Asana has built a great reputation as a dependable and capable Project Management software. But more and more small to medium businesses are experimenting with Asana in the role of CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Using Asana as a CRM would certainly reduce your IT spend, as there would be no need for a dedicated CRM platform like SalesForce or NetSuite.
A lot of a CRM’s workload is handling the dull, repetitive tasks that are necessary for maintaining a clean and up-to-date customer database. With the launch of their new Automation feature in October 2019, Asana immediately became a way to automate those time-consuming ‘backroom’ tasks. Now, you simply need to create a ‘Rule’ and let Asana’s Automation do the rest.
Here’s an example of how one company have been using Asana’s new Automation Rule feature:
So, handing over some repetitive tasks to Asana is certainly possible, but is Asana capable of replacing a full, dedicated CRM system?
In the next few paragraphs, we’ll look at what Asana is, how it works, and whether it can actually take on all the heavy lifting of a CRM system. But first, here’s a little reminder of the basics.
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What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way of handling and improving business relationships with past, current and prospective customers. Data crunching and tailored algorithms help you build a picture of your average customer and their sales journey, which in turn lets you develop better ways to optimise the relationship with your customers. A good CRM ultimately drives sales growth in more ways than one.
The CRM approach has been in existence for a while, dating back to the 1970s. Back then, it relied on annual surveys and post-sale customer questionnaires, and statistics were calculated using an expensive mainframe computer system.
Since then, customer relationship management has evolved into a finely-tuned process, with software automation allowing insights that just weren’t possible even ten years ago. What’s more, small and medium-sized enterprises are now tapping into the endless customer communication benefits it holds.
Why Use a CRM?
Satisfied customers are, usually, repeat customers. With its systematic approach to marketing and sales optimization, CRM can help to enhance customer satisfaction. Using the data gathered by CRM tools, businesses can learn better ways of improving their service to customers.
Additionally, you can use customer data to plan effective marketing campaigns. What does my customer need? How do my customers behave? What’s the most efficient sales process? A CRM can generate reports that will help you answer these questions. and allow you to plan a more targeted and cost-efficient marketing campaign.
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What Is Asana?
Sometime in 2008, former Facebook colleagues Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein came together to design software that would help teams to manage, organise and keep track of their work more efficiently. By April 2012, Asana, Inc was formed and launched its first version of Asana.
Asana‘s aim, first and foremost, is to improve team collaboration and project management. Its tools help users organise their work into shared projects. Projects are broken down into tasks, and tasks are further broken down into easy steps. Your Project Manager can see, at a glance, which parts of a project are on schedule, and which parts need more time or resources.
Speaking of resources, Asana oversees the assignment of resources to every project. Documentation, promotional material and any other digital resource is centrally available to everyone on the project, and real-time version control makes sure that everybody is singing off the same hymnsheet.
Since its inception, Asana has been through many updates – mainly prompted by user community requests. New features, such as the recent rules-based Automation, ensure that Asana stays at the forefront of team collaboration development. To date, it continues to serve as an essential software trusted by freelancers, small businesses and large enterprises.
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Asana Partnerships and Customers
In March 2017, Asana announced that it was fully integrated with Microsoft Teams. This was potentially huge, as a few months later Microsoft made a free version of Teams available.
Asides from Microsoft Teams, Asana has integrations with other Communication and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools. These include Slack, Zendesk, Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, Adobe Creative Cloud, Salesforce, Litmus, Harvest, and JIRA Cloud.
Asana’s customer list is extensive, ranging from small businesses to large enterprises. Notable among these are Yelp, Google, Sky, Deloitte, NASA, Vodafone and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. You’ll also recognise names like USAID, The New York Times, Zappos.com, Santander, Spotify, Airbnb and Red Bull. These companies represent just a small percentage of businesses and organisations that have absolute trust in Asana.
So now that we know what Asana is, and what it does, let’s see if we can answer the question: “is Asana a CRM?”
We’re going to look at some of the features in detail, specifically the ones that could be useful in a CRM capacity.
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1. Workflow Automation
Modern CRM workflow automation feature enables businesses to carry out tasks, projects, activities and processes via an automated and centralised system. With workflow automation, businesses can optimise their performance and overall productivity.
Additionally, workflow automation enables businesses and enterprises to operate at scale. These days, teams are intentional about automating their processes and workflows. However, workflow automation can be tiring as it takes a lot of time to plan. Notwithstanding the obvious set of setbacks, workflow automation offers many benefits and advantages to businesses.
For starters, workflow automation eliminates the occurrence of human error in tasks and projects. In addition to that, automation aims to reduce employee attrition which invariably enhances work satisfaction. Furthermore, workflow automation also achieves integration through productivity. On top of that, it reduces labour costs, and improve scalability. By workflow automation, your business will move to the next level.
What better software to use for workflow automation than Asana productivity software? Asana frees you from spending time on manual and repeatable work processes. The collaborative software features a tool called ‘Rules’ which automates work processes, task assignment and status changes.
What’s more, users can easily add ‘Rules’ from the gallery or make use of its custom rules builder to construct their own. Asana has plans to add a task dependency feature that will resolve any schedule conflict between tasks that are dependent on each other. Whilst this isn’t a vital addition, it does illustrate just how devoted they are to adding user-requested features.
2. Third-Party Integration
Many teams spend a lot of time, money and resources using software that does not integrate with any other company software. But CRM software relies on integration with other applications. It’s impossible to collect any meaningful data unless all your IT infrastructure can intercommunicate.
We have mentioned integration already, but it’s important that you check the full list to make sure your existing software can talk to Asana, and vice versa. Luckily, Asana can connect to 800+ software applications, and Zapier and Automate.io provide interfaces for any software not on the list.
To put your mind at ease, please use our link to check the full range of integrations.
3. Ease of Customisation
Customer relationship management software should be able to offer you some sort of flexibility to meet specific needs. A rigid CRM software will frustrate your every attempt at customisation.
Asana has a variety of custom templates users can choose from to spare them the time of creating templates from scratch. These templates can be customised to suit your individual need, workflows, or processes.
4. Lead Management
Lead generation is the lifeblood of any company or business. Nowadays, many people get influenced by local trends, family preferences, location, and many other factors. Like lead scoring, lead management enhances the efficiency and productivity of your marketing campaign.
Asana allows you to maintain a record of every customer interaction, which can then be used to maintain a database of new leads, based on predictions of your customer’s next actions.
Asana helps teams record more sales by automatically finding ways of optimising their sales processes and customer interaction. The app ensures your team gets the information they need to be able to enhance and fully take advantage of customer leads.
5. Customer Support
Good customer service plays a vital role in acquiring and retaining customers. A solid CRM solution generally enhances customer support and the overall customer experience.
Asana might just be a good place to start. It has dedicated customer support that is committed to helping you achieve your goal and aspirations. They have a range of support plans to choose from, including onboarding plans, customer success managers, professional services and custom resources. You’ll be teamed with a dedicated partner who is familiar with your business aims and objectives.
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Asana Pricing
Asana takes care of startups and small businesses by offering a Basic pricing plan that costs virtually nothing. You can use this to set up your basic project management system, whilst investigating the CRM capabilities.
Asana also has on offer three additional pricing modules: Premium, Business, and Enterprise. For a more detailed preview of the various plans and the features offered, check Asana’s pricing plans.
Conclusion
Every company conducts sales campaigns in a different way. But no matter what your first action is, essentially you’re launching a project.
You’re organising targets, assembling teams, assigning follow-up tasks and creating appointments. You’re making calls, logging activities and taking notes. You’re collaborating with everyone in your company, generating shared documents and sending emails.
You’re tracking the progress of the project (or campaign, if you prefer) all the way from start to finish, and you’re collecting data at every step of the way.
CRM systems do this. And so does Asana.
Our suggestion is to look through Asana’s blog and find case studies on how it’s been used as a CRM solution. It’s not as fully-fledged as Salesforce or NetSuite, but if all you need (for now, anyway) is a sort of ‘CRM-lite’, then Asana has you covered.
We hope you’ve enjoyed reading this article – please share it to anyone else who might be interested.
