Month: April 2015

Every business owner is a salesperson and I’m no exception. Even though I run a ten-person firm and spend much of my time on managing people, running projects, and marketing, I still find myself involved in most new client deals. I get leads from all sorts of different places and then it’s up to me to carry the ball through to close. I have met plenty of amazing salespeople over the years, some who could literally sell snow to an Eskimo in January. I am not in that league. But I think I’m still pretty good at selling. And I’ve been relatively successful at it. Over the past twenty years, I’ve developed a few characteristics that have helped me close more deals than average. Let me share four of them:

I’m a responder. I answer emails quickly. I return calls that day. I use my CRM system to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. I forward requests to others in my firm and I follow up with them too. I make it a point to touch base with my prospects (and clients) frequently. I hate it when people don’t respond to me in a timely manner, and I know I’m not alone. It’s important to me to not be one of those people. I lose deals for plenty of reasons, but lack of communication is not one of them.

I’m an educator. I sell CRM software every day so I know our products and our competitors really well. I’m an expert in this field, like all salespeople are experts in their fields. The typical person dipping their toes into this area is usually overwhelmed by choices and data. My job is to help them with the decision. I make recommendations. I suggest which of our products could help them and usually (and this is true) also recommend competitive products that could help them too. If a prospective client chooses to do business with me, I want that person to have done all the research possible so they’re comfortable with their decision. If they choose to use a competitive product because it’s a better fit, even one I’ve suggested, then I’m happy for them—and this oftentimes leads to referrals from them as an appreciation of the help I’ve provided. In the end, it’s not about me. It’s about them.

I’m a disqualifier. I don’t want to waste my time and I don’t want to waste a prospect’s time. I like to cut to the chase as fast as I can. I like to talk dollars right up front. I like to lay out the good, the bad, and the ugly that a client will encounter with the products we sell. I like to talk about our project failures and why they failed. I’ve learned that it’s better to scare someone away now then deal with an unhappy mess months later. I want to find out if a client is really ready, both financially and emotionally, to adopt a CRM system as their culture. If, after spending a half hour on the phone, we determine this is not a good idea, then it was a good half hour spent. I’ve learned to focus on those clients that are really ready, and to just keep in touch with those that are still considering.

I’m a cheerleader. I love the products I sell. I believe that every business, no matter the size or industry, should have a CRM system. I’m an evangelist. I’m a cheerleader. I want my passion for my products to rub off on my clients and prospects. I want to see them happy and productive and loving their system. Good salespeople are like that—they truly believe that what they sell is helping people. It is their little contribution to the world. They’re proud of their jobs and their companies.

Good selling, everyone!
 

Are you ready to bring CRM into your sales process? Try Insightly’s 14-day trial.

 
About the Author: Gene Marks is a small business owner, technology expert, author and columnist. He writes regularly for leading US media outlets such as The New York Times, Forbes, Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur. He has authored five books on business management and appears regularly on Fox News, Fox Business, MSNBC and CNBC. Gene runs a ten-person CRM and technology consulting firm outside of Philadelphia. Learn more at genemarks.com
 
Image courtesy of adamr at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Insightly CRM has the best customers in the business and we want to help you connect!

Our monthly #LoveYourCRM Twitter chats provide a forum to both follow and participate in a question-and-answer session on Twitter. Our next Twitter chat will take place on Wednesday, May 6, 2015 at 11 a.m., Pacific time.

The #LoveYourCRM chat brings together business owners to share success stories, best practices, and tips for using CRM. The focus will be on the creative and innovative ways that companies are using CRM to improve productivity and efficiency across the organization. Each month, we’ll feature a different guest to share his or her story and then everyone else is invited to share ideas and ask questions.

May’s chat will be with marketing expert Chris Hamilton, who will discuss the work he’s doing on integrating Insightly with live chat software to generate sales leads from a website and add them to Insightly directly.

If you can make it, we’d love to see you participate in our Twitter chat and hear your feedback afterwards. With your contribution, we can make this an informative and valuable experience for all participants!

To learn more about how to join a Twitter chat, see Janet Fouts’ great article, How to Participate in a Tweet Chat.

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!

Have You Checked Your User Settings, Lately?

Sometimes, especially when we’ve got a ton to do, we jump right in to new software, get to work, and focus only on what’s in front of us. In the rush to get more done, we can miss important updates or settings that can actually lighten our workloads. It’s a good idea to periodically review your software settings and have your staff do the same. Everyone who uses Insightly can access the User Settings page to update their preferences and make sure they’re not missing out on anything that can make their jobs easier.   To access the settings, click your profile icon in the upper right and select User Settings. There’s a menu on the left with all of your options. Some of them, like Contact Sync and Calendar Sync, will only function when your Insightly administrator has subscribed to a paid plan or enabled that option. Among the many options, you can: Set your time zone, default currency, and language (User Details and User Settings). Choose a different background color for Insightly (Color Theme). Customize the signature on emails you send from Insightly (Email Signature). Change what happens when you save an email or create a task (User Settings). Set which items you automatically follow and receive email updates about (Notifications). Setting things up the way you like them and the way they work best for you will make every Insightly day a little better.

Do What You’re Best At

When starting a business, you’ll often have to wear many different hats. But when you find yourself stretched too thin or your company starts expanding, recognize what your strengths are and fill other roles with contractors or staff to let you focus on the tasks you do best. Are you better at writing blog posts than networking? Do the writing and hire a PR person to handle the other marketing duties. If you’re a numbers wiz but slip up on invoicing your clients regularly, focus on the accounting and hire someone to come in once a month for billing. As our businesses expand, we all need more help with our jobs. Hiring the right person for the tasks that take more time for you will free you up to perform even better in the areas where you shine.

Personalize Your Space to Reflect Who You Are

Being in an environment that reflects your personality and reminds you of the things that make you happy can keep your mood positive and your mind at ease. When you leave work, having a space that’s your own gives you a place of refuge to come home to. Whether you’re a sports fan or a collector of African art, decorating to reflect your cultural connections can inspire you and energize you every time you come home. If certain colors resonate with you, paint your walls or include those shades in the objects you place around you. The ideas you put together don’t have to stop at home, either, so add a little something to your work desk to spruce it up. You can keep happy reminders on your desk, like a golf ball from one of your lowest-scoring rounds or your child’s unicorn/lion/parakeet drawing. The right colors and accessories can make your days more productive and maybe put a smile on your face just when things are feeling a little stressful.

 

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.

And if you haven’t tried the best CRM around, check out Insightly’s features and sign up for a free trial.

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

Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

TechnologyAdvice Product Spotlight: Insightly

The following summary post is from TechnologyAdvice.com, a website providing coverage content on crm software tools, the best customer relationship management software, lead management platforms, and much more.

In this product spotlight video, Insightly’s own Megan Roth spoke with Josh Bland of TechnologyAdvice. As a Marketing Manager with Insightly, Megan provided details on what Insightly does, how they strive to see businesses succeed, and what they specifically offer to help their clients.

Megan succinctly described Insightly’s purpose in one sentence: “Insightly CRM provides businesses a way to track their contacts, communication, sales, projects, tasks, and documents in one easy to use platform that is available via the web and mobile.”

When asked about what separates Insightly from similar CRM software providers, Megan gave two broad answers and six specific answers. They focus on how Insightly was “built to be easy to use, yet customizable and very powerful.” To that end, they want to make sure:

1. All business, even those that don’t have resources to manage a system or time and money to invest in product training, can get up and running fast.
2. It’s as easy to use as possible yet substantial enough to keep up with businesses as they grow.
3. Integrations are a strong focus.
4. The CRM is integrated with project management capabilities.

She also pointed to the fact that Insightly has over 800,000 customers so it’s important they make the platform fit businesses of all sizes.

When asked about Insightly’s ideal customer, Megan said they seek out companies that have about 50-300 employees. She also went on to say that Insightly has a strong following of customers in the service industry, “because we have project management capabilities included in our platform.”

Megan also relayed Insightly’s affordable, tiered pricing model that’s similar to many other current SaaS solutions:

• $12 per user per month.
• 14-day free trial of paid plan.
• Free plan for businesses up to 2 users.

When asked about best practices for Insightly, Megan replied that they “really stress finding the best CRM that will be fully utilized by your company.” In other words, they want users to take some time to plan before implementation. Users should list their goals and talk to their team about how they’ll use a CRM, and make sure they know how they’ll assess and measure the goals for the CRM after implementation. Lastly, Megan added users should import their contacts, since Insightly is customer relationship management, after all.

Regarding possible limitations to their software, Megan relayed that “sometimes we trade off more complicated features for ones that fit our customer requirements,” circling back to Insightly’s best practice: the best CRM is the one that is used.

Megan went on to add: People tend to think of CRM software as very technical and complicated, so we wanted to make sure Insightly is not a system you can get lost in. As we grow we’re adding more features to the product but luckily we have great integration partners that fill in gaps because they want to provide services to our customers.

To find out more about Insightly’s CRM capabilities or for a personalized product recommendation, check out the product selection tool at TechnologyAdvice.com

And if you’d like to test drive Insightly’s features and see if it’s a good fit for you, sign up for a 14-day free trial.

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!

Use Custom Filters for Informational Reporting

Insightly includes a number of analytical reports on our Reports tab, giving you easy access to summaries and totals for your opportunities and completed tasks. But if you’re looking for informational reports for your contacts, leads, opportunities, organizations, or projects, we include custom filtering options on each of these tabs to help you get to the information you’re looking for. You can create filtered lists on the fly or save filters to share with your team, allowing you to monitor or refer to the lists later. Just select the Filter option above the list and click New Filter to select the fields you’d like to filter by and enter your matching criteria. Creating a custom filter can help you segment your contact list by region, multiple criteria, or other demographics—a great way to focus your efforts and maintain client relationships. When filtering on the Opportunities tab, you’ll see a total value of the opportunities you’re viewing right at the top of the list. (Bonus Tip: You can even export your filtered list to a CSV file for mail merges.) With this ability to drill down and focus on records that match what you’re looking for, informational reports are right at your fingertips.

Take the Time to Look at Your Customer Analytics

If you’ve looked into implementing business intelligence (BI) at your company, you’re probably thinking BI means big data and big bucks. The truth is that business intelligence concepts can be implemented at any stage of growth with tools that are well within reach of small and mid-sized businesses. By researching the goals of other companies’ analytics efforts, you can find good ideas about how to focus your work and where to dig into the data you have. If you determine product improvement is an area you’d like to focus on, organize your sales data and customer feedback in a way that informs your future product development plans. If higher customer loyalty or satisfaction is your goal, put together some reports with information from your CRM, social network feeds, and customer service inbox. Try to be objective as you put this information together. Sometimes it’s difficult to get past our own pet ideas and hear what our customers are telling us, but stepping back and seeing the story through the lens of information that you have at hand can help you improve business across the board.

Chart Your Goals to Understand Your Progress

Data isn’t just for business anymore. The current wave of mobile technology has a band on every other techie’s wrist and a health app on every smartphone to count the steps we take through life. It doesn’t matter whether you use a mobile device, a spreadsheet, special software, or a chart scrawled on lined paper, keeping visual track of the progress toward your goals can help you grasp exactly where you’re at and where you’re headed. Trying to lose weight or bulk up? Seeing your calorie intake and exercise time falling and rising day after day can help you identify which days of the week you tend to slack off, giving you the opportunity to come up with a strategy to address the weak spots. Working hard to pay off that debt or save for that next smartphone with a fancy tracking app? Updating a graph as your debt falls and your savings balance rises can be a great motivator as you watch your financial situation change over time. Writing down goals helps us stay focused on them; tracking our progress towards those goals provides regular reminders of the incremental changes we can achieve—a good reward in and of itself.

 

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.

And if you haven’t tried the best CRM around, check out Insightly’s features and sign up for a free trial.

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

Image courtesy of Naypong at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Over the past three years, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools have skyrocketed in popularity among small and medium sized businesses. Previously not ranked on the list of top things that CIOs prioritized, CRM is now one of the top 10 SMB technologies, according to Gartner Research.

With the rapid growth of CRMs, one question remains constant: Is your team using the right CRM?

The right CRM is easy to use and pulls all the features your marketing and sales teams need to work efficiently into one convenient interface. Without effective CRM, your business is losing opportunities, sales, and in extreme cases, top employees. With so much at stake and such a high priority placed on this essential business tool, are you sure your sales team is using the best CRM available?

Here are a few key components that your team needs at its disposal to thrive. If your CRM doesn’t have them, it might be time to switch.

Scheduling Features

Your sales team is busy. Each team member fills her days with appointments to try to land the next big contract. To fill schedules and track important events seamlessly, your CRM must have a built-in calendar.

Your CRM calendar should have a few key features baked into it:

• Reminders
• Recurring tasks
• The ability to assign work to other team members
• Automated processes
• Sales pipelines

Without these features, it’s more difficult to stay on top of a prospect’s needs.

Program Integrations

Your CRM is not the only tool used in your business, so to be effective, it must work with other products to create an efficient workflow.

Here are some examples of the types of apps you can integrate with your CRM:

• If your team uses Evernote to jot down thoughts and ideas, your CRM should seamlessly link to the app to upload the information.
• Calendar. Your CRM should have calendar sync capabilities so it can sync your CRM calendar with data from popular scheduling tools, such as Google Calendar or Outlook.
• Email Marketing. Do you send emails using a third-party email marketing platform, such as MailChimp? If so, you’ll want to quickly copy your ever-growing list of contacts from one platform to another. Your CRM should make that as easy as possible.
• File Sharing. Clients often need to see files and documents related to their project. Make file sharing fast and simple by integrating your CRM with your favorite file-sharing program, such as Dropbox or Box.
• Sending proposals should be a painless process. Did you know that Insightly connects to Quote Roller? By pulling together your customer records and proposal software accessible from anywhere, a great CRM lets your team spend less time on paperwork and more time shaking hands with new customers.

Help your business and sales team run a little smoother on the backend by keeping your third party applications up-to-date and seamlessly integrated with your CRM.

Search

You juggle a lot in your business. Each client has unique demands, and for you to thrive, you need to stay on top of each unique request. That’s not always easy to do.

Your CRM should bridge the knowledge gap by offering a fast, easy way to search for notes and information about a client. Before your next phone call or meeting, give your sales team full access to the information it needs to make the best impression with fast search functionality. You’ll better equip these top performers to work harder and smarter for your business.

Notification System

Perhaps the most important part of your CRM is the notification system. This tells your sales team when something has happened to move a sale forward. On the flipside, it also shows your team when a prospect is dragging his or her feet and avoiding the sale.

With a notification system in place, your team can aggressively target the hot prospects and capture the sale before it goes to your competitor.

Is Your CRM Up to Par?

Don’t slow your sales team down by forcing them to use an outdated system. Give your top performers the tools needed to land you more sales and build your company.

 

Try out Insightly’s sales features to see if our CRM is a good fit for your team.
Sign up for a 14-day free trial.

 

Kimberly Crossland is a copywriter who works closely with the tech industry. She has a keen eye for new trends and products that make doing business a little (or a lot) easier.

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. And thank you for reading!

Personalize Insightly for Your Users

Your company logo is a symbol that resonates with your customers and your employees. When your staff is using Insightly every day, you may want to keep them connected to your brand by replacing the Insightly logo in the upper left corner of the page with your own branded image. Any customer with a paid subscription can do this. Among the many customization options on your User Settings and System Settings, Insightly includes the Logo option on the System Settings page. Administrators on paid accounts can upload a logo that will appear to all of their users on every page after they log in. Adding your logo will personalize their experience and keep that experience connected to your company.

Thank Your Customers

Giving thanks is automatic during any given transaction with a customer, but there are ongoing moments during a customer relationship where expressing appreciation will continue to strengthen the bond between your clients and your company. Although you can thank your top customers with added incentives and gifts, a simple thanks can go a long way.   You can send personalized thank-you notes with new orders and, for subscription-based services, when you reach a business anniversary. The holidays are also a common time to reach out and say thanks, and you might even spark a gift idea—another way to spread the word about your products or services. Acknowledge customer feedback on social networks, too, giving thanks for positive reviews and support.   As you reach out to customers, you’ll also expand your own recognition of the important contributions their business makes to your success. After all, you can’t grow your business without them.

Acknowledge Service Workers and Make Everyone’s Day Better

Johanna Michelin reached out to Insightly with a great tip to actively acknowledge people who work in service industries, whom many of us may take for granted. Everyone likes to be treated well, and her practice of handing wrapped candies to service workers like gas station attendants or tellers brightens everyone’s day.   “What surprised me was the genuine reaction of gratitude as I handed (wrapped) candies to ‘service people,’ such as gas attendants, cashiers, tellers, etc. More than thanks, they seemed touched and surprised that someone recognized their ‘existence.’ Even if they threw the candy away, they were happier… So was I!”   Thank you for the tip, Johanna! We’ll be sending an Amazon gift card your way!

 

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.

And if you haven’t tried the best CRM around, check out Insightly’s features and sign up for a free trial.

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

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.