Delivering ROI with Adhere Creative

Adhere Creative is a HubSpot partner focusing on inbound marketing. Our specific niche is B2B marketing for the manufacturing, SaaS, healthcare, and professional service industries in Houston and across the United States.

Adhere works with companies that may or may not have internal marketing teams. In most cases, we guide their marketing strategy from start to finish. As a result, we’re responsible for filling their funnel with marketing qualified leads and growing their businesses.

As Adhere Creative's sole Project Manager, I lead the execution of deliverables across the entire agency and ensure projects are completed on time, within budget, and achieve client goals.

• • Develop project timelines, estimates, and scope of work documents
• • Provide project direction and manage daily execution of tasks
• • Actively monitor resource allocation, budget, and scope creep
• • Ensure client goals and project quality standards are met for all deliverables
• • Coordinate internal teams and third-party vendors
• • Run daily stand up meetings and the agency Kanban
• • Collaboratively working with Account Director to provide client communication
• • Establish, create, and optimize agency project management processes, documentation, and reporting
• • Identify issues with current project management tool, research and identify alternatives, and manage the migration across the entire agency

I use ClickUp to manage every aspect of our agency’s production from strategy, copy, and design to development, printing, and launch. Without ClickUp we would be lost.

Adhere has a mix of retainer clients and project accounts. Retainer clients have pre planned deliverables, usually for 12 months of time whereas projects pop in throughout the year with unplanned deliverables. As an agency, we’re going back and forth between the two groups on a daily basis across all departments: strategy, marketing, content, design, and development. With the volume of deliverables across clients, ClickUp is visited daily, if not hourly.

Everyday we’re adhering to timelines, budget constraints, and client goals. I don’t know how we’d do it without ClickUp.

The project management tool in place before ClickUp was Basecamp. Though Basecamp worked for a few years, we eventually out grew it. It no longer matched our new Agile processes so it was causing a lot of extra work.

If you’re looking for super simple, Basecamp works. But the moment you need a more sophisticated way to monitor budgets, agency wide timelines (across all clients), or workload capacity, Basecamp falls short.

Our agency couldn’t run without a strong project management system. We have about 25-35 clients at any given moment and all have different goals, strategy, deliverables, timelines, and budgets. ClickUp allows us to easily work with each other smoothly and efficiently, without anything slipping in the cracks.

The board view has been the most helpful since it mimics a Kanban board. Every morning during our stand up meetings we move all client projects across the board. It’s a visual representation of where we currently are and where we want to go, as well as a helpful reminder across all departments.

The layout of individual to-do windows has also been extremely helpful. In just a few seconds we can identify what status the to-do is in, who it is assigned due, what the time estimate for the to-do is, due dates, attachments, and conversations around the project without digging or excessive scrolling. We previously came from Basecamp, and none of this was easily accessible if at all.

When we originally transitioned into ClickUp, the platform did not have the capability to add client accounts like Basecamp did. For that reason why decided to not add clients as “guest accounts” since tend to keep certain deliverables hidden from client view until they are ready for client review. That said, we were initially worried that it would be a difficult transition for clients since they were used to being able to see our every move but we haven’t received any negative feedback. We may continue to keep clients out of ClickUp.

Before moving to ClickUp we were using Basecamp and as our internal project management processes changed and our team grew, Basecamp was holding us back. It was causing more problems than it created. Our top priority was finding a project management tool that fit out new processes.

But we were also looking for very specific features based on our Basecamp experience, some were new and some were existing features:

• • Visually show task status (Kanban)
• • Create subtasks and co-assign them
• • Slack, Dropbox, and Google Suite integration
• • @ mentions within a task
• • Task start and end dates
• • File storage within the platform
• • Email notifications
• • Client integration
• • Easy search of all projects and communication
• • Task search by client, assignee, and date
• • Workload capacity data
• • Gantt chart capabilities
• • Time tracking integration
• • Multiple assignees per task
• • Recurring tasks

DoInbound was a quick cut. At first, the platform sounded like a perfect fit. They created a project management platform specifically for HubSpot’s inbound marketing funnel, and as an inbound agency, we were sold. But without the flexibility to integrate Agile components into the platform, it was a no-go.

I was excited to learn more about Asana because they had great reviews. What I was not excited about was being blown off. After emailing and calling several times with no answer, they finally informed me that our agency was too small for a live demo and pushed me in the direction of their resource center instead. If the demo experience was any indication of what customer support would be like, I was out.

TeamWork and Flow were great options. They fulfilled most the items on my list, but there was one contender that far outshined the others: ClickUp.

The process was pretty straight forward. As the project manager leading the migration I had a one on one demo with ClickUp to answer any immediate questions that I knew my team would have. After that, I dove right in with a sample project and starting customizing with my direct boss. After we got the kinks worked out we had a company wide demo with ClickUp and we took it from there. ClickUp is very user friendly and pretty intuitive.

Adhere Creative utilizes Custom Status workflows to delineate their process and communicate with teammates. This is the perfect solution for tasks that go through multiple steps on the way to completion.

The team also sets up recurring tasks to ensure that important repetitive tasks are attended to on time. Rather than creating a new task for every daily social media post or team meeting, recurring tasks helps them automate this portion of their workflow.

Finally, Adhere Creative utilizes the multiple assignee feature for many of their tasks. Rather than delegate a task to one person, multiple assignees allows them to initiate a dialogue within tasks, and divide responsibility as needed.

Other key features that helps their team organize their work includes multiple assignees, due dates, time tracking, priorities and tags. Tags help link tasks across projects and give you a quick view of related items for a certain project, as well identifies older tasks that may may be relevant to the current work. This helps the team keep up with work they’ve done in the past and how that work may help other clients for a similar project.