Month: January 2017

How to See What Went Wrong (in Insightly)

This reality can be extremely frustrating for business owners and sales reps alike. Countless calls, emails, and proposals are sent with the understanding that very few opportunities will bear fruit. As difficult as defeat can be, lost opportunities are an extremely valuable learning opportunity. That is, if you have the right information at your disposal.

Insightly users can quickly and accurately learn valuable lessons from lost opportunity data. Best of all, this type of information is easily accessible within prebuilt opportunity reports. Here’s how to access the information:

1. Open this report in your Insightly account
2. From the “report fields” menu on the left, drag two fields into the report area: “state / status” and “state reason”
3. In the “report filters and parameters” section, add a filter like this one:

1. Click the “run report” button and view the results
2. Sort by “state reason” for insight into why deals have failed

If you’d like to refer back to this report in the future, it’s also a good idea to save it as a personal report. Or, you could save it as a “shared” report if you wish to collaborate with others.

One important note: if you do not see any “state reason” data, your sales staff may not be using this dropdown field when closing opportunities. Develop a training plan to ensure your sales reps are aware of the menu and use it regularly.

Creating Logical Opportunity State Reasons

If you’re new to Insightly, you may not have had the time to define opportunity state reasons yet. Doing so may seem like a low priority, especially when you have so many other fields to organize. However, without it, you’ll be unable to run the report in the previous section.

Rather than just allowing your sales team to make updates as they see fit, it may be wise to be more strategic. You want to develop a list of menu options that are both clear and concise. Here is some food for thought when creating a list of options:

Survey Your Team: Your sales reps already know the most common reasons why deals go south. Create a quick survey and ask for their input. By canvassing those with the closest connection to the sales pipeline, you’re likely to gather some excellent feedback.

Look for Common Threads: Regroup with your data-minded staff and review the survey feedback. Seek to consolidate the responses into five to ten common state reasons. (There may be a few outliers that don’t make the final list. Develop a plan for dealing with these, too.)

Update Your CRM: If you’re using Insightly, updating your opportunity state reasons is fairly straightforward. Just be sure you’re updating the correct opportunity state (in this case, “lost”).

Reach Out to Your Team: Make sure you thank your team for providing feedback and participating in this process. Send them a note or schedule a brief call explaining how to use the new drop down options.

Do “Un-fun” Things in Fun Places

We’ve all been there. It’s been a long day, and you just want to ease into the evening. Some classical guitar music and a few cat memes sound pretty appealing right about now.

Unfortunately, your calendar says otherwise.

Several overdue tasks and last month’s accounting await your attention. You’ve saved the worst for last, which usually doesn’t turn out very well from an output standpoint. What should you do?

You might try shaking things up by getting out of your normal office setting. In today’s world of virtual work environments, the word “normal” should be used loosely here. Be that as it may, simply stepping away from your desk can release a few remaining drops of productivity from your brain.

Here are a few ideas:

For work-from-home professionals:

• Your back porch
• The kitchen table
• A comfy couch or recliner

For those in more traditional workspaces:

• The conference room that no one ever uses
• Your breakroom
• The gazebo out back

For anyone:

• Your favorite coffee shop
• The local library
• An Internet cafe

A change of scenery might just be the added boost you need to knock out a few remaining tasks!

Why You Need Battle Cards

As your CRM begins to reveal the most common causes of lost revenue, it’s important to take swift action. In some cases, action may involve adjustments to your product or pricing mix. However, in many cases, issues may be resolved simply by modifying your sales approach.

To get your sales staff singing from the same hymnal, it can be a good idea to create a “battle card.” What is a battle card? Depending on your organization, a battle card could take many shapes. At its core, however, a battle card is simply a shared document that consolidates competitive and differentiator information.

For starters, keep your battle card simple. You might start by listing each reason why customers choose your competitor over you. Then, below each reason, offer brief rebuttals that your staff can use when faced with an objection.

As an example, let’s say that you’ve recently lost several customers due to a competitor’s new (lower) monthly pricing plan. Although your company cannot match this offer, you do have several strong rebuttals:

• The competitor’s product is missing two important features
• Your company offers a longer free trial
• Your annual pricing plan is actually cheaper than the competitor’s

As you encounter additional problems, be sure to update the battle card accordingly. Your sales team will appreciate it, and so will your bottom line.

Build Forecasts in Insightly

Insightly’s expected revenue field is available to help you get more value from your pipeline data. Found within the opportunity report, “expected revenue” provides a logical, weighted forecast based on the opportunities currently being worked by your team.

Adding this field to your opportunity report is quick and easy. Follow these simple steps:

1. Log in to your Insightly account
2. Visit this link to open the opportunity report
3. Under the “opportunity” folder, find the “Expected Revenue” field
4. Drag the field into the reporting area on the right
5. Click the green “Run Report” folder

Once added to your report, you should see a new column of data like this:

It’s important to note, however, that this report field will return empty data unless you’re already tracking two specific opportunity fields: value and probability. In case you’re unfamiliar with these fields, opportunity value is an estimate (in dollars) of a deal’s worth. Probability is a somewhat arbitrary percentage (out of 100% certainty) assigned by your staff. Insightly multiplies these two data points to arrive at each opportunity’s expected revenue.

Need to share your forecast with a colleague or manager? As with any Insightly report, you can also export the data to a CSV. Simply click the “Actions” drop down after running the report, and exporting is just a click away.

Get More Value from Your Sales Projections

Aside from holding sales reps accountable, how else can your organization benefit from the sales forecasts generated with Insightly?

Here are a few quick ideas:

Capacity planning – An accurate picture of future demand can help you align necessary fulfillment resources. Does the forecast indicate a major uptick in next quarter’s orders? If so, do you need to hire new staff or expand your facility to accommodate? As your company refines the forecasting process, such data can become increasingly reliable for capacity planning purposes.

Marketing priorities – If projected sales are lower than anticipated, could additional marketing resources be leveraged? For example, an email marketing campaign targeted to high value / low probability deals might increase the likelihood of close, thereby improving forecasted revenue.

Sales allocation – Looking at your sales team, do you have your best reps working the right deals? By reviewing sales projections, you might learn that your top talent spends too much time chasing low impact deals.

Keep or drop – Not every product or sales strategy works. In situations where sales have already stalled, looking at future demand can help management decide whether or not to keep pursuing a plan. If the past, current, and future look bleak, then it may be time to move in a different direction.

Bookmark Your Most Visited Web Pages

If you’re like most business professionals, your day is probably split between your inbox, calendar, social media accounts, shared web documents, and various places within Insightly.

When you consider all of the back and forth, how much time is wasted simply by opening a new browser tab, keying in the first few letters of the web address, clicking a “login” link, and following the prompts? Surely there’s a more streamlined approach.

Most web browsers today allow you to show or hide your “bookmarks bar.” If you’ve never enabled this feature in your browser, it’s an extra menu that appears below the web address bar. Usually about one centimeter tall, it’s a concise place to store 15 to 20 of your favorite web addresses.

As you set up your bookmarks bar, don’t just settle for an app’s homepage. Dig a little deeper and link directly to the innermost pages. For example, if you’re a sales-minded person who likes to frequently check opportunity statuses, you might bookmark a pre-filtered opportunity page in Insightly. Here is a list of some other Insightly pages worth bookmarking.

• All open leads
• All open opportunities
• All open projects
• All open tasks
• My open tasks
• Insightly calendar

Start by bookmarking the most common Insightly pages you visit and expand from there. Over the course of the year, this simple trick could save hours of non-value added clicking!

Increase the Accuracy of Your Sales Forecasting

Back to the topic of forecasting – how do you know for sure that your “expected revenue” data in Insightly is legit?

At the end of the day, it does come down to the human factor and trust. Your users must be counted on to input reliable information. True as this may be, there are steps you can take to increase the validity of your forecast information.

At the sales rep level, use the technology to foster greater accountability. For example, you might create a repeating task for each member of your sales team. The task could contain a quick link to his or her open opportunities and ask for confirmation of deal probability and estimated value. In order to qualify for certain performance-based compensation, you might require each rep to have completed this task before month’s end. No confirmation, no bonus.

At the management level, it’s wise to continuously refine the reporting process. Do you have a monthly or quarterly management meeting scheduled to look at this data? Who will be responsible for tracking forecasted revenue versus actual sales? Once tabulated, what systems do you need to implement to reduce the divide between these two metrics? A tight correlation between expected and actual demand will, in time, make your forecasts more usable and beneficial to the company.