At first impression, Customer Relationship Managers (CRMs) and project management software seem to have little in common besides being part of business-critical tasks. CRMs provide a centralized interface for ensuring customer success. For this reason, companies implement CRMs for scaling up customer-centered decisions and actions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Project management, for its part, is the system for meeting the project requirements by using the company resources, including teams, tools, and techniques, and tracking the work done, making it one of the key assets to building software products.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Still, the basic idea behind combining CRM with project management is to prevent data silos between project management and the rest of the organization and, subsequently, democratize project decisions. The combination of CRMs and project management creates a bidirectional information exchange between the teams in contact with the customer and those working on product developers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In this article, we will take a look at how companies and their different departments can benefit from the information exchange between these two platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Customer success depends greatly on building products that meet market demands. As such, companies have to overcome the paradigm of keeping product development separated from their other departments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nowadays, with information created by anyone from anywhere and tools for tracking various actions, business plans are bound to change as they receive feedback from their customers and the market. Hence, as companies modify their business plans\u2019 assumptions and goals, they have to revise and update their projects. To achieve their goals, companies cannot afford to isolate project management systems from the other information systems within the company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sales teams can use project management to their advantage and close more deals. With access to project information, they can have a deeper understanding of the features and requirements of the products they are working with, or use it to provide accurate quotes swiftly. Besides, sales teams can use this information to communicate with customers what the product will offer in the short term for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Customers are also prone to require a change in the product for a variety of reasons; moreover, the inclusion of a new product or tendency might change the market. For this reason, project management integration allows sales teams to start projects and add requirements to existing ones while remaining updated about the status and evolution of these projects. Marketing teams, for their part, can use project information to shape marketing campaigns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n