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Monday Morning Mantra

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!

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Activity Sets
If you find that you’re entering the same tasks or events week after week or day after day, you might want to build an Activity Set to generate a series a repeatable tasks.  An Activity Set is a series of instructions to create tasks or events. Those tasks and events will be linked to the record they’re applied to, but aren’t connected to each other or grouped in any way. 
Activity sets:
⦁ Need to be set up by your Insightly administrator.
⦁ Can include calculated task due dates and event dates.
⦁ Can be used to create activities directly for leads, contacts, organizations, opportunities and projects.
⦁ Can be embedded in a Pipeline stage for opportunities or projects.
Activity-Sets

Let’s use an example of a sales team contacting new leads. Every time a lead is assigned, a salesperson must call the lead, send an email follow-up a few days later, and then stop by for a visit a few days after that. (This is a quite efficient sales group.)

 

Without an Activity Set, the salesperson or sales manager enters the same three tasks into Insightly for every lead. Each task is entered separately, which can mean lots of repeated data entry. This also leaves room for error when entering task names, due dates, and other details.

 

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.

 

Just Say No to Brain Drain
According to the NTL Institute, humans tend to remember:

  • 5% of what they learn when they’ve learned from a lecture (i.e. university/college lectures)
  • 10% of what they learn when they’ve learned from reading (i.e. books, articles)
  • 20% of what they learn from audio-visual (i.e. apps, videos)

Brain-Drain

  • 30% of what they learn when they see a demonstration
  • 50% of what they learn when engaged in a group discussion.
  • 75% of what they learn when they practice what they learned.
  • 90% of what they learn when they use immediately (or teach others)

What does that all mean? Well, it means all of that time we spent pouring through books and attending classroom lectures was a bit of a bust–with  80-95% of that information going in one ear and out the other. No!

Before you pull the plug on sending your kid to college or learning to speak another language, changing up your strategy will make a big difference. Instead of passive forms of learning, we focus our time, energy, and resources on “participatory” methods that have proven to deliver more effective results, in less time. So, if you want to learn to speak Spanish, start spending time with native speakers and talk, talk, talk.

Playing Well With Others
We all have our own unique way of doing things in the workplace; however, what make perfect sense to us might not to others. If you ever wonder if you’re being a good boss or co-worker, take five and ask/ponder a few simple questions:

  1. Have your colleagues sought you out for advice within the last three months.
  2. Can you think of a few examples where you proactively sought the perspectives of others that you knew would offer a different viewpoint?

Trust

  1. Do you show up on time for meetings and conference calls?
  2. Do you respond to emails within 24 hours?

Monday Morning Sales Mantra
Every day is different in the world of sales, and some days are simply going to go far better than others. If your week is going sideways, remind yourself of the simple things that help keep your mind and work day organized:

  • It’s not what you say; It’s what your customer believes.
  • Never go into a sales call not knowing how you’re going to close the sale.

Monday-Mantra

  • Have a dedicated time set aside either daily or weekly to do your prospecting.
  • Believe in yourself and what you’re doing to help your customers.
  • Show up and show up on time.

 

 

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.

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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.
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