Teams Are for Working and Playing Smarter

Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11

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. Enjoy this week’s tips!

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Set Up Teams for Task Assignments, Permissions, and Filtering

If you have different groups at your company using Insightly—like regional sales teams, a human resources department, and a project crew—you can create teams of users to assign, filter, and limit access to Insightly items on the team level.

  • For tasks, organizing a team allows you to create assignments for teams on either a per-user or per-team basis. The first option saves time by setting up a separate task for each team member—no more time-consuming duplicate data entry.
  • The default filters on the Home tab and Tasks tab include selections for teams so you can filter the list by members of the selected team. The Contacts, Organizations, Projects, and Opportunities tabs also include team options through custom filters.
  • Finally, you can set viewing permissions when creating or editing a contact, organization, opportunity, or project, and you can choose a team by selecting the team name from the Permissions section at the bottom of the record.

Teams will only appear on these lists after your administrator has added members to them from the System Settings > Teams page. So set them up and help your teams get organized!

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Gather a Team When Making Software Purchasing Decisions

With all the business applications available today, it can be hard to determine which ones will actually help your business be more productive. For any software to have a successful impact on your business, it must be used effectively by your staff. Making an executive decision without listening to input from the people who will use and configure your new software can set up your implementation for failure.

To avoid this pitfall, include relevant staff and stakeholders in the decision-making process when choosing an application. If you’re looking into new accounting software, your CFO, lead accountant, and one or two key users will be able to add valuable insights and help you shore up your requirements list. When looking for a CRM, define how you’ll use it and include people whose teams will be affected, whether it’s sales people, project managers, or HR representatives. If you have an IT department, you should ask for their requirements in addition to the input of users and management. And if you already have administrators in mind for the new system, include them in the process.

Choosing a handful of key people to help evaluate and define your software needs will guide you in making the right choice. You’ll also show your future users and administrators that you value their opinions, which will help to rally them behind a successful implementation.

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Play, With or Without a Team

“Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.”
― Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

We no longer live in the era of Justice Holmes when all of humanity was referred to as “men,” but the old guy probably knew something about longevity—he sat on the U.S. Supreme Court until he was 90. Today, it’s common to think of play as something only for kids, or in the context of competitive team sports, like the American football game that was just being created during Holmes’ time. But play is vital to keeping your mind creative and healthy.

As anyone who has brought up a kid can tell you, play is a great way to keep your body and brain in shape. Team sports leagues are certainly a way to connect with other people while getting exercise, but any kind of recreation can help you take the focus away from a nagging problem and let your subconscious tackle it for a while. From crossword puzzles and mobile brain games that can exercise your intellect to having a laugh at comedy club, take some time out to play to keep yourself healthy and make life more interesting.

 

Send Us Your Tips

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If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card!

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And if you haven’t tried the best CRM around, check out Insightly’s features and pricing plans, and sign up for a 14-day free trial from our pricing page.

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.