What are Project Management tools?
Project management tools help you organise and manage your projects and tasks more effectively.
What is a CRM?
CRM software is a system for managing relationships with your customers.
They’re your most valuable and important asset! But the details you have about them are spread out across heaps of different places: your brain, your inbox, the invoices piled up on your desk…
As your business grows, you need to have one central place where all of this information lives: Who are our customers? How do we get in touch with them? How do they interact with our content? What does our pipeline of new business look like?
From your customer’s perspective, they have a relationship with one company, not a bunch of different people from your team. So you want to keep their interactions with you clean and streamlined. Everyone on your team needs context about every customer’s needs, wants, and current state, so they can pick up the conversation where it left off. Ever been on the phone with a business and had to explain your situation to five different people? It’s the worst.
These are the problems that CRM systems are designed to solve. With one central place to organise all the details of your leads and customers, it’s easy for you and everyone on your team to gain insight into the state of your business, and the status of every customer relationship.
What are the similarities between CRM and project management software?
There is overlap between the two kinds of software.
- Both tend to have a project management or project planning component.
- Both have an email element.
- Both contain a scheduling and/or time-tracking tool.
- Both tend to have a mobile integration feature.
- Both have a system for organising contacts.
There are also many differences between PM and CRM tools. As technology stacks adapt and progress, it's a good idea to stay up to date with new features and new tools on the market.
If you're working with a business that wants to implement a CRM &/or PM tools make sure they are clear of the features and what they want the platform to do. A wishlist with a 'need to have' and 'nice to have' is a good place to start before researching what solution might be fit for purpose.
Monday.com is a cloud-based platform that allows businesses to create their own work management processes.
It’s probably the most versatile tool you'll find. You can use it to manage all your projects, but you can also use it as a CRM, to manage your ad campaigns, to track bugs, to manage customer projects, and to manage video production.
ActiveCampaign is an integrated email marketing, automation, sales software, and CRM platform. It lets users perform powerful automation, email marketing, and customer relationship management.
It provides a cloud-based solution to marketing and sales automation and includes features to create email marketing campaigns, web analytics, lead scoring, and customer relationship management. The platform gives users access to detailed behaviour tracking and marketing segmentation options to create the most customises campaigns for every audience.
- Head to Monday.com, ClickUp & Active Campaign and set up free accounts for each platform. Spend time getting to know all of them, their pricing and their key features.
- After you have set up all of these accounts choose one of these platforms to spend more time on. Then test out the functionality and do things like:
- Set up a board for a project - it might be an event or a piece of creative needed for a social campaign
- Set tasks needed to be completed & due dates
- Invite a team member into the board (this could be using another email address or another digital doer)
- Test inviting people to a board and setting tasks + sub-tasks
- Set up time tracking against that project
- Create & share documents
- Set up workflows and automation
- Prepare template emails
Create a document that includes screenshots of what functionality you used in the platform you chose to deep dive into. Also describe what you liked about that platform, any limitations you found. Post your document to your thread in the Module 5 Practicals Forum.
Later is a social marketing platform that lets you plan, analyse, and publish your content in a few clicks.
We love using Later to post things… (you guessed it) later. It means we can create a bunch of social media content when we’re feeling super inspired, and then set up a plan to post it automatically at a later date.
Set up an account here: Later.com scheduling Tool
