“How do you Wrike?” It’s a common question we ask customers in our customer advocacy program Wrike Stars. As you can imagine, the answers vary across industries and use cases, but we love hearing the variety of responses!
In today’s ‘How I Wrike’ interview, we meet Pietro Poli, the Chief Operating Officer of Yourbiz, a marketing agency based out of Treviolo, Italy. Get an inside look at how Pietro and his colleagues integrate Wrike into their everyday operations to streamline tasks, create order out of chaos, and deliver exceptional services to clients across the globe.
“Thanks to Wrike, we solved many of our problems and generated 25% more revenue with 10% fewer resources.”
How’d they do it? Let’s dive in to get the details.
What does your company do?
PP: My company Yourbiz works with manufacturing companies that produce in Italy and sell worldwide, especially in the B2B market. We help them acquire, nurture, and transform potential customers into paying customers via demand generation activities.
What department do you work in and how is your team structured?
PP: I work with two departments: marketing and content. The marketing team has two branches — demand generation and ecommerce. This department has two team leaders and six people who work alongside us. I'm also the team leader for the content department, which has four copywriters, two SEO Specialists, and two SEM specialists.
What is your job function? Describe a day in your life using Wrike.
PP: I am the Chief Operating Officer at Yourbiz. My responsibilities span three different categories:
- Collaborating with my colleagues to support their marketing or content endeavors, provide guidance on technical matters, and help them achieve their goals.
- Overseeing the entire team's workload through Wrike, actively assisting colleagues in resolving any bugs, monitoring incoming intake requests, and creating informative dashboards for efficient information retrieval.
- As a trainer, I frequently attend events and webinars and visit prospect and customer companies to educate them on demand generation and HubSpot, sharing valuable insights and knowledge.
Which Wrike features do you feel most knowledgeable about?
PP: Wrike no longer has many secrets for me as I'm becoming an onboarding partner. I especially love:
Workload chart
The ability to see in real time how much teammates are loaded with work and to be able to make forecasts on what can be sold to obtain an optimal load.
Wrike Analyze
Even though I don't consider myself a true Wrike Analyze guru, having a background as a marketer and data analyst, I spend a lot of time creating new data visualizations and discovering trends that I never would have seen in other ways.
Automations
Coming from the CRM world, marketing automation, and CRO, being able to create automations to simplify and execute the work is a huge benefit for all our teams love. We save a ton of time and can focus more on impactful work for clients.
Please provide 2-4 examples of processes you use Wrike to support.
PP: As I mentioned in the Wrike Community, we use Wrike throughout all our business processes. Whether it's a website development, marketing campaign, or strategic analysis, we have implemented and continue to implement and maintain specific processes and blueprints to help us in the work.
Example #1: Integrating other software
The process I’m most proud of in Wrike is integrating TimeLog with our billing software. It combines information on the budget available for each project with the hours that we schedule (effort) and the hours used. This process lets us know in advance if we’ll "overrun" when entering the project. It's incredible!
Example #2: Customizing project workflows
One of our web agency’s most important services is creating client websites. All departments are involved in these activities (sales, product marketing, content, developers, graphics, etc.). It took me three weeks to implement the process — designing a large workflow, defining all the dependencies, and all the possible activities (optional and otherwise). Only at that point did we create the blueprint. Every six months we do a review because things change quickly.
Example #3: Wrike request forms
We use Wrike custom request forms for a variety of reasons, but here are the top two.
Request for quotes with new clients
We ensure a seamless and efficient client onboarding process through a dedicated request form that our sales team utilizes when approaching new clients. This form contains a comprehensive set of interview questions that our salesperson can refer to during the client meeting. By using this form within Wrike, our team avoids the need to work with external files, and all the information gathered is conveniently stored within the platform.
After the interview, if a quote is needed, a different form is filled out, specifying objectives, client budget, and analysis requirements. Wrike then automatically creates tasks and subtasks for each analysis. It’s a manual process, but our goal is to automate it in the future, ensuring more efficient client onboarding.
Transfer of new contracts
Every time a contract is signed, the salesperson must use a specific form to pass it over to operations, the administrative office, and the PM. The PM confirms the salesman's request, with an approval, and completes all the missing information in the created task using a custom item type. At this point, the operations and administration teams receive an approval. They create the job in Wrike and ERP software and kick off the tasks.
Which Wrike features or use cases do you want to learn more about?
PP: Working with production companies that produce in Italy and sell all over the world, it would be very useful to know how other similar manufacturing companies have leveraged Wrike to communicate the value of the software even to more structured companies.
What’s your story?
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