June 2015 – Page 2 – user's Blog!

June 9, 2015

Social Profiles are Good for Business (If You Keep Them Up to Date)

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!

Utilize Social Profiles to Learn About Your Customers

If your contacts or leads are active and public on social media, they are likely sharing information that can help you understand their preferences and are offering another avenue where your business can engage with them. Insightly includes a Social Profiles section for your contacts and leads and will display links to public profiles that match the email addresses you have entered for those records.

The Social Profiles section for your contacts and leads is listed in the About subtab, and you can click a displayed link to jump right to the listed profile. If you don’t see the Social Profiles section, your Insightly administrator will need to enable it from the System Settings > Social Profiles page.

Keep Your Online Business Listings Updated

A 2012 survey by Constant Contact found that 50% of SMB’s had seen online listings for their businesses that were no longer accurate and that “49% of local businesses admitted having never updated their online listings, whether that’s on a search engine, review site, or mobile app.” With more customers than ever finding businesses online, it’s crucial that you check and update your business listings.

You’ll need to keep tabs on everything from search engine listings to Yelp and other review sites, which are becoming more important to customers every year. In 2014, 88% of surveyed consumers had “read reviews to determine the quality of a local business”—and this number had increased steadily over the previous four years.

You can find various resources online to guide you to the major sites where you can update your listings yourself (here’s one from Vertical Response and another from Signpost). You can also look into services like Moz, Yext, or SinglePlatform, which will update multiple sites for you for a fee. In this age where customers can check up on your business right from their phones, it’s important that your online presence is managed well to attract more business.

Review Your Online Privacy Settings

Social networks are great for sharing information with friends and family and connecting with groups and businesses online. With all the options and settings on every online account, it’s too easy for some details to slip past, and often too late when you post something in a public venue which you didn’t realize was so public. There are a number of things you can keep in mind when you’re active online, but checking your privacy settings is something that should be reviewed regularly.

Google has recently updated their account settings page, which occasionally happens with all the online networks and apps you use. When you get an email from a service provider about privacy changes or see a change on their pages, use that as a prompt to review your privacy settings. If this gets confusing for you, there are many tutorials available to guide you through the process. StaySafeOnline.org provides a page with links to the privacy settings of all the major sites and services that you might be using. It’s worth the time to check them out to keep you and your information safe.

If you haven’t tried the best CRM around, check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now.

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!

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.

Image courtesy of kanate at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

June 8, 2015

Insightly Introduces Lead Management!

Lead management is an important part of any sales process, and our new Leads record allows you to separate pre-qualified leads from your qualified sales opportunities and contacts. A lead is the best way to manage information about someone who might be interested in your products or services but hasn’t yet been qualified by your team.

After you determine a lead is qualified, you can convert it and have Insightly automatically create a sales opportunity with a linked contact and organization. By adding these prospects to Insightly’s Leads tab first, you can keep the pre-qualification process better organized and save space on your account, since related contacts and organizations are not created until the lead is converted.

The Leads tab will appear in the left navigation panel, and your administrator can enable or disable the tab from the System Settings > Lead Management page.

Leads include the functions that you already use for contacts, such as importing, Web to Lead forms, emailing from Insightly, activity sets, filtering, and custom fields. And they also include unique fields to record the lead’s Industry, Number of Employees, and Lead Rating—a way to score your leads to rank the more likely and less likely prospects.

When you’ve confirmed a lead is qualified, you can quickly create a related opportunity, contact, and organization all in one step by choosing the convert option from the lead’s Action menu. By converting the lead, you’ve now created three new records in Insightly that your sales team can use to pursue the new business.

Leads can help you manage the early stages of your sales funnel with ease and create qualified opportunities to pass on to your sales team for more closed sales. We’re very pleased to bring this new tool to our customers.

See our support article Setting up and using Leads for full details on setting up this new Insightly feature for your business!

June 4, 2015

7 Great Insightly Features for Growing Businesses

If you run a small- to medium-size business, you may not know what CRM can do for you. Even if you’ve dipped your toes into Insightly with a free account, you could still be missing out on premium features that can really help your business grow, plus they’ll save you time and money. What else can premium Insightly tools do for you?

QuickBooks Online Integration – Premium account holders can easily connect financial information to contacts. The best part is the ability to view QuickBooks Online data in a tab within Insightly, so you don’t have to navigate elsewhere. No workflow interruptions. It syncs both ways, so no double entry…a genuine time-saver. You can view QBO data for contacts and organizations by clicking the convenient QBO icon. Financial data can also be linked to projects and opportunities.

Business Card Scanner – This brand new feature lets you scan business cards using your smartphone camera and the Insightly app. Then, a real person will transcribe the information from the card directly into your Insightly contacts. Not only is it quick and easy for you, but you won’t have to worry if some application will incorrectly input a contact’s information because a person will be transcribing the information.

Newly Extended Calendar Sync – Just launched in 2015, this feature is one you’ll definitely be excited about. Previously, your Insightly calendar included all your time-sensitive tasks, events, and milestones in one place. However, it’s easy to miss something when you can’t see how your other calendars match up. Extended calendar sync fixes that problem. You can now sync your Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendars with your Insightly calendar and avoid double booking or missed meetings. Syncing is instant. Insightly will even search your contacts by email for meetings scheduled in your synced calendars and link them to the event. Handy!

Lead Management – Previously, your sales team would add a new lead by creating a contact and opportunity. While this was a decent way to track new leads, it meant that if the lead didn’t pan out, you would need to manually remove it from Insightly. Rather than add a lead in with your other contacts right off the bat, now you can add them in the new Leads tab. This special place lets you qualify a lead before you ever create an opportunity or contact entry. You can also track the status of the lead and the source. If the lead falls flat, you don’t need to remove the details from multiple places. If you qualify the lead, you can quickly and easily convert the lead to an opportunity.

Mass Email – Now you can email contacts right from Insightly. You can mask the Insightly domain to improve deliverability by making emails appear to come from your domain. Subscribers can even schedule future emails. Sent emails are linked to the recipients and viewable in My Emails. Compose a fresh message for an individual, specify certain individuals in a group to receive additional text in a group message, and even compose within the email tab or from a template. Mass emails are limited based on your subscription plan, but even our free plan includes 10 mass emails per account per day.

Email Templates – Eliminate the need for creating new emails every time with templates. To find what you need quickly, templates can be categorized. When you use a template, Insightly will track and display important statistics, such as number of emails sent with that template, successful deliveries, how many were read, and the click-through rate. Email templates are also limited based on your subscription. Free plans are allowed five templates.

Automation with Zapier – Insightly has many ways to automate workflows, marketing, and other actions. With Zapier integration, you can connect actions between many apps and Insightly. These recipes (called zaps) allow you to automate actions, such as adding LinkedIn contacts to Insightly and adding new MailChimp subscribers to contacts. New Insightly tasks automatically create a new folder in Google Drive. Apps you can integrate include: Wufoo, Evernote, Stripe, Gravity Forms, and many, many more!

In the coming months Insightly will be rolling out several more valuable features for growing businesses. Current users will see some of their greatest needs answered. Whether you’re just launching your business and looking into CRM for the first time or you’re a seasoned Insightly user, learn to leverage new features to keep your business operating efficiently. Stay tuned!

Check out Insightly’s full list of features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial to try our current offerings.

Image courtesy of phanlop88 at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

June 2, 2015

New Custom Field Options and Settings

We’ve just shipped a new version of Insightly with some great improvements to custom fields.

New Custom Field Types

To start we’ve added four new custom field types you can choose from when creating new custom fields:

A checkbox field type
A number field type
A URL / Hyperlink field type
A Multi-line text field.

New setting options for each custom field

We also added a couple of additional settings for each custom field.

When you create a new custom field you can choose to make it invisible in the user interface. This is useful for custom fields that represent lookup values to other systems for reference, but are of no interest to your users. You may want to hide those values from showing in the Insightly user interface on web and mobile to reduce clutter if those fields have no meaning to your users.

The second option we have added is the ability to make custom fields read only in the Insightly user interface on web and mobile. If you add records to Insightly with custom fields via our API, and you don’t want some of those custom field values changed by your users because they are important and should not be altered, you can set this flag and these fields will only be updatable via the API.

Default Values for All Custom Field Types

You can now set a default values for all custom fields you create including text fields, number fields, checkbox fields, date fields, and dropdown option fields. Adding a default value to a field that already exists will not populate existing records with that field.

New Custom Field Grouping Functionality

For those customers that have a lot of custom fields, we now allow for you to place those custom fields into groups to make organization of them easier on the screen. You can drag custom fields between groups and change the order of fields within a group, and you can also change the ordering of the groups themselves on the page. This allows for a lot of flexibility in designing the layouts of your detail pages for individual contacts, organizations, opportunities, projects, and leads.

June 2, 2015

New Filtering Options For Lists

We’ve just released a new version of Insightly with dramatically improved filtering capability for building lists. The new filters apply to lists of contacts, organizations, opportunities, projects and leads.

New Filter Operators

Text fields now have the following operators: Equals, Not equal to, Less than, Greater than, Less or equal, Greater or equal, Contains, Does not contain, Starts with, Is Empty, Is Not Empty.

Drop down fields now allow you to choose one of the option values along with operators: Equals, Not equal to, Is Empty, Is Not Empty.

Date fields now allow for: Equals, Not equal to, Less than, Greater than, Less or equal, Greater or equal, Is Empty, Is Not Empty.

Relative Dates in Filters

One of the biggest features we’re excited about is what we are calling ‘relative dates’ in filters. When you’re filtering by a date field, instead of picking a specific date to filter by, you can now type in a relative date value like ‘this week’, ‘next week’, ‘last month’, ‘3 months ago’, ‘last quarter’, ‘next 90 days’, ‘last year’ – and Insightly will determine what date range that represents each time you use that filter.

This means for example you don’t have to create a new filter each new week if you want to look at what contacts were created in the last week, you just type in ‘last week’ as the filter value, and each time you use that filter it will show you what was created in the last week, as shown below. We think that is a super powerful feature for date filtering and we know customers who do a lot of date filtering are going to love it.

Relative date support includes the following possible options:

Relative Date Value

Range

YESTERDAY

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the day before the current day and continues for 24 hours.

TODAY

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the current day and continues for 24 hours.

TOMORROW

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the day after the current day and continues for 24 hours.

LAST WEEK

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the week before the current week and continues for seven days.

THIS WEEK

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the current week and continues for seven days.

NEXT WEEK

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the week after the current week and continues for seven days.

LAST n WEEKS

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the week that started n weeks before the current week, and continues up to 11:59 p.m on the last day of the week before the current week.

NEXT n WEEKS

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the week after the current week and continues for n times seven days.

n WEEKS AGO

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the week that started n weeks before the start of the current week and continues for seven days.

LAST MONTH

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the month before the current month and continues for all the days of that month.

THIS MONTH

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the current month and continues for all the days of that month.

NEXT n MONTHS

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the month after the current month and continues until the end of the nth month.

LAST n
MONTHS

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the month that started n months before the current month and continues up to 11:59 p.m on the last day of the month before the current month.

n MONTHS
AGO

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the month that started n months before the start of the current month and continues for all the days of that month.

NEXT MONTH

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the month after the current month and continues for all the days of that month.

LAST 90 DAYS

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. 90 days before the current day and continues up to the current second. (The range includes today.)

NEXT 90 DAYS

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the day after the current day and continues for 90 days. (The range does not include today.)

LAST n DAYS

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. n days before the current day and continues up to the current second. (The range includes today. Using this date value creates a list including records from n + 1 days ago up to the current day.)

NEXT n DAYS

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the next day and continues for the next n days. (The range does not include today.)

n DAYS AGO

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the day n days before the current day and continues for 24 hours. (The range does not include today.)

LAST
QUARTER

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the calendar quarter before the current calendar quarter and continues to the end of that quarter.

THIS
QUARTER

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the current calendar quarter and continues to the end of the quarter.

NEXT
QUARTER

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the calendar quarter after the current calendar quarter and continues to the end of that quarter.

LAST n QUARTERS

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the calendar quarter n quarters ago and continues to the end of the calendar quarter before the current quarter. (The range does not include the current quarter.)

NEXT n QUARTERS

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the calendar quarter after the current quarter and continues to the end of the calendar quarter n quarters in the future. (The range does not include the current quarter.)

n
QUARTERS AGO

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on the first day of the calendar quarter n quarters before the current calendar quarter and continues to the end of that quarter.

LAST YEAR

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on January 1 of the year before the current year and continues through the end of December 31 of that year.

THIS YEAR

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on January 1 of the current year and continues through the end of December 31 of the current year.

NEXT YEAR

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on January 1 of the year after the current year and continues through the end of December 31 of that year.

n YEARS
AGO

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on January 1 of the calendar year n years before the current calendar year and continues through the end of December 31 of that year.

LAST n YEARS

Starts at 12:00:00 am on January 1, n+1 years ago. The range ends on December 31 of the year before the current year.

NEXT n YEARS

Starts at 12:00:00 a.m. on January 1 of the year after the current year and continues through the end of December 31 of the nth year.

June 2, 2015

Be More Effective in Your Communications

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!

Use Custom Fields to Record Communication Preferences

One of our customers, Joshua Kebabian, recently posted a marketing tip on our Insightly Community, where customers share tips and best practices to get the most out of their CRM. Kebabian’s is one of the best Oriental rug and carpet dealers in the world, and the oldest business of its kind in the USA, since 1882. Joshua’s tip for managing physical promotional mailings is to use a mail/don’t mail custom field:

“One of the things our business does is send out postcards or other physical advertising material to our customers. The thing is you may not want to send the promotional material to everyone in your contact list. To get by this, we created a custom field titled “Mailing List”, which has a drop-down menu with two options:

Mail marketing materials
Do not mail

This way, after the contact data is exported to a spreadsheet, I can simply delete all of the “Do not mails”. Then my mailing list is one-step closer to being ready! If you decide to use this tip, remember the power of Insightly’s “Bulk Edit“. This could expedite your implementation.”

As we mentioned on our blog last week, it’s important to know what your customers’ communication preferences are, and you may have contacts in your list who aren’t customers or prospects at all. Joshua’s tip is a great example of how you can record that information directly in Insightly and make your day-to-day marketing management easier.

We’re sending Joshua a $10 Amazon gift card, so check out our community and submit your tips for your chance to get a little thank-you from us! Thanks for the tip, Joshua!

Always Be Aware of Your Marketing Strategy

As you plan your marketing strategy, you’ll need to give different marketing methods some consideration: How much will it cost? How does this fit my customer base? Does the message fit my brand? How can we track the campaign’s effectiveness? The choices you’ll make in communicating with existing customers and potential customers can have a great impact on your business growth or they can flop. It’s important to measure the effectiveness of each campaign as you move forward, which will help you make smart adjustments to your future marketing efforts.

With online campaigns, you might already be using services that include email tracking or tools to measure website visits and visitor activity (for example, whether they view other pages, make a purchase, or contact you). Using promotional codes in your marketing can really help you understand what prompted a new customer to give you their business. Of course, you can always just ask them what brought them in, too. As you figure out what works to move business your way, it’s always possible the market or customer expectations may change. Always be ready to adjust your future marketing plans based on what the performance of your current campaigns tells you.

Give at Least One Compliment Every Day

I can live for two months on a good compliment.
—Mark Twain

Communicating something you like about someone can make a huge difference in their day as well as your own. If you’re down or having a rough day, offering a sincere compliment takes the focus off of your own mood as you let someone else know what you admire about them. It also helps to build trust with that person and strengthen the relationship. You can compliment someone on the way they do things, their efforts, their looks or style, or how they impact you in a positive way. Be specific in what it is that strikes you. As you make an effort to compliment people, you may find positive qualities that you’ve often overlooked.

Sincerity is important, here—if your feedback doesn’t ring true, it will come across as phony and won’t make you or the other person feel better. Some people set a goal of complimenting three people a day, and others will tell you try to do it in every conversation, such as ending a conversation with “It was nice to talk to you” when that fits. No matter how often you make it happen, you’ll make everyone’s day better by working this goal into your daily 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!

And if you haven’t tried the best CRM around, check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now.

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.

Image courtesy of Lordjiew at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

June 1, 2015

Insightly is Climbing the Charts!

With all the words that have been written about CRM software, we appreciate when Insightly is mentioned alongside large and complex CRMs like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and SAP. In Eugene Kim’s recent CRM article we’re not mentioned directly, but if you look at all three charts from TrustRadius.com, you’ll see Insightly is the only other CRM that appears in all three ratings for small, mid-sized, and enterprise businesses.

This is a strong testament to the functionality Insightly is able to provide to businesses of all sizes while keeping our CRM affordable and easy to use. Our ability to add features that businesses need and use on a regular basis is propelling us up the charts and into the offices of more businesses every day. We’re proud of the work our team has done to get us here and will continue to strive for improvements, not only in our CRM, but in the productivity and growth of our customers.

Image courtesy of jscreationzs at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.