Can You Get Away with Salesforce for Project Management?

FYI– With a Salesforce Lightning subscription, you can manage projects via collaboration tools, task management, collaboration, project tracking, and reporting. But if you want to go deeper and/or manage complex projects at scale, you’ll need to adopt a third-party solution.

If your team uses Salesforce to win customers, you might be curious as to whether or not you can simply continue with the software as you transition to the project management side.

To cut to the chase– the answer is yes and no.  

Salesforce is not designed to be a bonafide project management solution, but it happens to offer a few tools that can give you a leg up. 

From Sales to Projects in Salesforce

Using Salesforce as your CRM? You’re part of a popular club. Currently, 150,000 businesses around the globe use Salesforce, making it the world’s #1 CRM. 

If you’re in the professional services world, you know that CRMs are definitely critical for managing sales and marketing campaigns to reel in more customers. 

But after the deal is closed, it’s time to turn that deal into a project: to transition from your sales to your project team. 

Depending on your industry, the size of your business, and the nature of your projects and services, you may be able to get away with executing projects using native Salesforce features. This can be an attractive option for startups who are not yet sure what project management software they want to go with. 

3 Project Management Tools Native to Salesforce

As growth happens, Salesforce will not provide enough project management functionality for most service businesses to execute everything needed throughout the project lifecycle. 

But at the beginning, you may be able to get away with it before you eventually adopt an outside platform. 

Here are the basics of what Salesforce provides by way of project management:

1. Task management & project tracking with Salesforce Tasks

Task management is one of the most pivotal elements of project management. For startups, even if you haven’t yet figured out a way to streamline your invoicing, time tracking, etc, you’ll need some kind of task management to get started earning revenue.

Luckily, Salesforce provides this feature with Salesforce Tasks. You can easily create to-do lists, assign tasks, and set notifications for yourself and others on the team. 

The level of functionality for your tasks will hinge on which tier you’re paying for. For example, Salesforce Lightning will give you more options for notifications across the team, like automated follow-up tasks that can help increase your productivity and efficiency.

2. Collaboration and workflow management with Salesforce Chatter

Chatter serves as a robust collaboration tool and a task management suite within the native Salesforce environment. You can make it so posts act like projects or tasks, from which teams can then share pertinent information, communicate with one another, and keep work moving forward. 

With real-time status updates, this means that effectively, you may be able to use Chatter as a workload management tool on the project side. 

Managers and everyone on the team can know the status of the project at any given time. 

3. Project visibility with reports and dashboards

One of the things Salesforce is really good at is their reporting and analytics. You can easily create reports to give you insights into the status of your projects with just a couple clicks. Create an “All Open Tasks” report to see where your team may be falling behind. Customize a dashboard for just the project side to check up on progress. These tools will help you stay more in control of your projects by giving you more visibility.

Note that like Salesforce Tasks, dashboards and reporting in the Salesforce Lightning Experience are going to be significantly more functional when it comes to project management. 

In Sum:

If you go it alone, you better have Salesforce Lightning.

If you’re going to use Salesforce as your project management solution, you really can’t get the functionality necessary with Salesforce Classic. It’s recommended only for Lightning users who will get features like task notifications and reporting that you can’t live without for project management. 

In sum, Salesforce Lightning gives you enough to manage your projects by way of task management, collaboration, visibility, and project tracking. However, to get more granular into these areas and/or to execute complex projects for more customers, you’ll need to adopt a third-party solution.

Check out Salesforce-integrated project management software like PSOhub for an affordable solution that can cover all the bases as your business grows and scales.