Although there are many CRMs to choose from, picking the right one to work for you both now and in the future can be a daunting task. You need something simple to get started, but as you grow and add more people and processes to your sales team, you need something that will scale with you.
It’s important to pick a tool that gives you the flexibility you need for growth while also incorporating a somewhat rigid structure so nothing falls through the cracks.
For instance, if you’re currently keeping track of leads in a spreadsheet, it’s difficult to know what’s been done and what you still need to do. It’s also difficult to manage reporting and quickly gain insights from rows of data.
On the flip side, if you’re using an expensive tool like Salesforce, you might be paying too much for complicated features that you don’t have time to learn how to use and may never need.
Using Trello as a CRM
Of course, we’re a little biased but we think Trello makes an excellent tool for managing your contacts. You can make boards as simple or advanced as you need them to be, and it’s easy to adapt to changes. With a few minutes of setup, you can supercharge your Trello board to be a powerful, yet lightweight CRM that doesn’t require a steep learning curve or a crazy budget.
Start by adding the Crmble Power-Up for Trello to incorporate reporting, task management, and your contacts all together in your Trello board.
To incorporate specific guardrails in your process, you can couple Crmble with the Approvals for Trello Power-Up to prevent any chaos in your deal progression. No more worrying about items falling through the crack, lost contacts, or missed opportunities.
Setting it all up is easy peasy!
Build the Foundation of Your Trello CRM with Crmble
Start by creating a Trello board and adding the Crmble Power-Up or use one of our ready-to-start templates. From there, you’ll follow the wizard to get set up.
Want a step by step guide? Head over to our Getting Started with Crmble page for tips to get your Crmble board set up out of the box. (You can even watch our handy getting started video that demos how to get up and running in five minutes!)
Make sure you’ve created your board, added your lists (deal stages), and defined any custom fields you want to store for your contacts (several fields are already created for you by default, but you’re welcome to add more custom fields to your Trello board if you like!)
Next, set up any custom integrations (we call them “Toppings”) to sync your leads directly from the source. Collecting your leads with a Typeform? Just use our Typeform Topping to sync your forms so that anytime it’s filled out, that info goes straight to your board.
We have out-of-the-box integrations with Typeform, Google Forms, and Facebook Lead Gen forms. For anything else, you can use our Zapier integration to easily connect with other apps, like Jotform or any of the other 3,000+ apps that Zapier supports.
Next, bring the leads you’ve already got into Trello easily by using our handy dandy Trello CSV Import tool. It’s as simple as clicking “upload” and selecting which columns should populate which Crumble fields.
You’re all set! Now you can start emailing leads within your Trello board with our Crmble Gmail integration, and you can even create reports to share how your pipeline is performing.
Head over to the Crmble dashboard to check out your reports and view insights on your sales funnel by filtering the date, source, or lead owners (card members). You can even do some advanced reporting and filtering your leads with our Leads Table feature.
Now that your CRM is set up and looking awesome, you can begin thinking about adding your prospects to Trello and making your colleagues jealous of your cool setup!
But, we’re not finished there – we’ve got some more time saving tips for you.
In your sales pipeline you may need to get sign off from colleagues before you can proceed to closing a deal and popping open the champagne 🍾
Approvals could be needed on a range of different documents including pricing and discounts, partnership agreements and sales proposals to name just a few. It’s possible to manage this via email but this may be time consuming and version control can be difficult.
Why not integrate the approval process into your Trello CRM and make it even easier to manage everything from the comfort of your Trello Board?
Use Approvals for Trello to streamline the review process
With Approvals for Trello, you can integrate a simple but powerful approval process straight into your Trello Board.
Let us show you how it works using a sales proposal as an example.
You attach the sales proposal to the ACME Inc. Trello Card in your sales pipeline and want to send this to your manager for their review and approval.
With the click of a button, your line manager is added as an approver. Easy peasy!
Unlock extra features and make it Pro
Now if you want to take it a step further, you can unlock some cool extra features in the Pro version of Approvals for Trello, such as Approval Teams and Automation.
Depending on your business, you may have a set of people that need to review documents before you can proceed. Adding them individually to each card can be time consuming, but with the Pro version of Approvals for Trello you can create your own approval teams.
Approval Teams are not just a time saver, they also help you keep the review process consistent by having pre-defined teams of people that need to provide their approval before you can proceed.
And if you thought that was cool, wait till you see this!
The Pro version of Approvals for Trello comes with automation built in and you can set up rules for when your cards are approved or rejected. For example, you could set up a rule that automatically moves the Trello Card from the In Review column to Proposal Ready to Send once it has been approved.
Let’s say you’ve been working on a sales proposal all day. Before you head home, you send it to your manager for their review and approval and can now finally shut down the laptop for the day.
Before they log off for the day, your manager has reviewed and approved it.
Fast forward to the morning and before you have taken the first sip of your coffee, the Trello Card has automatically moved into the next stage of the sales pipeline and you are one step closer to closing the deal.
What a way to start the day!
Ready to get started?
Stop stressing over your sales tools or paying for solutions that are too expensive and clunky. Head over to Trello and set up a simple CRM that scales with your business and your needs.
As always, if you get stuck or have any questions, we’re here to help! Reach out to our support team by clicking the chat icon at the bottom right of this page, or send us an email at hello@crmble.com .