How a marketplace vendor uses Sales CRM in Jira

We are the masterminds behind the Atlassian Marketplace app: Sales CRM for Jira. So how do we, the original creators and fellow marketplace vendors, use Sales CRM in our day-to-day operations? 

In this article, we’ll show you everything we use – and how you recreate our full A-Z stack extremely easily!

Who are we and why did we decide to build Sales CRM?

We are Jsoft, an Atlassian Marketplace vendor with 10 apps on the Atlassian Marketplace. We have been in the Atlassian ecosystem since 2013 with our first app, Slack Connector. 

We decided to build Sales CRM after experiencing a need to better handle our own customers. 

As a Marketplace vendor, we  – surprise –  use Jira a lot! But we find that there were too many data silos and context switching required from having client information in different tools: 

We found that handling client requests and tickets with little context as to who they were, and having a disconnected CRM, outside of Atlassian, was not working too well for us. In addition, we wanted to do some nurturing and follow-ups to our own clients, but found that once again, there was not enough information around the client in the “other CRM” so we had to cross-reference with the information in Jira to get a more complete picture. 

And, on top of our previous irk, we can’t forget the costs of having a standalone CRM: we are not at a level where we can dish out thousands of dollars for a CRM to go for the industry standards (Hubspot, Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive and the others…)

So we decided to build one ourselves to remedy that problem, to centralize the information in Jira and add more context to clients we interact with. 

What is Sales CRM for Jira? 

As the name implies, Sales CRM for Jira is a fully integrated CRM created specifically for Jira. 

We’re trying to replicate the “traditional” CRM experience and centralize this information in Jira so that you can minimize the amount of tools that you have and leverage this information with data that’s available in Jira. 

In other words: 

• Track deals, accounts, contacts for your pipelines
• Create tasks and activities for users
• Create automation steps for the pipeline
• Integrate with other systems (Emails, Slack, JSM, etc.) 
• Import/Export Data → this part is key for us!
• Create dashboards to monitor your pipeline and track some KPIs

By using Sales CRM and being able to leverage the information within Atlassian, we are able to solve our initial problem immediately. With that being said, lets show you how we set up our CRM, to answer our needs as an Atlassian vendor.

How a Marketplace Vendors sets up Sales CRM

Sales CRM is an individual app that lives within the Jira app section. This means that the tool works independently of Jira projects. As such, let’s breakdown some key elements to Sales CRM and explain how they help us with our workflow:

Pipelines

One of the core features of a CRM is its ability to create a pipeline to track deals through stages of your sales process (e.g., Lead → Proposal → Close), helping you manage, prioritize, and optimize opportunities effectively.

Internally, we use the pipeline in a few ways: 

1- As a way of tracking new prospects and to track their conversion to subscribers 

2- As a way of tracking our churned customers and prospects and to do a “last ditch” effort in reconverting them

3- As a way of keeping track of our current user base and engaging with them to actively gather additional feedback and feature requests.

In other words, we’ll use the pipelines (yes, you can have many!)  as a way to organize our prospects and clients and help us follow-up on each appropriately. 

Beyond the various stages of the pipeline, we have also created a few visual cues in Sales CRM to help prioritize deals and prevent them from slipping through the cracks. 

Very quickly these are the following: 

1. Labels: colour coding to help identify types of deals at a glance
2. Assignee: allows you to assign deals to members of the pipeline for them to handle the deal
3. Activity: allows you to create tasks and reminders on deals so that follow-ups are done on time
4. Linked Jira Issue/Ticket: allows you to provide more context on the deal based on a project that you’re going through or an interaction with a customer. 

Internally, we use the assignee a lot as a way to distribute the workload to the right people by combining it with our automation and integrations → for example, when a prospect reaches a certain stage then it will have a certain assignee, and when it’s time for closing a deal, then it will be someone else.

Of course, activities are also used a lot internally as a way to keep tabs on what we should do. In the pipeline, you can see the activities that are due as well as your own personal ones though the “my work” button. In addition to that, there is a dedicated section in Sales CRM for the activities, which consolidates all your team’s upcoming activities. 

Contacts and Accounts

Of course, a CRM wouldn’t be completed without the possibility of having your own database of clients through contacts and accounts. These two elements are defined as follows: an account would refer to a company (e.g: Acme Co.) and a contact would refer to someone (e.g: peter from accounting).

One way of thinking of the whole relationship between Contacts, Accounts, and Deals is to adopt a similar mentality to the Parent- Child relationship of Jira: Account > Contact > Deal 

There is a dedicated section of Sales CRM to these two elements (they inherently work the same). Where you will be able to go through your whole database of clients and/or prospects.

Of course, you can customize the fields to add the information that you need to keep tab of (we’ll look into that a little more during the import section!)

In addition!

The best part, and something we use every single day!, is the detailed view for accounts/contacts/deals (again, they work the same). We use that view extensively as it allows us to keep tabs on clients and to understand what are the latest things that we’ve done with them : follow-ups to clients, track interactions, and handle our notes.

This is extremely powerful because we’re also able to grab interactions from JSM, which in turns allow us to paint a more complete picture of the client’s personas, intents, and blockers – all of which we can then easily address since we have the information centralized. 

Import and Export

Because we are a Marketplace Vendor, we get our customer data directly from Atlassian (either by downloading the data through a .csv or by using Atlassian’s API) This means that the data comes pre-populated with several fields such as : technical contact, billing contact, Partner, hosting, tier, etc. 

As a reminder, you are able to add your own custom fields (text or numbers) to your database, which means that you are able to capture all of Atlassian’s reporting data if you want. If you want to read more about it, check out our documentation on the Data Field Center. 

We use the import function of Sales CRM in order to get our client and account data from Atlassian, straight into Sales CRM. This allows us to build our own, up-to-date, database of clients and prospects directly in Jira. 

Having all of our customer databases in Jira is extremely convenient for us since we can pair it with our JSM data and have a much more complete understanding of who our customers are, what they want, and the blockers they face.

Sales CRM also allows us to nurture our clients and prospects  through integrations to third-party apps (see automation and integration section).

When we import our data, we map out the fields of the .csv to the fields of our pipeline. This means that we have all the relevant data and it’s organized properly within the tool. 

Getting Up-to-date data

Getting data through the .csv is an easy way to get customer info in our CRM. However, as a marketplace vendor, we get constant influxes of new clients, churned licenses, new trials, etc. 

Therefore, manually getting the data from Atlassian into Sales CRM, would not be the most time efficient operation; we would need to constantly be exporting the data from Atlassian and importing it into Sales CRM. 

Instead, what we’ve done is to connect the Atlassian Reporting API to our own REST APIs in order to automatically get new client data into Sales CRM. The methodology is exactly the same, but now we automate the process to get all the new information without us having to do the step manually. 

Then, all we have to do is to set up some automation rules to alert us on Slack when a new client has been added (See Automation and Integrations section)

Automation and Integrations

Automation

Sales CRM has a dedicated automation section to make recurring actions from our daily operations something that we don’t even need to think about. 

Sales CRM uses an IF-THEN logic that requires no coding, so it is very simple for someone with the right permissions to set up a rule. 

We use automation a lot internally, to assign our new deals to the right person, change the status of deals when a stage is changed, and also to alert us on our messaging app, Slack, when something new is happening. 

These elements are really key to us as we are not 100% of our time stuffed in Sales CRM (we have to develop our tool afterall!), so we rely on an automated process to ensure that the backend is running smoothly and that we can focus on the follow-up touches. 

Integration

Sales CRM also has integrations with a few external systems, which help us accomplish more complete vertical integrations for customer handling. 

What do we mean by that? 

Since there are multiple moving pieces that are each exposed to different pieces of information (developers, sales persons, customer success, etc.), having centralized information in Sales CRM allows more context about the customer to be captured. We capture this information from multiple tools (or information silos) and make that information available in Sales CRM for the team to use to their advantage.

Capturing more information 

Here’s what we do internally to capture more info: 

• Connect our JSM: we are able to convert tickets into customers or deals in Sales CRM to help capture customer interactions. 
• Connect our Emails: we use our inboxes as a way to capture
• Use Hubspot Meetings links: we’re able to create new customers from booking links and this has the advantage of also capturing the context of the meetings (name, reason for call, product of interest, etc.)

For example, we connect our inboxes to Sales CRM and we can convert these emails into customer interactions or as new deals. Very handy! 

Reaching out to clients 

In addition to that, integrations lets us proactively reach out to customers for various reasons, like for marketing campaigns, churn outreach, etc. 

We built an integration with Mailchimp so that prospects and clients can automatically be put in nurturing campaigns that we’ve built over in the Mailchimp platform. 

However, we know that just blasting emails is not the way to go: based on the customer’s lifecycle, we want to show them different types of content – for example, doing a trial, or a new client.

We set things up in Sales CRM with an automation so that when the right trigger occurs (for example, the contact is has one of their custom fields “Tier” as “Evaluation”), then we can have a rule created so that the contact goes in a specific Mailchimp Audience List: (Trial) 

As a result, when that audience member is exported from Sales CRM to Mailchimp, it will automatically be placed in a specific nurturing campaign that we created. 

This is all made possible because we are able to take client fields that are given by Atlassian’s reporting and leverage our APIs to import these clients into Sales CRM.  The cool thing is that we are able to update fields from past imports to help with the latest information, so this means that clients can automatically be part of new marketing campaigns without us doing anything. 

We find that this is an extremely powerful way of once again, scaling our operations, whilst being hands off.  

The cool part about this is that these clients are tagged as coming from Sales CRM, which means that you can find out in Mailchimp how these contacts are responding. 

Internal communications and alerts

Finally, we also use integrations in Sales CRM to keep us up-to-date to any modifications that might happen in the CRM. When there are multiple people working on the pipeline at the same time, we oftentime miss changes.

For this, we use the Slack integration to notify us of any significant changes to the pipeline, and avoid having deals fall through the cracks.

How we use Sales CRM Internally

In short, as a Marketplace Vendor, we use Sales CRM as a database of our customers and prospects to run our Marketplace business. We organize our data through pipelines and account/contact catalogues to make sure that things are running smoothly.

To do so, we centralize customer data from various sources (Atlassian customer data, Emails, JSM, Jira, Hubspot, etc.) into Jira to capture a view that pairs technical and non-technical customer interactions. This way, we’re able to have a much more complete overview of who our customers are and their intentions. 

We heavily use the built-in integrations of Sales CRM so that we can achieve the three following ideas with our customer data: 

1. Capturing customer data
2. Reaching out to customers
3. Internal communications and alerts

Below is a diagram that summarizes how we use each integration in our day-to-day workflow. 

As fellow marketplace vendors, we hope that this Sales CRM guide has at least provided some ideas on how you can run your own business and automate a lot of the steps, so that you can focus on other parts of the business. 

If you have any questions – don’t hesitate to contact us!