Which project management tools integrate with Salesforce?

Salesforce is an AI-driven CRM system, and it’s one of the most popular options for teams managing customer information and sales funnels at scale. It’s also a pretty complex piece of software. Once you have Salesforce set up and running smoothly, you’re going to want to keep it that way, even when you need to upgrade the software you use to manage the other aspects of your projects. 

Our platform, Wrike, is an enterprise-level project management solution that centralizes your project tasks in the same way Salesforce centralizes customer data. 

When you use our seamless integration to combine the two, it becomes far easier to track the initiatives that use your CRM data and share information from Salesforce with the other departments at your company.  

In this post, I’ll explain how Wrike’s Salesforce integration works and show you four more ways to improve your project management strategies with Wrike. 

Wrike’s best-in-class PM software meets your CRM

Wrike is an all-in-one work management platform. With our software, you have all the project management features you need to manage your tasks from end to end and a wide range of project overviews for 360° visibility of your portfolio. 

Wrike also has a direct integration with Salesforce Classic and Salesforce Lightning. 

By adding a Wrike widget to your Salesforce pages, your teams can manage more aspects of their projects within their Salesforce workspace. The integration also syncs Salesforce data to Wrike, which breaks down information silos between the customer-facing teams that work with Salesforce and your company’s other departments — like marketing, finance, and your executives.

The integration works in three ways: 

• It triggers new projects from Salesforce, complete with essential information like start and end dates, task assignments, and status tracking. When an opportunity turns into a deal and it’s time to begin deployment, you can start the project and track it in both platforms for better visibility of more aspects of your shared projects. 
• It manages sales and professional services projects in Wrike, which means your Salesforce teams benefit from the enhanced reporting, monitoring, and risk management features included with our platform — more on these later. 
• It shares data between Wrike and Salesforce without internal email, which standardizes your processes, saves manual work, and speeds up team collaboration.   

The integration is also customizable. You can tailor which types of Salesforce objects should contain a widget that links them to Wrike, and which project blueprints to use for each of these objects.

The benefits for both sales teams and cross-functional projects are clear to see. For example, Wrike: 

• Standardizes incoming tasks with fixed workflows and templates for the services your team offers, and template forms for requests 
• Boosts productivity by closing process gaps and eliminating the need to toggle between systems to manage a project 
• Gives full visibility into the status of client work, plus advanced reporting to inform managers
• Improves accountability by assigning tasks, tracking status, making updates visible, and creating a paper trail in your project management system

All this makes it easier to collaborate within your team and across your company, and delivers better results for your customers. 

3 steps to integrate Salesforce with Wrike

The Wrike and Salesforce native integration is incredibly easy to set up. You can get it up and running in three steps:

• Step 1: Go to Wrike’s “Apps and integrations” page. You’ll need a Wrike Business or Enterprise account with account administrator permissions and an unlimited Salesforce account to continue. 
• Step 2: Open the Salesforce card and click “Install.”
• Step 3: Follow the on-screen instructions to add the Wrike widget to your Salesforce pages.  Here, you’ll define the object types you want to link to Wrike to get started.

Most functionality is available from this out-of-the-box integration with Wrike, but if you have complex needs, more powerful connections can be accessed via Wrike Sync and Wrike Integrate. 

4 Wrike benefits for client management and more 

Knowing how easily Wrike syncs with Salesforce is a great starting point. But you can’t choose your next project management platform based on the strength of just one integration. It needs to be a strong collaboration tool in its own right, and that’s where Wrike excels. 

If your goal in integrating Salesforce is to ease communication, reduce the number of internal emails your teams send, boost transparency, and close the gaps in your processes, Wrike gives you the structure and visibility to meet those business needs. 

Wrike doesn’t just improve the experience for Salesforce users; it upgrades your entire project management system. And, just like Salesforce, Wrike can be automated and customized to suit your teams — saving a lot of time on repetitive project management tasks. 

To show how Wrike can support any type of project while working hand-in-hand with your Salesforce CRM, I’ve outlined some of our key features and benefits below. 

1. Strengthen cross-team collaboration 

As I mentioned above, Wrike is set up to optimize information and resource sharing for complex projects that involve multiple departments at your company. In fact, when you use Wrike as your project hub, you streamline every aspect of your business processes. 

We designed Wrike to share custom project workflows between separate teams within a company. Each team keeps their own Wrike workspace, tailored to their needs, but the tasks they share can move between each space without friction.For example, imagine your company’s sales, marketing, and design teams are all involved in project planning for a new holiday campaign: 

• The project workflow might start when the sales team consults on targeting for the campaign. They might even review your Salesforce pipeline to identify the best opportunities and put a report together. 
• The project then moves to the marketing team, who use this information to plan the strategy and develop the messaging for the campaign.  
• The design team is next. Their stage of the workflow produces and reviews the assets for the campaign. 
• In the final stages, the sales team collaborates with the marketers to share those assets and launch the campaign. 
• After the launch, the project ends when all three teams have come together to evaluate project success. 

If you work with entry-level project management apps, you may find it tough to build a process that passes smoothly between these teams. You’ll probably find yourself sharing files with external platforms, sitting in update meetings, and sending a lot of emails and Slack messages. 

But in Wrike, our innovative cross-tagging feature means you can share your resources, your standard process, and a project progress overview in real time. The latest versions of your reports, campaign documents, and design assets are available for everyone on the project to view in Wrike’s folders and task cards, and each team can anticipate when their input will be needed so they can plan the rest of their work.  

In the experience of Wrike users, you could also reduce the number of internal emails you send by 85–90%. Wrike’s integrated communication tools also create a more collaborative experience for your project teams. Our project management platform is set up to help you: 

• Send automatic notifications to team members when they’re assigned to a new project or when a task lands on their desk for the next stage of the workflow 
• Send rule-based reminders, for example, to request updates or remind someone that their work is due soon
• Use @mentions to show team members exactly where their input is needed for a task, for example, to request revisions during your approval workflow    
• Email external collaborators or stakeholders from within Wrike and view their replies on the task card you’re discussing 
• Integrate seamlessly with other communication tools 

All these features promote teamwork and collaboration for even the most complex projects. And when your project work moves seamlessly, you can deliver a better experience for your teams and ultimately your clients. 

2. Eliminate bottlenecks and accelerate your processes

Great project management software should also help you combat the bottlenecks that cause delays and frustration during your projects. When you work with Wrike, you have a range of tools to help prevent bottlenecks from forming, alert you when they start to develop, and adjust your strategies to keep your projects on track. 

From the very first phases of your projects, you can use Wrike’s task management and scheduling tools to estimate how long your tasks will take and share this information with your teams.Instead of simply adding milestones to your team calendar, you can set up your work as a custom item, broken down into subtasks with their own standardized workflow, and show your project team exactly when they’ll need to jump in. This helps you view your project schedule more accurately and in far more detail. 

In your shared team workspace, you can add tabs to view your project timelines from multiple angles, including: 

• Kanban boards, showing the repetitive tasks with a standard workflow (including those you create and add to Wrike from Salesforce). These are especially useful for customer service teams using Agile project management methodologies to deal with tickets or sales teams managing a lead funnel. 
• Gantt charts set up with drag-and-drop task dependencies to show your full timeline and whether you’re on track to meet your goals. 
• Team dashboards showing the status of the project tasks, the percentage completion, the remaining resources available, and more. 

These timelines are responsive and automated. Whenever you change a task status or adjust the dates, all your overviews update to show the latest information. These tools streamline your scheduling and make it more realistic, which helps prevent bottlenecks later in your project.Wrike also includes AI-driven risk management features, which alert you to potential delays even before you can see problems forming in a Kanban overview. 

This software helps you stay on top of at-risk projects by tracking their health in your dashboard overview. Or, you can set Wrike to send you risk alerts based on your KPIs, your team’s capacity, and your historical performance on similar tasks. 

These alerts can instantly show you the tasks at medium or high risk of missing their deadlines, disrupting an upcoming milestone, or going over budget while you still have time to course correct. Then, with Wrike’s capacity planning tools, you can adjust your resource management strategy by finding the team members who would be able to help you get the project over the line. 

Many of Wrike’s project templates include Gantt chart views, scheduling tools, and risk reports as standard. Find out more here: Project Management Templates for Collaborative Work.

3. Analyze performance with regular reports 

Project reporting is crucial for every type of team. It keeps your work on track during the project lifecycle, helps you deliver projects successfully, and shows you how to improve your results for upcoming projects. 

Wrike’s project reporting software makes it faster and easier to evaluate your project performance and share those insights with your team.When you track your projects in Wrike, you can generate reports automatically by filtering data on how your tasks have progressed through the project workflows and how your team is performing. This informs your decision making as a project manager — from your approach to your current project to your strategy for new requests. 

Say you’ve reached the end of the quarter, and one of your company’s strategic goals was to develop long-term customer relationships and improve retention rates. 

When you work with a combination of Wrike and Salesforce, you can quickly call up the data on renewals from Salesforce, and Wrike reports on the average length of a project, the delays projects experienced, how many revisions it took before the client approved the deliverables, and customer satisfaction scores. By combining these metrics, you can get a deeper understanding of your retention scores and make data-driven suggestions to bring them up in the next quarter.

Without project management software, it can take hours to track down this information. With Wrike, it’s automatic. You can even set up your workspace to generate reports on your project tracking KPIs and send them to your inbox ahead of your weekly team meetings or Scrum standups. 

As a complement to these detailed custom reports, you can also set up a project management dashboard to show your real-time performance metrics throughout your project. 

Dashboards use widgets to filter your latest project data. By choosing graphs, diagrams, and table views to represent different aspects of your project status, you create a shared space where your team can view these metrics and orient themselves at a glance. And because everything in Wrike is connected, you can dive from the dashboard to more detailed information on a certain task or team member in just a few clicks. 

Wrike is also easily scalable to an enterprise project management level. This means you can use advanced features in reporting and dashboards to monitor everything from the workload of an individual team to the status of your entire project portfolio.

4. Use specialist features to increase conversion rates 

Alongside our suite of user-friendly project management tools, Wrike can also be set up with specialist features for many of the teams that typically use a Salesforce platform for their daily work. 

For sales teams, Wrike includes sales lead tracking software. This helps you: 

• Categorize potential clients within your pipeline by creating a sales space with separate folders for each lead, so teams can access detailed information on their interactions with each potential client and quickly determine where they are in the funnel. 
• Monitor your leads, so you can make the right moves throughout the sales cycle. Wrike’s charts and boards give a detailed view of how each customer is interacting with your company. 
• Improve your customer service, with easy access to the data that helps develop a personal relationship with new clients.

For client services teams and account managers, Wrike includes: 

• Complete task histories so every team member can get up to speed with new clients 
• Integrated communication tools so you can action requests quickly and accurately, even when your clients are not Wrike users 
• Rigorous time-tracking tools to record and analyze your billable hours 
• Customizable workflows, which you can tailor to each client to build a process that meets their expectations and supports your team 

And for finance teams, Wrike offers: 

• Request forms and templates to centralize incoming requests and kick off new financial tasks or projects
• Detailed budget management and forecasting tools to keep your projects on track
• Intuitive, rule-based automations for standard tasks in financial management, which can be built to include your external tools

All these features can complement tools like Salesforce to help you turn leads into projects, and projects into long-term customers. 

And alongside Salesforce, Wrike also includes over 400 integrations with other tools your team relies on, so you can bring every aspect of your projects together and create your ideal management space. 

Salesforce project management made easier with Wrike 

Your CRM data is critical to many different aspects of your projects. When you connect Salesforce to Wrike, you open up the silos that can slow your projects down. Ultimately, this improves the project experience for everyone from your sales team, to the other departments at your company, to your customers and clients. 

With one simple sync, you continue to use Salesforce in all the ways your team has developed, and bring total scalability to your project management too.