Does HubSpot have project management capabilities and what do they look like? Read on to find out how you can better manage your projects using HubSpot.
HubSpot shakes hands with everyone these days. Among the crowd are numerous project management platforms. If you’re a HubSpot user and you’re looking to level up the way you manage your projects, setting up one of these integrations is a good place to start.
There are also some tools native to HubSpot that you can use to improve your project management capabilities, if you know where to find them and how to use them.
In this article, we’ll take a look at both to help you get a handle on your operations.
Integrate HubSpot with your project management tools
You might have read about our top five favourite project management integrations with HubSpot before. In case not, here are two of them — plus a new contender.
1. Accelo
“Accelo is a platform that automates business and customer communication as well as providing real-time visibility over everyone’s work capacity and how busy they are,” explains Laura Shelton, previously our operations manager.
“With this integration, you can manage all of your work in one place — HubSpot — including assigning tasks, tracking progress, and monitoring budgets and profitability.”
Some other features include project planning and collaboration, task and resource management, automatic time tracking, automated processes and notifications, and flexible invoicing. (We haven’t forgotten you, Finance!) Tasks, segmentation, and customer communications can also be triggered automatically.
“Accelo also integrates with your HubSpot contacts data,” Laura reveals, “including company records, contact activity, predictive lead scoring, ticketing, and workflows.”
2. Asana
Known as a work management platform, Asana helps businesses to stay on top of everything from the big-picture goals and projects to the smaller but no less important daily tasks.
“Some of its features include planning and structuring workloads, tracking overall and individual progress, creating to-do lists, setting priorities and deadlines, and assigning tasks,” says Laura.
“If you’re using HubSpot’s free CRM, you’ll be interested to know that like Accelo, Asana easily integrates with your company records, contact activity, and workflows.”
One of the things that makes this integration so great is Asana’s visual project plans. Communicating your project management this way can really help your team to engage with project details and identify any roadblocks ahead of time for a smoother project delivery.
3. PSOhub
PSOhub is a professional services automation (PSA) solution featuring project management, task management and an integration with HubSpot, among other platforms.
As their website explains, “Stop using all those stand-alone tools. Start with PSOhub, integrate with your favourite CRM, and use one tool for project management, time tracking and invoicing.”
We haven’t used this integration ourselves yet but we’re including it here because it’s the only project management integration that, as far as we can see, enables resource forecasting. As many companies tighten their purse-strings and put revenue under the microscope in response to the economic downturn, this is a tremendous advantage.
For the rest of our favourite project management integrations with HubSpot, see our dedicated article.
Special mention to: HubSpot’s Trello integrationTrello is great for task management, but you can also use HubSpot’s projects tool for that (see more below). The advantage of Trello is that you can view tasks on a storyboard. Like with Asana, the ability to present information in a visual way can be a gamechanger. On top of this, it integrates well with HubSpot, so we had to mention it here. |
How to use HubSpot tools for project management
HubSpot has three tools well-suited to project management: projects, pipelines, and custom objects.
We do have something of a disclaimer to make here: while the project tool is built to manage project tasks, pipelines and custom objects aren't designed specifically for project management.
When customers ask us about HubSpot’s project management capabilities, we usually advise them to use an integration depending on their requirements (see above).
If, on the other hand, you don’t want to add yet another platform into your techstack (even one that integrates well with HubSpot), the following tools could be of help.
1. Projects
HubSpot’s projects tool is simple to use and unlike the other tools below is custom-made for project management — specifically, task management.
The tool lets you create a to-do list in HubSpot. Anyone who spends a lot of time on the platform will benefit from being able to manage their day in the same place that they carry out the rest of their tasks. While the functionality isn’t especially complex or exciting, it’s practical and you can bet that the HubSpot aficionados on your team will be happy to use it.
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For when you need a project template… For those projects with predictable, repeatable tasks, HubSpot has even created project templates. Say you wanted to create an onboarding project, for example. You have the option of manually creating a custom onboarding project or simply using the template, pre-populated with the tasks typically carried out during a standard onboarding project. |
2. Pipelines
Most readily associated with deals, revenue, or forecasting, pipelines can also be turned to helping you manage a project’s lifecycle.
Because the tool helps you to manage deal flows, it can be an effective way of tracking how a project is progressing.
HubSpot’s pipeline management software lets you customise each pipeline to suit each project and keep it moving forward by assigning tasks to relevant team members.
Finally, the ability to drag and drop a deal (or ‘project’) into different stages when they hit certain deadlines or criteria means everyone can see what stage a project is at and when.
3. Custom objects
Custom objects are incredibly useful for goal-setting. Most of the time we look at this through the lens of sales but, as with pipelines, it can be turned to project management to help you set and track against your project targets.
We’ve written in detail about how to use custom objects to set goals and forecasting here so check it out if you’d like a step-by-step account for how to achieve this.
Demo HubSpot’s project management capabilities with us
The functionality that HubSpot provides is best suited if you’re not looking to go into in-depth detail on scheduling and project metrics etc.
If you do want more of the detail and functionality (enough to invest in a project management platform) consider one that integrates with HubSpot. Being able to manage your projects from the comfort of your favourite CRM suite will make all the difference, from buy-in and adoption to getting the most out of both the systems, day to day.
Whichever camp you fall into, get in touch today to book a demo with us. We’d be happy to show you around HubSpot’s various tools first-hand and it’s a great opportunity for you to ask any questions you have. As an Elite HubSpot partner, we're here to help you make the right decision for your business.
