5 ways to improve your project management with contact management in Trello
Ready to streamline your project management processes with Email for Trello? We show you how strategic contact management can help you improve client relationships, boost team collaboration, and grow your business.
Trello is a great workflow solution for all kinds of project management teams. The flexible, Kanban-style layout makes it adaptable to your unique business needs, so that you can stay organized and collaborate with your team on to-dos.
The Email for Trello Power-Up takes things one step further with contact management features for organizing client details, engaging with stakeholders, and more. In this article, we take a look at:
What contact management is, and why it’s important for project managers
How to manage your contacts in Trello with the Email for Trello Power-Up
5 ways to improve your project management workflow using Email for Trello’s contact relationship management (CRM) features
Why is managing contacts important for project management?
Managing your contacts effectively is an important part of project management across all industries. Maintaining a comprehensive contact database means that your team can store information about past and current clients, as well as track interactions across prospective business, stakeholder engagement, and upcoming project meetings.
A strategic approach to contact management helps project managers keep client information organized, so that you can develop better relationships, understand client needs, and effectively allocate resources to open jobs.
What is contact management?
In short, contact management is the organization and maintenance of contact information. For project management teams, contacts could include suppliers and stakeholders, as well as potential, current and past clients. Great contact management is the foundation to building great client relationships (and, ultimately, more successful business), so it’s important to have the right tools for the job.
💡 Great contact relationship management is an important growth driver for many small and medium-sized businesses. Learn more about the benefits of CRM software for small businesses.
Customize your project management workflow
The Email for Trello Power-Up connects your email address to your Trello board, so that you can manage incoming requests, stakeholder engagement, and project to-dos – all in one central workspace! Our advanced CRM features help project managers to:
Keep detailed records. Project management teams can maintain a comprehensive database of contacts, notes and email conversations.
Share information easily. Everyone on a project team can quickly access accurate information in one place – no need to waste time searching or asking colleagues for help.
Collaborate in real time. Greater visibility also makes it easier to keep track of ongoing conversations. If there are any bottlenecks, team members can quickly jump in to keep the project on track.
Find out more about how to manage projects with Email for Trello.
5 ways to streamline project management processes with CRM in Trello
Let’s take a closer look at how contact management works in Email for Trello, so that your project management team can get the most out of our powerful CRM features.
1. Make record-keeping easier with custom notes
Custom notes are great for organizing extra details relevant to your contacts. For example, project managers can add custom notes about client preferences, details about project briefs, or even reminders for other team members. This can help to:
Align your objectives with customer expectations. By recording interactions, observations and requests, your team is better positioned to personalize their service and improve project success rates. For example, a simple team reminder like, ‘Mr Smith asked for weekly email updates’ could be the difference between a satisfied or dissatisfied customer!
Improve team communication. Shared insights and updates make it easier to collaborate with colleagues, because everyone is working from the same set of information. If someone is sick or out of office, it’s easy for another team member to pick things up, even if they haven’t worked on the project before.
Time-stamped contact notes are visible alongside emails and comments in the activity feed
Learn more about adding custom notes to your contacts in Trello.
2. Improve collaboration with the activity feed
The Email for Trello activity feed makes all your emails, contacts and tasks visible at a glance. This can help your team to:
Co-ordinate across project tasks. The activity feed acts as a convenient, centralized platform for tracking your project pipeline and email interactions as they happen. This makes it easy for project managers to respond to real-time change and reallocate resources where necessary.
Stay up-to-date. A clear overview of open conversations means that everyone is on the same page with the latest information, reducing the need for time-consuming manual reporting.
By consolidating all your Trello information in one place, your team can easily review activity across all boards, contacts, notes and emails
Learn more about how to streamline your project workflow with the activity feed.
💡 Did you know? Our dark mode release means that you can enjoy the Email for Trello CRM dashboard in the same theme as your board.
3. Discover new business insights
The overview provided by the activity feed is not only a powerful tool for project managers looking to improve their client service and react quickly to real-time change. It’s also a really valuable way to discover new business insights, so that you can take proactive steps to optimize your workflow and move projects through your pipeline more effectively.
Monitor service levels. The ability to view team, contact and email activity across all your project boards in Trello can help you see what’s being done – and plan for how to improve.
Make data-driven decisions. The activity view can help you spot trends and notice areas for improvement. Using this knowledge, you can apply your insights for better team communication, CRM and project management.
Use the contact overview to see how long it took to respond to a client query – and plan to improve your project communication accordingly
4. Save time with contact import (and export)
Maintaining an up-to-date database is essential for great CRM, but manual data entry can be a real time-suck for busy project managers! Take advantage of Email for Trello’s easy import functionality so that you can:
Save team time. Importing contacts in bulk saves valuable time – and makes migrating your project inbox into Trello that much easier!
Ensure accuracy. Batch uploading contacts eliminates typos associated with manual uploads. Plus, we automatically take care of any duplicates!
💡 TIP Need to upload contacts to Trello? We’ve made it easy for you with this downloadable CSV template.
If you need to share contacts with external collaborators like a suppliers or other stakeholders (or simply do a data backup!), you can also export your contacts in just a few clicks. Learn more about contact import and export on the Email for Trello blog.
5. Keep your contacts organized with groups
Email for Trello makes it possible to group contacts by organization so that your team can keep contacts organized by company. This is especially useful for project teams that might be working with clients from various companies at the same time.
Keep contacts organized. Organization groups give you a better overview of your contacts, allowing you to see all correspondents associated with a single organization at a glance.
Improve knowledge sharing. Team members can see all conversations in the context of a single organization, making it easy to stay up to date and keep track of the bigger project management picture.
💡 TIP After you’ve imported a contact list, Email for Trello recognizes similar email addresses and automatically groups them by organization.
Transform your project management workflow with Email for Trello’s contact management features
Transform your project management pipeline with efficient contact management in Email for Trello! Make the most of our powerful CRM features to improve record-keeping and boost communication and collaboration, so that you can better engage with clients – and grow your business in the long term.
