How Top HubSpot Partners Streamline Operations with ClickUp

Integrations that they need as well, but they're really looking for that single source of truth for all the client services stuff and so is familiar with There's a handful of integration tools out there. Zapier we do a ton in Integromat, a lot of setup of automation via Integromat versus zapier just because it goes deeper into ClickUp and it tends to be a better long term solution. Unito is another option on the market. Obviously you could write the API directly, but ClickUp will be building a direct integration with HubSpot. It's a little bit, a little bit slower in terms of the pipeline right now. So I'm looking for. Here we go. I'm going to drop in the chat. You don't want to do me a name together on this one. Chris Moore for folks who know Chris helped head this up and steer it and he unfortunately is under the weather today so he's not able to join us as a, as a co pilot. So Andrew subbing in for him but appreciate all of his work and effort helping to pull this together. So super excited to dive in. Let me give you just a quick bit of context. I see a ton of familiar faces or names here in the chat, but for folks who aren't familiar with us, we run Zen Pilot. We are training and consulting firm that helps agencies specifically in ClickUp and we're really focused on helping agencies kind of escape the chaos and also increase profitability as a piece of streamlining their operations. But our background prior to doing what we're doing now with ZenPilot was joining the HubSpot ecosystem. We'd had our agency for a year, year and a half maybe, and we joined the HubSpot ecosystem super early on back in 2012 when it was 10 or 12 or 15 times smaller than it is now. And so it's been cool to see. I think we're in terms of stories, I think we're in a similar place with ClickUp where HubSpot was a great tailwind to ride here. If you've been in the HubSpot ecosystem over the last 10 years, it's been a great, they've had great success and ClickUp is a similar we've been in the agency ops space for the last eight years. So we exited the HubSpot ecosystem from an agency perspective relatively early on. But we are today ClickUp's largest implementation partner. It's the only project management tool that we service agencies on top of. But we get into all the main platforms and a bunch of the non main platforms as well. We run a podcast called Agency Journey. If you haven't seen that before, that's worth checking out, interviews with different agency owners and leaders and then that's a helpful place to just kind of get encouraged in terms of the journey that we're on. So I want to quickly take everyone through a super high level version of our agenda and then we're going to go deeper into it. But we're going to start in terms of what HubSpot partners need. Consistently when we're talking to them, people reach out and we get connected. Some of the most common needs and what those boil down to, we're gonna talk about because that's a huge bucket and inside of that bucket we'll talk about what the needs are in terms of making HubSpot and ClickUp play nicely together, which is its own challenge. And then we'll go into the way that the most successful agencies in ClickUp are setting up the platform from a hierarchy perspective, from a templating perspective, from a dashboarding perspective, how they're handling onboarding automations, all that kind of stuff. So if there's a piece there that you have questions about that sits outside of that, or that you've got questions about inside of that, go ahead and drop that. You should see the Q and A panel, you should see the chat panel as well. Anything that you've got, general chat stuff that you'd like to contribute, put that in chat, put in Q and A and anything that you've got from a Q and A perspective. And then obviously we'll wrap up. And I've got a template for folks who want to take advantage of a template. And we've got some additional opportunities to talk with us for folks who may need additional help on the ClickUp side. So let's start first from a HubSpot partner perspective. What do HubSpot agencies need out of ClickUp or what's the problem that they're trying to solve? And there's a handful of things that they need. The biggest thing is they're trying to figure out how to manage, track and scale a services team profitably and with as little chaos as possible in the process. And specifically, when we think of HubSpot and ClickUp, they're looking for a smooth handoff from the sales team to the delivery team, clear performance metrics, visibility, and there's some advance in favor of. Just pop up this link and at some point give me an upvote on this. I'll pull this up real quickly. On this integrations request page. Well we'll see how long that takes to load. So anyways, the piece that you need to keep in mind with any automations and integrations and we'll talk more about this but is understanding hey, what are we trying to accomplish? I love building stuff out initially, running it manually, figuring out what the weak parts are, optimizing that process and then the next step is to go automate it. So you need to figure out what's the actual enterprise value of building the solution or having that automation. Teamwork probably has the best native integration with HubSpot, but in a lot of ways it's a pretty simple integration into the platform. We've worked with a bunch of agencies who have been on teamwork and really dislike the idea of moving away from the integration. There's some elements of that that are not that challenging to rebuild in ClickUp and if it's the right fit I think there's enough for most agencies the value of ClickUp in terms of the interface and the feature set and the price point and all of that stuff justifies making the switch. But there's some automation stuff that we'll run through and talk through some of the solutions in terms of making those two platforms work together. But in terms of high level, these are two core business tools that you have. You've got your CRM which most of you are probably using HubSpot. There may be some folks who are using Pipedrive or an alternative, but most are probably using HubSpot right now if you're on this webinar specifically. And then you've got the ClickUp side, the project management side and HubSpot's pretty terrible at project management and ClickUp's not mature enough yet to be a fully functioned CRM for a larger team who's working a significant amount of stuff sales activity. So both of those two things we're trying to take together the leaders in those two areas and make them work nicely together. I want you to think about pre sales and your marketing living in HubSpot, post sales, servicing and tracking living in ClickUp and there's going to be a handful of additional tools that we see a lot of the top partners using as part of their engagements where things like Avoma for for call transcription and analytics is becoming more and more popular in the agency space. Slack obviously gets used a ton retently or a tool like that for NPS if you're not using HubSpot's NPS feature. So we'll get into all that But I want to take you inside ClickUp right now and talk through kind of the core pieces. We really shouldn't be too worried about integrations and automation until we get the core pieces of ClickUp correct. So I would imagine this is gonna create some questions, but I'm gonna take you inside our dashboard and give you a quick lay of the land in terms of hierarchy. For some of you, you likely have seen this before. This is available in blog posts, and this piece has stayed pretty consistent. But we're gonna start ClickUp's hierarchy. We go spaces down to folders, down to lists, and then into tasks, subtasks, and checklists. I'm gonna take you top to bottom through each of those right now. So you understand from a hierarchical perspective what we're trying to accomplish here. And the goal is to get the right data structure out of the box. There's a lot of folks who implement ClickUp don't feel a lot of pain initially. And we did this as well when we were getting started on the platform. Don't realize the implications of the setup decisions that you make until into the future. And so from a data structure perspective, all this stuff becomes pretty important. So we've got growth. We basically split every agency into three main areas. Growth, which is your business. Development, that's your marketing. Sales, delivery is all your client services. That's our word for client services. And that whole side of the business, which some people say, some people will call that your operations side, but we split those two functions out and say deliveries, your client services, and then operations is all the kind of the overhead that you need to run the business. This is the people, the culture, hr, legal, finance, those components of the business that you have going on. And I say overhead like it's just a cost. It's not. This is the most critical piece of the business, but it's not what most agencies come to us focused on. They're typically focused on, I need to solve my client service problems. And then eventually, hey, we also need to streamline what the rest of our operations look like in the platform. You see, we've got two additional spaces here, one that's called CRM. So that might be a little bit confusing since we're talking about HubSpot 1, we'll get into what this looks like, and then the process library. And so this is where we're keeping a live, latest copy of all the processes that power what we do. So let's move into, from a delivery perspective, the next layer in the hierarchy here. Each of these folders are clients, probably 90, close to 95% of the time. When we're working with an agency, this is the hierarchy that we'll choose. There's some use cases where clients should get moved up to spaces and a few use cases where they should get moved down level. But for the average agency, we'll wind up with clients as folders. And then we're using here inside of that, we're using lists to represent each service line that we have. If you are currently following this setup, would you just drop a note in the chat? I'd love to see how many people are already using this. And then if you've got something that's working well, that's a different setup, love to hear what that is as well. Okay. Inside each of these lists we then have our tasks and our subtasks. So kind of our phases, our milestones or deliverables are represented by parent tasks. And we're using subtasks for each individually owned step of the process inside of there. So here we're looking at client onboarding. What are all the steps that need to happen? There's a couple of key pieces that we want to get right in each one of these tasks. So we want every single subtask to have an assignee, so a task owner, a due date and an estimated amount of time. And if you think about things like being able to see resource planning or if we want to see workload availability, these are the three variables that you need to have. You need to know who's doing it, when is it getting done, how much time is it estimated to take, and that's going to power all of your workload and reporting views or setups. We've got. I would imagine some of you are already using descriptions and hopefully some of you have also gotten to the point in terms of systematizing what you do that you've got a step by step checklist and any additional context. Here's the form that we're gonna use, here's the email template you're gonna send, here's the checklist in terms of what needs to get customized. Where we're giving people the process for how to complete what they do right along with the assignment to complete the work. So that's a big piece of what we're trying to teach agencies who we work with is hey, let's make the process live, where the work actually gets done. Super common to see everyone living in or a ton of SOPs get built because an owner read a book at some point, they read the E Myth or they read a book like that and then they go on a sop kick. Those go into Google Docs, they spend a lot of work, create some valuable processes, and then no one ever sees that because it doesn't live where the work is actually happening. So that's kind of the quick overview in terms of hierarchy, taking us from the bottom side with checklists and subtasks all the way back up to our lists and folders and spaces and then ultimately that all rolls up into everything. View inside ClickUp. That's number one. Kaitlyn's getting a question about start dates, which we can come back to as well. But in most of our setups, actually, I'll answer that super quickly. Andrew. We should maybe come back to this. There's a longer explanation for this. Subtasks. We want our subtasks to have kind of a consistent rule. You can think of this as one owner, so it should only get assigned to one person. So there's a place where the buck stops. And then think of the general rule of thumb of in one sitting. So that means it should be due on a specific day. I don't want a subtask that starts this Monday and it's due on Friday. Cool. So from a hierarchy perspective, that's kind of high level. Getting that right is the fundamental thing that you need to start with in ClickUp. And a lot of times when we're going in with agencies who've already been on the platform, there's panes that they're not always tying to the hierarchy, but that are associated with the hierarchy. Second piece is the template side. So before we start rolling all this stuff live, we want to standardize across the team. Like, I'm going to sidetrack here for a second. I would take a slightly worse systems design. I would rather see you have the hierarchy that quite fit. Obviously perfect rule. I want that to be the best systems design for you. But I would rather take a slightly wrong design with everybody working in a consistent way inside of that over obviously the perfect design and very low percentage of people actually following that. So low compliance with the expectations that we have. So the whole goal is that in order to produce consistent outcomes for clients, we have consistent inputs into the process and that's going to require some standardization. And each service is a little bit different in terms of how far we can go in templatizing stuff we worked with. I had Heather and Michael park from Rentbridge on the Agency Journey podcast yesterday, and they're exclusively focused on the property management space and so there are a handful of recipes that are plug and play. And so those types of projects are going to be super systematized and super down to 18 step checklist items versus an agency that does agile software development. And there's the same workflow that happens time after time, but the inputs and outcomes are different in each case. So let's talk about getting those right. You may have something as broad as kind of a basic workflow. Here's what we're going to roll through. Or you may have that from a client services perspective. We looked at client onboarding. This is pretty prescriptive. If we pull up something like, let's take SEO here as an example, or if we take inbound marketing as an example and grab this and we look at a podcast, here's what we're going to do, or a blog post, here's what needs to happen in order to produce this. You can see we've got that same granularity here in subtask creation, which is way too much for, for you if you had to create this live every time. And this is why templates are so important. You need this template pre created so that you can then apply it. When I'm creating, I need to add in and plan out eight blog posts for a client and quickly be able to pull that from a template and go deploy those with the right workflow, with the right time delays built into the process, so that when I'm rescheduling those from a template, they rescheduled correctly with the right time estimates tied to it. And we're using a couple other custom fields here. This is a little bit farther down the road. We can hit this in Q and A if you'd like to, but some of the custom fields that we use to help with internal automations on the ClickUp platform and then reassigning tasks. Cool. Andrew, if there's a natural stopping point here, as I'm moving forward and you want to answer, if there's a question that feels like it would be relevant to everybody, go ahead and jump in.

I've got two here.

Quick.

If I could jump to them. One is someone asked about how do you manage subtasks, milestones and checklists? Because those are three different features that ClickUp offers here. Do you want me to take that one?

Go ahead.

Okay, cool. So number one is Milestones. Milestones is a really cool feature that ClickUp allows you to turn on and turn off using a click app. And it really doesn't do anything. It doesn't change up functionality at all. It just lets you distinguish one task from another by saying one is a milestone and one is not. So if you click into a task and you go to little tasks settings, there you can, you can set a task as a milestone. And so this is very helpful because it lets you quickly see them as like they pop out on the screen both in the list view and in the Gantt view. But the most powerful functionality, I think is the ability to filter. Because when I set different tasks as milestones, I can choose using the filter option to show or to hide those milestones. So if you ever want to create a public view, let's say, and you want to share that public view with your client, but you only want to show them the milestones and the progress on those milestones, you would just select the task you want to call milestones and filter for that. So that's a great benefit of the milestone side of things. The subtasks, again, like Gray was saying, those are the one user, one sitting you want to think of the first subtask hands the baton to the second, hands the baton to the third and moves through your workflow there. And within a subtask, that's where your checklist would live. So a checklist is where the process gets into the mix. And you can think of your checklist as the place where you put your best practices. That should be a spot where someone with a high level of proficiency should be able to just see three to five to seven steps and say, don't forget to do this, don't forget to do this, don't forget to do this. We do not want to see like a 35 point detailed checklist that says go to the top right and click here, then go to the bottom left and click there. That's just way too much detail for, um. So again we focus on three to five to seven. Like in that range of documentation that you want to link to that teaches them how to do those steps, you'd put that in the description of your task. So that is your subtasks, your milestones and your checklist there. And then we also had a good question from Ron on the hierarchy that you had mentioned earlier. He said that they use the delivery space, they use folders as clients. But when we get down to the list layer, he uses lists to represent like a month's worth of work for a client. So every month we'll have a new list down there for the wine. And one of the big, one of the big pros of using, we don't need to do any maintenance for it. It's a set and static place so we can train the team on where the information needs to go. Any client folder you jump into is going to. Things are organized there.

Yeah, there's a lot more we could dig into there from a Q and A perspective, including recurring tasks. So obviously that is pretty common, especially with HubSpot partners who are thinking, I get these monthly retainers each month is its own set of services that this dates back to the Playbook for deliverables. So you're thinking about how do I get those out? I need to have those grouped easily. We miss out on some of the advantages in this as well with recurring tasks, if you want. Obviously you can't set that up if you're on a monthly base schedule. So anyways, templates is a big piece building those out and you want to look at that from a client services perspective. If we're looking here first, what are the different things that we're doing? Are we doing website design projects? Are we doing SEO? Are we doing all these different pieces that have to get built out? But also from an internal perspective, there's. There's processes to be built out there as well. So go deeper on that side. I'm going to switch gears. This might seem like it's a little bit out of order, but I'm going to jump right to the account dashboard, which is probably something that you may have internally in some form or fashion, but it's our closed one. So these are all deals that we already. We're using a comment thread on each of these tasks to kind of be the hey, here's the milepost as we go through a relationship with a client where this becomes helpful. As you see, what services are we providing to each of these clients? And those services obviously will be tied into what templates become necessary to build out or what template these are going to be based on what you're actually providing. Now, I wouldn't include. I would standardize this, so I wouldn't say if someone's an inbound retainer, this would say inbound retainer. It wouldn't say all 15 different service lines that we have. And we can go farther into that. But this is helpful as a home base and we'll tie this into some automation along with also creating delivery folders for each client or less. So we'll get to that here in a second. But that account dashboard and being able to map that and see that in different ways, I'll just give you a couple different pieces Here you can see your inactive accounts. A couple ideas that I would give you all standardize why somebody's no longer working with you. So you have this data that may, if you're super early in your agency, that stuff probably doesn't seem important. You think I could go back and see that? But wait till you get three or four or five years in and you're not able to see. Why do people actually leave us when they're leaving? What was l score when they left? How long were they actually with us? That data is very easy once the right setup is built originally to capture, but very hard to go pull down the road. Some good questions there. Okay, so let's flip over though to the onboarding workflow, because this is really the starting point for any type of integration that I'd like to talk about. Figuring out how clients buy from you is a big deal. So right now I'm assuming for most people you're sending a contract, they're signing that contract, and maybe HubSpot quotes it may not be. And so you don't have. And then that deal is getting moved to closed one in your CRM. If that's the case, most likely you want to take that closed one and you want to feed that. You can use zapier for this. Integromats are preferred, but you could feed that to create. Take that as a trigger and go create a new deal here on your account dashboard in ClickUp, which is again where we're going to centralize all this information. Who's doing what, what are the roles, what's the KPIs, what are the people associated with it, all that stuff. Feed that into this. And then this is a more complex use case. You can also go create your folder from that or in some agencies cases, create a task automatically off of this being created, pulling values from here to go. Create the appropriate setup for whoever the account manager is or for your client services manager. So we'll get a little bit more into what that looks like. But the other onboarding workflow that's somewhat common is people are actually buying through a payment link. So you might be using HubSpot's payment links. That's one thing that we use. Let's see if I can grab an example here. What do I want? Let's go. Let's grab this as an example. Someone's buying through a HubSpot payment link. This is in beta right now, but this will be out live. Everyone who's using HubSpot eventually will wind up potentially using it. They go here. Now if they're buying through a form like that, you've got the ability to then redirect them to a ClickUp intake form if you wanted to. So if you use something like this, hey, here's what the process looks like. Here's how we're going to wind up working together. Here's all the information I need to capture from you as part of this project. What that is then going to do is create that deal automatically here for you or create it automatically in a specific area in ClickUp. So it's the first thing to understand is what does your onboarding process look like and what do you want that to look like to figure out how you want any integrations to happen. So in our case that's what we're doing. People are paying through a payment link. They're filling out the form that's automatically creating this that then gets assigned to our sales team who has to go through and fill out additional context. There's some other pieces of information that need to get filled in and it goes to the client services side and that creates a whole kind of a whole waterfall worth of things that start happening internally. Google Drive and Slack and everywhere else. It'll also tie back to that deal that was then created in HubSpot and we'll create associated contacts will get pulled in into the contact records. And we tie this into the tool that we use for MPS called recently. So we automatically get latest retently scores in terms of NPS pulled in here. And then we're using roll ups between that back to deals and back to companies to be able to see what's the nps. And this is kind of a small, this is a little bit nerdier but a little bit of a calibration. We've got the standardized health score that we use 1 to 5 and these are all have standard definitions but this is graded internally. NPS allows you to calibrate that a little bit. So if someone says hey, I think there are five, everything's great here, they were happy, they'd give us a testimon. But across the company contacts from your client, they're a detractor. From an NPS perspective something's not right and there needs to be some correction that happens there. So the handful of additional automation things that you can set up on that side, but hopefully that gives you some good ideas from a HubSpot integration side what some of the common use cases are in terms of ClickUp and HubSpot. Once you know what that onboarding workflow is, the next step is figuring out from that onboarding workflow what pieces actually make sense to automate versus don't. So you want to think about how frequently does something happen right now, how much pain is associated with that or how much time does it take, what's the cost associated with it and then how complex is the solution or the automation. So there are a lot of things, super commonly, as I mentioned before, where agencies were often wired to be a little bit of tech nuts and tech nerds and I'm definitely that way. And if you're on this webinar, you're probably also that way to a degree. So we've got to be a little bit careful here in terms of how much stuff should we actually automate versus where is it just fun to build automation? And it doesn't actually save us that much time. So I like to do is just outline all those different processes, what needs to get built, and then run through those three factors, give it a grade. So we grade this out. This is kind of our prioritization matrix internally, how frequently does it happen? How much pain or how much cost is associated with the problem right now and then how complex is the solution? How much time or effort or energy will it take to solve this problem? And obviously you want things that don't take that much work to solve and that happen a lot and are painful when they happen right now. Prioritize those and then work through those. And I would encourage you all to use kind of batch blocks of time or time blocking to address this. Once a month you get as a special treat to yourself, go block two hours to go do automations or build this in a schedule somewhere, assign time from the team. The other piece of automations is figuring out what happens internally in ClickUp versus what happens externally using an Integromat or a Zapier. So we've got all these automation possibilities inside ClickUp directly. And so anything that we want to do inside ClickUp or with email automation probably makes sense to have inside ClickUp. It's not always the case, but most of the time it's the case. There are some cases where we might want to take up a value that is spit out by a formula. So let's say we take, here's the length, we're doing a length field to see when did they start, when did they end, if they haven't ended yet, if there's no end date on the account, I still want a value, I just want the number of days to date. So we Might have a formula field. I can't in ClickUp right now use an automation to plug that. If I wanted that as a hard value that I could then run calculations off of. Occasionally we'll use external automations to copy it from this field, paste it to a field that we're actually going to work off of. But. But for the most part, anything internal to ClickUp will be an internal automation. External automations, if you want to take stuff from HubSpot, push it to ClickUp or vice versa. That'll be a job for Integromat or for zapier. Zapier and the Zapier ClickUp connection is getting rebuilt right now and later this year we should see that fully updated to support custom fields right now. Integromat has a superior integration from a custom field perspective. All right, so we've covered the hierarchy, we talked about templates, we talked about kind of the onboarding process to get clients in. The big huge piece that we've passed over is how HubSpot partners are training their team and getting their team actually bought in. But I'm going to continue skipping over that. We can talk more about that if that's helpful in Q and A. But from a dashboard perspective and a view perspective, we want to make sure that we're generating all this data inside the platform, we have a way to measure it and we know what those metrics that we should be looking for are. So I think this is one area that is chronically under leveraged by HubSpot Partners. When we start working with them, what do the different dashboards look like? And the challenge is always that you get into ClickUp and it's a completely blank slate. There's no pre built dashboard for you. So we're starting from scratch, adding whatever into the platform when really we. So I guess the encouragement I'd have for all of you would be think about what you actually need to see and then you can figure out how to visualize it from there. So we're always looking for what are the things that we need to measure and produce. And obviously we've done this a couple thousand times now, so pretty prescriptive in terms of here's the types of things that we'd like you to look at and the basis that we want you to measure those on. But what's the stuff that you need to see? Obviously you're looking at things like how much time gets estimated versus how much time got tracked on a client basis, on a service line basis, and on a team member basis. But understand what those metrics are first. Set the parameters around it and then you can build out the dashboards for it. So that's an internal dashboard, like your ClickUp leaderboard. Hey, here's our internal time, here's our chats, making sure that everyone's accountable. From a ClickUp performance perspective, that's an important piece of the compliance side internally. Or from an external perspective, if we're looking at an overview for a specific client of what's happening, there's a bunch of different dashboards that we're commonly building for agencies as a piece of this. So I wouldn't. Yeah, the order of operations here is get your data, understand what you need to measure, but then focus on getting the system built, the team trained and the data generated, and build the dashboards. If you're building a dashboard on day one in ClickUp, it can be pretty discouraging because you get a lot of blank. There's no content in that dashboard widget. It's hard to know whether actually measuring and looking at the right thing or not. Cool. Ron actually just asked this question, so this is timely. But setting client permissions, figuring out how you want to interface with clients. If you're brand new to ClickUp and you are currently working in a system where you're not bringing clients into your project management tool, get comfortable in the platform first and then pull clients in as it makes sense. We've got a split. There's a handful of main ways that we work with clients in ClickUp. You've got the transparent option where we're taking an entire client folder and we're going ahead and sharing it with them as a guest and they've got access to that, everything that happens inside of there. There's the opposite side of that where they see nothing. We tell them whenever, or we give them access purely to a client view, or we've taken a view, filtered it down for what we want to show them, and share that view publicly on the web so that they can see just those specific items here, but they're not actually logging into the platform outside of that. There's a whole bunch of options in terms of how you set this up. And this ties back into automations, so creating things like separate lists for clients. When tasks go to a certain stage, they go to client review. They have access to see it. Clients have guest access. We can go deeper into this if that's helpful as well. But some of the keys here are making sure that there's a training resource for clients. Here's how you're going to work with us as an agency. This is the one things that we build out and here's slack expectations. If you're going to work with us, here's what it looks like. Same thing in ClickUp. If you're gonna work with us in ClickUp, here's the rules of engagement that we have. So get your client permissions correct. We're gonna talk more about HubSpot and ClickUp examples but we've got some good questions here. So Andrew, I'm gonna wrap up on on this one. We've talked about a couple of those as we went. I want to hit the retently side but before we get into questions and answers as we're at 40 minutes right now want you know you all can chat with us if it'd be helpful to take a look at what you currently have set up. We've got a 30 minute option to grab a free call with our team who've all been trained on ClickUp zenpilot.com chat and we'd love to chat through your current setup and do a PM review with you. If there's additional help you need, feel free to use the same link or go to our website and use the book a call option on the site to talk to us about an engagement as well.