ClickUp 3.0 Best Practices for Agencies

Hey all, thanks for joining today's session on ClickUp 3.0. My name is Jeff Seifer. I'm the Productivity professor at a ClickUp diamond partner called zenpal. I'll give an introduction to myself as well as zenpal in a moment, but want to give a brief introduction to today's session. So today we're going to be talking about four different ways that agencies can break down silos and boost team productivity with ClickUp 3.0. If you're not an agency, don't worry, this session is still for you. I'm going to be giving a lot of practical examples and things that that you can implement right away to help you break down any silos amongst departments or teams within your organization. So if you're struggling to pass projects and work back and forth between different departments because they are in silos, this is going to be the session for you. In addition, I'm going to go over some brief productivity tips in terms of building out your processes and leveraging ClickUp AI to help your team be more productive inside of ClickUp. So lot to talk about today. Let's jump into it. So as I mentioned, my name is Jeff Seifer, Productivity professor at Zen Palette, as I like to call myself. I'm a marketing consultant turned operations nerd. I've been in the agency world, also been an internal marketing team in the Martech space as well, where I served as a marketing consultant but fell in love with the operational and process side of things which led me to Zen Palette. I have personally led over a hundred different teams from all over the world. Streamline their operations in ClickUp, help them implement the tool. Love working with a lot of different teams. Super, super fun. I'm also just a ClickUp nerd in general, verified consultant, power user, Social ambassador as well as a content creator and a fun fact About Me I'm a big fan of the Office, so if you've ever seen my content before, as well as in this webinar, you'll see a lot of Office easter eggs and references that I hope you enjoy. Make this a little bit more fun and engaging. In addition, Zen Pilot, we are a ClickUp diamond partner. As I mentioned, We've served over 2,700 teams and we are ClickUp's first and highest rated solutions partner. Been with them since 2018. Really the birth of ClickUp. We love ClickUp. It's a super customizable tool. On our team we have over 16 ClickUp certified experts and as we live by our mantra of if we can't build it in ClickUp, it can't be done. Again, we love working with a bunch of different teams, hearing their pain points here and what they're struggling with and building out solutions inside of ClickUp. Super customizable tool and very flexible that if you just have a little creativity and imagination, you can really build a whole lot in there. And as I go through this webinar, please if you have any questions or comments, put them in the questions box below. I'll be here to answer anything for you as we go on. So there's anything you're curious about or need some additional help on, leave a comment or question down below and I'll be here to answer that. So a brief agenda of what we're going to be going over today. As I mentioned, we're going to be talking about different pain points that maybe you are facing right now to kind of help you figure out if this webinar is for you. I'm going to be listing those out in a second, but then we're going to Talk about how ClickUp 3.0 can help us overcome these different pains. So I'm going to be talking a lot about the new inbox as well as the new task view especially, and then jumping into a little bit of ClickUp AI to help overcome these pain points. More specifically, we're going to be talking about building gold standard processes, which is super important for every single business that is using ClickUp or any other project management tool, something that you need to do. We're also going over leveraging templates to help you streamline your operations and how you can turn ClickUp into a communications hub, as well as leveraging AI to boost your productivity. So that's the agenda. Again, if you have any questions, leave them down below and I'll be here to answer them. So let's jump into agency pains or really any pains that you may be facing at your business. So I have a bunch listed out here, but the ones I'm going to be focusing on are a lot around communication and passing work back and forth. So if right now, as I mentioned earlier, if your team works, probably does in different departments or teams across the organization, you're struggling to take one sort of project from start to finish because you need to cross those different teams and people are losing context in communication because it's in a bunch of different places and so no one could go confidently into a task and complete it because they're missing something and maybe they have to ask a bunch of questions, which again leads to Them not being super productive. We're going to talk about how you can actually solve that and make sure ClickUp is your central source of truth for communication, for context, for every single resource, to make people get stuff done quicker and right the first time. Because it's super painful when you do something and maybe it's not what the client wants because the account manager didn't communicate that well, and so on and so forth. We don't want that to happen, so we're going to talk about overcoming that. In addition, maybe you just have communication happening in Slack Email, Google Docs sheets, whatever it may be, we want to eliminate that and centralize it in one platform or maybe across your organization. You're just lacking visibility works, falling through the cracks and your team just not super productive. We're going to go over a few different ways that you can make your team much more productive inside of the tool. So hearing all that, hopefully that aligns with sort of what you're facing. And let's talk about how we can solve all of that. So the first one I'm going to be going over is very, very important and I'm going to have a to do for you on this one. So not during this webinar, but right after. Please go in your ClickUp workspace and start building out a process library space inside of ClickUp. This is super, super important. This is the biggest mistake that I see teams make inside of any project management system is they go, they get the project management system with all the features and everything included and they think it's going to solve all the problems, but it won't unless you build out your processes. This is going to help with any sort of visibility, any sort of productivity and just really streamlining everything and giving your team the context and the tasks and the to dos and everything that they're going to need on a daily basis. So go build a process library. Let's walk through things you're going to need and how you can actually build out your processes right now. So my process library space, I have a lot in here. Don't worry about all of this. This is just an asset that we've built over time. But what you're going to want is a couple folders. One is going to be your task templates folder. In this Task Templates folder is going to be your task templates. It's going to be where all of your deliverables are going to live. So think of a deliverable as a tool in your toolbox. To give you an example, things like podcast episodes, case studies, we have webinars, we have blogs. These are things that maybe we do once a week for either our business or for others. Or maybe they're things we do once a month. Just things that are kind of repetitive that you can kind of deploy over and over and over again because you keep doing them and doing them. So these are going to be task templates where it's just going to be a parent task subtasks included in all that. You're also going to have list templates, which I'm not going to focus as much on these, but these are larger projects. Things that you might do once and then you never do them again. Or maybe you do, but maybe just like once a year or so. So think about things like client onboarding. We're going to have website projects, we're going to have video productions, so on and so forth. These are going to be things that are going to be a little bit different than the task template because they're going to have sort of multiple milestones within these. A list template is going to bring along the views and all the tasks within that list. I would save this up here as opposed to at the task level, which would be right, right there. So we're gonna have task analyst templates. We're also gonna have a folder template, but I'll get into that in a second. So in my task templates here, let's go over an example and I like to use the blog post as my example. So what you need to include in these templates, again, this is gonna make your, your business way more structured, make it way more scalable, and make it way easier to pass work back and forth and look amongst the team. Within this, the structure is going to be your parent task is going to be the deliverable. So as you can see here, my example blog post is my deliverable. Then underneath that, all my subtasks are going to be the steps to complete that deliverable. So create the strategy, create the outline, schedule the interview, complete the interview, write the copy, proof, copy, so on and so forth. All those are the action steps that will then be out and assigned to different people. In this, we're also going to have due dates, time estimates and custom fields. The due dates are going to be essentially just a date map of. All I care about in this process template is the distance between the dates. So 20th, 21st, 21st, 22nd, 22nd, 23rd, so on and so forth. Down to the last one will be the 29th scheduled blog publish date. Once that's done, this whole blog will be done as well. So that'll also be the 29th. What I can do is if I save this as a template in the ClickUp Template center, I can take this and I can deploy it and I can remap the due date. So I can say that this blog is due on December 1st and that's going to remap everything else with with it just like that. Also important is your time estimates and this is going to go Everyone that talks to me about I don't have visibility into workload, it's probably because you don't have process templates with these ingredients on them. So the time estimate is going to be what builds in that actual workload visibility. Because I know that once someone gets assigned to this, if it's due on April 20th with a 30 minute time estimate, that's going to fill up that workload bar 30 minutes. So I need to make sure those are in there well and then I also have some custom fields in here. One that I would highly recommend is a deliver role. This deliver role is essentially a way to assign work in the future as well as help us make future hiring decisions. Because once I deploy this template over and over again, a bunch of other templates, I kind of see who's busy. Senior strategist, copywriter, strategist, proofer, so on and so forth. These aren't necessarily job titles, they're just a role that someone is in as they complete this task. So the reason I do that instead of assigning work in my process library down here is because in the future you might have a bunch of different clients. You're not going to have one person that is always doing writing the copy or completing the interview with a client. You might have a different copywriter for each client, or maybe they're across a couple different clients and also same with senior strategists. But you want to make sure that I can take this and deploy this into shrut farms, deploy this into Mifflin. Maybe our copywriter for short farms is gray and maybe the copywriter for Dunmuffin is Andrew. So I want to make sure that I can deploy that and assign that to the correct copywriter as opposed to just this being Andrew all the time. So that just makes it our templates a little bit more scalable. But those are the important things to include in this. In addition, as you'll see within this task view, this is the new ClickUp task view which is super helpful. This then becomes our hub for everything. So any kind of assets to this blog post, the actual blog post, which I'll show you example of this in the future. But also anything that has to do with communication, all of it is coming out of this, this parent task right here. As you can see, I can easily navigate from one task to the next to the next. So in all these subtasks, these are going to be the action step. This is going to be how to do this specific subtask. As you can see here, I can either leave a task description, I can add in some action items, I can link out to an SOP document, I can put in a video of how to do this as well. So if I click on this, you'll see now I have the SOP for a blog post. It's all linked together. I have a knowledge base directly in ClickUp which is super helpful to have as well. So all of this is giving the instructions in the context for how to do it. And then you're going to have all the communication happening right here at the parent task level Again, as I pass work back and forth, all of it happens in this one place. Makes it super easy for anyone to know what's going on. So let's backtrack a little bit. I'm going to get into all of that sort of structure here in a second. But when I talk about how you can actually build these process templates and leverage click of AI to help with that as well. So let's go over a quick sort of demo list here. So let's say I need to go and build out my processes here. So I'm going to follow the structure I just went over. So let's say my process is new employee onboarding. So let's just give this as an example. This might be something different for you, whatever, but I just wanted to give a quick example of what this could look like. That's my parent task now I need all the subtasks underneath it. Let's say I jump into this and I have like no idea what the first step is and I need some help. Maybe I'm just getting started with this. I'm not sure how to build out a good process. So what I can do, as you see down here in this task view, I have my details, these are my custom fields. I have subtasks here, which is what I'm going to use. And then I have action items where I can create a checklist or have assigned comments. I want to go into the subtasks here and I want to start generating some subtasks. So I can either come here, add a new task just like that, if I know what I'm talking about. In addition, if you have this in a spreadsheet and it's in multiple rows, I can copy that in here and it's going to recognize as multiple rows and I create a bunch of subtasks just like that. That's a quick hack and ClickUp for you that you'll want to leverage. But maybe I don't have this built at all. What I can do is I can actually use this generate button here to generate some subtasks for this process. So as you can see here, it's going to give me a few different options. So these are subtasks that are generated for me and then I can easily go and save those as subtasks. As you can see here, we'll click save just like that, and that's going to add those as subtasks to this process. So that's going to make it way easier for me to go and add different subtasks to this if I go in and add those just like that. So new employee onboarding, that's a great way to get started. In addition, if you want to, I can come here and I can add a description on how to actually do this. So as you get those subtasks in here and you need some SOP documents and things like that, now what I can do is come to this new, new employee onboarding right here and if I backspace real quick, as you'll. You'll see before this had some different options on different AI tools and things like that. But I can also access those to like this. So I use my slash commands. I can either do AI tools like that or I can do. Right with AI, whatever it may be, you have a lot of different options there. So right with AI for this, what I like to do is once I get those tasks in here and I need to start leveraging some task descriptions for employees on how to actually do this. What I can do. Come in here. What would you like to write about? I can just say, can you please write a brief description on how to perform new employee onboarding? So just like that, again, you can have a better prompt like that for this, but this is just kind of a simple version there. Then I can go ahead and click Enter and then this is going to give me a nice guide on how to actually do this. So again, edit your prompt if you want like a checklist if you want an actual SOP document. If you want something else, you can be very descriptive on that. But this is a great way to start for all of your tasks. Starting to get sort of those steps on how to do this. So these are great options on either helping you create checklist items, helping you create subtasks, or helping you create sort of those descriptions to make sure that the process is living where the work gets done. So after that I can go and I can add this just like that. So now I have a bit more of the process for how to actually complete this new employee onboarding. Again, always helpful to have that get your subtasks in there. All the subtasks should have task descriptions. They can have checklists and things to not forget. But more context we can get in there, the more helpful it's going to be for the team. So after that let's just exit out of that there and then we're going to go over one other thing to do. So that's going to be how you build out your processes again. Get all the steps in there, build all the subtasks, checklists and things like that. But in addition to your task and list templates, the one other thing that you're going to want, and this is really step number two for, for this year is you want to create a new client folder template. And this is going to be pretty specific to agencies or anyone in client services is having these structure for these client folders are going to be super important because a you're going to have your onboarding process in here. So anytime you bring on a new client, you already have your onboarding steps ready to go. You also have your list structure built out and then you're also going to have these client docs right here. And so this is going to give good visibility to anyone that is working for a specific client. So I can come here. And especially on the sales to delivery handoff, you want your sales team to make sure they're filling this all out. So if there's a shared drive there becomes a weekly meeting time. If there's any like a link to your CRM or account dashboard that you might have within ClickUp or if there's a loom overview from the sales team as well, you can put that right in here as well. Some additional client notes and a client questionnaire. Centralize all that information here in this client doc. Again, I'll show you what this looks like live, but you want to make a template for this just like that. In addition, you can have meeting notes in here as well. So you can have meeting agendas that way I can just easily take this and I can go ahead and duplicate it every time I have a meeting for a client and then I can just take notes in the same fashion. And then it's going to be all centralized in one place. But you're going to want to have a client folder template just like that. The way you would save this as a template. Come here. Templates. Save as a template. Get your client folder template and that way all your client folders in the structure are going to be exactly the same and have all the necessary information to keep all the information centralized. So that's really point number two. And now point number three is where we actually get to the live stuff. So you want to build your processes, as I mentioned, and go into the process library, build out your task templates, build out your list templates and your client folder template and then we're going to come up here and actually see what it looks like when it's live. So I'm going to go here to Dunn or Mifflin and show you a little bit of how this communication happens for the team. So I go to my folder level here. I use that folder template that I just showed you earlier. As you'll see, I have my docs directly in here. So the client overview is going to have all that data populated. We linked out to the dunmifflin drive. We have our weekly meeting time. Our account dashboard link is right there. Loom overview for the sales team client notes as well as the client questionnaire. Everything is in one place for my team if they need it. In addition, we also have all of our client notes directly here. So as you can see, I've taken notes on this every time I've met with Michael. We have sort of our performance overview. What's going well, next steps, action items just gives me all the context directly here. In addition, if I didn't take this agenda, what I could do. This is another AI tools right here that I like to leverage. Go here and then I can go summarize customer call just like that. Put in my meeting type, put in my call, no call notes and then also the call transcript. And what that's going to do is it's going to summarize the call for me. So if you have transcripts from your calls and whatever tool you use, that can be very helpful to just. If I don't take these notes in here, I can generate the summary of what we talked about and then I can put that in this document as well for the rest of the team and if I need to add anyone to that, make sure they know what's going on, I can do that right there. So that's another great way of utilizing ClickUp AI and I love using it and a lot of our clients have as well. So from there now let's jump into what the blog post actually looks like. So I go here to my my list. As we'll see, I have a bunch of other processes and tasks in here as well that I have leveraged my process templates for. So you can see our case studies, we have our ebooks, and I also have my blog post right here. So as you can see, it's all assigned out. We have our time estimates in there, ability to track time and as people go to do these. So if Andrew clicks into this task, he's going to see the right blog outline, interview guide, there's maybe some action items in here, checklist items, hopefully a task description, this as well of how to actually do that. And then he's able to easily navigate to the parent task right here. Or he can come up here to see everything as well. So you can see all the different subtasks of things happening, but he can navigate to the parent task just like that as well. So now here is our hub for the whole deliverable of the blog post. So as you can see here, I can see everything. So I can see the actual blog post is right here, paper 101. I can click into that. That's actually in ClickUp as well. So it's very easy for me to find that. That's also over here in the links. So if I come over here, I can see everything from my doc links. You'll be able to see that blog post right here as well. So I can click into that just like that. And I'll see also everything else that's related to this task as well. But the most important piece is going to be activity. So within this, this is going to be sort of where your whole thread for all communication is going to happen in this one place. So everything needs to be put into here so everyone knows what's happening. So as you can see here, John Smith left me a comment. Here's the first version of the blog post that's going to link out to exactly what I showed you here. Let me know what you think. If you have any feedback I can go in here. I can leave feedback on it pretty easily. In addition, I can thread comments on this too. But but I can also go and if John either it's a video or a graphic, whatever it may be. He can post that in here and he can leave feedback directly on this picture. So if I come here, I can add a comment and I can click on whatever I want in this. So let's say paperless, I want to leave a comment specifically to that. I can at John Smith right there and leave my feedback to him to say, hey, maybe we need to change up this wording, maybe we need to change up this color. That way he knows exactly what I'm talking about when. Which makes it super helpful. Again, you can do the same thing with videos, which is very, very nice as well. So all that communication is gonna be funneled into one place for everyone to see it again. We're gonna have all the doc links and if there's any additional resources, we can put that in here as well. So if we need to link a Google sheet, if we need to link a Figma board, if we need to link anything From Canva or YouTube, all of it can put in here. And that way we have a central place for a central hub for all communication, all everything for this specific blog post. And the same thing goes with all your other processes that you do for your team or externally as well. So what that looks like in the inbox or new notification settings is anywhere on my keyboard, if I want to, I can click and that's going to take me to my notifications. But now this is super powerful in this as well. So inside of the new ClickUp notifications, I now have the opportunity to make it look just like it would my email inbox. So I'm going to have important, I'm going to have other, I'm going to have snooed, snoozed and I'm going to have cleared. So important is going to be really anything that's at mentioned to me and I can customize that in my notification settings if I want. But this makes it super easy for me to communicate and click up because now I can see all the things that I'm mentioned in where the communication is happening. I can easily go, I can see this view and as I get more and more comments, I'll see all that right here. But what I would recommend that everyone on your team follow the Inbox zero framework, where essentially you're going to go in every morning, in afternoon, you need to make sure you check all of that to get your inbox down to zero every single day. Because we want to make sure that we clear our notifications, we're going through them. Otherwise that's how work gets lost. But if I go here to this blog post, again the notification right here, I can now communicate directly here. So I'm seeing everything I was in the blog post. I can click into the blog post just like that to navigate back there. Also what I can do is I can leave comments directly in my notifications if I want. So I don't even need to go to the task. I can go right here and I can reply just like this. So if I wanted to, I can reply directly on that there if I wanted to. Otherwise what I like to do is I can open up the details like this. That way I have my inbox right here as well as the task directly next to it. So I can see if there's any additional activity on this as well. I can scroll up to find all of that. But everything is going to be stemming right out of this task. So it's very easy for me to find everything. So again, as you can see here, um, if I want to all the activities there, if I needed to leave a comment, I could do it over here on the right side of my screen or I could do it directly in this. And after I leave a comment, what I want to do is I can either click E or I can clear it right here to clear that conversation. And now I'm at inbox zero. So again, you can have your important stuff and if you accidentally clear something, you can go back in here and I can unclear this just like that, I'm gonna bring it back up into my important folder and you have a bunch of options up here as well. If you wanna add to your tray, you can. If you want to stop receiving this kind of notification, which I wouldn't recommend for that mark is unread or I can snooze this as well. And that's going to move it in my snooze folder there too. So a lot you can do with the new inbox and a lot of features that you should take advantage of and have your team make sure they're going through their inbox every single day to keep this communication working well inside of ClickUp. So that's what you can do there as well. One other feature inside of this that I would recommend, you can do this a bit more advanced, but but if you want to, again, this is something that you build in your folder template. You can have a shared client list and if your client wants to communicate with you sort of inside of ClickUp, I can go, I can create a shared client list. And as you can see Michael is invited into this list as a guest. So I would just go invite him as a guest in here, which I can go to sharing permissions and invite him by email, invite him as a guest so that he can only see this list. But then I create sort of the communication tasks for these so that he's not seeing all of our communication in that blog post task where it's actually living and he's just able to see what I post in here. So now I can leave this and then Michael can come in here and directly see this inside of ClickUp, leave comments the same way I was leaving comments on this. If he has any feedback or adjustments that he wants to leave. So that's going to make it super easy to communicate with your clients. In addition, you can link directly to your task. So I can go back to this blog post task right there. As you can see, if I go back to task links, I can do it in reverse as well. So it's easy to navigate from one to the next if everything is all linked together just like that. So that's super powerful. You're going to want to use that new task view, use the Inbox and use this sort of as your central communication hub where everything's going to live. In addition, another super powerful feature for your client or your account managers is in the future I'm able to go to the delivery space right here. So based off how my hierarchy set up, I can create a view for my account managers that's basically filtering by those specific clients. So say Steve's the account manager for Shrut Farms and Dunner Mifflin. What he's able to do, as you'll see right here, he's able to create an AI based summary custom field which to add that column you'd go here, add text area, try fill with AI right there. He can come here and if I want to edit this field to kind of show you what you can do here is you can choose this to be a progress updates AI summary. And I can get updates from the last 7 days, 3 days, 24 hours, 30 days, and I can choose the format on this as well. Bolded list, short or detailed. And I'll show you what that looks like. Essentially what that does is after you generate something which I'll use my example here for the blog post, what this is going to look like is now it's going to show the account manager essentially what happened. So Jeff Seifer updated the task status due in progress. John Smith shared the first version of the blog post and the feature thumbnail for feedback. So you can see it's going to pull the comments, it's going to fold, sort of any status changes or due date changes and put it all in one place here for the account managers to see. Again, this is across a bunch of different deliverables that we're doing for multiple clients. As this gets more crowded, this AI summary field is going to be super helpful for your account managers to get great visibility. In addition, you'll see this progress bar which is all updated based off subtasks, time estimates, time tracked. This is just a great way for your account managers to have visibility into everything that's going on. So that is really all for for all these different ways to increase communication, break down the silos and just make your team more productive. Inside of ClickUp again, think about the process library. Get those processes built out. Use the parent task as sort of your central communication point. Use the inbox for your team to actually communicate and just train them on how to use notifications. I'd recommend they go into the notification settings and pair those down because it can be very overwhelming if you have all the email notifications and things turned on. But then also utilize the client docs in here as well just to make sure that the agenda items and everything is in here too. And this can all be pointed back to the comments as well. If I wanted to copy this block link, I could take this and I can go back to that task and if I wanted to just ention someone and say hey, this is important, we talked about this in the meeting, I could do that as well. Because you could see once I go back to that blog post, let's click into it, I can leave a comment and it's going to copy that block link right here. So you can see then someone knows exactly what I'm talking about. Just like that. So a lot of powerful features inside of ClickUp 3.0. A lot that you can do. Let's talk about sort of the results that have come from all of this. So in terms of results that we've seen for different teams, a lot of it is increasing productivity. I have a few quotes for here for you here to read. People have increased productivity by over 400% by really building out those processes. That's going to be the biggest one that's going to contribute to productivity. AI is going to as well. But those process templates are super, super important. In addition, by just having visibility, increasing utilization and profitability is a big one as well. By being able to use those process templates by seeing how much capacity the team has and then using and deploying the process templates is going to make your team just way more utilized and just make it way easier and way more healthy for your team inside of the system. And then lastly, just things like increasing average contract value, increasing client health, NPS scores. We've seen all of that in ClickUp as well. So there's a lot of different results we've seen. It's not just in productivity, it's also in a lot of the health for your team. It's also in profitability, it's also in utilization. All that's really going to come from building out a streamlined system inside of ClickUp. So that is really all I have today in terms of a free gift for you all for watching this. We do have a 47 page ClickUp implementation guide. Very thorough, very detailed. This is going to take you step by step through our proven process on how we help agencies implement ClickUp. This is going to go over the hierarchy, custom fields, this is going to go over process building 101, basically everything you're going to need to get ClickUp set up correctly for your team so that you get the visibility, the reporting as well as the productivity improvements that your looking for. So go to zenpilot.com how to implement ClickUp for agencies. In addition, if you want to schedule some time with us to kind of go through your scenario and see what what's going on and how we can kind of help you leverage ClickUp 3.0 even more than you are right now, go to zenpal.com call we'd be happy to chat with you about your current situation. So that's really all I have today. If you have any questions or comments again, leave them in the questions below or reach out to us@zenpod.com call and we were we'll talk to you, but thanks for joining today. Hopefully this was super helpful for you and we'll see you again next time.