Leads.io finds a better way to ‘buy and build’ with Asana

Leads.io is a one-stop shop with a vision to become the biggest lead generator in the world. However, achieving this ambition via a focused ‘buy and build' strategy was a complex undertaking as Sjoerd Knol, Chief Process Officer at Leads.io, explained: “Business growth may signify success, but as the team grows, so do the workloads, and it all becomes more difficult to manage.” 

The Anatomy of Work Index indicates that managers lose 62% of their workdays to ‘work about work’. With responsibility for operational efficiency, Sjoerd leveraged the company’s tech-savviness to avoid a management headache as the business scaled. Primarily, the company needed the capability to standardise ways of working as new acquisitions joined, as well as know how to continuously improve to boost operational efficiency over time. 

“We chose Asana because it allowed users to set up workflows and manage their workloads without needing technical expertise,” explained Sjoerd. “And with the ability to add tasks to multiple projects, we can combine tasks from across departments into a general project overview, so we always have oversight to all the information we need.” 

Getting started with Asana is so simple

Taking advantage of Asana’s APIs, Sjoerd automated the migration. And through empowerment he secured the cultural buy-in to make the change stick. “We spent two weeks with the campaign management team to identify active projects, but Migrator.xyz stopped us from needing to manually transfer work to Asana,” said Sjoerd. “We established a help desk for technical support, but left it to the managers to decide how to best engage their teams and roll it out. It helped that Asana has such a user-friendly interface - it made the transition really simple.” 

Simplified work management brings clarity

Bigger teams and bigger workloads put Leads.io at risk of operational silos, which could adversely affect the business - according to The Anatomy of Work Index, 22% of employees miss deadlines because of uncertainty over priorities, while 129 hours are wasted on duplicated work each year.

Delivering greater clarity and transparency over what every person was working on, Asana provided a one-stop source that enabled Leads.io to retain control of the business as it scaled. Sjoerd explained, "To generate leads for a client can require us to set up multiple landing pages – and each page is treated as an individual project. The Portfolio options in Asana help us to structure these separate projects and keep track of the current campaign status per client.

“We link tasks across multiple projects so that when we tick off an action – for example, working on new creatives – the status is updated wherever the project resides. And then My Tasks is a very practical way to ensure our people know their priorities, can structure their daily workflow, and assign tasks to others.”

The changes have also removed the need for meetings on ‘work about work’ – an activity The Anatomy of Work Index shows to waste 129 hours per year. As Sjoerd explained, “With Asana we just don’t have certain meetings anymore. Our managers don’t need to spend an hour every morning setting priorities, and we don’t have a big campaign status update – anyone can check Asana anytime. It’s a far more efficient way of working.”

By eliminating long group emails Asana has simplified our work management.”

Intelligent insights unlock continuous improvements

Manually pulling data to learn from past projects would cost Leads.io more than the project made. It left the business running blind, unable to see where or how to optimise performance. However, Asana also brings clarity to processes, which The Anatomy of Work Index shows could save 257 hours per year.

Able to extract data about operational performance, Leads.io finally had access to sustainable intelligence that determines where continuous improvements would have the biggest impact. “The biggest win Asana has given us is better occupancy rates,” explained Sjoerd. “By integrating Asana with our Business Intelligence tool, Tableau, we can see how much work is done, how long it takes to set up and complete, and how long each stage in the process is and why. It gives us a much better grip on each department because we can see how their workload evolves - week over week, month over month, year over year - to identify peak times and know when to hire additional support.”

Asana reduced our product set up time by 35% – including client approval.”

Standardised workflows set expectations upfront

Although an effective way to scale, a buy and build strategy could add unnecessary operational complexity, unless Leads.io implemented a consistent way of working across all acquisitions. Asana provided a simple way to get everybody on the same page quickly, which The Anatomy of Work Index shows can save 5.4 hours per week.

“Asana standardised our processes and made them easy to follow,” said Sjoerd. “People simply copy the template into their client campaign, which contains all the tasks that need to be completed and allows work to be assigned to others. The whole project is clearly laid out, and everyone knows what’s expected of them.

“And because we set up our templates as a big checklist of actions to be completed, we no longer need to write standard operating procedures – everything is integrated into the workflow.”

Product plans used to take a campaign manager at least two hours to complete – Asana does it in one second.”

Accelerating the growth trajectory

Already a major player, Leads.io generates over 5 million leads annually for 2600 clients worldwide. But the company is still in hot pursuit of its vision to become the global leader in lead generation – scaling far beyond its current 250 specialists and 11 global offices to help more businesses reach their audiences and get the best possible ROI from their leads.

Leveraging Asana’s capabilities is key to this future growth. “When we work on campaign strategy between different departments, it takes time to manually get the right information in the right place to reach the right conclusions,” explained Sjoerd. “But if we hook Asana’s APIs into our existing systems - like our self-development marketing performance tool BERT, Client Portal and Google Workspace - we avoid duplication of effort and improve the quality of our data, because the custom fields are automatically populated. 

“There’s also more we can do when linking tasks across multiple projects. For example, if we apply automated rules to ensure new tasks added to a template are extracted out the back end. Not only does this save more manual effort, it prevents any new part of the process being lost or forgotten as we scale.

“Ultimately, Asana gives us a better way to achieve our vision of success.”