CRM Gantt View: Usability enhancements, new settings, and support for more object types

Per the panel, the CRM Gantt view now supports custom objects, tickets, contacts, companies, marketing events, orders, courses, listings, appointments, and meetings. You pick the start and end date properties in the new Gantt settings, including custom date properties, add task properties as columns, and choose more properties to show on the bars. There is an hours timescale, faded bars for records missing a start or end date, a table you can collapse, zoom buttons, and checkbox selection for bulk actions. It is live, and as Casey said on air, “This is live, though, so not a beta that you need to opt into.” The panel lists Marketing, Sales, Service, Content and Data Hub at Starter, Professional and Enterprise, and Smart CRM and Revenue Hub at Professional and Enterprise. That list is its own small story about how hub licensing is changing.

I picked this one first because I am excited for our Unified Revenue View conversation on Thursday, and Ryan asked the right question: how am I connecting the dots between work management and Gantt charts? Think about your best customer. Often the whole journey was great, from marketing through sales, service, support, success and renewal, and it is very hard to see all of that in one view, let alone template it for the next company that looks just like them. So “imagine a company record being at the top, and then all of these project records underneath.” Marketing sets up a VIP lunch and learn. Then a technical review, an executive review, a budget conversation. People try to shove all of that into a deal pipeline. You want to know which stage of the deal you are in, but you do not want the sales team owning every one of those tasks and projects, when in reality, those things are happening on other systems.

Here is what I want to test, and these are my questions, not things we saw on air. How easy is it to flip between different objects underneath, and can you have more than one? Orders are in there now, so I should be able to see everything that happened before activation, then the order. Custom objects are in there, which means I get to show deliverables. And the hours timescale: “Not that I advocate for measuring hours at all, but visually just to understand what the day needs, that can be super helpful.” I use a lot of appointment records, so that one matters to me. Ryan's read was the same direction: “the whole premise that you'd be able to look at a company and see all the connected pieces that actually relate to their time … the timeline of them starting and also renewing, I think is actually really cool.”

What to do: open a Gantt view this week on an object you already plan work in, such as projects, appointments, or a custom object. Set the start and end date properties in the new settings and look for faded bars, because those are the records missing dates. If you want to see a customer's journey, try a company with its projects underneath. If you never use Gantt view, you can skip this until you do.