Salesforce, one of the world’s leading CRM platforms, is widely used for managing customer relationships and data key aspects of many projects. Having a solid understanding of Salesforce’s functionality allows you to effectively plan and execute projects involving customer relationship management. As a project manager pursuing PMP Certification NYC, gaining expertise with popular project tools can help you succeed on the exam and in your career.
The PMP exam expects you to be well-versed in common software, so familiarizing yourself with Salesforce’s core components is great exam preparation. Let’s explore some key Salesforce areas and how mastering them can strengthen your project management abilities.
Opportunity Pipeline
The opportunity pipeline allows tracking leads and opportunities through different stages from initial contact to closing deals. Setting up defined stages provides visibility into the sales process and aids in forecasting. As a project manager, you can use the opportunity pipeline to track project proposals, understand reasons for winning or losing bids, and coordinate hand-offs between teams. Maintaining an organized opportunity pipeline brings structure to tracking prospects from the beginning of the sales cycle.
Accounts
Accounts represent clients or customers, with important details like industry, annual revenue, and primary contacts stored. All opportunities, contacts, cases, and other records are linked to a specific account. Accurately maintaining account information helps manage client expectations and foster ongoing relationships. As a project manager, you can leverage account details to understand your clients’ needs and coordinate communications.
Contacts
Contacts store information on individual client representatives like decision makers, stakeholders, and points of contact. Critical details include name, title, email, phone and other contact information. Contact roles help define relationships to the account and responsibilities. As a project manager, you would use the contact object to identify all stakeholders, assign tasks, and effectively manage communications throughout a project.
Tasks And Events
Tasks and events allow tracking activities like calls, meetings, emails and other action items against opportunities, accounts, contacts or custom objects. Setting reminders, due dates and assigning tasks helps ensure work stays on track. Recurring tasks can handle repetitive deliverables efficiently. As a project manager, you would leverage tasks and events to manage project plans, track issues and action items, and keep the team accountable to deadlines.
Reports And Dashboards
Salesforce offers many pre-built, configurable reports to provide insights into opportunities, accounts, contacts and other objects. Dashboards allow consolidating multiple reports and metrics onto a single screen for at-a-glance visibility. As a project manager, you may need to create some custom reports to track specific metrics important to a project like resource allocation, risks encountered, issues logged, and more. Dashboards are also useful for communicating project status updates visually to stakeholders.
Integration
Connecting Salesforce to other systems through APIs allows bi-directional syncing of data between platforms. Common integrations may include linking to Microsoft projects for resource planning or a documentation system to store project records. Integrations provide a single source of information while leveraging features of each individual system. As a project manager, knowledge of integration methods and how to set them up is important.
Conclusion
Mastery over core components like opportunities, accounts, contacts and customizing Salesforce using reports and configuration is crucial for using the best project management methodologies pursuing PMP certification. Familiarity with the Salesforce platform better prepares you to effectively plan, execute and manage projects involving CRM systems.
