Asana & CRM

Anybody have some robust solutions for using Asana and CRM. I know that templana has Templana, anything is possible with Asana but not sure it looks that good to me. My initial thoughts are to build contacts in a Master List with each contact being a subtask and then build out from there. Have not thought about custom fields enough to think how they would be used. Thoughts welcome

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We currently use Asana as a CRM on the Customer Success side. For us, we have each customer as a task in a central project, and then the customer is also adding into the project for the program that they are a part of.

From there, the central project has fields for the core information we track along the customer journey including:

  • Key contact & contact email
  • Success stage
  • Outreach touchpoints
  • Plan size
  • Industry
  • Geo
  • Sales status
  • etc…
    The assignee on each task is the CSM who manages the account.

Once the contact is created, the assigned CSM will capture details about their touchpoints (calls, feature requests, working sessions) in subtasks on the parent task, and we communicate any issues, concerns or celebrations as comments on the parent task so other team members can follow certain customer tasks to get updates.

Happy to share more details if you think a set up like this might make sense for your team.

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How many of these are custom fields. Can you show a screen shot of how it looks. I was thinking of something similar using subtasks as customers/names and wondering if some kind of custom field configuration could work.

I use asana as CRM for one of my companies. Central to everything I have a project called CONTACTS. I have a template which I duplicate every new contact, which contains certain pre-defined fields and subtasks.
I then have another template called OPPORTUNITY, which I duplicate every time one of my contacts is in a possible stage of sale. This task contains quite a lot of subtasks which have a step-by-step guide and can actually guide even a newbie of the organisation to move through an opportunity and how we make sure to transform it. Now, the complex thing I do is that every time I duplicate the opportunity, I make it become a subtask of the contact AND I place the same in a project called OPPORTUNITIES.
Similarly to the opportunities I have a template called DEAL, which I duplicate and assign as subtask of a contact (plus add in a project called deals) every time I transform an opportunity.
Opportunities and Deals all have a specific stage, which I can place them into (Initialised, Appointment Schedules, On Hold, Won In Progress for Opportunities and Inception, Pre Production, Post Production, Post Sale for the Deals).

I find the moving the opportunities and deals as subtasks of a contact a bit of a workout, but when I open a contact I immediately have an overview of every opportunity and deal.

I mainly work in B2B, but I also have a project called COMPANIES which contains a template for companies to which I can add the contacts as subtasks.

The flexibility I have is that I can have as many types of opportunities and deals as I like, and I can keep track with a quick glance of the stage of everything.

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A Snippet Example of each would be great

Just to clarify could you attach a picture of each of your templates. Thanks

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Hi @JCarl

Let me re-create them in an environment in which I don’t have actual customers and I will upload the info

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@Carlo Thanks as that would be very useful and the kind of things that this community could serve each other well !!!

I built a custom CRM with the Knack.com PLATFORM

within my CRM, I have BUTTONS, like “call”

when things happen in my CRM, like “NEW lead” gets added, I assign a TASK in ASANA to my sales guy to “FOLLOW UP w/ NEW LEAD, and I can even set the due date to thing’s like “tomorrow” or “next week””

I do this with my Zapier integration, because Knack and Asana both integrate with Zapier

so, for example,

if there is a “new lead” in Knack-- I set Asana to create “new task” and assign it to my sales guy; within this task, I insert the Lead’s contact info (bc it is originally stored as fields within me new database entry) in the task title as well as the task description;

So this helps, for example, by reducing the time he spends in our CRM, he just needs to stay in Asana when he makes his follow up calls

but this is not an ideal situation, because I don’t have a 2-way sync of info from Asana flowing back to the CRM;

and the best situation is when your CRM and Project management are the same, integrated system;

however, when my favorite PM system is Asana-- then you end up having to find ways to integrate everything you do with Asana

for example I am exploring HubSpot Software too now; this is my next challenge

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This is my (simplified) project list (only “Templates” is a tag)


The “Templates” contains the templates for creating a contact, an opportunity and a deal. You can have multiple type of opportunities and multiple type of deals here


The template for the contact has few fields and a step-by-step guide that trains every user (even the new one in the company) on how to create a contact. Please note that this screenshot has the details in the description and not in some fields as it is in a free account.


The template already contains a list of subtasks that are generally used (in my case I always try to keep in mind the important dates)


The template for the opportunity is similar. It explains step by step what to do after duplicating the template and make it a subtask of the contact it refers to


Each opportunity has a list of subtasks we use to make sure to provide the best experience to the contact (without forgetting so send any info) and to higher the chances of transforming a lead in a customer




The Deals are structured in the same way (apologies, the template of the deal contains sensitive info that can’t be published, but you can define the subtasks of each deal to mirror your business and everything you need to do to navigate your clients to a positive sale process)

In the Contacts project I keep all the contacts. As mentioned above, as this is the free version of asana, used for creating these screenshots, I don’t have the custom fields. In “Contacts”, “Opportunities” and “Deals” I don’t have subgroups, but I use a custom field in the contacts, opportunities and deals tasks to define their status!


When I create a new contact, I can use the Opportunity and Deal templates as subtasks of the contact. In this way I have a complete vision of a contact, every note and opportunity neatly folded in the same view :slight_smile:


Duplicating a template (an opportunity in this case) gives me access to all the subtasks I need to work on. No fear of missing something I have to do.


Each opportunity is stored in the “Opportunities” project as well. In this way I have an immediate view of all the open opportunities and their stages


Same thing goes for the Deals. If I want to see which deals I am working on, I just check the Deals project, and there they are, neatly organised (in here I organise them manually, in a pro-account they are automatically organised with a custom field).


While I don’t think this is the simplest way of doing things, this I have shown here is the best way we reached so far to higher our chances to win customers and provide them the best end-to-end experience. It supports multiple opportunities and deals per contact, and it can be expanded to support companies as well.

Every subtask in each Opportunity, Deal and Contact has a similar step-by-step guide that makes training of new employee in our company (this I use for my photography business) a breeze!!!

Hopefully you will find this interesting, and any suggestions you may have to make this structure better is welcome! I am always looking for ways of making my processes better and leaner!

Ciao,
Carlo

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@carlo thank you for the information.

@carlo it was so nice of you to add all of this information and take screenshots! I really like your use of sections and subtasks to guide the workflow for each customer relationship.

At the risk of stating what everyone already knows: this is a situation where several things can be super helpful: templates, nesting subtasks, custom fields (especially!), and adding one task to multiple projects.

For instance, as Kaitie mentioned, we use a system where any given customer will be found as a parent task in an “All Customers” project (not our exact title) and a “Program X Customers.”

Note that for us, the customer parent task is generally the hub for communication and updates about that customer. In most cases, we communicate using subtasks and comments and also attach all relevant documents to that parent task. If for some reason a customer is mentioned elsewhere, perhaps for a marketing opportunity, we’ll make sure to add a link to relevant external projects in the parent task or vice versa.

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Another thing we do to use Asana for CRM is we pair our CRM process to the customer data platform(s) we use. Each customer parent task has links to that customer’s data in our customer analytics and reporting tools (we use Looker and an in-house tool). The process could be more seamless, but it certainly does the trick!

Great setup @Carlo! For those that already have a CRM in place, I’ve seen some really great integrations with Asana and Saleforce. We worked with tray.io, one of our partners to build a robust Salesforce > Asana integrations that can automatically trigger project creation and assignment based on actions that take place in Salesforce. This really helps automate workflows on sales teams and also other teams that engage with Sales. Here is the Tray.io Template if you want to explore more.

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Hi @Michael
Thanks for the tip. I will look into tray.io to see how I can integrate asana with other apps!

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Hi,

I am the founder of Templana. If any of you have a great template to use as a CRM I would be more than happy to include it on templana.com! Also our templates are fully refundable if you are not happy with our (simplistic!) CRM template.

Bastien

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Hi there. I’m not sure if my hopes and dreams for a CRM are typical or not. I want just a simple way of knowing how long it’s been since my client heard from somebody on my team. Anyone, about anything. Do you have some way to do that?

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Hi @dan_sullivan! There are a few different ways you could do this. We often use Asana “conventions” for tracking client communications. For instance, we might have a task for a client account and the CSM could create a subtask or comment for every client call that describes the interaction. You could also use a Forms integration if your customers are reaching out to you via forms online (or you’d like them to). I recommend this Guide article if you haven’t seen it already:

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Interesting… This is probably the most practical response so far! I suppose
I would set up a recurring task or calendar reminder, say once a week, to
simply run through all clients and see how long it had been since somebody
had had contact with them. Thanks, I’ll noodle on this!

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Hi CRM lovers :slight_smile:

The main points missing in Asana to use it as a CRM are from what I heard from friends:
Not possible to send emails from Asana to customers
Not able to see all linked emails to an account inside the task
Not able to call contact directly from Asana (VoIP tool) like cloze.io is for instance doing it

Has anyone of you found some solutions for that?

Best
Sebastian

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