No matter the industry you’re operating in or the nature of your business, one tool you need to execute your processes with great levels of efficiency is project management software. Not many are aware that Salesforce can be used to manage projects with high efficacy; the IT platform is much more than just a suite of CRM applications. It has certain basic features that you can use to monitor the progress of and ensure the successful completion of IT projects. You can also go in for various project management apps on Salesforce AppExchange or integrate external apps with Salesforce.
Here’s What We Will Cover
- How to Use Salesforce for Project Management?
- Benefits of Native Salesforce Project Management Apps
How to Use Salesforce for Project Management?
Send Task Notification Alerts to Your Team
Notification alerts are one of the fundamental features of almost any app today. Apart from alerting users about tasks, they also provide relevant information regarding the same from time to time. Thus, they help you execute your projects smoothly. However, you need to remember that this feature is available only in the Lightning version of Salesforce. So, if you’re not using this version yet, you need to upgrade your Salesforce system to use this feature.
Sync-up with Project Timelines
Ensuring that all your tasks are in sync with your project timelines is one of the main elements of a good execution strategy. Salesforce Reports helps you stay updated about the progress of your projects. In addition to enabling you to view the latest updates made by your team members, this feature from Salesforce lets you use time filters and manage issues with high levels of efficaciousness. You can also view details of activities that are specific to certain accounts.
Ensure Effective Communication
One of the features of a good project management app is enabling effective communication. The Files and Chatter features of Salesforce help you communicate effectively with your team members. To explain further, Files lets you share documents either privately or publicly with your teammates and centralize all your communications. Chatter, on the other hand, allows you to communicate about important new releases related to your projects, share information with your team members effectively and discuss issues that are relevant and important to your projects on the go.
Effective Team Management
For managing your team effectively, Salesforce offers two specific features viz. Accounts Teams and Opportunity Teams. Let’s get into the details of these two features and how they can help you with your team management.
Accounts Teams allows each of your team members to work on individual accounts. This feature displays all the activities, tasks, deals, opportunities and data that are account-specific on a single platform giving your team members an understanding of their roles and responsibilities at an individual level. On a broader note, it helps you monitor your team’s performance with just a few clicks.
Opportunity Teams, on the other hand, can be used by a group of employees working on opportunities that have the potential to be converted into successful deals. But, you cannot get a detailed view of various accounts at an individual level like Accounts Teams.
Benefits of Salesforce Native Project Management Apps
Easy Integration
As opposed to external apps, native project management apps have more benefits to offer your business. And the main reason why these native apps are easy to integrate is they’re all developed using Salesforce itself. What does this mean for your business? It helps you save money and time as the apps don’t require any additional integration assistance. They work in coherence with custom and standard Salesforce objects. Another plus point is your project management tools will be compatible with the latest Salesforce functionalities and releases.
Increased Flexibility
Native Salesforce applications let you personalize your project management software as per your business needs. For instance, you can customize the software’s workflow rules, the objects and fields, and more to precision. Also, choosing a native app for your project management helps you expand your software’s range of capabilities even further as you can integrate many other applications from Salesforce AppExchange easily.
360-degree View of Customer
Understanding customers helps businesses create cutting-edge products and services and stay ahead of the competition. Various apps native to Salesforce allow you to link other Salesforce objects with your projects including opportunities, cases, accounts and more. Your team gets a 360-degree, real-time view of what actions your customers are taking; you can create various reports about growth opportunities and accounts that help you acquire deep insights into the business.
Security
Yet another benefit of adopting native apps is you enjoy the same security standards and the technical infrastructure that Salesforce provides. With native apps, you can rest assured that your entire data hosting is within the Salesforce environment. Further, you will also be in control of your data governance as you can define data-sharing restrictions and security settings completely. The bottom line is you need not worry about your project management tool being exposed to any kind of cyber threats at all.
Real-time Reporting
Relevance is the key to success, in this digital world, for businesses. To stay relevant, you need essential tools. As you choose to adopt native apps like Salesforce reports and dashboards, you can be confident of getting real-time data always. With this real-time data, you can get the latest analytics reports, identify the impending bottlenecks and gain insights on key industry trends on your project management app.
Automation
By using native apps, you can leverage the potential of automation through the Salesforce Process Builder for various processes. For instance, you can automatically launch a project anytime an opportunity is won or closed based on specific templates, with fully configured and pre-attached documents. Also, you can automatically assign tasks based on roles and boost your overall productivity.
As you can see, Salesforce can be used with high efficacy to manage your projects. At Solunus, we can help you make the best use of the Salesforce platform to handle your projects efficiently. Our strong emphasis on understanding your needs coupled with our unparalleled expertise of Salesforce makes us the ideal partner to meet your project management needs.
About Solunus
Solunus is a dedicated Salesforce partner organization, headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Our unrelenting focus on comprehending the unique needs of our clients coupled with our unrivaled expertise of the Salesforce platform enables us to deliver the perfect solutions that create the best value for IT and business analytics firms.
