Month: May 2016

Mobile CRM is here to stay. Are you paying attention to your customers when you’re out and about generating new sales, attending events, or purchasing supplies? A true superhero doesn’t have to duck into a phone booth to call the office for updates. With smartphone or tablet in hand, you’re never more than a login away from retrieving all the necessary information from your CRM. Embrace your inner superhero and learn more about the many ways small businesses are using (and maximizing) mobile technologies to keep them informed, 24/7.

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

Whether you’re still on the fence about Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or you’ve begun to use it with lukewarm results, you may be concerned about what your salespeople will really get out of using CRM. Is it basically a digital rolodex? Does it take too much time? Can they learn how to use all the features? Start by helping everyone on your sales team master the most useful CRM features.

Collaborative Tools

CRM isn’t much more than an address book if your team isn’t using it to collaborate. Marketing and sales teams, especially, can use CRM to stay on the same page and keep projects moving forward. Create a pipeline, assign responsible parties, and attach pertinent information.

Collaborative tools arm your salespeople with all the information they need to follow the sales pipeline. It lets the marketing team see where their efforts are going. Best of all, it allows both teams to work together more effectively to complete a sale.

Calendar with Scheduling

If you have an SMB CRM, it likely has a calendar of some sort, but you need one that really works for your team. It must have reminders, notifications, and recurring tasks as a bare minimum. If it can also include sales pipelines, collaborations with other team members, and the ability to sync with other popular calendars it will work out even better.

Robust calendar features save your team the time of double checking deadlines, tasks, and others’ schedules each day. It also lets them avoid double booking anything by having a completely synched schedule. With reminders and notifications, there is no chance of forgetting about a deadline.

Social Media Integration

Typically, data gathered from customer social signals is most useful to your marketing team. Sales will find this data useful as well, when they know how to leverage it. Using CRM with social media integration allows your salespeople to see all of your company’s social interactions with a contact. They’ll be able to gauge a customer’s sense of satisfaction and tailor their approach based on past interactions, rather than starting fresh each time.

File Sharing

As your team progresses through sales pipelines, they can attach relevant documents. File sharing ensures that everyone in a project can see those documents. Indeed, any contact given access can see shared files, including clients if appropriate.

For your salespeople, file sharing means instant access to such important information as past purchases, personal information, relevant images, and so on. Having files from other team members at their fingertips empowers your sales team and saves them time.

Ongoing Support

Sometimes we assume that a product like CRM automatically comes with lifetime support and training. It’s a feature that can easily be overlooked during the buying process. If you want your team to use CRM effectively and feel supported in doing so, make sure the product you choose has support. Typically, different plans have varying levels of support, such as priority email support or chat support. Your team will want personal help when they need it. Onboarding is equally as important to setting your salespeople up for success with CRM.

Lead Management

When someone is interested in your business, but they’re not quite at the sales point yet, your team needs to stay on top of nurturing those warm leads. That’s where lead management in a CRM comes in very handy. Create leads from web forms, social media, and other places. Your team can reach out to gauge interest in buying, then converting them to a sales opp when the customer is ready. In CRM, sales opportunities can be linked to a contact’s data, history, and interactions, giving your salespeople all the information they need to close the deal.

For small businesses, shopping for CRM can be an overwhelming task. The lists of features all sound wonderful until you and your team are trying to wade through them. Tools that give you more customer data, encourage collaboration, and save time are always the most useful. Help your team master the CRM tools that will empower them to work more effectively.

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.

Customer data provides your business with a great deal of insight on how you can best connect with your audience. But, if you’re just starting out or unsure of the direction that data is pointing you in, it’s time to go directly to the source and ask. Nielsen data suggests 84% of customers trust recommendations from people they know, and 68% trust online reviews, so customer feedback plays a critical role in the success of your business.

We’ve already talked about how you can use customer feedback to improve your business, so today, we’re going to dive a bit further into the benefits of polling your customers, and just how Insightly can help you do that.

Benefits of Polling Your Customers

Customer polls have numerous benefits, including:

• Finding out how customers feel about a certain product or service
• The additional products and services they’d be most likely to buy from you
• How they feel about your company overall
• Finding out what kind of customer service experience they expect vs. what they receive
• How they respond to certain offers
• Price points at which they’d be most likely to make purchases
• And more…

No matter what you want to know about how your customers are responding your business, there’s a tool available to make it easier for you to communicate with them. The key is to use the right tools to generate polls and keep track of the data that comes in through the platforms.

Use your email marketing platform to send targeted surveys to the necessary segments of your list. This is the best way to find out information about a certain product – you’d send the survey to list members who’ve purchased the product, rather than your entire customer base.

Use Facebook polls to get information from fans of your page who may or may not already be customers. You can choose from a simple one-question poll installed on your page tab or embedded on your website, a timeline hashtag poll, a customer satisfaction survey, a giveaway contest, a photo submission contest, a photo voting contest, and even quizzes if you’re willing to also invest in Quizzes for Facebook.

For longer, more in-depth surveys, turn to a tool like SurveyMonkey to get the information you need. Just be sure you’re asking necessary questions, and keeping things short and to the point. If the survey is going to take a significant amount of time, reward customers with a freebie or discount for their time.

Take for instance, Nexonia, a Canadian-based company that offers a cloud-based solution for expense and timesheet management. After 10 years in business, the company hadn’t established a formal customer feedback solution, but after turning to SurveyMonkey, they were able to create a solution that enabled them to learn more about how users felt about the mobile and web experience.

The survey results indicated customers wanted to see a visual modernization of both the web and mobile interfaces, and they love the app so much they want to access the full web capabilities from it. As a result, the company was able to roll out the desired user face changes within 60 days of getting the feedback, and started developing the additional functionality for the mobile app.

How Insightly’s Lead Management Features Can Help

With our lead management features, you can funnel your leads from a number of sources into the CRM. Using a form on your website, you can convert the information from a contact form, or a feedback survey into a lead in Insightly. And, if you’re out and about away from the office and just happen to connect with someone who may be interested in what you have to offer, you can create a lead in the system so you know you need to verify them later.

After collecting the lead data and determining the lead is qualified, convert it to a sales opportunity, and Insightly automatically creates a linked contact and organization to keep everything streamlined and efficient.

With the new customer feedback data in hand, you’re better equipped to qualify leads, and then make changes to processes, products, and services to better suit the needs of your customers. In turn, this creates a happy, engaged, customer base, which helps to foster loyalty. Rosetta says engaged customers buy 90% more frequently, and spend 60% more per transaction, leading to those customers delivering three times the value over the course of a year.

If you’re not already using surveys and polls to get information from your customers, you’re missing out – so get started today.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about 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 using Insightly CRM, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

Keyboard Shortcuts

Insightly includes a number of shortcuts to navigate through the application with a press of a key or two. Click outside of an entry field and type the keys below to prompt the associated action.You can also view the list of shortcuts in Insightly by clicking the profile icon and selecting Keyboard Shortcuts. And you can disable the keyboard shortcuts by unchecking the Enable Keyboard Shortcuts box in the shortcuts window. 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.

The Clean Machine

It won’t be long before we hit Labor Day weekend and spring officially rolls over into the summer season. Before you hit the road with the family for summer vacation, set aside a couple of hours to tidy up your digital universe: Refresh Your Passwords Minding a herd of passwords can test your memory, but it’s still one of the best first lines of defense in keeping your online presence off limits. Good practices for creating passwords include creating something lengthy and complicated.  Long and random combinations of letters, numbers and other characters work best.   Back It Up Hackers are getting ever more creative in their approach to cyber crime. One of the more recent crimes are called “extortion hacks“.  As the name suggests, a hacker will infiltrate and lock down a computer and demand money in exchange for NOT wiping the hard drive clean. The remedy? Back it, back it up, back it up.   Update Software on the Regular Whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, desktop, or laptop, software updates are critical. They are created to fix flaws that could otherwise give hackers a way into your device. This applies not just to operating systems but to common apps like browsers and media players. Dump software that you no longer use or that’s no longer updated.

Get Cozy With Cold Calls

This week we’re introducing a new series of weekly sales tips. To kick off the series, here are some best practices that will keep you warmed up and ready during cold calls. After all, cold calls often result in warm leads. Most calls land in voice mail, either on a person’s cell or on their desk phone, so keep it short and sweet.  If you look at a message on your phone that is over a minute long from a unknown number, chances are hight it’s getting deleted.  Identify yourself, your company, and why you were trying to reach the person.  Don’t pitch, don’t lie, and don’t be fancy, keep it short and to the point and let them know exactly why you called.   Keep your ultimate goal in mind as you are making your calls. The goal is to discover if the person you are calling has a pain, need, and budget for what you are selling.  Having this in mind will keep you more aware of what you are doing and why, rather than letting your brain switch to autopilot and becoming a robo dialer. Above all, stay positive!  This is easier to do for some of us than it is for others, but it will make the experience of the call better for both you and the person you are calling.  Stand up when you make your calls, smile as you dial the number, put a mirror in front of you, make funny faces at the coworkers sitting near you – do anything that will keep you from speaking lethargically over the phone.

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!

Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email.

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: 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.

An online community can be hugely beneficial to your business. It may boost sales, increase customer satisfaction, and give you more customer insight. However, managing a community takes a lot of resources. What kind of benefits might you see from your own online community? How can you tell whether it’s worth your time and energy to start your own?

What an Online Community Looks Like

Your community probably already exists — you have loyal customers, new customers, and potential customers already talking about you and your product. Your job in creating an online community for your SMB is to bring all those folks together, get them communicating with you and each other, and give them value. This could be in the form of an active blog, a message board, a wiki, even a Facebook page or group.

The format you choose will depend on what business you’re in as well as where you customers like to spend their time online. For example, if you have a handmade children’s toy business, your customers probably spend far more time on Instagram than they do updating technical wikis. Your business will determine the shape of your community, while your customers will determine its direction.

Invest in Your Customers

If you give your customers an empty message board, they aren’t going to use it. They want to know their time and opinions are valued. When you listen to your community, they know you care what they have to say. Have you ever had a great idea for an app feature that you submitted to the developer? What did you hear back? How quick was the response? Your customers have great ideas they’d like to share, too.

An active online community provides you with invaluable insights, far beyond suggestions and complaints. You can see how your customers are using your products and gauge the impact upon their lives. You can talk directly with them, often in real time.

Valuable Content

In addition to investing your time in your customers, another way to give them value is with high quality content. Community-building content is about your customers’ interests and needs, not about promotion of your business. Social media posts, blog posts, help articles, and even emails replies should be useful and interesting. This doesn’t merely apply to content you’ve created, but content you share from other sources as well. In fact, sharing great content from other sources with your customers is excellent for community building. Their time is as valuable as yours. Make sure the time they spend with your brand is not wasted.

Social Media

If you’re considering creating an online community, you’re probably already thinking about whether Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or others are the right fit. You may have already tried using social media to build your online community and found out it’s not quite as easy as it sounds.

If you’re going to use social media, keep a few important tips in mind. Use the network that makes the most sense for your business. Consider using a CRM with social media integration to help you determine where your customers are most active. Interact with groups and individuals who have interests that match your business and with complementary businesses. Remember the “social” in social media; it’s not a place solely for self-promotion.

Business Friendships

It’s just as important to engage with other businesses in your community as it is to engage customers. An active online community enables you to partner with other businesses to build connections. Likewise, being active in other online communities with related interests lets you meet and engage with other business owners. For SMBs this is an exceptionally powerful tool. Perhaps you feature a fellow business’ products in your storefront, hire a freelance designer you met in a group, or find a trustworthy tax preparer by recommendation. These kinds of connections and partnerships can highly benefit all of you.

Online communities can do wonders for your business, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that creating one is the right move for your business. Running a community with a respectable response time and dedication to quality content requires a significant time investment. For some small businesses, your time is better spent on other aspects of your business. Likewise, hiring someone to manage a community can be expensive for an SMB. Before you jump into starting an online community, carefully consider whether it’s really the right move for your business.

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

Have you ever sat in a business meeting and pretended to know about some “amazing new app” that’s mentioned? Or perhaps you’ve been at a dinner party where an inside joke or line from a film is quoted. You might have chuckled and played along… but as soon as you can sneak away or subtly use your phone, what’s the first thing you do?

Google it.

Everyone does it. The Internet is a powerful resource; when something new is introduced to us, the modern-day answer is to search online. What is it? Why is it important? Who is involved? How is it relevant?

Your potential buyers act the same way. Even when a recommendation comes from a reliable source, most consumers want to arm themselves with information and knowledge. In fact, Forrester reported last year that “74% of business buyers told us they conduct more than half of their research online before making an offline purchase.”

The ensuing questions for you are: what online content do you provide for information seekers? How can you ensure that your potential buyers find what they want? Do you know what messaging will convince them that your business has the right solution?

Besides having strong SEO and a social media presence (which are topics for another day), let’s focus on what content should be available on your website when potential buyers land there searching for information.

Here’s the good news: some basic “markers” exist in the Buyer’s Journey. (In case that term is new to you, the Buyer’s Journey refers to the path a buyer takes from first realizing he or she has a challenge, to the discovery of a potential solution, to the selection and purchase.)

For our purposes, we will look at the three pre-purchase stages when potential buyers are using online resources to learn about your business, products, and services before they engage directly with your sales team.

While you may see alternative terminology used to describe the stages of the Buyer’s Journey, the basic path during pre-purchase is the same:

Awareness, Education, Evaluation

You may be asking yourself, what are the differences between the stages? How can we provide the right resources for each? What content are buyers looking for?

Here’s the mixed news: with the ability to search online, the Buyer’s Journey has morphed into an individual experience. You can no longer control the step-by-step education of the buyer. The Wild West of the Internet means that buyers determine their own destiny. There isn’t a moment where someone says, “I’m still in the Awareness stage. Therefore, I should read analyst reports before I move on to blogs or webinars.”

So, buyers don’t search linearly. Great. What does that mean?

Let’s get back to the good news: subconsciously, buyers are asking linear questions. They need to find out the scope of the problem before determining if a solution is right for them. Therefore, buyers will self-select the content they read and likely gravitate towards a type of content (such as videos), expecting to find answers to the question currently at the forefront of their mind.

As such, content for each pre-purchase stage in the Buyer’s Journey is a huge asset for your business. Additionally, it behooves you to provide at least two or three types (e.g. videos, blogs, white papers, infographics) per stage to suit different types of learners (visual learners v. readers).

Let’s look at the three stages and refine our thinking about why they are distinct and critical to address.

AWARENESS

As the name implies, the Awareness stage is when your potential buyer first discovers or figures out that he or she has a problem and needs to find a solution.

For example, let’s say our potential buyer, Samantha, just realized that she can’t do X&Y as quickly as she wants because she lacks Z.

Naturally, she wonders to herself:

• Do other people have this problem?
• What exactly do I need to make this problem go away?
• Are there businesses or products out there that solve it for me?

As the Solver of Samantha’s Problem (you!), your best bet is to ask her the same questions she is asking herself, i.e. speak directly to her in her language:

• Do you struggle to do X&Y quickly?
• Do you wonder if Z exists?

Frame any content you create for the Awareness stage to speak to the problems that Samantha and people like her are facing. The immediate “That’s my problem!” response almost guarantees that she stays on your website instead of returning to her search.

This messaging should, at a minimum, be on your home page, as well as in assets such as brochures for download, in one- to two-minute product and company videos, and in visuals.

Remember: any time you remind the buyer of their pain points and how you solve it, you’re keeping the buyer tethered to your solution.

EDUCATION

Now that you have Samantha’s attention, she wants to learn more.

Your goal is to convince Samantha that you not only understand her pain points, but you also have the right solution. The Education stage is about building up and reiterating your key messaging so that buyers like Samantha know exactly what you have to offer, why it’s important, and how you provide the best answers to her challenges.

Just as important: your content must be current and, ideally, provided in a variety of formats. She can watch videos, check out infographics, read blog posts, download white papers, and consume case studies which show how people just like her have found success with your solution.

Bonus points if you can educate her AND illustrate that you’re a thought leader in your industry through white papers, e-Books, articles, and publications.

EVALUATION

Evaluation means that your product or service is now in serious contention. Samantha is interested in the details: the features, the functionality, your upcoming product releases, customer satisfaction, etc.

She is watching demo videos to see the product in action. She’s signing up for webinars to learn more. She’s using your ROI tools. She’s hooked.

Pro tip: when Samantha starts interacting with content that belongs to this Evaluation stage, you should capture her contact information. By putting your in-depth content behind a simple form, you can gather buyer data, push it directly into your CRM, and then provide the contact to marketing and/or a salesperson.

Imagine how impressed Samantha will be when your salesperson calls or emails to follow up on that webinar she registered for and to answer any questions she may have.

In Conclusion

The best thing you can do to guarantee the right content at the right time is to provide resources that match these three Buyer’s Journey stages.

When you’re starting out and building up your content base, worry less about having a multitude of content types and more about the substance of the messaging. You’ll answer potential buyer’s questions and engage them.

When you’re ready to expand your assets and provide different types of content, you should think about your buyer personas:

• If they tend to be visual people and desire quick bites of information, then you may decide to go strong with videos, demos, and infographics.
• If you cater to an intellectual crowd who reads everything you give them, you may want to invest in white papers and e-Books, as well as regular blog posts.
• If you have both types (and most businesses do), then do a mix of both but make sure it’s across all three Buyer’s Journey stages.

Once you do have different types of content, track your metrics to see what’s most popular and what keeps viewers on your site… and then make more!

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

Annette DeNoyer is a strategic content marketing consultant with over eight years experience in a variety of technology roles, most notably in product management, product marketing, and content marketing. Her experiences at both tech startups and established organizations enable her to create effective messaging for young companies looking to attract attention and garner credibility, as well as for established companies developing strategic content for each sales stage in the Buyers Journey.

Join us on Tuesday, May 10th from 9am – 10:00am PST for our next Insightly Insider Discussion “How to enable sales with the right content” with our guest host and tech entrepreneur, Mikita Mikado, of PandaDoc.

As a CEO of document automation company, PandaDoc, Mikita has spent the last 5 years of his career helping to align marketing and sales leaders at thousands of businesses. Mikita will share ideas on how to build and organize the necessary content for sales, and share a few tips and tricks for increasing sales by tweaking your quote, proposal, and contract process.

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

Guidance Aviation is a helicopter flight and training school, with the goal of providing fast, thorough helicopter flying lessons for aspiring helicopter pilots. As more and more people showed interest in training at Guidance, the company needed a solution that made it easier to track new prospects and applications. A lengthy spreadsheet worked for a while, but Guidance needed an easy-to-use CRM tool that worked seamlessly with Google.

Guidance’s integration with Insightly has helped the company reach out to new students and work with them on a personal level. With Insightly, employees can track prospective students, answer questions and provide personalized service. All of the information prospects provide is tracked and captured within Insightly, which makes it readily available to Guidance employees, as needed. Using tags, Guidance is able to easily organize prospects based on their specific interests, ways they learned about Guidance, preferred semester start dates and much more.

Representatives from the school have successfully used the data stored in Insightly to give students more attention and highlight the benefits of Guidance most likely to suit their needs. With more individual attention, Guidance has consistently increased enrollment for both its flying and teaching programs.

“The other CRMs we used weren’t right for a company of our size. With Insightly, we can manage our database easily and get the information we need to give our students and applicants the answers they need. Our enrollment has increased because of the improvements we’ve made since we started using Insightly.”

– Robert Short, student services manager for Guidance Aviation

Find out more about how Guidance Aviation uses Insightly to track prospects and increase enrollment. 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 Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

National Small Business Week (May 1-7) is here. This annual event (sponsored by the U.S. Small Business Administration), honors the contributions of the tens-of-thousands of small businesses across the U.S., emphasizing the pivotal role they play in fueling the US economy and providing jobs. To recognize National Small Business Week, Insightly is partnering with Melinda Emerson (known to thousands of small business owners as ‘The Small Business Lady’) to sponsor a chat about the importance of good sales processes.

Emerson will live stream her regular #SmallBizChat, interviewing a variety of business experts, including Brent Leary, a CRM implementation and strategy expert. During the chat, Emerson and Leary will cover a variety of important sales-specific topics such as, “where do businesses owners go wrong with building a sales process,” and “when is the right time to bring on a sales person?” Don’t miss this live event! Mark your calendar for May 4^th at 8 pm, EST, and follow the conversation @http://succeedasyourownboss.com/sbclive/.

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