3 Salesforce Project Management Hacks Small Businesses Should Implement to Save Money and Time
When you start a small business, you quickly realize how valuable your time is and how little of it you seem to have. You start viewing tasks as opportunity trade-offs and you go from being very DIY to questioning “how much is my time worth?” and “is it worth more than what I could pay for software or someone to do this?” The longer we’ve been in business at Rotive, the more we have realized how important technology like Salesforce is for organizing our data & automating our processes to save us time.
That’s why we’ve started taking full advantage of Salesforce’s capabilities and building our own project management solutions, in addition to leveraging innovative apps from AppExchange. This blog post will highlight the three most helpful hacks that can help your small business, too. The best part? They’re all 100% FREE.
1. Automate repeatable tasks with a flow.
Every time we sell a service (this also applies to products), there are a set of standard deliverables or tasks associated with that service that need to be completed. For example, if we sell a Pardot implementation package, we’d have to create individual tasks for the kick-off call, implementation, asset creation, walkthrough call, & workshops. Every. Single. Time. But now we use a Template Tasks flow (a creation of our own, which we made available for free on AppExchange) where with the click of a custom button, all of those tasks are created at once!
2. Track projects & invoices using a custom object.
There are a lot of project management tools & software out there. But being a small business & cost-conscious, we wanted to have a solution that wasn’t expensive and that we could use natively within Salesforce to take advantage of the robust reporting and automation capabilities. So, we created a couple of custom objects — one for projects and one for invoices. Then we added some relevant custom fields to capture all the important information pertaining to those objects and voilà! Now we’re able to easily keep projects on time and have visibility into closed and outstanding invoices and payments.
3. Improve project deliverability using reports.
Remember that Project custom object we just told you about? Because it’s built in Salesforce, we can use the power of Salesforce’s reporting and dashboard capabilities. We’ve used it to build reports that tell us when projects need attention, if we have any outstanding invoices that still need to be paid, the average days to close a project, and how many open projects and tasks each person has (just to name a few). Having these insights help our projects stay on track and help us see what areas of our process need improvement so we can deliver better service.
Conclusion
These improvements to your process may seem small at first, but they lead to big, business-transforming results. And again, these are three free solutions that you can build right within Salesforce to serve as a simple project management system until you need something more robust. If your small business is looking to save time and money, look no further than your own Salesforce CRM system.
Delegating to an expert is one of the ways to save time and help your business grow faster. Rotive is an official Salesforce partner and Pardot + Sales Cloud consulting agency that helps small businesses make the most of their CRM investment through implementations, training, and custom projects. Find Rotive on the AppExchange today.
