Project Management for Sales & Onboarding: Why Choose Flowla?

By
Elen Udovichenko
December 26, 2024
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Does it feel like you’re forcing a square peg into a round hole when managing your sales and onboarding processes with traditional project management tools? You’re not alone. Tools like Asana, Monday.com, and Trello are powerful for general task management, but when it comes to dynamic, buyer-centric workflows, they often fall short.

In this post, we’ll explore the key differences between traditional project management tools and Flowla, a platform designed specifically for sales and onboarding needs. By looking at common challenges and contrasting approaches, it’ll help you determine which type of tool is better suited for streamlining these critical business processes.

The problem with traditional project management tools

Traditional project management tools like Asana, Trello, and Monday.com have revolutionized general task management for businesses. However, they often fall short when applied to sales and onboarding processes, which require tools tailored to dynamic, buyer-centric workflows. Here’s where the disconnect happens:

1. Designed for internal teams

Traditional tools are inherently inward-facing. They’re great for organizing tasks within a team but struggle to accommodate collaboration with clients, buyers, or external stakeholders. Namely, if you use Asana for sales, sharing a project board with a buyer is clunky, often requiring excessive permissions, confusing interfaces, or static exports like PDFs or screenshots.

This creates silos, leaving key participants in the sales or onboarding journey without clear visibility into progress or resources.

2. One-size-fits-all approach

These tools aim to serve diverse industries and workflows, from software development to marketing campaigns. While versatile, this generality results in limited customization for sales and onboarding workflows, where the focus is on moving deals forward, building relationships, and providing seamless handoffs.

For example, a sales team might need a templated workflow for onboarding multiple clients simultaneously. Setting this up in a traditional tool often requires building custom fields, processes, and templates from scratch—time that could be better spent on revenue-driving activities.

3. Overwhelming complexity for non-technical users

Despite their broad functionality, traditional project management tools can overwhelm users with features irrelevant to their specific needs. This creates:

  • A steep learning curve, especially for teams unfamiliar with project management jargon or workflows.
  • An increased reliance on admins to set up and manage workflows, slowing down adoption and usage.

So if a leader decides to use Jira for sales pipeline or onboarding process, they might find themselves spending more time training staff on how to use it than actually closing deals.

4. Lack of asynchronous buyer enablement

Sales and onboarding processes often depend on buyers reviewing documents, timelines, or resources at their convenience. Traditional tools fail to provide an elegant, shareable interface for project management in sales and marketing that buyers can access asynchronously. This results in:

  • Fragmented communication, with key details scattered across email threads, shared drives, or third-party platforms.
  • A lack of real-time updates, leaving buyers feeling out of the loop.

As a result, buyers will often need to ask for updates or chase down deliverables, creating friction in the process.

5. Misaligned integrations

Traditional tools integrate with many apps, but they often lack deep integrations with CRM and sales-focused tech stacks. Namely, a sales team using HubSpot or Salesforce must manually transfer information from the CRM to the project management tool, risking errors and inefficiencies. 

This misalignment results in:

  • Duplicated work, with teams manually updating both their CRM and project management tool.
  • A lack of end-to-end visibility into the sales pipeline and client journey.

These challenges highlight why traditional project management tools often fail to deliver the speed, agility, and buyer-centricity needed in today’s pipeline management and onboarding processes. 

What makes Flowla different?

When comparing Flowla to traditional project management tools, it’s clear that the platform is designed with specific workflows in mind—namely sales and onboarding. This distinction allows Flowla to address challenges that generic tools often miss, offering unique advantages for teams focused on buyer engagement and process automation. Below, we’ll explore the key benefits that make Flowla a better fit for managing these critical processes.

Purpose-built for sales and onboarding

Unlike traditional project management tools, Flowla is specifically designed for the unique demands of sales and onboarding workflows. It consolidates all relevant information—timelines, resources, and updates—into a single, shareable space, eliminating the need to juggle multiple platforms or communication channels.

This streamlined approach is especially useful for asynchronous communication, allowing sales and onboarding teams to collaborate with clients and stakeholders without the constraints of real-time interactions. Buyers can access up-to-date information at their convenience, reducing back-and-forth and ensuring everyone stays aligned.

Image with screenshots from Flowla's Mutual Action Plans

Ease of use

Flowla prioritizes simplicity and efficiency in its design, offering a user-friendly interface that minimizes setup time and manual effort allowing you to easily adopt the software. Its automation features help teams streamline repetitive tasks, while pre-built templates ensure processes are consistent and easy to replicate.

In comparison, traditional tools often come with a steeper learning curve, requiring significant customization before they can support pipeline management and customer onboarding workflows effectively. This can slow down adoption and create friction within teams unfamiliar with project management platforms.

Seamless customer collaboration

Sales and onboarding workflows thrive on collaboration—not just within internal teams but also with external stakeholders like clients and buyers. Flowla fosters this by providing a shared space where all parties can interact, track progress, and exchange resources.

This buyer-focused approach helps eliminate silos and ensures a smooth handoff from sales to customer success teams. By keeping everyone on the same page, it reduces friction in the client journey and improves overall satisfaction.

These features address the common gaps found in traditional tools, offering a more aligned and effective solution for sales and onboarding teams. Instead of forcing a generic tool to fit a specialized process, Flowla provides a framework that matches the speed, collaboration, and clarity these workflows demand.

Key features comparison

Now, let’s take a closer look at the key features of traditional project management tools and how they compare to Flowla's capabilities. While traditional tools excel in general project tracking, Flowla offers a more tailored solution designed specifically for sales and onboarding processes. Here's how the two stack up.

1. Task management

Traditional tools like Asana, Trello, and Monday.com are built around task management, allowing teams to create, assign, and track tasks. These tools often include features like due dates, priority levels, and task dependencies, making it easy to keep projects on track. However, in the context of sales and onboarding, this can feel like a one-size-fits-all approach, with limited ability to cater to the unique needs of these workflows.

Flowla, on the other hand, goes beyond task management by providing templates tailored for sales and onboarding, helping teams automate repetitive actions and maintain consistent processes. While task management remains a core feature, Flowla ensures that every task is tied to the broader context of buyer engagement and progress.

2. Collaboration and communication

Both traditional tools and Flowla enable team collaboration through comments, file sharing, and real-time updates. However, traditional tools primarily serve internal teams and often lack seamless integration for working with external stakeholders like clients. This results in fragmented communication and multiple platforms for different stages of the customer journey.

Flowla is built for external collaboration, providing a shared digital space where teams and clients can access, interact with, and update the same resources. This unified approach ensures smoother communication, helping both internal teams and clients stay on the same page throughout the entire sales and onboarding process.

Decorative design with screenshots from Flowla

3. Reporting and analytics

Traditional project management tools typically offer basic reporting capabilities, such as task completion rates, project timelines, and team performance metrics. While useful for internal project tracking, these tools may not provide insights tailored to sales or customer success activities, where the focus is on customer progress, engagement, and retention.

Flowla’s reporting features are designed to track buyer interactions and onboarding milestones, offering insights into customer success metrics and areas that may need attention. These custom reports give sales and customer success teams a clear view of where each buyer stands, enabling proactive follow-ups and more personalized support.

4. Workflow automation

Automation in traditional tools often involves simple triggers like due date reminders or task assignments. While this helps streamline internal workflows, sales and onboarding processes require more dynamic automation, such as sending custom follow-ups, triggering next steps based on buyer interactions, or automatically updating a client’s progress as they move through different stages.

Flowla offers more advanced automation that’s specific to sales and onboarding, allowing teams to set up pre-defined actions that save time and reduce the manual work involved in tracking buyer progress. For example, follow-up emails, onboarding resources, and reminders can be sent automatically, freeing up teams to focus on more strategic tasks.

5. Integrations with other tools

Traditional project management tools offer a wide range of integrations with apps like Google Drive, Slack, and Dropbox, allowing teams to centralize their work in one place. However, integrating these tools with sales-focused systems like CRMs or customer success platforms often requires additional setup or third-party plugins.

Flowla integrates seamlessly with sales and customer success tools like CRMs, LMS, and communication platforms, creating a more cohesive ecosystem that ensures data flows smoothly across all systems. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and helps teams avoid the inefficiencies of siloed information.

6. User interface and experience

Traditional tools can sometimes feel cluttered, especially when used for purposes they weren’t initially designed for, such as managing buyer relationships or complex onboarding journeys. Sales and onboarding teams often find themselves adapting their internal workflows to fit the rigid structure of these tools, which can lead to frustration and inefficiency.

Flowla’s user interface is streamlined and intuitive, with a design that reflects the specific needs of sales teams and their clients. Its focus on simplicity helps reduce the friction of using the platform, making it easier for both teams and clients to navigate and engage with content without being overwhelmed by unnecessary features.

8. File and resource management

Traditional tools allow teams to share files and resources within their project boards, but this system can become cluttered when large volumes of documents, contracts, or sales materials are involved. Sales and onboarding teams often need to manage a variety of content, from contracts to product tutorials, all of which must be easily accessible to both the team and the client.

Flowla provides a centralized space to share and track all relevant documents, ensuring that important resources are always easy to find. By integrating resources into the context of the sales or onboarding process, Flowla ensures that teams and clients can access the right content at the right time, improving efficiency and reducing confusion.

content management flow

As you can see, while traditional project management tools are effective for general task management, they often fall short when applied to the specialized needs of sales and onboarding. Flowla’s features are purpose-built to address these unique challenges, providing a more tailored and effective solution for managing the buyer journey and ensuring smooth onboarding experiences.

When to choose Flowla?

While traditional project management tools can work well for general task tracking and project coordination, there are specific scenarios where Flowla’s tailored features make it the superior choice. Here are a few examples of when Flowla stands out:

  • Sales teams needing buyer enablement tools

Traditional tools are typically designed for internal task management, which means they may lack the buyer-focused capabilities that sales teams need. If your team requires a platform that centralizes buyer interactions, automates follow-ups, and provides real-time visibility into the buyer journey, Flowla is the better fit. Flowla allows you to manage and collaborate on sales content, track buyer progress, and engage in a seamless, personalized way—features that traditional tools simply aren’t designed to handle.

  • Onboarding teams juggling high client volumes

When onboarding a large number of clients simultaneously, traditional tools can become cumbersome. They may lack the flexibility needed to manage multiple client journeys in parallel and often require too much manual effort to maintain. Flowla’s automation features and customizable templates make it easier to streamline the onboarding process, ensuring that teams can manage high volumes without sacrificing the quality of the experience. Whether it’s sending automated check-ins or tracking client milestones, Flowla offers the scalability needed for teams managing numerous clients at once.

  • RevOps professionals seeking automation and scalability  

RevOps teams often need to streamline workflows across sales, marketing, and customer success—something traditional tools are not always equipped to do effectively. With Flowla’s automation capabilities, RevOps professionals can eliminate manual processes, integrate with existing tools, and ensure that all teams are aligned. Flowla allows for the kind of scalability that grows with your business, automating repetitive tasks like data entry, follow-up emails, and task assignments. This results in a more efficient workflow that saves time and resources, which traditional tools can’t always deliver.

In summary, while traditional project management tools may work well for general project management tasks, Flowla shines when your business needs a solution tailored to the fast-paced, customer-centric workflows of sales, onboarding, and RevOps teams.

Final word

Traditional project management tools may help you track tasks and organize your internal workflows, but when it comes to sales and onboarding, they often fall short. Flowla steps in where these tools leave off, offering a more streamlined, automated solution that’s designed specifically for managing the buyer journey and client onboarding.

For teams looking to boost efficiency, reduce manual work, and create a seamless experience for both clients and internal teams, Flowla provides the focused approach that traditional tools just can’t offer. If you’re ready to take your sales and onboarding processes to the next level, Flowla might be the game-changer you've been looking for.

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