Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. This week, we reach the end of the year, a time to pause and reflect on experiences of the last twelve months. Enjoy this week’s tips!

	Use Insightly’s Reports to Measure Progress
	Insightly’s opportunity reports are a great way to assess the progress of your business over the last year. Different reports use different parameters to gather their data, so make the most of them by entering essential information when creating your opportunities. Key fields include the Forecast Close Date, the Opportunity Value, and the Probability of Winning.

Look Back to Improve Your Business

Keeping a business running requires loads of work and focus as you’re working to close the next deal and hustling to keep up with current customer demand. The year-end is a good time to pause and consider the highs and lows of 2014: What made the good deals shine and what contributed to the ones that slipped by? Don’t sweat the missed opportunities—after all, you can’t go back in time. Instead, see them as a chance to learn and make things better for next year. Think about the processes you’ve always wanted to improve and try out new tools or software features that can increase productivity. By being as objective as possible in your assessment and investing some time in improvements, you can increase efficiency, lower expenses, and boost future sales!

Your Own Money Matters

Your holiday spending or charitable donations may have called attention to your personal finances, but that money is flowing during the rest of the year, too. Just as you have to regularly manage your business finances, your personal financial future is an ongoing consideration. Take a look at your savings, debt, and spending over the last year. If you haven’t created a budget, start planning one for 2015. And don’t forget to put aside something for savings and retirement—your future self will be very thankful that you did!

Send Us Your Tips

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If you haven’t tried Insightly, everyone’s favorite CRM, sign up for our 14-day free trial for all features or our free account for the basics. Our full list of features is available on our pricing page.

As we reach the end of the year, it’s a natural time for reflection. You might find yourself thinking about the things you’ve learned, reviewing your achievements, and planning your goals for the new year.

If growing your business is among your New Year’s resolutions, but you’re not sure where to begin, we’ve compiled a list of some of the best small business books of 2014 to help you reach your goal.

	Accounting for the Numberphobic: A Survival Guide for Small Business Owners by Dawn Fotopulos Does the word “accounting” fill you with dread? Never fear—Dawn Fotopulos is here! In this book, she demystifies accounting through illustrated real-world examples. You’ll learn simple steps you can put into practice to better measure and understand the health of your business.
	A World Gone Social: How Companies Must Adapt to Survive by Ted Coine and Mark Babbit If you think having a social media strategy is just for big companies, think again. Through stories of social media success and failure at organizations like Zappos, Bank of America, and Southwest Airlines, you’ll learn all you need to know to not only survive the world of social media, but to actually thrive.
	Nonstop Sales Boom: Powerful Strategies to Drive Consistent Growth Year after Year by Colleen Francis If your sales results unpredictably waver between highs and lows, this book is for you. You’ll learn how to break the cycle by recognizing and nurturing all four critical stages of client engagement, resulting in a regular flow of prospects moving seamlessly through your sales pipeline.
	The Small Business Life Cycle: A No-Fluff Guide to Navigating the Five Stages of Small Business Growth by Charlie Gilkey Whether you’re just starting out or have been around the block a time or two, this book is a must-read for small business owners. It will help you to determine which of the five stages of small business growth you’re currently in and, more importantly, what you need to do to make your business grow stronger.
	The Daily Entrepreneur: 33 Success Habits for Small Business Owners, Freelancers, and Aspiring 9-to-5 Escape Artists by Rebecca Livermore You can train yourself to build a successful business, the trick is to establish habits that will get you there. This book will help you do just that. You’ll learn valuable lessons such as how to stand out from the competition, how to overcome stress and burnout, and even how to build solid business connections—all with the goal of helping you run your business more efficiently.

If you’re not already using Insightly CRM to review this year’s work or lay out your tasks for 2015, try all of our features with a 14-day free trial or register for a free account for the basics!

Jess Greene-Pierson is Insightly’s Senior Customer Experience Manager, and she’s passionate about helping our customers get the most out of Insightly and grow their business.

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday from Insightly CRM, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

Tag Contacts When Sending Them to MailChimp

Many customers with Insightly paid subscriptions are using our MailChimp integration to keep in touch with groups of Insightly contacts. If you’re sending out email campaigns or other communications, use Insightly’s tagging feature to keep track of which contacts have received an email.After you’ve selected contacts and sent them over to MailChimp, they will still be selected on the Contacts tab, so you can quickly use our bulk editing feature to tag them with information about the email. Include a date in the tag, and each time you view a contact, you’ll be able to spot when they received the last MailChimp email!

Stay in Touch With Your Customers

Sustaining business relationships, from your customers to your employees, is vital to small business growth. Keep the door for communication open by sending newsletters, company or industry updates, or holiday messages at regular intervals—a “drip marketing” strategy. You don’t want to overdo it and have your emails relegated to someone’s spam folder, so keep track of your communication history. Not only will you keep your business contacts informed, but you’ll be more likely to receive feedback, referrals, and repeat business!

Nurture Your Personal Relationships

Making a small business a big business takes a lot of work and time, so your work life and personal life can easily get out of balance. Actively nurturing good personal relationships helps you recharge, reminds the people you care about that they’re important to you, and gives you a broader perspective that helps you manage stress when times get tough. Just as you keep in touch with your business contacts, schedule regular time for your personal relationships. From phone calls to family time, make these moments count.

Send Us Your Tips

Would you like to share your tips with other Insightly customers? Send them to us!
If we use your tip in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card!

Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email.

And if you haven’t tried Insightly, everyone’s favorite CRM, try all of our features with a 14-day free trial or register for a free Gratis account to try the basics.

We’ve reached the season to review our year and share our joy and appreciation for all good things.

Insightly is tremendously grateful for our amazing customers and their continued support. As we wrap up 2014, we’d like to review some of our accomplishments and preview some of the exciting developments we have planned for 2015.

The Gifts of 2014

Insightly is proud of the very productive year we’ve had. Early in 2014, we introduced a new, more intuitive user interface with a design that works faster and helps you get more done every day. A new pricing structure was then introduced, making Insightly more accessible to even more small businesses around the world and taking us from 400,000 to over 750,000 users!

We also focused on integrations and our mobile apps. We developed integrations with Google+ Hangouts, Box, Dropbox, and Microsoft OneDrive. Our most awaited integration with QuickBooks Online for Business has allowed customers on our paid plans to access their customer payments and records all from within Insightly. We worked diligently to improve our mobile apps, releasing 10 new updates for our iOS and Android apps.

With customers in over 200 countries, we localized the application in French, German, Dutch, Latin American Spanish and Portuguese, and also translated our website into Spanish, Portuguese and German.

Finally, we now offer a resources page with great self-service tutorial assets. And our paid customers can take advantage of 1-on-1 Getting Started sessions, our Ask the Expert webinar series, and priority online support.

Our Resolutions for 2015

Our product team has been very busy, and they’re already hard at work on even more features to make your work easier. We are excited about 2015, when we will launch native mass email capabilities in Insightly. You’ll be able to create your own templates, schedule emails, and review your email metrics to measure their success!

We’ll also be adding a lead record to Insightly so you can track your non-customers and interact with them differently as they move through your sales funnel. Finally, we are making great updates to our Google calendar sync as well as introducing calendar sync with Microsoft Exchange server to provide our Outlook users with another powerful option to manage their calendars.

Growing Partnerships

We know you work hard to grow your business, so we work hard to make things easier for you. We have developed partnerships with companies who are on board with that goal, too—check out our Integrations page to see the newest additions. Some of our partners offer specials for Insightly customers, and we encourage you to explore these services:

• The first 500 Insightly customers to try Brandizi marketing automation will get one month free by entering code INSIGHTLY500.
  
• Insightly customers get to try Proposable for sales proposals free for 14 days.
• You can also use the Happyfox support ticketing system integrated with Insightly for 30 days, free.
• Alignable is a social network for local business owners that enables an easy, online way to connect and discuss relevant issues. Join Alignable to connect with your local business community and increase word-of-mouth about your business.
  

Thank you!

We’ve accomplished so much this year and have so much more planned for the future. We couldn’t have done it without the customers who work so hard to make their businesses successful. Insightly is proud to provide you with the best CRM to help you meet your goals, grow your business, and make every day more productive.

Thank you for being part of Insightly’s success! We wish you all the best and a very Happy New Year!

(If you aren’t using Insightly, give yourself the gift that keeps on giving by signing up for our free account or the 14-day trial to try our premium features.)

Thank you to everyone who voted on a name for our Tuesday tips feature!

We’re happy to present Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

What’s in a name? Better search results.

When you’re searching for an Insightly project or a task related to one of your clients, you’re probably searching for the client, opening their organization or contact record, then scrolling down to the Links section to look through all related items. One trick to make searching a snap is to set up a naming scheme for your opportunities, tasks, and projects, such as using the contact or organization name, the product or service, and the closing month and date. For example, you might name an opportunity “Company Inc. | Spring Fling Tickets | April 2016.” The next time you search for Company Inc. from Insightly’s global search bar—Ta-da! All the company’s projects will appear in the search results!

Choosing a Name for Your Business or Product

“That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” — Juliet I don’t know about Juliet’s online shopping habits, but if Etsy were named Grshkinmiffle, their business might not be doing so well. When coming up with a name for your business or product, find words that are memorable and have a connection to what you do. Make a list of all your ideas and say them out loud. Listen to how they sound—clever? catchy? meaningful? Find the right tone to match your business.

	Remember What’s-His-Name
	Do you have trouble remembering the name of someone you’ve just met? Ways to make a name stick include: Repeating it in the conversation (“Nice to meet you, Louie.”). Use name association, such as alliteration or rhymes (“Larry from Los Angeles” or “Dan the man”—but don’t call him that!). Of course, sometimes you’ll just need to ask again.

Send Us Your Tips

Would you like to share your tips with other Insightly customers? Send them to us!
If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card!

Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email.

About the author: Tony Roma is Insightly’s Content Manager. He’s been helping businesses implement software solutions and improve their work processes for over ten years.

Scaling – you’ve probably heard the word tossed around between other entrepreneurs or investors, but what does it really mean? In the business world, scaling refers to a company that has the ability to grow rapidly at an exponential rate. It is the cornerstone of your startup as it reduces time to solution for critical tasks, minimizes the impact of higher volumes of business and makes future expansion easier. In order to scale successfully, however, you need to have a clear vision of your business’ future while also keeping in mind that you might need to evolve.

Plan for Scaling

Forty-six percent (46%) of startups fail due to incompetence and poor planning. If you don’t want be a statistic, it’s imperative that you have a solid plan in place that includes a section on your growth strategy. The most successful businesses have a vision for the future of their business but also realize that they must be willing to evolve. After all, growth signifies change and even the best laid plans can’t necessarily predict exactly what your growth will look like. Still, a solid, vetted business plan can map out the basics on how your business intends to scale. When creating this section, keep in mind opportunities to scale within and outside your business and growth possibilities outside of your initial product or service.

For an accurate growth prediction, think big. This doesn’t mean daydreaming about how you will be the next Steve Jobs, it means thinking how you can strategically grow your business from a $5 million one to a $50 million one. Of course all the thinking in the world won’t get you anywhere if you don’t do something. Taking risks and making bold moves might be scary, but you will likely see more success being a risk taker than playing it safe.

Focus on Growing Your Business

There are only so many hours in a day and if you try to do everything, you’ll end up exhausted and unhappy. Many entrepreneurs get lost in all the details of the daily tasks of their business and spend little time actually focusing on the key activities that move their business forward. This eventually causes their company to stagnate.

If you find yourself working in your business more than you work on your business, you need to take a step back and reevaluate your priorities. Identify the core activities you need to focus on and then protect your boundaries around these actions. Not using a CRM? You should be. Many CRM’s offer workflow management features to keep track of routine tasks and help you stay focused on growing your business. You might need to hire staff to handle the small details of the business, and an online CRM centralizes the management of tasks and projects. With the right CRM and project management software, you’ll be able to focus on building up your business and pointing it in the right direction.

Network

You’ve probably heard plenty of people tell you “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.” This is especially true for businesses. While you certainly need to be an expert in your field and know your customers, ultimately a successful business comes down to connections. Nurture your current network and plan on growing it by reaching out to potential investors, mentors and partners through emails or cold calls. Keep notes on your interactions in your CRM and create tasks to follow up with the most promising contacts. As busy as they might be, many are willing to help out those that have a good business idea.

Have Access to Capital

There are few businesses that are self-funded. Most use a mixture of loans and investors to fund their scaling. After all, people, equipment and office space cost a lot of money and small businesses generally won’t have the capital to increase their capacity without an infusion of money. Besides leveraging your network it’s also important to have a high-level financial advisor who can tell you exactly how much you will need to expand.

Succeeding as a Small Business

No amount of planning and scaling will help your business succeed unless you have something of value to offer your customers. Also, if your business simply doesn’t have the built-in audience, it’s unlikely that you will be able to see long-term growth. Not all small businesses need to be global, multi-billion dollar companies: ninety (90%) percent of small businesses are family businesses that are small by design. Deciding whether to stay small or scale up is a strategic decision that you need to consider before going further with your planning. Smaller businesses can often offer a more personal experience for their consumers over larger, scalable companies. Even if you don’t scale, you can still follow the same advice to ensure you work efficiently and leave room for potential, smaller growth.

A strong CRM like Insightly is a valuable tool for focusing on vital tasks, centralizing communications, and reducing costs to lead your business to greater success. Sign up for a free account or a 14-day trial with added functionality, today.

About the Author:  Ivan Serrano is a web journalist and infographic designer from the Golden State. He specializes in social media, global business and technology. Ivan also loves to practice his photography and watch as many Bay Area sports games as he can.