Pipedrive has announced an integration with Asana project management suite. The news came in a blog post by Aivar Ots, Growth Product Manager at Pipedrive.
Pipedrive has built a flexible integration between the two products that allows companies to trigger actions within their operational teams who use Asana. Asana is a low cost project management tool that allows companies to set up project teams, assign tasks and communicate. It has integrations to both file storage platforms such as Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Microsoft Office, Google Docs. As well as communication solutions such as Gmail, Slack, Hipchat, Microsoft Teams, Skype.
The process starts with sales
One of the challenges with CRM systems is that once a sale is completed the automation stops. This integration allows it continue to flow through the organisation. For example, once a deal is closed within Pipedrive relevant tasks can be created in Asana.
Within Asana it is possible to default a task to a given person based on the customer. This means the service account manager could be allocated to all new tasks for a given customer.
You can do more than just configure tasks based on actions in Pipedrive. Asana allows settings such as default assignees or whether you want the deal transferred into a task or project. Pipedrive also allows the transfer of relevant data about the deal to be transferred between the two systems. This includes:
- Deal title
- Deal Value
- Contact Person Details
- Organization Details
- Pinned Notes
- Attached documents
Not just with deal closure
Task initiation can be configured at key points in the sales process. This includes when the deal is won, lost or moved. When a deal is won the task could initiate the start of a process to make products, collate materials or just start a project. Similarly, if the deal is lost, the system could trigger a task to cancel resources allocated.
Pipedrive is an activity based CRM solution. If the integration could be extended to specific tasks it would be even more powerful. It could mean that at any point in the sales cycle a task is set within Asana. In service industries it means a request to allocate resources for a demonstration once that phase of the sales cycle is reached. It could also mean that resources are reserved ready for the start of a potential project if it reaches last and final offer.
What does this mean
This integration will help sales teams communicate with the operations function but it only addresses part of the problem. Asana have not yet created a system to integrate with Pipedrive and push information or actions back to Pipedrive. There is no indication when this functionality will happen. For small organisations using Pipedrive and Asana this is a step to improve efficiency within the organisation as a whole.
At some point organisations need to decide whether they would be better going for a more comprehensive ERP solution. However, there is a trend for these point solutions to start becoming more sophisticated. Customers often want more functionality and for the application to grow with them.
The recent announcement by Xero that they are looking to evolve and become an ERP platform is another instance of this evolution of software. The question remains whether companies are better selecting best in class point solutions that integrate with one another or a single integrated suite.