Jira as CRM?! Yep, and we’re done pretending it can’t be done correctly!

Before you commit some of your time reading this blog – the first question we should answer is : Can Jira be used as a CRM?  – Yes, it can. There are two main methods for having Jira be used as a CRM; 

1- Build it yourself using Jira’s native functionality and some project customization (workflows, framework, custom fields, automation scripts, etc.). We wrote a short blog about it to provide some general guidelines here and a much more thorough blog documenting every step on the Atlassian Marketplace here.

2- You can buy an app for that. We wrote a short blog detailing the types of CRMs in Jira and which one we would recommend here. 

Building vs. Buying

One of the defining questions for you is to determine whether you should build the CRM in Jira or buy it yourself. There are of course different pros and cons to each methods – its probably not your first rodeo with the matter so we will briefly go over the matter. 

Building (or DIY)

The perks of building the CRM yourself within Jira is that for the most part, it should be free! So if you’re on a tight budget, or are just starting and have no budget, then this is definitely something to explore. 

Creating a solid foundation

As highlighted in our other blog, creating a DIY CRM within Jira can leave you with a very solid basic CRM and sales pipeline. By that we mean having a customized project with a custom workflow, where you can use the Project board (kanban board) as a Sales pipeline to keep track and move your deals around. In addition, you’re able to use custom fields and automation to improve the CRM experience and allow you to capture much more relevant customer information. Finally, we shouldn’t diminish the fact that you can leverage more than Jira for your CRM – you could absolutely get information from Confluence and connect it to your deals (e.g: notes) or be able to link customer support tickets back to your deals.

Difficulty tracking accounts and contacts

However, you should be aware that the solution can be a little bit of a let down for other elements. For example, you will most likely need a workaround to be able to accurately track accounts and contacts with that same pipeline as there is no real good way of doing it. 

Workarounds, workaround, workarounds….

Aside from the customer and contacts aspect that will not be captured within your makeshift CRM without having to do some workarounds, we found, from our own experience trying to produce the best possible DIY version, that you would have some limitations that wouldn’t be the case for other services. 

For example, there isn’t a good way to connect and integrate your inbox to the CRM, in order to track customer interactions. This just means that you will need to track every interaction manually. Again, not the end of the World but annoying for sure. 

What amplifies this inconvenience is the fact that you will need to set up workarounds for anything that is not directly done in Jira. A traditional CRM will have other services connected to it (Mailchimp for emailing, booking links, email tracking, lead forms, etc.). You can still do those, but keeping track of the data and even exporting this data will be time consuming and require some more workarounds every time. 

Maintenance and increasing use case

Oh and let’s not forget that you’ll have to set up everything from scratch – which is not the end of the world, but not a timesaver either → this also implies that if anything breaks, you will have to try to figure out yourself where things went wrong. In other words, scalability and long-term feasibility might not be guaranteed. 

Buying

Complete CRM 

If you’re paying a premium for a tool, then you should absolutely ensure that it can provide you with more than the DIY method. 

The main perks of buying a tool is that it’s configured specifically for the use case. For example, Sales CRM for Jira, is the tool that we specifically created to work as a dedicated CRM in Jira. In this specific case, it means that: 

• You’ll be able to host multiple sales pipelines,
• You can gather and track information and interactions for accounts, deals, and contacts
• You can have integrations with outside services (Mailchimp, Husbpot, Google, Slack, etc.) 
• You can create your own automation rules

Each dedicated CRM on the Atlassian Marketplace will have their secret sauce, but we’ll share more about Sales CRM’s in another section. 

Budget needed

The main issue with buying a dedicated CRM in Jira is that you have to pay for it. However, if you look at the pricing for apps on the Atlassian Marketplace (even outside of ours), you will notice that these are very affordable prices, especially compared to the classic culprits (Salesforce, Zoho, Hubspot, etc.). Do note that if the budget is tight for you – you can always reach out to the vendor and ask them to cut you some sort of deal. For example, we at Jsoft would be happy to provide the tool for free for the year if we can have some sort of user interview with you. 

Set defined framework

The main problem with buying a tool is that they might work differently than the vision that you had. However, the odds are that if you can do it in an “outside” CRM (a CRM outside the Atlassian ecosystem), then you should be able to replicate this idea with a dedicated CRM in Jira. If that’s still not the case, then it might be tricky to find a tool that is perfectly customized to your needs so you’ll have to see if you can contend with some workarounds or change of workflow. 

What is a paid alternative that could be done to have a dedicated CRMs in Jira?

We developed a fully integrated CRM in Jira for the Atlassian Ecosystem. If you want to learn more about the Atlassian Ecosystem’s CRM state and a little bit more about the evolution of each player, we would recommend the following article by our Co-founder, here. 

Sales CRM – Our creation available on the Atlassian Marketplace

The pitch: 

Sales CRM is a fully integrated CRM for Jira that is available on the Atlassian Marketplace (this means being able to track contacts, accounts, and deals in Jira). We created this with two things in mind: 

1- Better automation options to make the Sales Pipeline more efficient

2- Ability to import data and possibility to export data to outside channels/tools

We believe that these two elements are extremely important to go beyond the limitations of the DIY version because you will be able to quickly create rules to optimize your sales pipeline, and have steps within those automation rules to integrate this information to other systems. 

For example, the marketing team would be able to interact with customers once they reach a certain step in the sales pipeline by having leads be sent to a Mailchimp drip-campaign. Achieving this with the DIY build of Jira would be fairly hard to pull off in an efficient manner. 

This means that now, multiple teams are able to coordinate and collaborate on the sales pipeline to improve the touch points with clients. 

Client interaction tracking to the next level with JSM, Jira, and Sales CRM

Traditional CRMs put a lot of emphasis on capturing interactions with clients (emails, forms, website tracked, etc.) and centralize this information, so that you can make more educated information based on the client’s interest and latest information. 

We follow the same mentality with what we consider to be one of Sales CRM’s strongest points: its client’s interactions from multiple sources of information. There are a few things to note that level up Sales CRM ability to centralize all activities done to a client directly in Sales CRM: 

1- You have the possibility to leverage information from Jira: This means that if you are working on a project for a customer, you can quickly link that project to your deal/prospective deal to quickly navigate back and forth and understand the latest done for that project. This can be very useful for client facing teams to better understand the state of a project and react accordingly.  

For example, an account manager will be able to understand when a key feature is going to be released from the project’s updates, and therefore, be able to quickly move in to communicate the updates to the client. 

Having all the information in Jira means that you can skip redundant update meetings and instead get all the information from the source with perhaps the addition of a simple message to clarify some information if needed. Much more efficient to have Jira as a source of truth. 

2- You have the possibility to leverage information from JSM: Since Jira Service Management (JSM) is also from the Atlassian ecosystem and also uses issues as structure for its ticketing capabilities, it means that you can also leverage that information to quickly understand the latest tickets that a client might have. More importantly, this means that you are able to add more context in your client support portal. 

This idea is an efficiency hack that can add a lot of optimization possibilities for your support team because the added context will provide more information to prioritize and triage tickets for your team. 

For example, you would be able to know that an existing customer is having some issues and might be in a prospecting phase for a 300k$ deal. It might then be in your best interest to prioritize that issue and ensure that the customer is pleased with your operations.  Alternatively, if you had a ticket for an unknown customer, you would be able to convert them to a potential lead in Sales CRM, which would then appear in your sales pipeline – very handy!

3- You have the possibility to track interactions from other tools: We have already mentioned that Sales CRM was able to integrate with external tools. However, where this comes in handy is the ability to track what was done for each lead. For example, be able to easily tell what email was sent, if a demo was booked with the client, or if the lead was sent to Mailchimp for that nurturing. 

One of our favorite examples is with the possibility of capturing email interactions with Sales CRM. If you are not too up to date on some of the Sales CRM functionality, we have the ability to send emails and track those emails directly from Sales CRM. 

In other words, you are also able to centralize customer touch points and interactions with clients in Jira to provide a better picture of the latest done with a customer. 

4- You have the possibility of tracking your own activities on your deals. If you have been doing follow-ups or have gone on a call with a client, you will most likely want to write that somewhere so that you and your team can quickly get back up to speed whenever the time comes to track time. These activities that you’ve created will be attached to deals so tracing back to those elements will be very easy and convenient to do. 

5-  Sales CRM has a dedicated activity section to allow you to create follow-up tasks and to be aware of upcoming activities that will be due soon. 

We created this centralized view to make it easy to organize daily tasks for an entire sales pipeline. This means that you and your team will quickly be able to understand to-dos and prioritize tasks based on urgency.  A very convenient way of making sure that your deals are getting the attention they require to be successful. 

Sales Pipeline specific dashboard

Sales CRM has a built-in dashboard that can provide you with the possibility of quickly assessing the overall health of your sales pipeline. The options that are provided are specialized to the data of Sales CRM and will ensure that you’re able to know things like : how many elements are in each stage of your pipeline, what proportion of your deals have been own, how much potential revenue is in your pipeline, what’s in your backlog, and also if your team is able to hit their goals and KPIs.

Having this dashboard is the cherry on top for a CRM in Jira and we believe you will appreciate the insights that it is able to provide you with. 

Jira as CRM at your fingertips

While you can build your own Sales Pipeline in Jira, you will soon be faced with limitations that will severely impair your client-facing teams. However, we believe that these gaps are handled well with Sales CRM. With Sales CRM, you should be able to centralize information from multiple data sources, both inside and outside the Atlassian ecosystem, to allow a much more holistic view of your customer touchpoints and interactions. Powered with the automation rules of Sales CRM, your team will be able to be much more efficient in their ability to keep up with customers and deals. 

In other words, one way that you can use Jira as a CRM is to get yourself tools specially designed for the job on the Atlassian Marketplace!