The Way I Manage My Projects with brightpod
ESG provides Customer Success as a Service. In a nutshell, we provide people (virtual customer success managers or vCSMs) that manage our client’s customers throughout their lifecycle, from onboarding to advocacy. We ensure every tier our client’s customers are proactively managed to help them reach their desired outcomes faster and realize life-long value in our client’s solutions. For more information on the concept of Customer Success as a Service (CSaaS) or to learn more about ESG, visit us on the web at esgsuccess.com.
Every day our goal is to provide our customers with results and insights they couldn’t acquire otherwise. How we do that can differ from day-to-day and account-by-account. On any given day: our marketing team is cranking out global campaigns to drive awareness, our sales and services teams are doing whatever it takes to meet their weekly targets, our operations folks are ensuring everything runs smoothly on the back end, and our management team is keeping us all on course.
My day kicks off with a piping hot cup of green tea and a quick review of my calendar and task list. Then it’s off to the races with meetings, tasks and whatever else may come my way. At the end of the day, I review what I’ve accomplished and load my time to Brightpod. Keeping an accurate record of time spent on internal and eternal projects helps me identify process roadblocks, skillset gaps and upsell opportunities.
1. Make time for you. Don’t get bombarded by impromptu meeting requests that can derail you from getting your job done. Block time out on your calendar, even if it’s just 15-minutes to review your priorities. You should be the master of your schedule.
2. Prioritize your tasks. We’re all guilty of procrastination, but it’s harder to do when the urgency is staring you in the face. Number your daily tasks in the order they should be completed and keep the list visible throughout the day. Consider rewarding yourself for accomplishing all of them at the end of the day.
3. Double monitors = efficiency. Having access to two screens makes referencing emails, building reports and reviewing proofs so much easier. Less time toggling between pages means more time getting stuff done.
We scale the number of Brightpod users depending on projects. Different users manage different clients and therefore manage different projects depending on the engagement. Each project is associated to a specific client, and projects are then grouped by type with specific naming conventions, e.g. an email blast project title contains the acronym ‘EB’; a sales collateral project contains the acronym ‘SC’. This makes it easy to identify projects by customer and type, plus it allows us to compare time tracked on like tasks between customers so we can easily identify where a process may be broken or where we may need to train up a marketer to lessen the output of hours.
Yep. Basecamp. It seemed better suited for tracking internal projects as opposed to billable time.
Yep! Because Brightpod is our most accurate source of time consumed by project and client, it has been a great resource to help us determine when we need to hire more folks to manage client workloads. Plus, it’s been helpful to see where our marketers spend most of their time, so we know what skill sets they need to be successful.
The online training tools were straightforward and provided us with the foundation we needed to get started. As our business has evolved, so too has our use case for Brightpod. Since the tool is so flexible, we’ve been able to adapt Brightpod to our new processes without issue.
Hard to pick just one. It’s a toss-up between customizable template pods or the insights feature. Both are super important for our business since we are often managing projects and agreements that are slightly different than a typical creative agency.
I prefer to not think about a world without Brightpod.
Nope. I think we covered it all.