings project management capabilities to Microsoft Dynamics CRM. As a company, AbleBridge actually specializes in building add-on solutions for the Microsoft Dynamics platform, so you can expect their project management app to be a seamless addition. The app helps project managers and customer-facing teams collaborate on key aspects of projects and stay on the same page about tasks, resource availability, budgets and progress.

Users will be able to automate routine processes, create project templates, and receive alerts about changes in real time. All of this is accessible from a clean, simple interface inside of Microsoft Dynamics. In summary there are a number of strategic advantages of connecting CRM with project management tools such as helping businesses manage the customer lifecycle—from initial contact to project completion—in one system. To find out more about CRMs with Integrated Project Management, check out our website where we can help you find software that fits the needs of your work.