Month: December 2015

 

In our busy, interconnected world, where we can chat in real time from and to location in the world, it’s easy to forget the value of an in-person connection. Conferences take us out of the daily grind, while still offering full industry immersion. They offer an atmosphere where you have opportunities to learn new processes and share ideas with interesting people who speak your language.

As a small business owner, you may wonder if taking several days off from business to attend a conference is doable…or even worth doing. That depends on what the conference offers and whether you can afford to take the deluxe route. Not every conference is well-equipped to welcome and nurture small businesses.

Here’s why you should consider it…and why you should be cautious.

1. Gain actionable advice

Every business person, no matter how experienced, can use fresh ideas. Small business owners often work alone or with a small group, and can easily become bogged down by outdated ideas or miss growing trends. Attending a conference exposes you to new ways to improve your business and become more productive.

2. Meet new vendors and suppliers

You’re thinking “Ugh! Salespeople. No thanks.” But industry vendors bring new and innovative products to trade exhibits at conferences and conventions. It’s a great way to discover the best new products and services on the market.

3. Build authority

One of your marketing goals should be to build authority and trust. Even if you’re not a speaker, attending a conference offers you opportunities to show your knowledge and impress influential people in your industry. In fact, consider being a speaker to extend your reach and show your depth of knowledge to competitors and people interested in your industry.

4. Find talent

Great employees can be hard to find. Among the crowd will be ambitious college students, people looking to change careers, and people who are unhappy at their current jobs. You may meet someone who will revolutionize your business in the future.

5. Build your network

A strong ability to network can be one of your greatest assets in business. Your network supports you, provides answers, and keeps you informed about the latest industry news through social media. They may be your indirect or direct competitors, but they are also the people who know most about your industry. You may run into collaboration opportunities or get new customers by referral when you can answer a need your competitor can’t.

6. Reap the benefits of consumer research

You may not have the resources to do consumer research, but your big competitors do. You can learn from their experience, and use the information to better target your market and develop new products to answer customer needs.

7. Learn new skills

In addition to insight and new ways to do things you’re familiar with, most conferences will offer information about new approaches, like SEO and inbound marketing techniques.

8. Get Inspired

Your job can get pretty routine. Same people, same tasks, same old same old, week after week. It’s easy to lose sight of the passion and vision that drew you to the industry. Attending a conference can spark your creative process and give you the impetus to shake things up and start something new.

9. Sharpen your competitive edge

You can’t beat the competition unless you know what they’re doing. Attending a conference gives you an intimate view of what the leaders in your industry are up to. Since you get to rub elbows with customers, competitors, and vendors, you can gain tremendous insight from casual conversations.

10. Collect swag, meet celebrities, and have fun

Small business owners work way too hard! Conferences are as fun and lively, as they are enlightening.

You’ll come home with plenty of swag, try some free snacks, have a few drinks, maybe take a dip in a hot tub or take a turn at terrible karaoke. How often can you have a blast, take away knowledge, contacts, and ideas, and write it off on your taxes?

You may even get up close and personal with industry leaders and celebrities. Converse with the most well-known people in your industry or even meet a celebrity connected to your industry in some way or simply hired as a draw.

Choose your Conference Carefully

Big conferences that attract and cater to large businesses don’t always have small business at heart, and small businesses can suffer as a result. If budget concerns mean you have to buy a more affordable package, you may miss out on some of the sessions you most want to see.

Before you book your tickets, make sure you know what you’re getting, and plan what sessions you want to attend. If you’re new to conferences, consider a smaller gathering to get started and pick up some contacts to avoid getting lost in the crowd.

In the planning stages, do your homework. Find out which social media contacts are attending and make casual plans to meet up. Even if you’re taking a team, having social groups to break away ensures that you don’t negate the benefits of networking by remaining isolated.

Conferences are an exciting way to break your routine, enhance your knowledge, and build your network. The key to getting the most from your investment is to choose the conference that will most benefit you – and plan ahead for success.

 

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

Did you know email marketing is 40 times more effective than using social media — Facebook and Twitter combined — to acquire new customers? 91% of all consumers in the United States still use email every day and email prompts purchases three times more often than social media, with an average order that’s 17% higher. With this kind of oomph, it’s critical to maximize your email marketing campaigns. Artificial intelligence and predictive analytics can help you do just that.

What is Artificial Intelligence?

Merriam-Webster defines artificial intelligence (AI) as “an area of computer science that deals with giving machines the ability to seem like they have human intelligence” and “the power of a machine to copy intelligent human behavior.”

One of the most stellar examples of AI is IBM’s Watson. “He” isn’t programmed, but learns — and isn’t a single computer, but a collection of “cognitive computer systems.” Watson is perhaps best known for competing on Jeopardy in 2011 where “he” went on to win $77,147. His human competition, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, known for their outstanding performances on the show, each finished with $24,000 and $21,600 respectively.

Watson has a number of practical uses, in business, healthcare, crime solving, and more. It continues to expand daily. 50% of customer service calls routed through call centers every day go unanswered, leading to unhappy customers and churn. Watson Engagement Advisor steps in to automate customer interaction and field questions with evidence based reasoning, allowing you to answer what your customer really needs.

How Artificial Intelligence Helps Email Marketing

According to AVA.ai, a lead interaction management software provider, AI-driven email conversations have an engagement rate of 50% or higher, compared to just 9% with the standard email autoresponder.

Using AI in email marketing simply means a platform handles the messaging for you. Sometime after a prospect visits your landing page and signs up for your email list, they get an email from your “sales assistant” that’s personalized and relevant. At specified intervals, the sales assistant sends another email, and will continue to do so, with variations on the message, to continue encouraging the prospect to action.

Once the prospect responds, even if they say something like, “I’m not able to make the decisions for this department, but I’ll put you in touch with my boss.” the AI is sophisticated enough to field the reply and respond accordingly, all while the prospect thinks he or she is interacting with a human. Your sales and marketing leads are qualified and sent to the appropriate human for follow-up, saving you time.

What is Predictive Analytics?

Predictive analytics uses both your past and current data to predict trends and outcomes. While it can’t tell you exactly what will happen in the future, it can forecast possibilities to help you develop a plan. Predictive analytics use customer data you have on hand, including buying persona, shopping behavior, and browsing history to forecast future actions and help you understand your customers better.

How Predictive Analytics Helps Email Marketing

With predictive analytics your business can:

Nurture leads through the funnel to sales. Through better list segmentation and more personalized messaging, predictive analytics can help improve sales conversions by moving key leads through the funnel to your sales department. You’ll get the right leads to the right place, and stop wasting time and money on leads that won’t convert.

Make improvements to buyer personas. With data from predictive analytics, you can improve buyer personas based on actions they’ve already taken, and actions they’re likely to take. The more you know about them, the better you can tailor your messaging to meet their needs.

Improve marketing spend ROI. Predictive analytics help you learn more about where your buyers are, so you can focus your marketing spend to connect with them on their social turf. You’ll be able to identify where your marketing spend has faltered in the past, to focus your resources where they’ll be most effective.

Marketing automation can save your business time, but unless it’s also helping to drive conversions with the use of AI and predictive analytics, it’s not necessarily boosting your bottom line. Your CRM holds a tremendous amount of data that can be harnessed by AI and predictive analytics to ensure you’re making the right moves, not just for your email marketing campaigns, but for your business as a whole.

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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

 

	Body Language Speaks Volumes
	It’s never too late to brush up on our networking skills. Whether you know the person you are talking to, always find a common point of interest as quickly as possible. It helps put both parties of the conversation at ease. Ask the right type of questions. You don’t want to ask people about the weather. Instead, ask questions that begin with “What’s your favorite…” “Tell me the best…” or “When was the last time…” Heed the power of body language. For instance, don’t Cross Your Arms. It sends out a strong signal that you are skeptical, bored, judgmental, or even close minded. As silly as they might look always wear your nametag, even if you think you already know everybody at the event. New people join organizations all the time and let’s face it, even if we’ve met somebody before sometimes we simply forget names.
	Changing Your Insightly URL
	Want to change your Insightly URL to something that is a better reflection of your company name? Your Insightly administrators can do that by clicking Profile icon > System Settings > Insightly URL. If you are a Google Apps user on an Insightly for Google Apps account your Insightly URL will incorporate your domain name and cannot be changed. What’s the Insightly URL for? It is the unique web address that users can use to log in and access Insightly. The last part of this address is always “.insight.ly” but you can change the first part of the web address to something your users will remember, if it has not already been reserved. Your users will then type in that URL to access Insightly. Examples might include: http://mycompany.insight.ly, http://myteam.insight.ly/, or http://myproject.insight.ly/. Your Insightly URL must contain only the characters A-Z or a-z, the numbers 0-9, or the hyphen character. No spaces are allowed and it must include at least 5 characters. If you change your Insightly URL, it’s up to you to tell all your users the new URL so they can continue to access Insightly.
	Make Your Creativity Flow
	Whether you’re a small manufacturer producing coat hangers or an accountant advising dozens of clients, we all need to step out of our tried and true “knowledge zones” and seek some inspiration from time to time. Well, inspiration and creativity abound at the Maker Faire. Held at both the national and international level, the spirit of the Maker Faire is rooted in bringing together the minds of people who are involved in science, technology, crafts, engineering, authoring books, creating art, and more.   From hands on demonstrations of personal 3D printing and a life-sized mouse trap to tattooing and sock making, there is sure to be something that will get your creative juices flowing. Find a Maker Faire near you. Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around. Send Us Your Tips. Would you like to share your tips with 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: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

 

Simply put, customer relationship management, or CRM, is a collection of tools to help document, organize, and analyze customer contact information and interactions.

You start with the basics…whatever information you collect from the customer in your initial contact. Typically, you ask a website visitor to trade info in exchange for something valuable: a free trial, an informative newsletter, a contest entry, or a digital asset.

What you collect may vary. Some companies ask for the full salad bar of information – name, address, company, position, phone, email. Others just want name and email. Which is enough to discover all the rest if the customer provides their primary email address.

Discover your customers

That’s the first thing in your CRM – the ability to tie minimal basic information to customer profiles all over the web. To discover information they’ve already made public without having to seem intrusive.

Make connections

Access to customer’s social media accounts in your CRM gives you the power to make connections. You can find out where the majority of your customers spend time online and concentrate your social media presence there. Find out what they talk about, and even if they know each other or are attending the same conference.

Picture discovering that several of your large clients will be attending an industry event…what a great opportunity to meet face-to-face, or even make a presentation and send a personal invitation with an invite for coffee after.

Track everything.

Get organized by integrating your CRM with your financial software, your email provider, your data analysis, and more to see what’s happening at a glance, without opening half a dozen different programs.

CRM puts all the data at your fingertips when you need it most and have the least time to find everything. Like when you’re on a call with an important client who wants answers. You’ll know the status of their last order, invoice, and what was said during the last conversation, even if you weren’t there. You’ll even know if the customer has an important event coming up, like a birthday or a speaking event, so you can throw in a warm, personal touch.

Automate tasks

Some tasks are dull, repetitive, and error-prone. And you don’t have to do them anymore. All your contacts in a single database means no laboriously copying info from one record to the next or formatting for upload.

Automating your workflow might include adding tasks to be performed when a new contact is added to your CRM, say a welcome email or a special offer, or sending automated reminders to yourself or your staff when a task deadline is approaching.

Sales management

By integrating your CRM with sales management and invoicing tools like Quote Roller or QuickBooks, you can easily follow the sale from quote to payoff…at a glance. Know where your customers are in the sales pipeline, so you can send the right message at the right time.

Tracking the source of leads in your CRM will tell you where your marketing efforts are having the most effect. So you can save time and keep that cashflow smooth.

Our opportunity reports will break it all down for you: incoming opportunities, their value, and how you performed. Did you make the sale? If not, why not? You can also see a funnel analysis, task analysis…and who was responsible for things that were completed or not.

Trends and issues

In the past, it wasn’t so easy to spot when a process or sales initiative went off the rails. With CRM, you can filter by keyword to find out the reasons people call for customer service and what their most common complaints are. When you begin to spot a trend, you can be proactive. Fix the problem, or take an interactive approach by asking customers how you can improve in this area.

Your CRM is full of possibilities, from recovering lost sales, to automating daily tasks, to informing your marketing campaigns for better results. To really get to know your customers, build lastingrelationships, and give them a voice in guiding your new products and services, you have only to spend some time inside your CRM.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

 

The Cloud Technology Alliance released its new Business Transformation Guide for Google Apps—A Practical Guide to Planning and Execution. The purpose of the guide is to help executives, IT administrators, Google Apps resellers, and change-minded employees make intelligent and informed decisions about selecting cloud-based technologies supported by Google Apps.

Insightly received high praise in the guide, referred to as ‘your secret CRM weapon.’ The excerpt on Insightly reads as follows:

‘There’s no question that it’s hard to run a business. So what’s the secret? The keys are efficiency, organization, maximum productivity, sales, and happy customers. You’ve got limited resources, so how do you get it all done? With Insightly for Google Apps—your secret weapon to help you manage your business like a boss! Insightly CRM and project management will help you keep your sanity, keep you on top of your sales game, keep your employees on the same page, and keep your customers happy.’

The Cloud Technology Alliance is comprised of the leading independent software vendors in the cloud office ecosystem. It is the only consortium that emphasizes adopting cloud technologies from independent, cloud-based software vendors. The objective of the alliance is to assist businesses in their decision-making process as they move towards operating in an entirely cloud-based infrastructure rather than remaining stuck in an inefficient hybrid on/off premise environment.

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

 

	Are You a Multi Task Master?
	For those of us who take pride in doing myriad things all at once, we’ve been fooling ourselves. There is no such thing as multi-tasking. What?! It’s true and there’s plenty of research to back it up. While we may think we can do things such as check email, talk on the phone, and make a list simultaneously, the human brain is, by design, only able to focus on one task at a time. Attempting to multi-task actually slows your progress down and, even worse it actually lowers your IQ! A study at the University of London found that participants who multi-tasked during cognitive tasks experienced IQ score declines that were similar to what they’d expect if they had smoked marijuana or stayed up all night. Rather than attempting the false exercise of multi-tasking, researchers advise that we work on our abilities to achieve deeper concentration, instead. Set a timer while you’re working, and try to make as much progress as you can before the timer goes off Turn off your internet connection, or install software to block certain websites (this can help break the habit of constantly multitasking) Keep a time log of exactly what you do during the day – writing down your actions makes you more self-aware
	Deleting Old Data In Insightly
	There are several ways to delete data in Insightly. You can delete individual records or groups of records. Deletions are permanent, so deleted records cannot be recovered! Deleting individual records Open the record you would like to delete. Click the Actions Select the Delete Read the warnings on the next page and click the Delete button to confirm.
	The end of 2015 is just days away, which means tax season is right around the corner. If you have specific questions about things such as deductions, tax laws or self-employment taxes, avoid mistakes by consulting with a tax professional.     In the meantime, as you sit down to collect up your paper work, here are a few commonly overlooked deductions to keep in mind: Home office and office supplies—including phone charges Furniture and other equipment Software and subscriptions Mileage, travel, meals, entertainment and gifts Insurance premiums Retirement contribution and Social Security
	Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around. Send Us Your Tips. Would you like to share your tips with 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: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

While it’s a wonderful thing that we have so many technology tools and applications to organize our small businesses and make us more productive, it can be overwhelming to remember to use them all, or find ways to connect them for ease of use.

At Insightly, we’re big on helping you stay on track and on deadline, which is why we have so many integrations that work with Insightly’s CRM.

Smartening Up Your Sales

Having the right tools integrated with your CRM lets you have a closed loop sales and lead generation system. Everything from early prospect communication, to closing the sale, to invoicing and payments can be tracked from both a sales perspective and your accounting system. Insightly has partnered with Xero to offer integration that provides more financial visibility into customer records.

Additionally, the Insightly/QuickBooks integration is another asset to your sales process. You can view any customer payment status and history within Insightly via the QuickBooks Online tab, eliminating dual data entry. Finally, you have a single operational and financial view of your customers and their account status, invoices, and payments.

Enhance Your Marketing

Marketing is an area where businesses often have overlaps between the information in one system, like email marketing, and that of another. Insightly has integrations for MailChimp, INinbox, DirectIQ and more that help you combine the power of Insightly as a data-rich CRM tool with what you’re already doing, marketing-wise.

Really Get Productive

With so many productivity tools out there, it’s virtually impossible to actually get anything done because you’re too busy trying them all out! CRMs with integrations reduce the chaos by connecting the dots between disparate apps.

Zapier is a productivity tool you can use to set up tasks like “create Insightly contacts from Google contacts,” or “add new Insightly contacts to list in MailChimp.” It’s a great tool for automating many processes.

You can also import your Evernote notes into Insightly files, and vice versa. That way, you don’t have to copy and paste each note into two systems.

With the TimeCamp integration, you can measure hours spent on activities defined in Insightly; track the time spent on a given sales process or keep track of billable hours, for example.

Bottom line: integrations help you save time, money, and hassle. By pairing up services you already use, you can reduce the time you spend in each one so that you’ve got more time to focus on your business.

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.