Jira as a CRM – How We Put Together Our CRM in Jira
Every company needs an efficient and well-organized Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform for optimal sales performance. Is it possible to build a CRM using Jira? Absolutely! We put together our CRM directly in Jira – and we would never consider a different option.
Our CRM mainly serves our sales team. The vast majority of incoming inquiries concerns license purchase, and some relate to service purchase. These inquiries are processed by our sales team with an active participation of the technical staff whose expertise is required to develop individual offers.
Here’s our dashboard.
It displays all the inquiries that are ‘In progress’. All are assigned to specific employees.
The dashboard looks like Kanban board for tasks related to sales. On the left side, users find offers that are to be prepared, as well as offers that have expired and require attention. The middle of the board is occupied by projects related to the service offers that have been accepted by clients. On the right side, users can see all finished projects and realized orders that should be invoiced.
One glance is enough to know what the expert team should be working on at the moment.
Jira as a CRM in Practice
Let’s have a closer look at one of these inquiries.
We were recently approached by our customer to deliver a series of training workshops combined with a consulting session.
Company X develops software solutions for the justice sector. The organization delivers products that help justice institutions to manage complex legal and business processes, enabling them to focus on core business goals and effective case management.
Company X was looking for a way to streamline development processes across the entire organization and picked the Scaled Agile Framework as their solution. Our task was to train the team in using JIRA Software and show how Jira supports Scrum and Kanban.
Here’s what the inquiry looks like in our CRM.
Our CRM inquiries or offers look very similar to Jira issues.
The sales and tech expert teams can instantly see the type of the inquiry, its priority, main components, and security level.
We also created custom workflow stages – in the case above, the stage of the issue is ‘Offer sent’, and its resolution status is set to ‘Unresolved’. The comments sections displays the entire history of correspondence with the client, so if a new employee takes over the project, they have full information about the current agreement.
The section located below describes the CRM customer. Note that apart from the description and company, the users of our CRM can also see the Key for that issue which is individually created for every customer.
Clicking on that Key, users will get the following screen.
That Key is also an issue where you can see comprehensive customer data, and a list of all the CRM cases realized for that client.
CRM Cases
Instead of searching though archived email correspondence or reports, users of our CRM can get an instant look into our collaboration history with that particular customer.
Moreover, the CRM Cases table displays the status of each case, indicating whether our team has sent an offer, billed a service, or prepared an invoice.
CRM Contacts section displays detailed contact data of key individuals responsible for carrying out the collaboration.
That’s a great help when dealing with large organizations where these contacts change frequently, but thanks to that information our sales team can help the current contacts recall our previous collaborations.
Note that the table includes information about the role of the person in the company, offering to our sales team more valuable context when getting in touch with the client.
Clicking on a particular CRM case, the user gets all the critical information regarding that service.
Note that we display information about the cost of the service, as well as the percentage of the discount given to the customer in that instance (‘Rabat’). That information is very valuable when calculating the pricing of other services carried out for the same client.
The same issue also includes the section Attachments which features documents such as offers, including different versions that incorporate changes requested by the client. That kind of history is of great value to any sales team.
All materials sent in by clients also land in the Attachment section. If the person who manages that account changes, they won’t have to send these files to the new account manager.
Users can also link that issue to a related service carried out for the same company.
Our Workflow
Let’s take a closer look at our workflow. For the purposes of our organization, all workflow stages are in Polish.
Here are the labels translated into English:
Otwarty = Open
Czeka na odpowiedź = Waiting for response
Oferta wyslana = Offer sent
Oferta zaakceptowana = Offer accepted
Odrzucony = Rejected
Zamówiony = Ordered
Wyfakturowany = Invoiced
Rozwiazany = Resolved
Zamówienie Zrealizowane = Order realized
Note that the workflow can be edited by the users of our CRM in accordance with their processes.
Kanban Boards
Our Atlassian Sales project includes Kanban boards as well.
One look at the board is enough to know how many inquiries are awaiting reply, as well as the number of offers that were sent or are currently in preparation. Users can also learn how many offers were accepted, ordered, invoiced, and realized – and for which client.
The top of the board includes helpful filters that allow users instantly see all issues of interest. The ‘Recently Updated’ filter is of great help when dealing with a large number of inquiries as our team does.
Offer Statuses
We set up several offer statuses that serve as filters to help the sales team quickly see where there’s work to be done.
You can see some examples of these statuses on the screen below – ‘Sent’, ‘Overdue’, or ‘In Preparation’.
Here’s a closer look at Overdue offers. Note the query field that regulates which offers are displayed there
On the basis of this filter, users can set up a subscription for a particular group. That group will receive a message about these offers at a set interval – for example, every week.
Some Atlassian Sales are able to create project issues automatically, and these are later processed separately by teams responsible for implementation. That kind of division allows us to separate offer creation from realization on the level of system permissions.
Jira as CRM at Deviniti
Needless to say, we’ve been using Jira as a CRM with much success and today we’re focused on polishing its functionalities to better suit our needs. I hope this case study illustrates that using Jira components for creating and organizing a CRM is a smart move. Do you have any questions about setting up a functional CRM in Jira? Reach out to us, we’ll be happy to help you.