Sink Your Teeth into the New Year

Segment Your Lead List in Insightly

Unlike some CRMs that offer limited segmentation options, Insightly is somewhat of a blank canvas for your needs. You can slice and dice your data the way you see fit, rather than forcing your business model into something that doesn’t quite work.

With regard to lead segmentation, Insightly presents a number of unique solutions. To illustrate how this can work, let’s imagine that your company provides web design services for a variety of industries. As your lead list grows, it becomes clear that certain sectors and customer types require slightly different sales approaches.

To segment your list, you take the following actions:

Create a filter for web leads – Your research shows that leads originating from your website tend to close faster than outbound cold calls. Creating a filter with the existing “lead source” drop down option gives your sales team a list of warm prospects to engage.

Add a custom dropdown field for your products – On your website, you’ve published your standard packages and prices. Before your sales team reaches out, the prospect typically expresses an interest in one of your service products. Capturing this information upfront will help your team prioritize their efforts and identify upsell possibilities.

Set up a tag for “hot” leads – Some leads need answers now, not later. A “hot lead” tag could help organize time-sensitive follow up actions that need to happen first.

Try using segmentation today!

Use Segmentation Data to Develop New Profit Centers

There’s a wild card factor associated with lead and customer segmentation: the creation of new profit centers.

By segmenting your CRM records, you inherently become more in touch with customer needs. Each new bit of data helps you better relate to the many challenges, goals, and frustrations of the people you serve. Armed with this information, you can begin to think more like your target audience and identify innovative solutions.

How can you use segmentation data to develop new profitable products or services? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Use the information in your CRM to identify common “personas.” For example, a customer persona might be a “community college IT director, who is satisfied with our entry level product.” A prospect persona might be a “university department chair, who is budget-constrained.”
2. Huddle with your team and build out a more detailed picture for each persona. What makes each person tick? Are there ways your company could make them even happier?
3. Review actual feedback from prospects and customers. Look for comments such as, “I wish your product did…” or, “Does your company offer…” If your team has been taking good notes in Insightly, exporting and synthesizing this data should be relatively straightforward.
4. Create a backlog of product or service enhancement ideas.
5. Evaluate each idea based on two factors: impact and ease of implementation. For those that rise to the top, develop a business case and gauge persona interest.
6. If the business case makes financial sense, develop an implementation plan.

Set New Year’s Resolutions (with Teeth)

The infancy of another year is upon us.

As with any new year, people feel compelled to set resolutions for themselves.

“I want to lose 15 pounds.”

“I’m going to finally write that book that I’ve always talked about.”

“It’s time that I hired myself an administrative assistant.”

“I will spend more time with my children this year.”

Although admirable, most resolutions unfortunately vanish into the cold January wind. Don’t let yourself fall into this trap. Hold yourself accountable in 2017 by creating resolutions with teeth.

Since you’re already an Insightly user, you can use the tool’s project management capabilities to avoid forgetfulness. Try setting up a milestone and assign a due date. Then, start adding related tasks as stepping stones toward the accomplishment of your goal. As new emails appear in your inbox, your conscience will be more likely to push you into action.

Let technology be your accountability partner in 2017!

Keep Your Customers Segmented

You just won a new client. Congratulations!

Many companies stop all segmentation activities at this point. However, as the old adage says, “it’s easier to sell to an existing client than to a new one.” Why not capitalize on this truth by maintaining tight segmentation of your customers, too?

As you develop your customer segmentation strategy, there are a number of factors to consider. You might want to think through these questions before going much further:

• Are there any common patterns that our customers follow after the initial sale?
• Should we assign segmentation data at the contact or organization level? (or both)?
• Do we have a process for identifying cross-sell and upsell opportunities?
• Should we set recurring tasks for sales staff to regularly follow up on opportunities with existing customers?
• How should our sales team pursue additional opportunities without becoming an extension of our customer support function?
• Would integrating Insightly to our email marketing system streamline customer segmentation data and downstream communication?
• What will be our strategy for ensuring segmentation data is up-to-date and accurate?
• Should we implement an API connection between our CRM and our other databases?
• How do we avoid confusion between our lead segmentation and customer segmentation fields/tags?

Once you’ve worked through such issues and begun applying segmentation data to customer records, you might be surprised at the many new revenue opportunities that present themselves.