How to Work and Collaborate in ClickUp

Hey there, it's Jeff from Zenpilot, your productivity professor. Let me start by asking you a question. Have projects ever gotten delayed at your agency or tasks slipped through the cracks? Productivity is just not as high as you want it to be. Maybe this is because communication is in a lot of different channels. Maybe it's in Slack, email, ClickUp or another project management tool. And maybe context is just not being passed from team member to team member across departments or whoever. And so people get to their task and they have no idea what they're supposed to do. They don't know what the client goal or objective is. They don't have the full context into how to actually complete something. I'm guessing the answer is probably yes. I want to take you through the best way that you can solve this. Inside of ClickUp, I'm going to walk through three different scenarios of how information can be passed from your account management team to leadership, from your account management team to the rest of the team, as well as how everyone else, all of your team members, can best collaborate and Communicate inside of ClickUp to make sure everyone has context on how to do a task and deliver amazing results for your clients. So let's get started. So let's walk through how account management can best get all of the context and information out of their heads into ClickUp for leadership as well as the rest of the team to see. So everyone knows what's going on with all of your clients. So first of all, inside of ClickUp you're going to want to build out either a a more in depth CRM space or just an account dashboard. That's basically just a list with all of your deals on it. As you can see here, I have a CRM. It has deals, companies and contacts. Essentially what that allows me to do is relate all these together so that I can have a deal with a company and all the contacts within that company all related to each other. So it just makes it very easy for me to see all that information. But the most important piece of this is within all of these you're going to have a task. It's going to be more of a record task instead of an actual task. And this task is going to be all of your deals. So as you can see here, I have all these sorted by delivery lead and in here, Jeff Cypher, I have Dun and Mifflin, Shrug Farms, Advanced Refrigeration. Those are all the accounts that I'm the account manager for. As you can see, Paul has shop, nSafe, Georgia has Wegmans, we all have our different deals that we are associated with. We are the account manager on them. Within this, I'm able to have a lot of other information in custom fields like health score, services, statuses, objectives, start date, end dates, revenue, things like that. It allows me to centralize all the information that I would need to know. But within this, what's super powerful is that I can go in this. What you need your account managers to do is every week they come to each of these tasks that they have and the due date will be related to either the weekly or the biweekly sync. And after that, saying, what they're going to do is they're going to fill out this weekly update in the comments within that task here. So on Dunn Mifflin, I'm going to come in and, and I fill out this weekly update. This can be a template with just four questions that they need to answer every single week to make sure again, we get all the information out of their head into the system for the rest of the team to know. So here we have, why would the customer be unhappy? They'll answer that, are you happy with the account? Have there been any changes in the strategy or timeline that we need to know about? And what do you need help with on this account? And within this one, they can mention someone, maybe it's the, the head of client services or someone else that needs to know, Hey, I need maybe a designer or copywriter running low on resources here so that we can pull someone in to make sure that we don't fall off the timeline for that specific client. What this allows me to do is I'm going to list all of these out. I'm going to fill out the weekly update every single week. Again, keep it detailed, make sure they fill it out so that everyone knows what's going on. But as you can see, if I come to this parent desk right here for Dunder Mifflin, as I fill out those weekly updates, I'm going to leave a nice running log of everything of all those weekly updates. So as we get four months, five months, six months or a year of weekly updates, I have all of that historical information in one place for me to come through and see maybe where did the relationship turn around? I can start to see those weekly updates and sort of see that trend of, oh, we pulled in some additional resources. This is when the health of this customer, this client, started to improve. So I'm able to see all of that right here in this task. So I'm going to keep all the weekly updates a nice running log in one place. In addition, how this is going to be very helpful is now for for leadership. Instead of them having to go through task by task to view all of those, they're able to come here to an activity view that allows them to see all the comments across the different account managers across the different accounts right here. So this activity view will pull in all the weekly updates. So if they need to read all of them, they can go through, they can give it a thumbs up or they can reply to it if they have to. So again, if they're mentioned in that comment, if they're a watcher on that task, they'll get a notification. But if not, they can easily go to this activity view and see all of these weekly updates right here to make sure everything is going according to plan with all of the different accounts and clients that they have. And best practice number two for your account managers is for them to standardize their meeting agendas and take all of their meeting notes inside of ClickUp so if I come here I have my delivery space. This is where all my delivery related work is. If you don't know the ClickUp hierarchy for agencies as suggest you watch this video in the top right you'll see that there. So watch that. It'll give you a nice overview of my framework that I have built out in here. But as you see in my delivery space I have all of my clients, Dunder Mifflin, Shrewd Farms, Vance Refrigeration, Athletes Ready by Jan, so on and so forth. All of those are folders. In those folders, all the work for that client's going to live there. And what's great about this hierarchy now too is I can come here Dunder Mifflin folder, I can click on this and I'll be able to go to the top here and you'll see I have these Dunder Mifflin docs. So every single client folder is going to have a place where all of their documents live or are stemming from. So you could still have a document in Google Docs, but if I link out to that from here, that gives me one spot to go to to find everything I need. So if you have external dashboards, you can always embed a lot of those things in here as views. If I come here, I can do that as well. I can also embed it into a document, but we want to keep everything sort of centralized in one place. I can still link out to other things but keep it here for the most part. So what this does is allows me to have a client overview. So first of all, if this is for everyone, maybe this is sales passing to the delivery team. So you'll see here we have our Dynamif and drive, when is our weekly meeting, our account dashboard task link, which will go out to my CRM in there Loom overview from the sales team. Basically what happened, what did we sell, so on and so forth. That's all here. Any client notes and sort of the client questionnaire too. If we have a submission from that, we can put it in here. In addition, you want to make sure that account managers, every single meeting, they take their notes and they leave it here. The great part about ClickUp is I can have a nice sort of hierarchy with my documents. So I'll have all my meeting notes here and I can expand that. You'll see I have all my meeting notes from Q1, 2023, now Q2, 2023, all that's here, very easy for me to find that. I'll click on it and you'll see now I have my notes with the attendees, what the agenda was, key points discussed all the way down to how everything is going, as well as action items and things like that. So what this allows me to do now is if anyone needs to know what happened in that meeting, they can come here. I can also mention someone in this if they need to see something as well as maybe there's a task in my workspace that someone needs to know something. I can always come here, I can create a task just like this, or I'm able to go here and I can copy this block link and let's say maybe there's a note in this that someone needs to know to actually complete one of their tasks that I have here, one of these lists, I can easily go here and I'll pick a task. Let's just say it's this one and let's say this is good context from that document from my agenda I come here, paste that and you'll see it's going to show right here. That way it gives them the note from that block link as well as if I send this here, you'll see it's also going to link directly out to that document. So I can do that very, very easily. And the last strategy you're going to want to implement for your team is the way that they communicate inside of ClickUp. So before you can really implement this, you're going to want to build out all of your processes in the ZenPower methodology. If you haven't done that yet. I suggest you read this ClickUp for Agencies Guide. You can download it in the description below. That's going to take you through how to build out your processes in ClickUp so you can best leverage the strategy. However, what you're going to want to do is if I come here again on my delivery space dunmyfin folder, all my work is going to live in these lists. You'll see here we're writing a blog for Michael and Dunder Mifflin. The paper one on one blog. This is my parent task. This is the deliverable and then all of these subtasks are the action steps that are necessary to complete that blog post. And if I come here, the strategy you really want to do is as you'll see over here I have all of my communication happening in one place in this parent task. So what this does as you can see, if I pull up all my tasks that we've completed and not completed, as you see here, the first one that I had to do was create blog strategy and document the parent task notes. If you come up here, that's exactly what I did. I documented it. If I click on this, you'll be able to see our strategy. So we have our Paper 101 blog, the Outline, keyword, monthly search, volume, author, there was a due date, published date, buyer, Persona as well and then all of it's going to be written out here. So I gave a bit of a framework for the rest of the team to start to use. As you'll see, all that can happen in one place. If we have any suggestions or comments, I can also do just like that so that we can make it live where the work is getting done. In addition, you want to make sure you again ention everyone so everyone knows where it is and then anyone can easily come to this parent task and see the strategy, see what's going on so that context is not missed and it's not in a bunch of replaces. It's not email, it's not in Slack, it's all right here. In addition to that, as we continue to go through all these subtasks like one of them here, as I send something to Michael to the client for their review, I can tell the whole team right here the post has been sent to Michael. I'll provide updates when he gets back to me. That way everyone knows it's out there. We're able to see sort of the progress of that. As you can see, the next step here that's not done is post client feedback of the Blog to the parent task so everyone will know. Once I actually receive those updates, I'll document it right here and make sure John who is actually writing the blog gets all that information. So the communication is all happening here. It's centralized in one place so anyone on the team can come here, passing work across departments, things like that. In addition, what's great inside to click up to here as John completes maybe the featured image. If I click on this I'm able to. If I have any comments for this I can leave it right here. So let's say I didn't like the squiggly leave a comment right there. John will be able to see exactly what I'm talking about. So again, everything is living in the parent task. But then there's comments living within each of the deliverables to the blog post as well as a featured image that is all stemming from the parent task all in one place makes it super easy for everyone to communicate together. In addition, what this does is I'm able to say as I complete this, we're able to see a lot of progress. So I can say this is in client review. This is one of my statuses. As you can see here, we haven't gotten a review back from Michael. It's a bit overdue. This is due June 2nd. I still haven't gotten it back from. So that's not great. However, if I mark things like that over time, what you can do is you can create account manager views. So if Steve is the account manager for this account, he'll be able to see all this in one place. So if this meta campaign for Shrut Farms is also in client review, he'll be able to see that there this one, the best beat farm in the world is also in client review. And then we have the paper 101 blog and client review. So this is going to be using custom fields and things like that. But this is another great view that you're able to get out of building your processes as well as communicating with impaired task. Because as you can see here, if this is in client review, he'll be able to see the latest comment just like this. So in this one I said hi Steve, this is blocked by Dwight right now. Could you bring it up in your next meeting? He can see all that there. So that way he knows when he goes to the True Farms meeting he's able to take all of his notes in these docs and then if he needs to mention me, let me know that something is being sent through all of that can happen in one place for the whole team. So that's a great way to make sure that communication is not lost and context is really kept there for the team to use. So to quickly summarize what you're going to want to do so that you can pass information from the account management team to the leadership team is you want to have an account dashboard or CRM built inside of ClickUp and then also utilize those weekly updates to make sure the account management team is updating leadership as well as everyone else on how the client is progressing, are things going well or not so well? They'll leave that weekly update so that everyone has context into maybe how a meeting that they just met with the client went. In addition, we want to have our delivery space all set up correctly with the Dunn or Mifflin folder here with my documents and I want to make sure I'm taking all of my notes here so that anyone can come to it. They can see it. I can create tasks from these notes. I can take these and put them as context into different tasks if necessary, but everyone will be able to go to these agendas in these notes and see everything that happened. That way it's super easy for the team to find all that. In addition, you have your client overviews here with all the information from sales as well as some notes, questionnaires, things like that for onboarding into everything else. And then lastly, you want to make sure you have your processes built out with communication happening in the parent task. So that way I can easily come to my parent task, click on it and see all of the communication in one place. So if anyone new comes in to see what's going on, they can easily come here. Everyone knows maybe why a project's behind or how it's ahead. Things like that makes it super easy for the team to work together and collaborate. Thanks for watching. If you like this video, please hit subscribe so you get notified when we come out with new content specifically for agencies. Inside of ClickUp. If you have any questions, please leave in the comments below. But if not, if you want our help implementing all these strategies to help you build a more productive, profitable and healthy team inside of ClickUp, go to zenpilot.com call book a call. We'd love to walk through your current scenario, learn your goals, and figure out how we can best streamline your operations Inside of ClickUp. Again, thanks for watching. I'll see you again next time.