Month: March 2016

 

Up until August last year, the Hubstaff team didn’t place much focus on direct sales. We assumed there wouldn’t be enough ROI since our product cost is pretty low at $5/user. Instead, we focused on inbound marketing because it’s the kind of channel that got us great results. I feel that this is often the case; direct sales are underrated and take a backseat to online marketing.

Nathan Barry of ConvertKit wrote a post on how he prioritized direct sales as a channel to acquire customers over his content marketing and other tactics. With direct sales, ConvertKit saw a whopping growth of 2605% in the last 12 months. That post inspired us to start allocating some time in direct sales as a growth channel for us. Here are the steps we took, which ultimately contributed to our more than 200% revenue growth in the past 12 months:

1. Building our sales process

I knew we needed to build a sales process that was both efficient and economical, since we’re a bootstrapped company. To make that possible, I had to track my time spent on the project so that later I could compare it with our average LTV (lifetime value) per prospect, and decide if the strategy was worth scaling or not.

Tools used:

1. Hubstaff (free) – to track our time spent on direct sales and to determine if it is a reliable growth channel for us.

2. Building a list of prospects

I began by researching a couple of prospects on LinkedIn, AngelList, and similar websites, then created a contact list. To start with, I had to set some goals in order for me to be able to reach our target of paid customers from this campaign:

1. To get 20% response rate – I wanted 20% of the prospects that I contacted to reply back to me. This is double the industry average, which is about 8-10%.
2. Keep the email outreach process as efficient as possible – I didn’t want to send individual emails to each prospect, but rather sent them in bulk so we could save time.

3. A/B testing our email pitch

Next step for me was to create an email pitch that would get our prospects to reply back. It didn’t necessarily have to be a sales pitch immediately; all we wanted was to get them interested. We tried 3 email pitches:

1. One pitch advertised our product
2. The second pitch sent a very personalized email which involved deep research on the prospect
3. The third pitch sent a short email asking them one question for a research study we were doing

Note: All 3 pitches above had at least 3 followup emails to them. If you’re not following up to the original emails, you’re almost certainly NOT going to receive a reply. There are a couple of tools out there that can help you schedule automatic followups – Rebump, Boomerang and Tout.

Now let me ask you a question: which one of the 3 pitches worked?

Drumroll…

Both pitches 2 & 3. Although pitch 3 had a good response rate (above 20%) v/s pitch 2, pitch 2 was the real winner in terms of acquiring customers. So we realized, a combination of those 2 pitches would probably be the sweet spot for us.

4. Analyzing and optimizing our strategy

A couple of weeks after the campaign started, we went into our time tracking software and looked at the time we tracked on this campaign v/s average LTV of our customers.

We were spending more money on reaching out per customer and moving them across the funnel versus the revenue from the customers acquired by us from this campaign.

Or in short:

Average customer LTV > CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

 

 

Here’s a snapshot of the hours I spent doing this task in August & September via Hubstaff

However, we didn’t decide to end the campaign, label it as a failure, and look at alternative growth channels. We knew optimization was the key here.

There were 2 things we needed to optimize to make this strategy work:

1. We needed to hire someone at a more affordable rate to help us do the prospect research and reaching out. That would cut costs by a lot.
2. We needed to reduce our time spent on sending highly personalized emails per prospect.

5. Hiring a virtual assistant

To solve the first task, we decided to hire a Virtual Assistant (VA). VAs can be very efficient and the rates are reasonable. But the one thing that’s very critical for them to be successful is to have proper blueprinting & documentation in place for them.

To solve the second task, we worked with our new VA to set up a process for building a highly qualified list of prospects. To make our prospect research laser-targeted, we built lists filtered by industry, company size, location, role of contact etc.

6. Building a list of highly qualified prospects

How did we collect that data? By searching. It’s that simple. All this requires is some patience and hard work.

Tools we used:

1. LinkedIn premium account (paid) – to find target companies filtered by our parameters
2. Rapportive in Gmail (free) – to find the email address of our desired contact in every company
3. Google Sheets (free) – here is the template of our prospect sheet
4. Gmail Mail Merge (free) – to set up highly customized emails based on our parameters

7. Managing tasks after you have an interested prospect

It’s also important to know that you must have a task-management system. You must load every single task into a centralized calendar and make a discipline of managing it. Trust your brain at your own risk.

Tools we used:

1. Insightly (free) – to track your tasks and understand the conversion rate at each step of your sales funnel
2. Google Sheets – Insightly Zap (free) – to automate creating our tasks in Insightly when a new lead in added to our prospect sheet

8. Recording time to our Insightly tasks

What is even more awesome is that Insightly integrates with Hubstaff. All I needed to do was integrate my Hubstaff account with Insightly (<1 minute), and then my Insightly tasks would automatically show up in my Hubstaff timer.

Apart from time tracking, Hubstaff also takes screenshots and monitors our productivity levels throughout the day so we can make sure all of us are being productive.

9. Final Audit

The above optimizations helped us achieve our target of a 20% response rate and acquire some great customers. A month later, we checked our time data in Hubstaff again and found that now our customer acquisition cost was much less than our average LTV, thanks to the optimization we did based on the time data.

With time and sales funnel data showing positive numbers, I can confidently say that this campaign has been successful for us so far. Our company’s revenue has grown by more than 200%, from $287,873 to $883,000 in the last 12 months. We’re a fully revenue transparent company, so you can see all of our numbers in real time.

 

 

Caveat – if you’re not tracking time to your tasks, you’re losing a lot of insightful data that can help you better optimize your sales strategy and efficiently manage your team.

 

 

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.

 

About the Author: Madhav handles growth at Hubstaff. He helps acquire customers with high ROI marketing experiments, action focused analytics and product iterations.

 

 

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!

 

	Lights, Camera, Action
	Video is a powerful means to promote your product, service, and brand. If you’re considering flipping on the bright lights, here are some great reasons to get started: Show off a product Video gives people a sense of what the product is actually like, how it feels and what it’s made of. Explain how to do something ‘How to’ videos are a great way to give people some useful information, while also reminding them of your product. Bring testimonials to life You can create more interest and authenticity if you interview people or invite customers to upload videos of them using your products. Create and upload new videos regularly Building a regular audience can give your business prospects a big boost, so create new videos regularly and encourage people to subscribe to your YouTube channel.
	Adding New Opportunity State Reasons
	When changing the state of an opportunity, you have the option of including State Reasons to give you more information about the status of an opportunity. Adding new opportunity state reasons Insightly administrators can add and edit state reasons by following these steps: Go to the System Settings > Opportunity States page. Select the opportunity state for which you would like to add a reason. Type the reason in the text field and click the Add Reason button. Your new state reason will now appear when you change an opportunity to that state. One tricky thing about the Opportunity State Reasons: You can only assign one when you change a state, so change the state to “Suspended,” save the record, then change it back to the original status to add the reason. (Using the Suspended state instead of Won, Lost, or Abandoned prevents a “closed date” from being added to the opportunity.)
	Love Thy Selfie
	Stanford University is a harbinger of many brilliant minds, including one Andrej Karpathy, who developed a learning system called a ConvNet that is designed to study selfies. Yes, selfies. Anybody who’s spent any time snapping selfies knows that capturing that perfect smile or lip pout is not that easy. After ConvNet examined 2 million selfies, it was determined that there is a definitive pattern to poor selfies—bad lighting or getting the camera a little too close to your mug. Thankfully, the time and effort put into ConvNet also produced some information what to avoid in order to improve your self-images: Take selfies in low lighting.Very consistently, darker photos (which usually include much more noise as well) are ranked very low by the ConvNet. Frame your head too large.Presumably no one wants to see such an up-close view. Take group shots.It’s fun to take selfies with your friends but this seems to not work very well. Keep it simple and take up all the space yourself. But not too much space. The cleanest, clearest selfies also had a black and white filter and white borders. As for juxtaposition, the best selfies showed a face in the middle third of the photo, and (surprisingly) were cropped so that the person’s forehead is cut off.     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. Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around. 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.

Zeidman Development is a software company focused on the nonprofit industry. The company has been customizing and enhancing leading donor management system, Raiser’s Edge for thirteen years.

As a solopreneur, David Zeidman started out much like any other one-person startup – using readily available tools, such as Google apps, to keep track of prospects, leads, and the various conversations and documents associated with each. But as his business began to grow and he added more people to his team, Zeidman realized he needed another way to keep his team up to date and on the same page.

Zeidman understood CRM solutions are not one-size-fits-all and wanted a CRM built specifically for small businesses’ needs. Since he was invested in Google apps and Gmail, he began looking for a CRM that offered seamless integration with those tools, while also offering a simple user interface at an affordable price. There were very few tools that fit the bill at the time, but eventually Zeidman came across Insightly and has been a satisfied customer ever since.

“Insightly makes our work more efficient by automating things that otherwise we’d spend hours handling manually. It definitely improves our ability to respond and follow up; and the results are much more visible.” – David Zeidman, founder and managing director of Zeidman Development

Find out more about how Zeidman Development is using Insightly for daily marketing and lead generation. Read the full story–and others like it–in our customer case study library.

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!

 

	Go With the Flow…
	If you perform well under pressure but are easily distracted by the dozens of other projects you’re juggling, finishing that marketing plan or blog post swiftly can be, well, a bit challenging. If you’re game to sweat it out under a different type of pressure, there are apps out there that will put your writing focus to the test: Flowstate or The Most Dangerous Writing App.     In a nutshell, these two apps allow you to select a time increment in which to complete a writing task. If you don’t keep that keyboard moving for the duration of your session – here comes the scary part – your progress will be erased! Go with the flow for the entire session and your prose will be safe.
	Fast Pass to Adding New Items in Insightly
	You can add a new contact, opportunity, project, task, event or organization from any page in Insightly with just one click. This little shortcut is to the left of the search box at the top of the page and is labeled with a plus (+) icon. Just click the icon to bring up the menu.   Insightly remembers the last ten items you viewed, and creates a list of those items so you can quickly jump between them, or jump back to them and continue where you left off between sessions. You can access the Recent Items list on the right side of the central search box at the top of the page. Just click the icon and the list will pop-up. Initially it won’t be populated, but as you view items like contacts, projects, opportunities, organizations, tasks or emails – the list will add those items in.     This week’s tip comes from our resident product expert, Tony Roma. Tony’s been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.
	Feeling Lightly Blue
	We love our smartphones and tablets and laptops. In fact, it’s hard to imagine life without them. But, are they loving us back? Recent studies show that the light emitted from these devices can be disruptive to our sleep cycles. Research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America found that those who read on a light-emitting device like an eReader were sleepier come morning time and they took longer to wake up.   So what’s the remedy? Power down those devices 90 minutes before you tap out for the night and you will likely enjoy a noticeable improvement in the quality and length of your sleep. If you want to take it a step further, Lighting Science offers a variety of products that are designed to address the needs of round the clock lighting while keeping the needs of our biology and circadian clocks in mind. 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. Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around. 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.

 

It’s that time of year! Maybe you’ve been waiting all winter for this season’s newest CRM feature launches, or you’re just starting to learn what CRM can do for you. No matter where you stand, your small to medium business (SMB) is living, breathing and ever-changing. It deserves CRM features that grow and change with it, and you deserve to know how to save time and money using the season’s latest and greatest features.

Advanced reporting

Have you heard about Xero? A cloud-based accounting software designed to perfectly fit into the SMB’s toolkit, Xero has partnered with Insightly to give you all your reporting in one place. Integration gives you the ability to see the full dollar value of a customer, through features like the Lifetime and 12 Month Value snapshots, without having to flip between software.

Xero also automatically imports and sorts your bank statements, giving your team real-time numbers to collaborate on, as well as invoicing, bill pay and more.

Sidebar for Gmail

Gmail users, rejoice! With the Insightly Sidebar Chrome extension you can save and get to important emails, projects, key customer information and more straight from your Gmail account. Like the previous feature, this gives you access to all the information you need without having to open up a new tab or application. The Insightly Sidebar extension puts your CRM in your Gmail inbox. And you don’t even need a Google Apps for Work account to make it happen.

Custom fields and filters

Many SMBs use unique information categories or terminology that just doesn’t fit into the CRM’s default fields or filters. Now you can create custom fields to improve categorization and sorting of your contacts, projects, opportunities and more. You can now sort and filter by, for example, tracking or reference numbers, projects specifications, referral information or birthdays. You can filter by these fields and, when you export data from (or import to) Insightly, those custom fields will remain intact. The same applies to leads that are converted—the information carries over already sorted. Hallelujah!

Business card scanner

Remember that business card your last new contact gave you? Where did it end up? Maybe it’s tucked away safely in a folder but chances are you have a lot of other things to worry about. With the business card scanner (and a rear camera) you can take a photo of that bad boy from Insightly’s iOS or Android app and have a CRM contact or lead created for you.
Provided the card is in English, Insightly will send an email confirmation for each card you submit saying the record was created successfully, that it already exists, or that there was an issue transcribing the card. From there the transcribed information is verified by real people and you can later set permissions to one card or a group of cards.

Mass emails

No more exporting email addresses and then switching to an email app—you can now email customer and lead groups directly from within Insightly. You can also create email templates for everyone on your account to use, and schedule emails to send automatically. Your emails will be sent from the email address you use to log in to Insightly.

It’s spring cleaning season and updating the features in your CRM arsenal is one of the easiest ways to freshen up and get your SMB on the right foot for the rest of the year. Whether you choose just one or incorporate them all, know that these awesome features will help you get (and keep) your business on track to thrive for seasons to come.

 

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.