Month: April 2015

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 CRM, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

Improve Customer Intelligence with Custom Fields, Tags, and Linking

Have you ever been working on a deal and found you had a common connection with your prospective client? Insightly has a number of ways to capture information to bring these connections to light. Features like linking, tags, and custom fields can quickly present you with valuable intelligence and help you build rapport with someone on your very first call. With custom fields, for example, you can create a “Referred by” field to track high-level sources like “Customer,” “Website,” or “Spring Blossoms Email.” Tags can be used to label prospects in multiple ways according to their needs, interests, and previous purchases. And when you or someone in your company knows about a personal or business relationship that the prospect has with an existing customer or employee, linking is an important way of not only noting that relationship, but also creating a hyperlink to the other contact records right in your CRM. (Bonus Tip! Using custom filters, you can create lists of contacts or leads based on field and tag values to break down your call lists into more focused segments.) If you haven’t tried out some of these features, give it a go! You’re likely to find a way of improving your process and making more sales.

Reduce Acquisition Costs Through Customer Connections

Marketing, sales efforts, requirements analysis—every stage of acquiring a new customer costs money. Since you’ve already invested in your existing customers, and word of mouth is a powerful tool for growing your business, why not encourage them to help you in expanding your client base? A referral program is a great way to bring in more business while letting your customers feel they are an important part of your efforts. Make sure your customers understand what you’re looking for in new clients through discussions or promotional material, and then reward them when a referral pans out. Referral awards can be as simple as a thank-you card or a movie ticket and will help your customers feel even more appreciated.

Connect Your Dots to Find a Way Forward

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards.” —Steve Jobs   If you’ve ever helped a child with their homework, you probably faced that moment when the kid felt frustrated and gave up, saying, “I can’t do it!” The best solution is often to encourage them to approach the problem from a different angle and help them follow their own way of thinking to get to—and understand—the answer. Like many childhood lessons, this one can serve us well as adults.   If you feel frustrated, blocked, or stuck in a rut, it’s a good idea to reflect on your past experiences to identify what drives you. Take some time to understand the motivations that will help you find your path to a more fulfilling career, better health, or hobbies that help you feel more satisfied. Having trouble staying in shape? You probably haven’t found the right exercise, yet. Can’t seem to finish that construction project? Maybe working on it for a half hour every afternoon will be just the right schedule to make progress. Figuring out how you work best and recognizing that failed attempts mean you haven’t given up can help you find the right course and move forward in life.

 
 

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 and spent a good deal of time helping his niece with her homework.

Ranking Based on 480+ in-depth reviews and user ratings

We are happy to announce that Insightly was named a top-rated CRM platform by enterprise and small business users on TrustRadius, a leading peer review site for business software. We are very grateful to our customers who took the time to submit their high reviews and provide their opinions on Insightly.

Reviewers pointed out that Insightly is affordable and is easy to set up and use. Insightly’s task management features, customization, and integrations with a variety of software are all listed as reasons to use our CRM.

We believe that the movement of Insightly into the enterprise-level ratings is an indication that our responsiveness to customers’ needs is helping us add all the right features at the right time, allowing our CRM to grow as our customers’ businesses do.

Insightly is one of the top 12 CRM platforms listed in TrustRadius’ Buyers Guide to CRM Software, an in-depth guide to help stakeholders understand the benefits of CRM and compare available products to make the right purchase decision for their business.

You can download a free copy of the report here:
https://www.trustradius.com/guides/crm

 

Insightly offers an easy 14-day free trial, so you can give our CRM a try.

 
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.

Meet Joe. The Best CRM Client Ever.

Every year, about five to ten times a year, I get the same call.

“Yeah,” the voice says to me on the phone. “I’m Joe. I’m a sales manager. And I need a CRM system.”

“OK,” I say. Time to ask some questions. Except before I do, Joe keeps going.

“I just switched jobs. At my last job I used a CRM system called XYZ. I understand you guys sell that, too. I’m not saying XYZ is the greatest, but I’m happy with it. So I want you to come out to my new place and set it up for me. I want it to look exactly like the system at my last job. I want you to teach my guys how to use it.”

“OK,” I say. So far so good.

“Except there’s just one thing,” the guy says.

Uh-oh, I think. Here it comes.

“I need you to make sure you’ve set up three reports for me. I need these reports to do my job. You set up the system and set up the reports and teach my guys just to do the data entry and the rest will be up to me.”

“When can I start?” I say. I love my wife, but I want to kiss Joe.

Because I love Joe, too. I love when I get these calls. Joe, a sales manager, knows exactly what’s needed from a CRM system for it to be useful. He’s not a technical guy. But when I get calls like this I know from the start that he will be successful with his CRM system. That’s because he understands four core things about CRM systems.

For starters, CRM systems are nothing more than databases. With all due respect to the great CRM vendors and software out there, Joe knows this. The fact that these databases can now be hosted and maintained online only makes them that much more available and easier to use. But putting aside all of the buzzwords and features—opportunity management, campaigns, workflows, alerts, and social integration—in the end, the data is just stored in a database. Joe knows that he needs a good, reliable repository of data to run his organization and wants to be sure that it’s configured the right way and his people are trained to get the data in accurately.

He also knows the 20% rule. Joe is a sales manager. And like all workers in today’s organizations he uses software: word processing, spreadsheets, online applications. But he also knows that he doesn’t use all the capabilities of all the software applications available to him. Who does? The same goes for CRM applications. My best clients, like Joe, use maybe 20-30% of what their CRM applications do. There are entire areas that they don’t even touch. But that’s OK. No one has to be 100% good at everything. Joe and other sales managers like him focus on those aspects of the software that help their teams the most and don’t get caught up in features or functions that have no value for them.

He’s very direct: Use it or don’t work here. Joe and sales managers like him are brutally frank. He tells his team that the CRM is not about them. It’s his system. It’s the company’s system. He will do his best to employ experts (like me) to make it as user-friendly as possible and provide as much training as needed. “But in the end,” he says to them. “I need the information from this system to manage this group. I need it to do my job. And you’re going to have to get that data in there if you want to do your job.” No wimps here! That’s what it’s like to run a sales team in 2015. Good sales managers need data. They are sympathetic to their employees, but they don’t bow down to them.

Finally, it’s all about the reports. Joe wants his reports. He lives by his reports. He is a manager. And managers need accurate, complete reports to help them manage their teams, their organizations, and their businesses. A CRM system is completely useless unless good data is coming out of it, routinely, consistently, and accurately. Joe knows that to be a good manager, you have to be a data-driven manager. And that is the core function of his CRM system. What reports does he like the most? Stay tuned….

So thank God for Joe. He knows what he wants. He’s asked for very black-and-white deliverables. He’s all about the data, all about the reports. He values his CRM system as a tool to help him get his job done, not some miracle technology that will change his life. I wish every one of my CRM clients was as focused and pragmatic as he is.
 

Check out Insightly’s features for managing your sales process and collaborating with your team by registering for our 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 khunaspix at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.