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!

 

	Remote, But Not Distant
	While not all jobs are suitable for telecommuting, before you turn and run hard and fast away from the idea, take a few moments to reflect on what it could mean for your bottom line in the long run. Fiction: If you let an employee work from home, he’s sure to slack all day and miss his deadlines, right? Fact: Studies have shown that a telecommuting staff is more productive than in-office workers. Chalk it up to not having chatty coworkers and more time to focus on work for just some of the reasons why they’re more productive.   Fiction: People don’t mind the commuter grind Fact: Without having to start their workday with a lengthy commute, crushed into a train car, smushed on a bus, or being jostled on a busy city sidewalk, telecommuters can start their workday earlier and dedicate more time to the job. Fiction: Daily distractions help productivity and a sense of well-being Fact: Remote workers often incorporate more physical exercise into their day than office workers. Why does this matter? Well, a healthy workforce means a more productive one, with fewer personal days taken off to go to doctors’ appointments.
	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 the profile icon and going to the System Settings > Insightly URL page.Note: 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.   The Insightly URL 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, be sure to share it with your users so they can continue to access Insightly.   This week’s tip was provided by Tony Roma. Tony is an Insightly product expert who has been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.
	Get Your Swag On…. Or Not
	We all love a bit of swag, right? For the uninitiated, swag are (for example) those free giveaways you get at trade shows or perhaps at a charity event such as a fun run. Yes and no. According to a study conducted by the PPAI, only 28% of recipients felt more positive after receiving a promotional product valued at under $5. About 40% of recipients felt more positive after receiving promotional product worth between $5 and $25. However, there is a noticeable increase (54%) in positive attitudes towards companies who give out swag worth more than $25. Note that the most popular swag items include ink pens and cotton t-shirts. To make things a bit confusing, a separate study conducging by Princeton Marketing revealed that 52% of trade who attendees are more inclined to enter an exhibit that provides some sort of giveaway. Last but not least, for your efforts at selecting the perfect bit of swag, not that the average amount of time a promotional item is kept around is 6 months.   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.

As today’s market shifts gears from in-store purchases to the less personable online shopping, retailers are beginning to lose a grip on their most valuable resource, customer feedback.

Key information that only customers can provide is slipping out of reach as consumers grow tired of endless wait times on email and telephone support lines.

The new consumer generation needs a faster and better way to communicate with your company to provide the feedback necessary for your company’s growth.

Live chats have become the new standard for support and are quickly gathering steam as they provide a quick and easy way for customers to contact you both on their mobile or desktop device.

So what’s stopping you? Take your support team to the next level and learn more about your brand directly from the people that help keep it moving. Here’s how to get started:

Choosing a live chat solution

The most important things to look for when choosing a live chat solution are: features, pricing, and compatibility. With a wide selection of free and paid live chats available on the market, a good tip is to sample a few services to find one that works best for your business. Before deciding on a payment plan, keep in mind that many chat providers offer a discount when you pay for a full year in advance. You may also be able to pay a set price for all of your operators if you plan to use an enterprise option.

Develop your support team

The most important task after selecting your live chat solution is to ensure that you have a strong team to manage the chats on your website. Customers enjoy being able to contact you in real-time, but will be drawn away if they are poorly received by your support team.

Take a look at this survey performed by Dimensional Research where it was observed that consumers are “50% more likely” to share bad customer experiences with their friends and social media as opposed to when receiving good service. There are a few main principles to follow as you begin to build out a support team:

• You must always make sure that your operators are well-trained to manage customers effectively, especially when a customer is distressed.
• Take the time to train your staff or hire experienced personnel who have effective customer service skills for your business.
• Remember, your support team is an extension of your business. It is always best to take the time to find the right people for the job rather than to provide a sub par customer service.

Integrating with your CRM

To make the most out of live chat, integrate it with your CRM solution. This cloud networking will allow you to share customer statistics across all of your customer relation software for a quicker and more effective service.

Many live chat providers offer a quick and easy integration process. Insightly’s integration with Tidio Chat gives you the ability to transfer leads directly from the chat into your Insightly panel. You can even send a full transcript of the conversation to your panel for later use.

Now it’s time to take that first step. Are you ready to give your customers the support that they need? You can try out  Tidio Live Chat at www.tidiochat.com, and sign up for free 7-day trial, then you can use the premium subscriptions or free plan.

 

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: Sebastian Pokora is a Customer Satisfaction specialist at Tidio. He was born in Boston and is  passionate about Blues and Polish cuisine.

 

 

Today’s guest post comes from Erin Mathie and Melissa Bamfo from Business Made Simple. Join Erin and Melissa tomorrow, April 6th, at 11:00 am, PST, for a live Twitter Chat. You can find and follow us at: @insightlyapp #LoveYourCRM. You can also follow Erin and Melissa at: @businessmadesim.

If you don’t have sales, you don’t have a business. The trend in sales is the higher the price, the longer the sales process. Managing a longer, more detailed sales process can be tricky. Insightly  can help you stay on top of all the important details and make a huge difference on your bottom line. Here are 3 essential steps to creating a sales system that pays big.

Lead Collection

Capturing information is the first step in the sales process. This information can be helpful in many ways (market research and understanding your customer) but the most important reason you should collect leads is to market to them. Not everyone will buy from you, but studies show that it takes 5-7 touches before someone takes action to purchase. That statistic is especially true with larger ticket items.

Insightly makes lead capture simple. For online leads, simply integrate an insightly web form onto your website and have your online leads added directly to Insightly. Once they have been added to Insightly,  you can organize and tag them based on custom tags you create.

Maybe you’re old school and collect business cards from your sales prospects. Paid insightly plans include a business card scanner that will enter your contacts information for you. You can also add them individually to Insightly by creating a new contact. If you are adding cards in bulk, simply  input all the data into a spreadsheet and upload them to Insightly. Now that you have their information, use that information to educate them on your product or service. That leads us to the next step of the sales process.

Lead Nurture

When it comes to purchasing a high ticket item, consumers tend to research before they buy. When someone is spending thousands of dollars, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, they want to know they’re getting “the best bang for their buck.” The consumer needs to know they can trust you. You do this by nurturing your lead.

Once a consumer knows who you are, the next step is to educate (nurture) them on your product or service. Companies often use their lead nurture approach as a “lead magnet” to attract and nurture prospective clients. This can be done in many ways, depending on your product or service. Here are just a few:

• Free consultation
• Free trial
• Live workshop
• Online webinar
• Monthly e-newsletter
• Weekly tip email
• Video e-course
• Free content such as swipe files or a template

Mailchimp is a great way to deliver lead nurture content to everyone on your email list. Because Mailchimp integrates with Insightly, you can easily add new leads or contacts to your email marketing campaigns from within Insightly with just the click of a button.

The Insightly email template feature also allows you to send personalized content to the masses. Insightly email templates offers less design elements than Mailchimp, but it’s a great way to deliver essential content to the masses without spending hours playing copy paste or using  BCC and increasing your chances of ending up in the spam folder.

Asking for the sale

For larger ticket items or services, asking for the sale can involve consulting time, developing proposals, putting together bids and estimates, and creating reports. Insightly’s activity sets and pipeline features are great for helping you utilize best practices for each client.  Here’s an example from the real estate industry.

Task Who When

Set appointment to meet with new lead	Eva	Day 1
Book meeting room if not holding at their location	Eva	Day 1
Send pre-meeting survey	Peter	Day 1
Start a folder for client in Google drive–>Clients. Create spreadsheet with client name	Eva	Day 1
Send reminder email to complete survey if they haven’t already done so	Peter	Day 5
Pull properties from MLS based on their survey responses	Peter	Day 5
Add survey results and MLS properties to their client file	Eva	Day 6
Follow up to ensure engagement agreement was signed	Joan	Day 14

 

When you use pipelines and activity sets, your sales process begins to run like a well oiled machine. Set tasks for more custom client activities such as specific follow up dates. Insightly will remind you on the day you need to call a client to follow up. Remember, the fortune is in the follow up.

Larger ticket sales can be a lot to manage, but using Insightly can help you stay on top of multiple opportunities at once. Easily import new leads into Insightly using the business card scanner or their easy upload features. Use email templates and Mailchimp integration to make sure your

leads are being nurtured until they’re ready to purchase. And instead of managing the sales process in your head, activity sets and pipelines can help ensure you utilize best practices to manage every detail.

****Alternate chart for activity set example*******

Day 1

• Eva will set an appointment to meet with new lead
• Eva will book a meeting room if needed
• Peter will send the pre-meeting survey email template
• Eva will create a new client file in the Google Drive

Day 5

• Peter will remind client to complete survey if they haven’t already done so
• Peter will pull properties from MLS based on survey responses

Day 6

• Eva will add survey results and MLS properties to the client file

Day 14

• Joan will follow up to make sure the engagement agreement is signed

 

Today’s guest post comes from Erin Mathie and Melissa Bamfo from Business Made Simple. Join Erin and Melissa tomorrow, April 6th, at 11:00 am, PST, for a live Twitter Chat. You can find and follow us at: @insightlyapp #LoveYourCRM. You can also follow Erin and Melissa at: @businessmadesim.

 

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!

 

	Handy Work
	As a business person, your sales calls may take you on trips across the globe. When we’re in unfamiliar cultures and surroundings, we can sometimes “put our foot in it” when we don’t understand cultural customs, particularly when it comes to hand gestures. There are lots of “handy” quick reference guides you can bring along that will help you navigate these murky waters. In the mean time, here a few tidbits that will let your fingers and hands do the talking… without being insulting:   Thumbs up What’s accepted as a glaring sign of approval or agreement in the United States is actually used as an insult in Bangladesh as well as parts of the Middle East. The horn fingers In USA “the horn fingers” is adopted by rockers and it is a sign of approval, rock on! However, in a many Mediterranean and Latin countries (e.g. Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Spain, Italy and Portugal) that particular hand gesture is tantamount to telling someone that (yikes!) their spouse is cheating on them. The “V” Sign This sign has two formats: one with the palm faced outwards, and another with the palm inwards. In the US, both ways refer to “victory” and peace. In other places, such as in the UK, Australia, and South Africa, the same gesture with the back of the hand facing the other person is considered to be an extremely insulting.
	No More Google Contacts Duplicates
	We can all agree that duplicates in Google Contacts is tiresome to say the least. Whether it’s from inconsistent data entry input or that your contact wears a few different hats, duplicates can really throw a wrench in your works. Take a look at this example,     I’ve got Henry in Google Contacts three times – once under his first name and email, the second time his full name, email and work number, and the third time under his nickname. Gah! Merge Google Contacts Duplicates Manually The easiest way to get rid of duplicates is to merge them together, and it’s so simple you’ll wonder why you’ve never thought of it before. The first step is to search for and select duplicate Google Contacts entries. Once your search is complete then click “More” on the menu bar above the contacts, then click “Merge Contacts” in the drop down menu.   And this will happen, Great! You’ve got your first duplicate out of the way. But this method works only on a small scale. If you start searching through the all the contacts that you’ve collected over the years, you’ll quickly realise it’s impossible to manually weed out all the duplicates, and if you’re not careful, you’ll accidentally lose some valuable contact information in the process. Merge Google Contacts Duplicates Semi-Automatically You can clean up your Google Contacts en masse, and remain in control of the whole process so you don’t accidentally lose valuable contact information. Go back to Google Contacts and click on “More” in the menu bar. Then click on “Find & merge duplicates” in the drop down menu. This screen will pop up:   Click “expand” at the top to see all the duplicates. This is a really important step, so be sure to check carefully or you run the risk of merging contact details that should stay separate. You then unselect any duplicates you don’t want to merge and then click “Merge” at the bottom of the popup.   Voila! A cleaner Google Contacts list, which makes it so much easier if you want to sync your Google Contacts with your CRM, like Insightly! If you want to learn more secrets about Google Contacts, check out our free ebook “The Ultimate Guide to Google Contacts”   This week’s Insightly tip was provided by Vanessa Rombaut, Digital Communications Marketeer PieSync.
	Don’t Worry, Keep Smiling
	According to Psychology Today, smiling is truly transformational. In fact, research shows us that a smile elevates your own mood as well as the moods of those around us. Apparently, it can even lengthen your life.     The act of smiling activates neural messaging that benefits your health and happiness. It activates the release of neuropeptides (moleculres that foster neuro communication) that work toward fighting off stress. They also facilitate messaging to the whole body when we are happy, sad, angry, depressed, or excited. The feel good neurotransmitters dopamine, endorphins and serotonin are all released when a smile flashes across your face as well, which relaxes and can have the domino affect of lowering your heart rate and blood pressure.   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.