Month: February 2017

Track Sales Appointments in Insightly

Those are pretty lofty goals without a proper plan for the day-to-day. For this reason, both management and sales reps need tangible, short-term benchmarks to help them stay on track. One commonly tracked metric involves the number of sales appointments set and/or made.

If you’re using Insightly, you can easily keep track of past and upcoming appointments (along with other important sales KPIs).

Here’s how to get started:

1. Log in to Insightly and navigate to the reports section.

2. Scroll down to “other reports” and click on “event report.” This should show you a listing of every event in the system.

3. Depending on the information you’re looking for, you can use filters to further refine your list. As a simple experiment, you might view events created by you within the past 30 days that also contain the words “sales call.”

4. Once you’re comfortable with how the report works, consider saving it to your “personal reports” in Insightly. You can then use it as a template for tracking events set by your staff. (Copying a report is easy in Insightly!)

Always Have Your CRM Handy

Most CRMs offer a mobile app for their users. (Insightly is no exception – download Insightly’s apps here.) Unfortunately, your phone is already bogged down with dozens of other apps. Is it really worth installing another app that you may – or may not – use?

Having your CRM just a tap away can be incredibly useful, particularly for small business owners. Here are a few reasons to consider:

Capturing ideas: Whether you’re at a ballgame or stuck in line at the store, you never really know when genius will strike. By capturing ideas as tasks or projects in your CRM, you can easily link to other related ideas, assign users and due dates, and upload handwritten notes. Better now than later!

Maintaining better customer notes: These days, most smartphones offer some type of voice dictation. The problem is that you have to save the file on your phone, find it, email it to yourself, and then remember to actually use it. A better approach is to capture voice notes directly on the contact’s record in your CRM. No busywork later on.

Digitizing business cards: How many business cards have you lost or misplaced over the years? A good CRM mobile app will let you scan in business cards, instantly creating new leads on your behalf. That’s especially important at trade shows or networking events.

Get Affirmation on Your Calendar Events

You’re moving at a mile a minute.

Clients never seem to stop calling. Emails and to-do lists fill your every waking moment. Needless to say, going this quickly can sometimes lead to careless oversights.

To create structure for an otherwise chaotic work life, you probably already use an online calendar. Employees, contractors, and clients routinely send invitations that automatically post events to your calendar. Such inbound invitations are great because you’re not the instigator. You simply click the accept button, and technology handles the rest. If the event’s time or date was entered incorrectly, it’s ultimately not your problem.

Of course, there are many other events for which you’re solely responsible. In fact, other people may not officially be “invited” via your calendar – but, they still expect you to show up. For example, when:

• A new lead asks you to call back next year
• Your client requests that you stop by next Thursday
• Your barber puts you down for your next appointment

Such events can easily be entered incorrectly, which makes them equally easy to overlook. When the appointment rolls around, you probably find yourself asking questions such as, “Is this appointment really at 4:30 – or did I just enter it incorrectly again?”

Avoid all of this confusion by making a habit of using the event’s title and/or description to double confirm the details with yourself. The likelihood of entering a wrong date/time twice on the same event is nearly impossible.

Cut Back on Sales Admin With Abbreviations

Cut Back on Sales Admin with Abbreviations

Sales is a game of numbers. All things being equal, more calls lead to more discussions. Discussions lead to opportunities, and opportunities convert into sales.

Every second spent on unnecessary administrative work is a second wasted. However, your company does need reliable information input into your CRM system.

There are many ways to make your sales team more efficient. In addition to leveraging activity sets and lead assignments, it’s also wise to standardize how your team captures information.

For example, simply reducing the number of characters keyed into your CRM can make a noticeable impact. To illustrate this point, open up a document and key in this phrase:  “I left a voicemail with the customer.” By my calculations, that takes about 5 seconds to key in. Now try this: “LVM.” Less than a second, right?

Just think about the hundreds of voicemails reps leave per year. Assuming a conservative 500 voicemails per rep, each team member could save 30 minutes annually in non value-added time. Multiply this across all team members and common phrases, and it really starts to add up.

Here are a few possible abbreviations to try:

• LVM – left voice message
• DNA – did not answer
• SE – sent email
• CB – call(ed) back
• HB – hear(d) back
• GC – gatekeeper
• DM – decision maker
• IF – influencer

Alternatively, you could try using tags for some (or all) of such phrases. It’s really up to how your organization uses its CRM system.

Assign Tasks to an Entire Team

If you’re like most Insightly users, you’ve probably at least experimented with tasks. As you may know, tasks can be used in many different ways and linked to a variety of Insightly records (projects, contacts, opportunities, and organizations to name a few). Tasks can also be assigned to other members of your organization, helping you create greater accountability.

But, did you know that tasks can also be assigned to an entire Insightly team? Teams allow you to group your users in logical ways, making it easier to delegate work (or share viewing permissions).

Delegating to a team is fairly straightforward (assuming that your administrator has already enabled the teams feature). Here’s how it works:

1. Open your Insightly task list
2. Create a new task
3. Instead of assigning the task to an individual user, look for the correct team name under “assigned to.”
4. After selecting a team, you’ll notice the next drop down offers two choices: assigning a task for each team member – or – assigning one task for the entire team. Make your selection and save your work.

You might be wondering how the two options in step four differ from one another. It really comes down to whether or not you need each user to have a separate task. (Check out the “sales tip” below for a few example scenarios.)

Scale Your Team With Freelancers

As you leverage technology to improve your delegation workflow, you may realize new capacity for additional projects.

To capitalize on this opportunity, many business owners turn to the freelance economy. In fact, according to a recent study by Upwork Global, Inc., freelancers now represent 35% of the US workforce. Thanks to marketplaces (such as Upwork), it’s never been easier to recruit freelancers.

How can freelancers help your business? Here are a few tips for getting started.

Identify low-risk, high-reward opportunities – Hiring a freelancer may be easier than an employee, but there are certainly still risks. Minimize your exposure to risk by identifying bite-sized, definable projects to outsource. Good examples might be: designing a logo, writing a blog post, or performing a website audit.

Hire several freelancers to a test project – Freelancers are usually virtual (off site) workers. Despite your best due diligence, it’s tricky to pick a winner in a remote setting. Try hiring several candidates to the same project. This way, you’ll create a sense of competition and let the best rise to the top.

Build trust before going too far – Your first inclination might be to give freelancers access to your important systems (such as Insightly). Invest time and build trust before providing too much access. For the first couple projects, just delegate the old-fashioned way (via email or verbally). Once a freelancer proves himself, then it may be appropriate to invite him to your inner circle.

Keep a Journal

Why should you keep a journal?

It’s lonely at the top. As a business owner, few people can relate to the struggles you face each day. Journaling helps you document those issues for future reference. In addition, journaling can be an effective release of your anxiety. By putting your concerns on paper, you may find comfort in knowing an issue is captured (somewhere other than in your brain).

How do you get started? It’s simple. For the next week, make a commitment to spend the last five minutes of each day journaling. One approach is to use a simple notebook and draw a line down the middle of the page. On the left, write “Things that Went Well.” On the right, write “Things that Didn’t Go Well.” In your five-minute session, note the day’s date and then list a few things that come to mind. There’s no right or wrong answer.

You don’t have to write a novella. Just scratch down a few of the things on your mind. Give it a try for a week or two and see if it positively impacts your perspective. (You could also follow the same approach for personal matters, too!)

Delegate to Your Sales Team … in One Click

We’ve already discussed how a team delegation tool (such as Insightly) can expedite your delegation workflow. That can only be true, however, if you take the first step.

If you’re using Insightly’s sales management features, you probably already have your reps set up as users in the system. Why not group these users together in one or more “teams”?

For most companies, it probably makes sense to create a team that consists of every sales rep. For companies with geographic or industry-specific sales organizations, adding additional teams may be logical. For vertical organizations, setting up role-specific groups could be useful.

Once enabled, you can then reap the benefits of group delegation. Examples might include:

Delegations to Your Entire Sales Team

• Prepare your slides for the annual company meeting
• Complete this month’s sales training course
• Submit your expense report

Delegations to Your Western Sales Group

• Invite customers to the upcoming trade show in Phoenix
• Prepare a report of your top five growth markets

Delegations to Your Sales Directors

• Finish quarterly performance reviews
• Submit your annual recruitment plan
• Update your team’s competitor intelligence report

Stop wasting time to build duplicate one-off tasks. Instead, harness the power of team delegation today! You’ll save time – and end up with the same result.