Through its evolution into a widely successful, publicly-traded company, Asana remains an affordable and easy-to-use project management solution for small and large companies alike. In fact, many of Asana’s core features are still ideal for SMB users. For example, Asana’s simple navigation and quick onboarding make it easy for users and teams to get started using the tool.
Through Asana’s continued success as a leading task and project management tool for small organizations, as more of Asana’s customer base has matured and grown, the company has also shifted its offering towards larger businesses.
This change in focus is visible in Asana’s product development and messaging. The company has released new features targeted at large companies, such as admin tools, advanced security, and integrations. Additionally, Asana has been ramping up its marketing and sales efforts to target enterprise buyers.
What is an enterprise buyer?
Asana has a pretty clear definition of an enterprise buyer – mainly associated with the investment in Asana’s product. Asana buckets these customers in 2 tiers – those spending over $5,000 annually, and those spending over $50,000 annually on the product. Asana has identified these businesses as a key market segment and is now focusing its efforts on meeting the needs of these customers.
One of the challenges faced by enterprise buyers is that they often have very specific needs that are difficult to meet with off-the-shelf products. Asana’s custom field and workflow features are designed to bring additional power and flexibility to address this challenge. Additionally, Asana offers a wide range of integrations with other software products, allowing enterprises to easily connect their existing workflows with Asana.
At Velocity, we look at enterprise buyers a bit more holistically. We focus not on the amount being spent, but rather on the internal capabilities of the organization and the number of employees. We try to take a broader look at the customer-facing organizations that are using project management software and account for their needs.
How is project management different for enterprise buyers?
Enterprises have different needs than small businesses, which means different priorities and product features. In larger organizations, projects can often span multiple departments and dozens (or hundreds!) of users, so it’s essential to have transparency and insights across the departments. Security is also a big concern, especially for organizations with sensitive customer, financial, or medical data.
Enterprise buyers are often looking for project management software to help manage projects effectively and drive strategic outcomes across multiple departments. They want options that allow them to create workflows specific to their unique needs and access features that encourage collaboration and transparency between teams.
Asana is a great option for organizations facing these challenges because it addresses each of them very well. It has built-in accountability features, project management workflow tools, and advanced security controls that make it a great choice for enterprises who want their software to be as efficient as possible.
Asana for the enterprise
Asana’s product updates, especially over the last year, have made Asana a very capable tool for enterprise organizations. We dive into some of these new features below:
Security and Admin Management
With Asana, Administrators have complete visibility into what is happening across the organization, who is doing it, and where that information lies.
Asana offers multiple types of admin roles, with super admins being the highest level of administrative role in Asana. They have complete and unrestricted access to all data in the account. This is necessary for companies that need to follow specific compliance regulations.
Admins can create groups of users with specific permissions so that they cannot edit or access certain projects and data. This guarantees that sensitive data isn’t freely available to all users. With two-factor authentication (2FA) available, admins can provide further protection and security against unauthorized access.
If you’re an IT leader looking for a powerful way to manage permissions and security for your team, Asana is an extremely viable solution. With multiple admin roles and 2FA, you can delegate permissions and safeguard sensitive data while keeping your team productive.
Work Graph (newly released!)
Larger organizations often have work that’s distributed across multiple teams and departments. Understanding who is doing what, where, and when can be complicated and onerous. Asana introduced a unique data model called the Asana Work Graph earlier this year to solve this problem.
The Work Graph is built on Asana’s unique task graph data structure, which makes sure that all tasks are connected to at least one other task. This allows for a much more accurate depiction of how work flows across an organization.
The Work Graph is also accessible through Asana’s API and can be integrated into existing tools and processes. This makes it easy for organizations to start with Asana and continue using the tools and processes they’re already comfortable using.
Integrations + API
Today, a tool cannot sit alone, as many businesses already have systems they have invested deeply in. Fortunately, the Asana ecosystem is expansive and ever-growing, making it possible to connect Asana with the tools you use every day.
Asana partners provide a vast array of solutions that help teams work smarter and faster. From Salesforce to Adobe, Slack to Atlassian, Asana has integrations and plugins that help to expand its capabilities with software and products that are deeply embedded within organizations.
The Asana API is also growing in popularity as a way for developers to create custom integrations. With the Asana API, developers like Velocity can create integrations that allow teams to access and work with Asana data in new and innovative ways.
Enterprise Reporting
Enterprise customers often have specific needs for their data reporting. Asana has greatly improved its internal reporting tools, but many teams need more than what Asana provides within its platform. This is where Velocity comes in.
With Universal Reporting, teams can get a high-level overview of all their projects in one place. This is a helpful feature for teams who are just getting started with Asana or for teams who want to get a quick snapshot of their progress within the Asana UI.
However, sometimes Universal Reporting doesn’t provide the level of detail and flexibility that superusers need. With Velocity, teams can access their data to create the reports, charts, and live data exports that give them power and flexibility to get key insights on their project management data.
As Asana continues to grow with Enterprise customers, reporting needs will continue to mature as well.
The ability to create custom reports on increasingly complex and unique data sets is crucial. We often hear from organizations that they want access to their Asana data to create dashboards in Business Intelligence tools, combine Asana data with other data sources, or just create a spreadsheet with their data without having to manually create CSV exports.
Questions? Feedback? Not sure where to start? Feel free to email us or visit our website for a 7-day free trial and find out if Velocity is right for you!