Month: January 2016

There is no shortage of distractions in the average workplace. Cell phones are ringing, break room microwaves are humming, and hallway conversations are buzzing. The full effect of these goings on can make it challenging to remain focused and productive. While you can’t always quiet down your cubicle neighbor, having the right productivity tools (e.g. mobile access, a SaaS-based collaboration platform, ) at your disposal can help you boost your productivity in the workplace. Here are a few stats that might convince to roll out a CRM solution if you haven’t already done so.

Click on the infographic to see more details.

 

 

Your customers didn’t become customers by chance. Maybe it was your commitment to premium service that won them over. Maybe your product or service just fit their needs best. Or, maybe their decision was based on price. No matter the reason, customer engagement, at some point, played a part to help you win the sale.

Your customers have more options than ever before. Standing out means putting customer engagement at the forefront of your sales and marketing strategies. What does excellent customer engagement look like in 2016? Here’s a closer look at why customer experience is important and how small businesses can master the art of engagement:

Encourage good ‘ol fashioned word-of-mouth.  

Keeping your customers happy and loyal will give your SMB a considerable competitive advantage. That’s because loyal customers are more likely to spread the good word about your business to their circle. Word-of-mouth will always be a key avenue for sales. Eighty-four percent of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family, colleagues and friends about businesses, products and services, and 74 percent of consumers identify word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decision. For these reasons, it’s important that your employees are in-tune with your customers, and if there’s a complaint, that it is taken care of quickly. Even if you can’t immediately address the issue, you shouldn’t leave them hanging without  word or plan of action. Customers want to know someone is putting them first and working on their problem, so tell them that.

One way technology can support this is by centralizing customer data. This will help to ensure smooth customer engagement from every employee. For example, Union Mutual of Vermont, an insurance provider serving more than 130,000 policyholders, takes great pride in building and maintaining personal relationships with its clients. The company considers every touchpoint an opportunity to provide an excellent customer experience. To achieve this, they rely on their ability to find and access important customer data quickly, wherever they are. A team member fielding a call can’t wait – and keep their client waiting – while trying to find relevant details to address a question or problem.

By eliminating the amount of time you and your employees are spending trying to find key customer information, customer interactions will be smoother and result in a better overall experience.

 

 

Personalize, personalize, personalize.

So you’ve been listening to your customers, taking their requests into consideration and doing your best to solve problems. Now what? Take all that information and put it into action. For example, the last time you spoke with a particular customer, he asked to be contacted via phone between 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. Now, it’s up to you to accommodate his preference. And this personalization will pay off big time and give you a leg up on the competition. According to a CEI survey, 86 percent of customers said they are willing to pay more for a better customer experience, but only one percent of those surveyed feel that businesses consistently meet their expectations. By taking the extra step to personalize every experience, such as calling during certain hours, you are showing customers that you’re willing to go the distance and personalize every interaction, improving and building a solid customer relationship and delivering an above-average experience.

Embrace customer feedback.

You’re not likely to be able to get it right every time — we’re only human after all. When you do miss the mark, take it as a learning experience. Ask the customer for feedback so you can either make it right or learn from it so you can better serve your customers. Research has shown that simply asking customers for feedback increases customer retention. But, don’t just ask for feedback. Asking for customer feedback will help you understand what your existing customers need to avoid losing them down the road. Acting on that feedback will build customer loyalty and improve retention. And, since increasing customer retention by just five percent can lead to a 25 to 95 percent increase in profits, embracing customer feedback is time well spent.

Customer engagement is a broad concept. It encompasses every touchpoint you have with customers and must be a priority for the entire company. When your team puts customer experience and service at the top of their priority lists, loyalty will increase and business will boom.
CRM software can work for any company that needs to serve a diverse, growing customer base. Don’t believe us? Check out the range of companies and industries we serve on our customers page.

 

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!

 

	The Land of Freedom
	Has anybody ever said to you, don’t give anything away for free? Not so fast, say the experts at the Journal of Marketing. Researchers from the University of Miami found that offering a free gift-with-purchase without specifying what the item is prompts people to buy.     Better still, drawing customers in with the promise of a free surprise holds the promise of creating buzz on social media and… it encourages people to spend more.
	Using Your Insightly Mailbox Address to Save E-Mails
	When forwarding messages to Insightly, you can send them to your Insightly mailbox address or to a mailbox for a specific opportunity or project. You can find your Insightly mailbox address at the bottom of the Emails tab or on the User Settings > Mailbox page.     Here’s a shortcut that some customers like: Add a contact entry to your email program’s address book for your Insightly mailbox address. Then, instead of copying-and-pasting the address from Insightly each time you need it, you can simply CC or forward to a contact name you set up, like “My Insightly Mailbox.”
	Fish Farmers
	If you enjoy the serenity of plant life and tranquility of fish gliding gently through the water, go Back To The Roots and procure a The Water Garden. Sized perfectly for a desktop or kitchen counter, The Water Garden sits atop a self-cleaning fish tank with a closed-loop system—the fish feed the plants and plants clean the water. The design employs aquaponics, a sustainable farming method that combines traditional aquaculture (raising aquatic animals) and hydroponics (growing plants without soil). It uses 90% less water than traditional farming.   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.

 

Non-profit organizations spend a lot of time thinking about raising money. Whether you’re trying to save the endangered animals or teach a troop of little girls life lessons, you need money, and that money has to come from donations, sales, or walkathons.

So how can you make everything run smoothly and boost your success? A great Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system can really help, even though you might not technically have “customers.”

CRM is much more than a simple contact database. Nonprofit organizations can use CRM to communicate with volunteers, vendors, members, buyers, and donors, and even to coordinate events and track projects.

Get to Know Your Benefactors

Acquiring an email address from your contacts opens the door to the wide range of information people share on social media. You’ll be able to find out what your donor’s interests are and schedule events designed to appeal to the largest number of people.

Targeting Your Market

One thing nonprofits must avoid at all costs is annoying people willing to donate. Scheduling a lot of diverse events allows you to interest different types of people, but if you’re sending invitations to the same list of people for a family fun day, a wine tasting at an art gallery, and midnight bowling at a local alley, your recipients might feel spammed by events they’d never be interested in attending.

Your CRM can help you identify and segment different groups by demographic information, so you can send invites to the family fun day to families, the wine tasting event to professionals, and the midnight bowling event to people who mention bowling on social media.

Targeting your market is a sophisticated marketing technique used by business, and it can work for you, too. When you know who your donors are, what they enjoy doing, and where they hang out on and off line, you can send invitations they are more likely to respond to. And that will make your donations go up.

Finding Volunteers

Organizations need a constant stream of people to help out, and you can find them in your CRM. Find the best cooks for your bake sales, the most energetic organizers, and the social butterflies with big Pinterest or Facebook followings who will be great at promoting your events. You already know that finding the right person for the job is critical for success. The clues are all in your data. With a CRM, you can tease them out.

Tagging Your Contacts

How do you keep track of who’s who in a database full of one-time volunteers, occasional donors, dedicated volunteers, reliable (and unreliable) vendors, and people with useful skills? You can tag each contact record with keywords that identify how they fit into your contacts and your organization.

Keywords will help you find the people who raised money by participating in your tutu fun run, the moms who organized last year’s pie-eating contest, and the donors who are always willing to shell out a few bucks when asked.

You can even separate buyers by last purchase, so you can craft email subject lines they’ll be sure to open. Sure, you could send an email that says “Cookie drive starts next week,” but you could also send out “Karen, your favorite guilty pleasure is back! Order your Thin Mints today.”

Send Emails to Segmented Lists

Once you’ve got your lists segmented for each event, it’s a simple matter to schedule emails directly from your CRM, or to integrate with a program like MailChimp in order to access their templates and features.

When you send an email campaign, you’ll be able to track what happens to your emails. Are they being opened or ignored? Are people clicking the links? If your emails aren’t successful, try a more appealing subject line with the next round.

Boost Your Social Media

One mistake made by many organizations and businesses is too much or too little social media. With a CRM, you’ll be able to better communicate with your donors. Search for social media profiles to figure out which channels are most popular with your donors and focus your efforts there. You’ll make more impact in less time.

You can set alerts to let you know when someone friends or follows you for a personal response, and automatically import new contacts into your CRM.

Passing on the Knowledge

Chances are pretty good that when new leadership comes in, data is lost. CMS makes for a smooth transition, even if there is a contentious turnover in management. With all your data stored in a centralized database and accessible to key volunteers, files can’t be misplaced, lost, or inaccessible because a former board member is MIA. Your volunteer and donor lists will always be right where you left them.

Access Anywhere

Storing your data online means you can access it when you need it. Even when you’re at an event and need extra helpers. Put out a call for help to your volunteers from any smartphone, no matter where you are.

Smart use of CRM can help you organize your events, keep notes on your contacts, and build your donor base. You’ll also set a system in motion that makes it easy to pass the torch when new volunteers come in.

 

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!

 

	Swipe Right to Hire Smart
	The Tinder dating app may be best suited for the millennials, but the concept of “swiping right” is gaining traction in the world of employment. The app is called Switch (available for both Android and iOS) and it was designed to make hiring a simple and straightforward process. Employers can upload open positions, and then begin browsing through qualified candidates who are presented based upon your job description and keywords. If you like what you see, swipe right to “like” a prospect, or swipe left to take a pass. If there is mutual interest between employer and prospect, the Switch app puts you into a direct contact loop through chat or email.
	Navigating From Previews to Details in the Insightly Sidebar
	Rolling your mouse cursor over an item in the Sidebar will display the preview window in the Sidebar (for contacts) or to the left of the Sidebar. When click the Display inside Sidebar arrow icon, the Sidebar will display the selected record in more detail.
	Making the Friendly Skies Even Friendlier
	If you travel via airplane for business and you can’t afford the wide open spaces of business or first class, Soarigami could become your new best travel companion. The product, which looks a little bit like a paper airplane, folds out (like a piece of Origami) when you need it, and then neatly folds up again when you don’t. When open, you simply attach Soaragami to the armrest, then enjoy the benefit of a barrier that separates your arm-space from your neighbor’s arm-space.   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.

 

 

 

As great scientific discoveries so often do, psychology’s newest secret is finding its way into the business world.

To improve employees’ performance, contentment and health – i.e. overall wellness, leaders are beginning to harness a discovery that shifted how psychotherapy is practiced.

It’s only the beginning…

What’s the big secret?

I call it “Mind Exercising.”

A Mind Exercise is a strategic meditation that guides your attention through specific shifts with the intention of achieving and maintaining “real life” results.

Think of Mind Exercise as meditation’s high-performing cousin. You can Mind Exercise to improve your tennis game, customer service style, sales results or personal relationships.

Brain scientists have concluded that how and where you direct your attention produces measurable changes in your brain’s structure, physiology and function. A changed brain produces changed results.

The impact of Mind Exercise is not only theoretical or intellectual; it’s psychological, physiological and practical too.

How does it work?

Mind Exercise works like physical exercise. Just as the right physical exercise can improve your body’s strength and function so you perform better at particular tasks, the right Mind Exercise can improve the strength and function of your attention so you perform better at particular tasks.

How much practice produces measurable results?

Let’s look at examples of meditation research results that relate to changes to the brain that have been found in meditators.

Eight weeks of strategic meditation has been shown to increase the thickness of the hippocampus—a pair of thumb-sized structures located in the center of your brain that are vital to your ability to learn and remember.

When you manage your stress effectively your hippocampus can generate roughly seven hundred new brain cells every day. When unmanaged stress accumulates your hippocampus cells can shrink and die.

A shrinking hippocampus is associated with stress-related conditions such as anxiety and depression, and lifestyle choices like being sedentary and eating junk food. Your performance is negatively impacted in very real ways when you don’t manage your stress effectively.

What are other important findings?

Improvements in attention and concentration, (i.e. less mind wandering), have been repeatedly found in empirical research on meditation’s effects.

The average attention span of a human being has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013 (National Center for Biotechnology Information, at the U.S. National Library of Medicine).

Where does Mind Exercise come in?

Meditating with the intention of achieving a specific goal — Mind Exercising — is meditating strategically to change your “real life.”

With the right practice, you can reduce stress and access your ideally focused state of mind and body for performing at specific tasks that are important to you.

My clients typically set five to twenty-minute appointments with themselves throughout the day to complete Mind Exercises that relax their brain and body and strategically reconnect them to their personal, real-life, intention.

Mind Exercising can improve performance of teams as well. Group objectives are integrated into a customized Mind Exercise sequence that team members complete on a schedule. The exercises align team member’s mind-body state with their intention to produce clearly defined results.

Strategically applied habits of mind can lead to increased productivity, propagating a virtuous circle of improving performance and propelling teams toward shared goals.

What’s the rub?

The rub is that research indicates a variety of specific requirements must be met to realize many of the benefits of meditation. My experience is that the same criteria apply to benefitting from Mind Exercise.

While the benefits of meditation and Mind Exercise are significant, developing an effective practice is a commitment.

What’s the best way to begin?

Since maintaining your Mind Exercise practice after the initial fun and excitement of learning something new wears off is a challenge, it helps to clearly understand how your brain is changing, and how that will benefit you if you keep it up over time.

I developed an online learning format to guide people through the sequential steps my clients and patients take when they begin a Mind Exercise practice. You can complete the steps free at BeYourPurpose.com anytime.

Dr. Sean Sullivan consults to organizations about brain training and Mind Exercise and maintains a performance-focused psychology practice awarded as, “One of the Top Psychology Practices in San Francisco in 2015,” by OpenCare. Dr. Sullivan is the author of two popular books about Mind Exercising: The Mind Master’s Silence Journey and Be Your Purpose. Join Dr. Sean live on Periscope to meditate and Mind Exercise.

 

 

About the author: Dr. Sean Sullivan consults to organizations about brain training and Mind Exercise and maintains a performance-focused psychology practice awarded as, “One of the Top Psychology Practices in San Francisco in 2015,” by OpenCare. Dr. Sullivan is the author of two popular books about Mind Exercising: The Mind Master’s Silence Journey and Be Your Purpose. Join Dr. Sean live on Periscope to meditate and Mind Exercise.

 

 

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.