If you’re reading this article, there’s a good chance you’re already using Salesforce as the home of your customer and sales data. Since it’s the most expansive and feature-rich CRM on the market, there are plenty of good reasons to do this.
But if you’re a large or complex organization, there’s also a good chance you’re using a professional services automation (PSA) or project management platform alongside Salesforce. Alternatively, it could be expense management tools, time trackers, revenue forecasters, or even manual spreadsheets. The list goes on.
By now, you can probably start to see the issue…
The Challenge of Salesforce Silos
For customer-facing teams, Salesforce is a one-stop shop with almost everything you need built in. For back-office teams, the situation is more complicated. After all, the platform is a CRM, not a project management or PSA tool. When it comes to tasks like time tracking, resource planning, revenue forecasting, and more, there’s no native Salesforce functionality available.
So what happens when organizations need tools to manage these tasks alongside their CRM? In practice, it means customer-facing teams end up using one set of tools, and back-office teams another set entirely.
Here’s the problem: While the tools might exist in a silo, the processes they power don’t. Here are just a few examples:
- Project managers require oversight over deals closed in Salesforce to effectively plan the project, including scope, product, and contract details.
- Resource managers need visibility over current and potential sales or leads to proactively plan capacity and manage contractors.
- Finance teams need access to information on current and future projects in Salesforce and ongoing projects from PSA/project management tools.
- Account managers working from Salesforce need access to information about project deadlines, resources, and more in order to effectively manage client relationships.
These are just a few examples, but there are plenty more.
For many organizations, the end result is that customer-facing and back-office teams become increasingly siloed and self-contained. Project plans are filled with outdated and inaccurate information. Revenue projections don’t take into account recent sales and new leads. And customer-facing teams struggle to convert customers because they’re not armed with the information they need to effectively communicate with them.
So what’s the alternative?
A Single Base-of-Operations in Salesforce
No organization wants disconnected tools, incorrect information, and manual processes to become their default setting. The best way to avoid this is to create a single location where front and back-office teams can share information and collaborate.
For many organizations, there’s only one candidate: Salesforce. By bringing project management and PSA functionality into the CRM you’re already using, you can virtually eliminate the silos we discussed above.
But what does that look like in practice? To explore this in more detail, let’s look at a fictional IT consultancy: Implementers Inc. Here, we’ll explain the issues that sales, project management, and finance teams face – and how an integrated approach in Salesforce would work.
1. Automated Project Templates
Before
Mark, the sales rep, closes a deal in Salesforce and puts his feet up; job done. But for the delivery manager, Sally, the job’s just beginning. To kick off the project, she manually re-enters information into a project management tool, creating unnecessary manual work and inefficiency. If she gets something wrong, it just creates more errors.
After
With project management in Salesforce, project templates can be automatically populated with data about the deal, reducing work for all teams and making the transition from sales to delivery a lot smoother.
2. Dynamic Resource Planning
Before
Now, Sally needs to plan the staff and project resources. To do that, she needs to export the list of required roles into Excel, then cross-reference availability via a separate resource planning platform. Getting visibility over vacations or capacity changes can be time-consuming, since these are also tracked separately.
After
With resource scheduling in Salesforce, Sally can open a drag-and-drop scheduling tool directly in the CRM. Information on staff availability, vacations, and resourcing requirements is available in the same window and updated to the minute.
3. Resourcing and Time Tracking
Before
Later in the project, Sally needs to reconcile timesheets against project milestones. This can be a hugely manual process, since consultants track time, deadlines, and project progress through several third-party tools.
When she’s done, she passes the project over to Stephen, the Finance lead, who has to export data out of Salesforce to understand what has been delivered and what can be billed.
After
If consultants can complete their time tracking in Salesforce, much of this confusion and admin is eliminated. This means Sally can view timesheets from the same window she’s already using to manage the project.
Then, Stephen can instantly see how the data relates to the client, project, and billing schedule. This reduces the risk of duplicate entries, manual reconciliation, and billing delays.
4. Custom Revenue Dashboards
Before
Now, Stephen needs to generate revenue reports and forecasts for the whole organization, based on all ongoing projects. To do this, his team relies on a specialist revenue forecaster.
But all the information he needs to build these reports is in Salesforce or a separate PSA tool.
Therefore, Stephen needs to manually reconcile information from three different systems. By the time he’s done, the reports are often already out of date.
After
But what if all that information was already in Salesforce to start with? Then, Stephen’s life becomes a lot easier.
All financial data is surfaced in Salesforce and automatically updates based on pipeline and account information. This eliminates manual reconciliation across platforms and ensures reporting is real-time, consistent, and reliable.
5. Creating AI-Ready Data
Before
Implementers Inc. is planning to train their own AI models so the team can plan their projects more effectively and eliminate bottlenecks. But currently, fragmented and poor-quality data make that challenge particularly difficult.
This means forecasts can’t effectively analyze trends or flag risks because they lack the visibility and context required. At the same time, much of the data they’re being trained on is inconsistent and unreliable.
After
With all delivery and financial data captured natively in Salesforce, the data model is clean, structured, and consistent. AI can accurately forecast revenue, flag projects at risk of margin erosion, or predict resourcing shortfalls.
Klient PSA: The Native Professional Services Automation Tool in Salesforce
To avoid the issues we discussed in this piece, it’s important to bring revenue, sales, and project management together under one roof. Simply put, the best way to avoid silos forming between back and front office teams is to not have them working from separate tools in the first place.
For most organizations, Salesforce will be the obvious choice for this single base-of-operations. After all, the combination of CRM, Data Cloud, and AI-native features means the platform is uniquely positioned to unify disparate teams and systems.
For those looking to combine project management and CRM into one place, Klient PSA can help. Here’s how:
- A native PSA in Salesforce: Klient PSA is the only solution that offers Salesforce-native PSA functionality. Other tools may integrate with Salesforce or require complex data pipelines, but only Klient PSA brings everything into one place from the start.
- Full PSA functionality: Klient PSA features the full range of professional services automation features, including revenue forecasting, billing and financials, resource management, task and time tracking, project management, customer collaboration, and more.
- Get automation ready: With a single source of truth for all your data, you’ll be well on the way to training effective AI models on clean, structured, and consistent data.
- Cut costs: PSA and CRM tools don’t need to be expensive. We include Salesforce licenses in all our costs to reduce costs and complexity for your team.
Want to find out more? Request a demo.
