Combining a CRM System and Project Management Tool: Why You Want That as an Agency

Combining CRM and project management prevents the handover between sales and delivery from becoming a black hole. At most agencies, sales documents in the CRM and delivery works in a separate project tool, and that exact split is where promises, context and agreements go missing. One environment solves this, because a won deal automatically becomes a project with all the notes attached.

Koos wins the deal. Three weeks later, Truus, the client's contact person, calls asking when that extra landing page discussed during the sales conversation is coming. Bep, who runs the project, hears about it for the first time. She checks the project board: nothing. She asks Koos, who has to dig deep into his notes. Eventually it turns out to be buried as a side note in an email.

Nobody did anything wrong here. The problem lies in the handover itself: sales lives in one system, delivery in another, and between them is a gap where information falls through. If you're a freelancer juggling multiple clients at once, the same gap exists, except it sits between the sales conversation from three weeks ago and the moment you pick that project back up yourself.

Where's the leak between your CRM system and project management tool?

At most agencies, the sales process is neatly documented, in the CRM. And the project is neatly documented, in the project tool. But the moment in between, the handover, is usually a verbal story, a handover document nobody updates, or a four-line chat message.

And that handover is exactly where the information sits that makes or breaks the project:

• The promises. What was committed during the sales process, big and small? The client remembers everything. The team only knows what was passed on.
• The context. Why did this client choose you? Where's the pressure, who still needs convincing internally, what went wrong with the previous provider?
• The expectations. What picture does the client have of the first month? Sales painted that picture, delivery has to live up to it.
• The fine print. Who gives feedback, how often is there contact, what falls inside and outside scope. Small stuff, until it starts to chafe.

Why this wrecks the client relationship

To the client, your agency is one party. Truus doesn't distinguish between your sales team and your delivery team. If she has to repeat something she already explained three weeks earlier, it feels like talking to a wall. The first weeks of a collaboration set the tone, and nothing sets that tone wrong quite like the question of whether she can explain, once again, what exactly was agreed.

I recognize this myself. At Evertising, we worked with separate tools that didn't connect, and a messy start with a client kept causing friction for a surprisingly long time: you spend the rest of the project fixing what went wrong in the first few weeks.

An integration only solves half the problem

The standard response is an integration: Zapier between the CRM and the project tool, or an export for every won deal. That helps a little, but it mostly just moves the problem. The integration creates a project with a name and maybe a deal value. The notes, the conversation history and the commitments stay behind in the CRM, exactly where the project team never looks.

On top of that, such an integration only works one way. What happens during the project doesn't flow back into the client picture in your CRM. Want to propose an expansion six months later? The searching starts all over again, only now in the other direction. I wrote earlier about why this is a structural problem for agencies in why a normal CRM is not enough for an agency.

What it looks like when it's one environment

In one system, the handover doesn't exist as a separate moment. The deal, with all its notes, agreements and documents, becomes the project. Nobody has to retype anything and nobody has to decide what's important enough to pass on, because it's all already there.

With Wecooking, we built it that way: a won deal becomes a client with a project in one action, and the notes and follow-up moments from the sales process travel along. The team sees what was discussed and promised, and through the client portal the client follows progress and approves deliverables. Truus doesn't have to tell her story again, because her story never went anywhere.

This is also why I think an agency, and just as much a freelancer with multiple clients, shouldn't look for the best CRM plus the best project tool, but for the combination that lets the least fall between the systems.

Check whether this is happening to you

Three questions to ask your team this week:

• Ask whoever runs projects: do you know what was promised in the last sales conversation, without having to ask?
• Ask sales: do you know how the project of the client you landed two months ago is actually going?
• Ask both: where would you look it up?

If the answer to that last question involves two different systems, you've found the leak. And it gets worse as more clients run at the same time. How to keep an overview then is covered in managing multiple clients overview.

Curious what it feels like when sales and delivery sit in one environment, whether that's an agency with a separate sales team or a freelancer wearing both hats? Try Wecooking for free. Signing up takes a minute, and it's free during the beta.