The Best Way to Streamline Your Client Projects as a Service Provider
Managing your client experience is one thing, but managing and streamlining your client projects is a whole other beast to tackle as a service provider. You might be wondering what the difference is, so when we talk about managing your client experience, we mean all of the communication, appointment scheduling, sending forms, proposals, contracts, getting paid, and all that jazz. (Dubsado’s our trusted CRM for that– here’s why.)
On the other hand, you also have to deal with the actual tasks that come with fulfilling a client project for both you and your team. For this, we recommend using a project management system like Asana. It’s robust enough to handle even the most complex projects, yet simple enough that if you don’t need to use all of the fancy-shmancy extras, you don’t have to.
Today we’ll be diving into the best way to streamline your client projects using Asana!
A Basic Overview of Asana
You may have never used Asana before, but if you’ve used other project management software like Trello or ClickUp, you’re already 5 steps ahead because Asana has most of the very same capabilities. You’re able to have a board view with task cards, which is the main selling point of Trello for so many service providers, yet you can customize those views and have many different organized projects (we’re talking about boards when we say this) just like in ClickUp.
PROJECTS
You can create multiple projects in Asana and choose their default view: list, board, timeline, or calendar, although you can still switch between different views afterwards. Projects live inside of Teams, and you can decide what team members are added to each team or individual projects. For example, if you want to use Asana for other aspects of your business, too, you could have a Marketing Team with all of the Projects for your blog, social, email, etc.
Within your project you can have multiple sections, which we call columns when using board view. You could use columns to signify stages that a card may move through in your project, or you can just use them as organizers to group cards by certain types.
TASK CARDS
We commonly refer to them as cards because we live inside of the board view for all of our projects, but they’re basically the main tasks that are in a project. You’re able to add custom tags, an assignee, due date, card description, files and comments, and subtasks. If you upgrade to an Asana Premium account, you can also create custom fields that are specific to a single project to use with all of its tasks.
In our lead board, for example, we have custom fields to track when someone signed up for our services waitlist, their discovery call and sales call dates, when they signed the contract, their preferred communication, and how often they’d like to be contacted. When viewing the project as a whole, you can easily see those fields on the task card.
SUBTASKS
Subtasks are the tasks within the main task (which Asana calls the Parent Task). You can have as many subtasks as you need with their own assignees and due dates. Subtasks can also have descriptions if you want to to add notes to a subtask, as well as their own files, comments, and even more subtasks. With Asana Premium, you can utilize task dependencies for your subtasks. If there’s a specific subtask that can’t be done until another is complete, you can add a dependency to that subtask which will let the assignee know when they can complete their task once the other has been checked off.
AUTOMATED RULES
Rules are optional, but they make automating certain parts of your project management a whole lot easier. You need an Asana Premium account to use Rules, or a Business account to create custom Rules. You could automatically move a card to a certain column in your project based on a field change, auto-add subtasks with an assignee or due date based on a card moving to a certain column, move a card to an entirely different project based on whatever you want the trigger to be, the possibilities are honestly endless.
3 Ideas for Streamlining Client Projects in Asana
Now that we have the basic functionalities that you’re going to be spending most of your time with in Asana, let’s move on to how to actually use it to streamline your client projects. We have three main strategies/ideas that we practice and teach to our clients inside the Incubator to help them (and us) manage their/our leads, clients, and client projects.
1. CREATE A LEAD TRACKER BOARD
The lead tracker board will do, well, exactly that– It will essentially be the house for all of your leads where you can track what stage of the lead process they’re in. Each lead will have its own card with the needed information that you’d like to keep up with inside of their card’s description and/or with custom fields like we mentioned earlier.
Then, each section/column of the board will represent where they are in the lead journey. This is totally specific to your own lead journey, but some examples of the different stages could be:
Conversation Started
Lead Capture Form Submitted
Discovery Call Booked
Sales Pitch Booked
Proposal Sent
Contract Signed
Invoice/Deposit Paid
Feel free to get more specific with your columns, i.e. if you have multiple follow-up emails or touchpoints, you can add those sections as well for a more micro-view of where your leads are.
2. CREATE AN ACTIVE CLIENTS PROJECT
This project is specifically designed to keep track of your current active clients and can be set up many different ways depending on what you’d prefer. For example, if your clients go through certain milestones in their journey, like if you’re a coach, you can have those milestones as sections to see at a glance where each client is. If you simply want to see what clients are in a certain package that you offer, you could have your package names as sections.
Don’t forget about those custom fields! You can add fields for what stage of the process each client is in to serve you even more in that at-a-glance view. This would also be the project where the manual tasks like sending client gifts would be held (because sending any onboarding guides, questionnaires, or other tasks involved in the client experience would be automatic with Dubsado workflows).
3. CREATE A BOARD FOR EACH CLIENT PROJECT
Finally, we recommend having an Asana project for each individual client project. This will house all of the tasks related specifically to the client’s project, i.e. what goes into fulfilling the deliverables of their package. This board will vary depending on if you have a one-time client project or a retainer client. If retainer, you’d simply need to set up recurring tasks. You can set how often they repeat, and you can organize them by daily, weekly, or monthly recurring tasks in sections.
For one-time projects (what we call “linear” projects), you could have a column for each phase of the process with tasks/cards related to what’s happening in that phase. For example, as a Branding and Web Designer, your sections could look something like this:
Brand Development - This section may have tasks associated with it like reviewing the brand questionnaire that was sent to the client via Dubsado, creating a mood board, gathering fonts, preparing the brand presentation, etc.
Brand Creation - This is where you’re creating the logos and patterns, choosing the typography, creating the brand guide with the color hex codes, etc.
Web Design - Here you may have tasks for creating wireframes, writing page copy or outsourcing for it, receiving photography, building each webpage, etc.
Delivery/Offboarding - This is where you may have tasks like recording maintenance tutorials, gathering onboarding files, preparing the offboarding guide, etc.
Want to Try Asana for Yourself?
Hopefully we were able to spark ideas for how you can be using Asana right now to streamline your client projects as a service provider. If you’re ready to give it a spin, get your first 30 days free of whatever plan you choose by using our link.
And if you want even more help streamlining your projects, creating your dream work week, and learning how to live life-first again, we’d love to have you take just 10 minutes to apply for the Incubator. We have thorough conversations packed full of value with each applicant to make sure this is the right next move for your business. Even if you decide not to join, if you’re approved you’ll have instant access to a private training all about how to streamline your work week without increasing your client capacity or sacrificing income.
As soon as you apply, send us a DM on Instagram @bossproject so we can get the conversation started!
