Hey @Chris_Stacey, and thanks for the kind words! I’ll do my best to answer your questions, but definitely worth checking out some of Asana’s own documentation as well, especially when it comes to use cases for Portfolios vs. Projects (we tend to mostly nest things within Projects rather than Portfolios, because the majority of our tasks are basic “I need this” requests that work well within a simple Scrumban project management framework).
That being said, I would recommend using a Portfolio to track your sales workflow, with each new opp/company having its own project within the portfolio. In many ways, this will probably be easier for you to setup and use than the workflow I created, because you’ll be able to use the “relative due dates” project-level feature that isn’t available at the task level (and therefore required me to figure out my workaround). A portfolio will also allow you to create rollup views for ALL projects (i.e. new sales opps) and track overall progress towards completion at a holistic level. In our company, we typically have hundreds of active new opps open at any given time, each at varying stages of progression, so this rollup view would be extremely helpful. Also, if your sales workflow involves 30+ unique steps, it would be difficult to manage all of this from a single project view (30 steps x 10 active sales opps = 300 tasks on a single board, and that’s a conservative estimate!). You can add relevant documents and other assets to each project in Asana, which might be helpful for keeping things organized amongst your team (these will appear in the project “Overview” tab) – kind of like an old school “job jacket” when we’d keep everything in a manila folder for each account 
. Lastly, you can create standard roles in your project template – using these as placeholders in your task framework – and then assign them to individual collaborators when you use your template to create a new project. This is really helpful if, for example, you have standard tasks that would go to a BDR, but have multiple BDRs on your team – once you’ve assigned a particular BDR to a new sales opp, you would assign that person to the “BDR” role in your project template, and they will automatically be assigned and/or added to all relevant tasks in your project template.
I’m guessing you have a pretty standard workflow already established for tracking new sales opps, so to get started with an Asana portfolio workflow, I’d start by creating a project template with placeholder tasks for each step in the workflow. If you decide to create a dedicated project for each new sales opp, you won’t need to create sections for every single step in your workflow; I’d use key milestones as your sections instead, with an automated rule that will move completed tasks to a dedicated “Completed” section on the far right. That way, you can look at the project in either “list” or “board” view to quickly see what milestone you’re currently at, and what tasks are remaining to be completed.
You can set the template up with relative due dates (e.g. “n# days after project start date”) for each task, which will be automatically populated when you create a new project, using the project creation date as the starting point. You should define task dependencies as much as possible in your initial template, which will allow you to dynamically adjust dates across all dependent tasks (this is the challenge I had to solve with my workaround, as relative due dates don’t work like this at the sub-task level). So, let’s say you create your project template with “Step 1” due 5 days after the project has been created, and “Step 2” – marked as “blocked by” Step 1 – due 10 days after project creation. If the due date for Step 1 is adjusted (let’s say you move it back by 2 days), the date range for Step 2 will automatically adjust as well (to start and end 2 days later than in the initial project template). Any other tasks that are marked as dependencies (“blocked by”) of Step 1 OR Step 2 will also have their due dates adjusted accordingly as well. This makes maintaining an accurate timeline WAY easier.
For any branch points, I would suggest creating automation rules to manage your next steps. How you set these up is your call, but you can do things like adding a custom field with single-select options for “Invoice, nurture, hold”, with each option triggering a different automation (e.g. “Invoice” gets assigned to someone on Finance and marks project status “complete”; “hold” adjusts due date for current task by +6 months – which then automatically adjusts the due date by =6 mos. for all dependent tasks after it – and sets project status to “on hold”). There are plenty of help docs and threads in the Asana forums about this, but honestly it’s pretty easy to setup.
Lastly, because I needed my workflow to work using tasks/sub-tasks, I utilized Asana’s automation rules to create my “template” rather than using a more traditional, dedicated project template. Again, this was largely because of how we use Asana in our organization already, but it’s more of a workaround than best-practice. If you decide to use a Portfolio for your top-level nesting (instead of a Project, like we do), you can create a Project template that won’t require nearly as much custom automation/rules as my setup.
Hope this helps, and next time I’m down in DC I just might take you up on the offer 
Cheers!
~Kendal
