Streamline Lead Management with Insightly

Regardless of the source, leads must be quickly and effectively followed up with. With each passing minute, you reduce the chances of successfully converting them to opportunities. Luckily, Insightly makes it easy to view, assign, and automate the lead management process.

Let’s say you wanted to view all of today’s new leads and then assign them (in bulk) to your sales guy or gal. You’re in luck, as Insightly has a prebuilt filter for that. Simply use the “today’s leads” filter, select all of the results, and change the responsible user. Presto! Your sales team now has an actionable plan for the day.

As you get more leads (and sales reps), you’ll likely want to automate this process. Insightly has you covered here, too, thanks to its lead assignment rule feature. In a nutshell, lead assignment rules prevent you (or someone else at your organization) from becoming the bottleneck. Rather than waiting on a person to dish out new leads, Insightly does it for you – based on your predefined criteria, of course. To begin using lead assignment rules, you’ll need to upgrade to at least a Professional level Insightly account. Find out more about upgrading here.

Getting More Leads in Your CRM

A guaranteed way to make your sales reps even happier is by flooding your CRM with high-quality leads. The more leads you provide them, the greater chance they have to maximize their commission checks. (Remember, when you’re paying big commissions, it also means that sales revenue is humming along.)

Sure, this all sounds great. But, how can you do so without breaking the bank?

As pointed out in this multi-part series, increasing lead flow may not be as difficult as first thought. It just comes down to your company’s dedication to solid marketing principles. Here are some basic steps for getting started with a lead-focused marketing strategy:

1. Clearly define how your company should use leads and opportunities (they’re different!)
2. View your website through the eyes of a prospective customer
3. Consider what leads are looking for from your website
4. Research where your existing web visitors are coming from (social, organic, paid ads, etc.)
5. Brainstorm low-hanging fruit for increasing traffic from top sources
6. Budget for a more engaging website and content marketing
7. Implement your plan and track progress
8. Do more of what works – and less of what doesn’t

Obviously, this is a simplified version of the process. Each step above could require days or weeks of work, but at least you have a general game plan now!

Ease Out of the Day

It’s 5:29 pm. You just wrapped up that big project, and now you have one minute to check your email again before calling it a day. As you put on your jacket and walk out the door, you can’t help but feeling totally frazzled. Another intense ten-hour day is in the books, and now it’s time to go back to being a good parent and spouse.

Sound familiar? With so many things to get done, it’s easy to work up until the very last minute. Although a highly efficient use of time, a wall-to-wall day can make transitioning back to your personal life difficult at best.

Try this simple experiment next week. Open your calendar and block off the last five minutes of each workday. Don’t just ignore your calendar when it prompts you to stop working. Actually quit working and do something mindless, such as:

• Close your eyes and think about the successes of the day
• Enjoy a relaxing song
• Plan out tomorrow’s priorities and work schedule
• Count your blessings
• Review your impressive sales pipeline in Insightly
• Daydream about big goals for next quarter
• Send a nice note to a colleague or friend
• Look out the window and enjoy the evening landscape

Ahhh…just thinking about these activities probably makes you feel more relaxed. Invest the twenty-five minutes in next week’s work plan, and you’ll find it much easier to transition out of work. Your family will thank you!

Avoid Turf Wars with Better Communication

In a perfect world, your sales department would happily accept the leads they’re assigned. Unfortunately, as with any other group of people, jealousy and hard feelings can develop if you’re not careful.

How can you prevent such negativity from plaguing your company? For starters, maintain an open dialogue about how you assign leads. If you’re using Insightly’s lead assignment rules, you might consider publishing the criteria into a shared document somewhere on your network drive. This way, when your robotic lead assignments go out, everyone already understands the ground rules.

Determining which criteria to use is equally important. There’s no magic combination and largely depends on your business model. Here are a few quick examples:

Heating & Air Company Serving St. Louis – Given the localized footprint, it might make sense to break leads into two (industry) groups: commercial & residential. If you have more than two reps, consider using additional refining criteria such as ZIP Code or tagged info.

Manufacturing Firm Supplying Auto Part Shops – Since this firm serves the entire US automotive aftermarket, it may be wise to assign leads based on region. Each rep would manage particular states or state groups, which creates clear distinction and expectations.

IT Firm Serving Public K-12 Schools In Iowa – Some schools are much smaller than others, which means “IT services” could vary significantly depending on the number of students and employees. Since employee data is publicly available, it might be wise to pre-populate leads with this information to streamline lead delegation.