Get to Know Brian Nourani: New Wrike President and Chief Revenue Officer
Earlier this year, Wrike caught a boomerang. No, not the wooden kind, the type where a much-loved employee comes back after taking another role. Brian Nourani previously served as Senior Vice President, Global Sales at Wrike where he grew the business in North America, EMEA, and APAC. This included building our global enterprise business from its inception and participating in two successful exits in 2021 and 2022. Recently, Brian rejoined Wrike as our President and Chief Revenue Officer, and we’re excited to have him back. Brian has over 13 years of senior sales leadership experience providing strategic and operational guidance for revenue generation. In addition to his time as CRO at Khoros, Brian served as VP of Sales at Tealium and held regional sales roles at Oracle. He returns with a deep understanding of the Wrike business and the enterprise selling motion, both in the areas of expansion and customer acquisition. We knew a Q&A would be the perfect informal format to help our customers and the general public get to know Brian and learn about his experience, his goals, and what makes him tick. Q: Let’s hear why you’re here! A: I’m thrilled to be back at Wrike at a time when the company is looking to expand its business to more verticals. I couldn’t pass up the chance to join a high-energy team in a competitive space and help drive Wrike’s go-to-market strategy and meet the growing market demand for work management software. We’re going to make this an incredibly successful next chapter for the organization and our customers. Q: Tell us about three critical career moves you’ve made. A: Making the move from fintech to tech, which gave me the opportunity to join a great company like Oracle, helping them open their new hub in Los Angeles. I had the opportunity to work with several executives and learn from highly talented individuals through my time at Oracle, specifically seeing their transformation from on-premise to cloud. Next would be my career change, moving to Wrike in 2019 after the Vista Equity Partners acquisition, building the global enterprise business, partnering with countless Fortune 500 customers and seeing two successful exits. Third, would be re-entering Wrike in 2023 as President and CRO. Q: What brought you back to Wrike? A: The new ownership through Symphony Technology Group, the vision, and new leadership through Tom Scott were all very exciting to me. Coming back to Wrike gives me the opportunity to work with so many great people, including customers I built relationships with in the past. I’m excited to take the reins leading our go-to-market organization and influence real change across the business. And I would be remiss not to say, my fellow Wrikers and the culture of innovation and camaraderie at Wrike played a big part in my return. Previously, I had the opportunity to work in the San Diego office with so many great people. Then COVID hit, and we transitioned to remote work and worked through so many challenges. It brought all of us closer together and helped build strong, lasting relationships. I also enjoy visiting Wrikers in other offices. We had a company kickoff in 2020 right before the pandemic, and I got to meet our international teams in Galway, Ireland, and then our AMS employees in San Diego. That event was a blast, and something I will always remember. Q: As Wrike’s new CRO, what are you most excited about? A: The demand has never been greater for a versatile, collaborative work management platform like ours. Wrike will continue to accelerate innovation that’s focused on solving dynamic workplace challenges and meeting the needs of the modern workforce. I am excited to work closely with Symphony Technology Group, my fellow ELT members, and the full team at Wrike to continue to deliver value to our customers and employees globally. Q: What are some of the most impactful changes you’ve made since returning to Wrike? A: Building out a new “pod” structure gives our customer-facing teams the ability to work more collaboratively and serve our customers in a more efficient way. We’re already developing and implementing company-specific sales methodologies, territory and team structures, and new quotas and commission plans, as well as more sophisticated pipeline management and reporting. All of these changes are designed to improve the customer experience. Q: What are areas for potential growth for Wrike? A: I would like to see Wrike continue to lead the way in the collaborative work management space as the most innovative solution in the market — standing at the forefront of artificial intelligence. I believe AI empowers teams to streamline their processes, eliminating time-consuming manual tasks. This enables team members to shift their focus on to more strategic and creative aspects of their work, promoting higher levels of engagement. As a company, we have a great opportunity to be a leader in our space, actively helping our customers streamline work processes for maximum efficiency, empowering teams across all departments to collaborate, manage projects, drive strategic initiatives, and achieve goals. A few rapid-fire favorites: Favorite book? Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, by Jim Collins. I love this book because you will learn what it takes to be a top leader, why building the right team is so critical, and why “stop doing” is as important as what you should do. Favorite quote? “Leaders get out in front and stay there by raising the standards by which they judge themselves — and by which they are willing to be judged.” Frederick W Smith, CEO of Fedex Favorite country? England London, England is so culturally rich and such a diverse city, with centuries of history, not to mention amazing tea! There is so much to see and do in London, from the markets, to the food and architecture — it’s impossible not to love! Favorite Wrike feature? Request forms and automation. Brian will be delivering a keynote at our sixth annual virtual Collaborate event in November. He’ll be sharing impactful customer success stories you won’t want to miss. Save your spot today! Register for Collaborate
Wrike Helps Yourbiz Earn 25% More Revenue With 10% Fewer Resources
“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. Try Wrike free 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! Try Wrike free 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. Try Wrike free 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? Want to tell your Wrike story and be featured in a customer spotlight? Join our exclusive customer advocacy program where you can connect and network with other Wrike users. When you do, you’ll get your chance to earn points, badges, and rewards by completing fun activities, participating in the Wrike Community, and amplifying the Wrike brand.
Step-By-Step Process How To Build a Wrike Request Form
Work requests can be big, or small, come in via email, direct message, conference call, and of course, the most dreaded — the "pop-in" request. With a variety of channels, it can be chaotic and difficult to keep track of everything and what projects are high priority. Not anymore with Wrike’s custom request forms. What are Wrike request forms? Wrike's request forms help you automate your work intake, route all requests to one place from internal and external customers, and ensure requesters provide the information you need. Translation: you have more control and can kickstart work immediately. Request forms don’t just streamline work intake, they also enable you to create tasks, workflows, and entire projects automatically — saving you and your team hours of time. Wrike request forms can also launch blueprints, which are templates for new work items and are designed to replicate recurring tasks such as writing a new blog post or press release. During this process, all necessary tasks, owners, and due dates are automatically created as well. When you create a project from a blueprint via the request form, project progress settings are preserved, along with the date and custom field rollup settings and the statuses of any subitems. In the end, request forms and blueprints both increase efficiency, helping you save time and eliminate admin work so that you can start focusing immediately on more impactful work. How to build request forms in Wrike Step 1: Navigate to the space where you want to create a request form Step 2: Click the gear icon in the top-right corner Try Wrike free Step 3: Select Request forms Step 4: Click ‘Create a Request form’ if it’s the first request form in the space, or + Form if the space already contains existing forms. Step 5: Insert form information Enter a name for your request form (Optional) Provide a description for the form to help users understand what it’s for and when to submit it. Move to the right-hand panel and specify: The space your form should belong to Who should be able to see the form (everyone in your Wrike account, specific users and groups, or nobody in your account) If the form should create a new task or project, duplicate a task or project, or create an item from a blueprint Note: to create an item from a blueprint, first select ‘Duplicate task’ or ‘Duplicate project’ from this dropdown, then select ‘template task,’ and finally, the ‘blueprint’ tab. (Optional) Designate whether you want to enable a public link to the form (for non-Wrike users) and if it should trigger email notifications or contain a CAPTCHA security feature (Optional) Select the folder, project, or space where the items created via the form should be placed Note: If you don’t select anything at this step, the item created via form submission will be placed in the ‘Shared with me’ folder (Optional) Select a status for the task or folder that will be created after form submission. If you don’t select a status, tasks and projects created via request submission will have the first active status of the workflow applied to the folder, project, or space where they’re created. (Optional) Select a user to assign the created task or project (Optional) Set up an approval to be created via the request form (Optional) Add a prefix. You can set a prefix for tasks and projects duplicated via a request. The prefix will be a specified answer and is added to all associated subfolders, subprojects, tasks, and subtasks upon submission. Step 6: Customize form inputs After completing the steps above, click + Add question Select the question type you’d like to add from the dropdown menu Try Wrike free Step 7: Customization continued Enter your question and available answers (depending on the question type) (Optional) Enter ‘helper’ text to add additional information about the question. This information is visible to requesters but won’t appear on the resulting task or project. Click ‘Required’ to make a given question mandatory to complete and submit the form. You can also make questions and answers in your request form conditional, so requesters are redirected to different questions based on their form inputs. You can also map responses telling Wrike how to use certain answers in the created task or project Publish or save your new request form How will you use Wrike request forms to organize work? For more details and to learn more about Wrike’s request forms, visit our help center. To set up an approval process in Wrike, please take a look at this how-to article.
Navigating the Shift to Efficient Marketing: Leverage Wrike for Maximum Results
Please note: As of October 26, 2023, the Marketing Insights add-on is no longer available to new customers. Don’t worry, our award-winning software still offers robust support for marketing teams to measure and report on performance data. Check out our pricing page or contact our sales team for more information. Following an era of “growth at all costs,” many organizations are pulling back due to the uncertain economic climate, and efficiency is now the name of the game. In an effort to improve efficiency, marketing teams are tightening their budgets and focusing on campaigns that produce maximum results. Delivering value to customers and stakeholders is more important than ever, and having real-time, end-to-end visibility into campaign performance is crucial for marketing success. To achieve this, teams must efficiently execute impactful multi-channel campaigns and measure their outcomes. Easily digestible data is essential for understanding and sharing marketing impact with stakeholders. However, limited visibility across campaigns and channels makes this challenging. Different teams often manage channels and produce separate reports, resulting in time wasted consolidating resources and findings. This is where Wrike comes in, offering unparalleled support as a comprehensive work management platform for marketing and creative teams. The need for a single source of truth The pressure is on for marketing teams to prove their strategies are driving results, despite having fewer resources to execute work. Identifying and implementing impactful campaigns across multiple channels and measuring success is a challenge if you don’t have real-time visibility across every project and campaign. And what’s hampering that visibility? Too many disconnected apps. As a result of remote and hybrid work, organizations deployed more applications to support disparate teams, and marketers now use 15 apps on average each day to complete work. Because of this surge in applications, employees and heads of departments find it increasingly difficult to understand exactly what work is underway and its progress; what has been completed; and how that work relates to, supports, or even counteracts strategic initiatives and company goals. The result is the Dark Matter of Work. Just as CERN identified Dark Matter as the “invisible” content that makes up 95% of the mass of the universe, the Dark Matter of Work represents activity and information that we can’t immediately see but that has a powerful influence on everything around it. Dark Matter exists in texts, apps, video calls, spreadsheets, and conversations, and has a gravitational mass that can easily pull business and projects in the wrong direction. Most business function leaders only have visibility into 55% of the work taking place within their departments. And only 37% of business leaders understand how their teams are performing against goals and objectives. Marketers need an integrated platform to easily access and present performance metrics and communicate impact more meaningfully. This is where Wrike excels. Try Wrike for free Introducing improved Wrike Marketing Insights: The game changer for marketing teams Wrike is the only work management solution empowering marketers to optimize cross-channel ROI and ad spend to connect end-to-end processes and bring together campaign management, asset production, and performance insights into a single platform, allowing marketing teams to move at the speed of digital. With Wrike Marketing Insights, marketers can integrate 15 popular digital tools across advertising, social media, and marketing automation and watch their data roll in, automatically giving them 360-degree visibility into full-funnel performance insights. That way, teams can easily identify high-performing initiatives while flagging those that underperform and pivot as needed within their workflow for optimization. Wrike Marketing Insights also provides instant access to project status, campaign performance, and resource investments. By opening metrics up to all and breaking down team silos, Wrike increases operational efficiencies across the entire organization and allows marketing teams to move much faster and more successfully. Here are just a few ways marketing teams can use Wrike Marketing Insights: Creative: Wrike enables creative teams to work in a connected way in one centralized location. From asset creation, review, approval to publishing and tracking. Creative teams can see the return on assets and show the impact they make. Digital: Campaigns that are integrated through various channels have many touch points and Wrike allows them to have the essential visibility and insights that they need to identify the impactful campaigns. With Wrike they can achieve full-funnel visibility into their performance and innovate as they go in an easy to use interface. Marketing Ops/Project Management: Align all marketing teams and gain visibility into how efforts translate to campaign success metrics. Wrike allows them to focus on initiatives that drive the most impact and quickly identify problem areas. Try Wrike for free Wrike’s a cut above the rest The post-pandemic challenges in marketing demand a robust and comprehensive solution that enables teams to move at the speed of digital. Wrike provides the tools and platform for optimizing ad spend, managing resources effectively, and demonstrating marketing impact on a granular level. By unifying team efforts, maintaining transparency, and promoting more efficient collaboration, Wrike is the go-to platform for driving successful marketing campaigns in today’s uncertain times.
FAQ: Wrike Experts Answer Everything About Custom Item Types
Over the years, Wrike has become known as the most intuitive and versatile work management platform, one that any team, department, or company can leverage for work. No two teams are alike; they adhere to different workflows and have unique terminology and processes. So, it’s only logical to offer users the flexibility to configure their work however they need. Enter: Wrike Custom item types. This feature is unique to Wrike, enabling teams to go beyond generic tasks and projects. Translation: Wrike adapts to you, not the other way around. Our platform speaks your team’s language, so you can tailor work items in whichever way suits you best. ‘Work your own way’ has never been more true than it does today with Custom item types. During a recent webinar, Wrike experts Andrey Moskvin and Ryan Candela introduced Custom item types, and we caught up with them after to get some more insight. The questions here were collected from webinar attendees along with our Collaborate 2022 session. For an in-depth demo, please watch the webinar here, but until then, enjoy the Q&A below. QUESTION: Do Custom item types eliminate the need for projects for fairly simple workflows? A: No, if you prefer, you can keep using native project and task types for your work items where it’s relevant. Though, some teams don’t feel comfortable relying on project management terminology and prefer their own language to name work. In that case, you can use Custom item types, which are tailored derivatives of a native task or project with very similar attributes, but with the ability to configure the layout, fields, automation rules, parent-child relations, and set specific naming and icons. Furthermore, Custom item types can be unique to the Space where the team is operating. To sum up, you can rely on out-of-the-box Wrike Projects or make it your own project-based work item type — whichever works best for your use case and work style. QUESTION: Can we update current tasks to Custom item types? A: Yes! Open a task and hover over the three dots. Scroll down to “Change item type” to select a Custom item type you've created. You can also change the item back to a task if you want. The detailed step-by-step process is covered in this help center article. QUESTION: Can we set up a recurring Custom item type? A: Yes! Custom item types (and any item with the new Work Item View) now have the option to add recurrences. Feel free to ideate and create item types for regular activities, such as meeting notes, sprint reviews, company all-hands agendas, and many more. Try Wrike for free QUESTION: Can you provide information on when to use a Blueprint vs a Custom item type? A: Blueprints are meant to help quickly create a project without starting from scratch and serve to templatize work structure, assignments, and other details in any work item. Blueprints are commonly used for recurring work and usually contain pre-filled content, assignees, and/or dates. Custom item types don’t have pre-filled content (except the description field) and serve as types of work items allowing you to configure fields, layout, and automation rules. A Custom item type defines key characteristics of work elements and specifies the parent-child relationship between objects. Custom item types and Blueprints work great in tandem. Custom items can be used as Blueprint building blocks as any regular work item (task, project, folder). You can simply build a new work structure based on a mix of tasks and your own items, add values to the fields, add sub-items, and finally templatize it all as a Blueprint. For existing Blueprints, you can make adjustments and convert some tasks to relevant Custom items when it makes sense for your scenario. Also, both Blueprints and stand-alone Custom item types can be used with our powerful dynamic request forms — the selection depends on your specific use case. QUESTION: Is there a gallery of examples of creative ways to use Custom item types? A: You can visit our help page which features a few examples along with a three-minute video on how to set up Custom item types. The Wrike community page also highlights some use case templates, and you can expect to see more templates — with out-of-the-box custom types — for various use cases in 2023. QUESTION: How do Projects and Custom item types co-exist in a marketing/creative services team? A: The best practice is to set up and rely on Space-specific, project-based Custom item types, like Campaigns, Events, or Press Releases. Your own types can then be configured to include only relevant task-type subitems, like Copy, Brief, Ad, Promo, etc. that include the same values. Marketing and creative services teams will benefit from having familiar terminology, standardized behavior, an intuitive layout, and field names (removing all unnecessary fields and clutter). Some teams may still be used to existing Wrike projects and tasks and willing to experiment with only a few work item types. In this case, they can work with both, and start noticing the benefits of Custom item types. For instance, type- and space-specific automation rules and fields that bring unique business logic to work streams. Once teams adopt Custom item types and decide to switch, it’s easy to convert existing work items to the specific type they need. If there are still initiatives (like cross-functional activities) that don’t fall under this category and miss a dedicated item type, we recommend you rely on our native Project and Task types instead. Marketing and creative users will still have the option to add these items to their Space and manage projects alongside project-based Custom items using Wrike views, progress tracking, and risk prediction. QUESTION: Are the item types already supported in API Calls and BI export? A: Custom item types are supported in API. BI export support is not ready yet but is on our roadmap, and we'll make an announcement when it’s available. QUESTION: Can Custom item types be usable in multiple Spaces, but not account-wide? A: Custom item types are configured one of two ways — Space-specific or account-wide. At this time, it’s not possible to pick and choose which Spaces they appear in or to convert between Space- and account-level Custom item types. To clarify, you can: Create and manage Space-level Custom item types in one Space only Create real work items based on the Custom item type catalog related to this Space, or account-wide Tag Custom item type-based work items to other locations, i.e. other Spaces or folders and projects from the other Spaces Try Wrike for free QUESTION: Can we filter by Custom item types in Wrike Analyze, reports, calendars, and dashboards? A: Yes! We provide full support across reports, calendars, dashboards, and various Wrike views (table, board, Gantt, etc.). Pinnacle customers can also filter in Wrike Analyze. Get started with Custom item types today Custom item types unleash Wrike’s power and configurability to unprecedented levels, but it’s worth mentioning that not all users have access to create and manage them. For security and governance reasons, Custom item types are managed by Space and Account administrators depending on their respective needs. Want to add Custom item types to your team’s toolkit? If you’re on a ‘Business’ plan or higher, good news — you already have access! For other Wrike users, please contact your customer success representative about upgrading today. Now, the only remaining question is — how will you configure Wrike for your team?
