August 2017 – user's Blog!

August 23, 2017

6 Tips for Building a More Collaborative Virtual Team

Big businesses aren’t the only ones benefitting from virtual teams.

Thanks in large part to freelance marketplaces, such as Upwork.com, traditional brick-and-mortars, mom and pops, and startups are now able to rapidly staff up with team members from across the globe.

Although virtual teams offer a number of tangible benefits to your business, they do have their share of distinct challenges. In particular, many companies struggle to create a truly “collaborative” virtual culture.

In this post, we’ll explore a few best practices for using Insightly to boost engagement among your virtual workers.

1. Get Everyone In the Same Place

Emails…group chats…random to-do lists…shared project documents…customer tracking spreadsheets.

Unless instructed otherwise, remote workers have a tendency to spread information across multiple systems and inboxes. Although productivity may seem high, it’s impossible to know for sure. After all, you don’t have time to dig through the many different apps they’re using. Likewise, it would be wasteful to ask each team member to manually cobble together a report. Unfortunately, you’ll just have to assume things are operating smoothly.

Solving this problem requires you to first take control of the situation. Even though your team has your best intentions in mind, reliance on overlapping systems or siloed datasets is no longer going to cut it. You need everyone working from the same system and database.

A system like Insightly can get everyone on the same page. Your sales team can hit the ground running by centralizing all of their customers, leads, and deals. Customer emails, notes, invoices, and quotations are also accessible from any web-enabled device.

Everyone else will love the built-in project and task management functionality. Since each team member has his or her own unique Insightly log in, you can create a greater sense of accountability. Assign due dates, define recurrence patterns, and indicate priority for each task. No more handwritten sticky notes or “forgotten” assignments.

Note: Insightly also allows you to configure teams, letting you assign and manage view permissions in fewer steps.

2. Differentiate Between Projects & Tasks

Some initiatives require more collaboration than others.

For example, rebranding a website involves much greater thought and coordination than scanning a stack of paper documents. Launching a new product line is more complicated than invoicing a client. Some initiatives require multiple iterations, meetings, and collaborators to achieve the greater goal. In other words, not every delegation is as simple as making a one-time request. You therefore need a process for managing the many moving parts.

At the heart of this discussion is the differentiation between “tasks” (individual pieces of work) and “projects” (larger initiatives or desired outcomes). If you’re planning on using Insightly, this terminology is natively built into the application. In fact, you can “link” individual tasks to a larger project, making it easier to see the specific steps required to arrive at your end goal.

Projects can be structured one of two ways in Insightly. For initiatives following a sequential pattern (such as onboarding a new customer), using a project pipeline might work best.

For less predictable projects (such as an expansion into adjacent markets), you might consider using one or more milestones. Milestones allow you to set goals, assign dates, and group together related tasks – without the rigidity of a sequential pattern.

With milestones, pipelines, and tasks, your team will feel more organized and less scattered. As the business owner, you’ll appreciate the enhanced visibility into your company’s work-in-process, bottlenecks, and completed work.

3. Integrate, Integrate, Integrate

Migrating your project and sales processes into a single web-based application is a great starting point. However, even the most robust of platforms can’t do everything. Your team will still rely heavily on their email inboxes, document processors, marketing tools, and other third-party apps.

A highly integrated platform, such as Insightly, can offer the best of both worlds. Insightly actually acts as the “hub” for everything else your team uses.

Take, for example, your marketing consultant who uses the MailChimp email marketing software to build and send the company newsletter. He’s doing a nice job, but he occasionally forgets to prepare the summary reports that you need. This situation reduces the productivity of your strategy sessions and creates unnecessary friction for the entire team.

How can you make this problem go away?

One possibility is to connect your Insightly and MailChimp accounts. Insightly’s innovative integration pulls in highly valuable marketing analytics into each lead or contact record. Once enabled, you’ll be able to see real-time MailChimp data without ever leaving your Insightly account, such as:

Campaign history
Click rate
Open rate
Engagement history
Opt-in / subscription date
List membership

Problem solved! Now, your marketing consultant can stay focused on the next newsletter, and you have the information you need.

Better yet, Insightly integrates with dozens of other best-in-class apps. The possibilities seem endless.

4. Build “Links” Between Internal (& External) Relationships

Organizational charts become murky as you grow your team of freelancers, part-time staff, consultants, and employees. Who reports to whom? Solid line or dashed? The questions never seem to end.

It’s time to scrap the diagram software and leverage the info that’s already in Insightly. If you’ve already added your team as Insightly users, you can easily use relationship links to track your organizational structure.

Each user can be linked to other internal (or external) team members, offering a 360-degree view of who knows whom. Insightly’s relationship dropdown lets you identify:

Boss / direct report relationships
Client / consultant relationships
Colleague relationships
Other unique relationships

This type of linking also comes in handy for tracking your customer relationships. By tracking the organizational hierarchy of your customers, your sales reps and support staff will be more equipped to deliver an unbelievable experience.

5. Free Up More Time for Collaboration (with Automation)

Just because something needs to be done, it doesn’t mean that a human has to do it. As workflow technology and artificial intelligence become increasingly prevalent, business owners are seeking ways to maximize their investment in human capital – virtual team members included.

A tool like Insightly can help you maximize ROI from virtual staff via automation.

To illustrate my point, let’s look at your current web lead management process. If you’re like many business owners, your web developer probably configured your site to send email alerts for new leads. New lead data is keyed in by your virtual assistant, the lead is assigned for follow up, and then your reps finally reach out. All of this occurs over several hours (or days), during which leads can go completely cold.

By leveraging Insightly automation, you could build a better lead management model. How does the following workflow sound?

The lead fills out a form on your website.
Insightly automatically parses the lead information and creates a new record.
Insightly immediately sends an email that “looks like” it came from your sales rep.
Insightly assigns the lead (and a follow-up task) to the correct rep.

Instead of wasting time on data entry, your virtual assistant can finally get around to organizing your backlog of game-changing ideas. In addition, your reps can engage leads with much less effort.

6. Monitor Productivity

There’s an additional benefit of using a self-contained management system like Insightly: better business analytics. Each task, project, contact, lead, opportunity, and event is a trackable piece of data that’s easily modeled within Insightly’s intuitive reporting dashboard.

Perhaps you find yourself asking these questions:

Which team members are completing the most tasks?
Who is delegating the most work to other users?
What are our bottlenecks?
How long did certain milestones take to complete?
Who has the most overdue tasks?
Which projects are requiring the most effort?
How many leads can each sales rep manage per month?

If your virtual team is using Insightly correctly, you should be able to answer these questions within seconds. Better yet, you’ll be able to sort, filter, and customize the reports to your exact specification. Just drag and drop, and Insightly gives you the data that you need.

Columnar reports can also be converted into highly engaging charts and graphs. This saves you (or your assistant) the effort of exporting and charting the data. Once again, Insightly does the busywork for you.

Get a More Collaborative Virtual Team

Your virtual team adds value to your business. No question about it. However, there’s always room for improvement. By leveraging a cloud-based business management system, such as Insightly, you can boost engagement and take their value to an entirely new level.

To learn more about Insightly, click here to compare the features that best fit your virtual team.

Matt Keener is a marketing consultant and President of Keener Marketing Solutions, LLC. Matt specializes in content marketing and strategic planning, having helped numerous Saas (software as a service) companies and other small businesses worldwide. Read more of Matt’s work, get his book, or connect on Linkedin.

August 21, 2017

Bedrock Data Announces Sales and Marketing Automation System Integration with Insightly

On the heels of Insightly’s announcement of a major release of its CRM featuring a redesigned technical architecture and user interface that helps sales team improve productivity, Bedrock Data is now featured as an Insightly integration service. They offer successful marketing automation system integration of Insightly with some of the top software used by companies worldwide.

Bedrock Data allows Insightly customers to setup a multi-directional integration between Insightly and one or more systems, to ensure consistent customer and prospect data across the frontline systems in an organization.

Top integrations include Insightly and HubSpot; Insightly and Marketo; and Insightly and Pardot – all of which leverage Bedrock Data’s pre-built integrations to allow companies to setup and manage expert-level integrations with no code.

This helps extend the Insightly vision of building lifelong customer relationships, by serving prospects and customers with a well aligned experience across a company’s sales and marketing touchpoints.

Bedrock Data’s marketing automation system integrations help Insightly users in a variety of ways.

Marketing communicates to customers & prospects in the right way

The 1:1 relationship that companies are looking to build with customers, needs to extend to all marketing communications. To ensure companies communicate to their customers as customer (and not a brand new prospect “off the street”), and that those communications are tailored (based on their preferences, business factors such as industry or size, etc.), marketing needs that CRM data to be accurate, complete and up-to-date in marketing automation systems.

Salespeople are informed for conversations based on the customer’s interactions with marketing

A customer or prospect interacts with a company through many digital means – visiting the website, registering for a webinar, downloading content, reading emails. Providing salespeople with the right snapshot summary of marketing interactions helps them best prepare for an informed conversation with customers or prospects. Bedrock Data uses custom fields in Insightly to map in key marketing data, so that salespeople get the right summary information at their fingertips in the CRM system they are using every day. No extra clicks, no new interfaces to learn.

No delays in sales or SDR follow up with new prospects

There are many different ways a prospect can signal to a company that they want to engage. Some – like filling out a Contact Us form on a website – signal they want immediate engagement. A marketing automation-Insightly integration ensures that when prospects are ready to engage, that information is fed directly to sales reps or SDRs so they can take immediate action. When engaging with today’s modern, digital buyer, you definitely don’t want to be stuck uploading spreadsheets between systems to communicate – as that will only cause errors and delays.

Marketing has insight around effectiveness for making investment decisions

Marketing is a key conduit between a business and the lifelong relationships of their customers; making the right marketing investments based on what your customers appreciate, goes a long way towards furthering these relationships.

A marketing automation integration is at its best when feeding sales opportunity, pipeline and closed won data back from the CRM to marketing automation, to help marketing teams make decisions on their resources around what’s effective: answer questions such as: What types of initiatives are prospects responding to? What is leading to sustained growth and profitable return?

Bedrock Data feeds that data from Insightly based on the marketing automations – each which have their own way of using that data. For HubSpot, it’s a Lead Source reporting showing top sources of customers. For Marketo, it’s powering their Revenue Cycle Analytics reports around program effectiveness. And for Pardot, it’s the Customer Lifecycle Report.

Thanks to Bedrock Data, these are all now compatible with Insightly – with no code required to setup and manage the integration.

Interested customers can explore Bedrock Data’s Insightly connectors.

August 10, 2017

How to Measure Customer Relationships with a CRM

You know your business needs to build long-term customer relationships to succeed. So, you implement a CRM to help manage the process company-wide, watch the data start flowing in, and wait.

And wait. And wait.

Unless you’re paying attention to the right metrics, you may never figure out whether your customer relationships are growing the way they should. While you may have chosen the right path with a CRM, it is imperative to then devise a CRM strategy so that you can identify and measure important milestones, and then track progress and results along the way. This will let you know where to adjust your approach to ensure that your efforts are truly encouraging the long-term customer relationships you’re trying to build.

The best way to measure customer relationships is to view them in the context of who on your team is interacting with the customer and how the CRM can track those particular aspects of the customer lifecycle. By looking at the relationship through this lens, you can more accurately measure your efforts and their effectiveness.

Marketing

Let’s start at the top – your marketing team. In terms of the customer lifecycle, marketing’s primary goal is first to raise awareness of your product. Your marketing efforts are often the first point of contact with a potential customer and (hopefully) the beginning of a customer relationship. As such, the first way you can use CRM to fine tune your marketing team’s efforts is to track the effectiveness of campaigns throughout the various stages of the marketing funnel.

The most obvious number to keep track of is return on investment (ROI). Whether your marketing campaigns are easily quantified paid advertisements or more elusive grassroots outreach programs, they both share one common goal – generating sales. A CRM can help measure campaign ROI by tracking leads generated, lead conversion rates, and resulting sales compared to the cost of the marketing efforts.

While you might think that the marketing funnel ends with a sale, further down your marketing team works to keep existing customers engaged. If existing customers become disengaged, they are more likely to discontinue using your service or purchasing your product, and acquiring a new customer can often cost many times more than retaining these existing customers. CRM can help here by tracking customer retention rates in comparison to specific marketing efforts. Is your newsletter subscription base dwindling alongside your customer numbers? Are your discount offers and deals going unnoticed? A properly implemented CRM will tell you where your marketing efforts are missing the mark.

Finally, you will want to keep a close eye on lifetime customer value – this is how much your business will earn from a single customer over the lifetime of the relationship. By examining this particular number, you can determine where and when to offer discounts and deals to existing customers. Knowing when to make a deal can be the difference between revenue lost or gained over the long haul.

Some stats to monitor include:

– Number of campaigns

– Number of campaign responses

– Number of campaign purchases

– Revenue generated by campaign

– Number of new customers acquired by campaign

– Number of customer referrals

– Number of web page views

– User goal completion rate on the web

– Time per website visit

– Customer lifetime value

– Cross-sell ration

– Up-sell ratio

– Email list growth rate

Sales

In most representations of the funnel, the next step after marketing is sales. Your sales team has an integral role when it comes to the customer relationship. This is arguably the lifeblood of your company and there are a number of important metrics you can track with your CRM to improve sales efforts.

First, how long is your sales cycle? By tracking how long it takes from the time you identify a sales lead to when you close the deal, your sales team can reflect on their efforts and see what works and what doesn’t. On this same vein, you can track sales closing rates – that is, how often does a lead become a sale – and evaluate not only members of your sales team, but also the channels through which those prospects arrived.

Next, your CRM can track key sales activities, such as outbound sales calls or inbound passive inquiries. Perhaps sales are lacking because your team is spending too much time on each call rather than maximizing the number of calls made. Or inversely not spending enough time on each call. Either way, you can see these effects by tracking outbound sales calls over time and analyzing the trend. Similarly, trends in inbound sales inquiries can point to effective or ineffective marketing campaigns and sales techniques.

Some stats to monitor include:

– Number of prospects

– Number of new customers

– Number of retained customers

– Close rate

– Renewal rate

– Number of sales calls made

– Number of sales calls per opportunity

– Amount of new revenue

– Number of open opportunities

– Sales stage duration

– Sales cycle duration

– Number of proposals given

Operations

Finally, once you’ve secured the customer relationship, you will want to track how effectively you deliver projects. If we return to the funnel, we’ll see that it often ends at the sale, but this is far from the truth. In order to keep that customer and build a lifelong relationship with them, we need to always consider them as somewhere along the marketing-sales-delivery continuum. Delivery is when we make good on the promises made in our marketing and sales efforts and provide the customer with an excellent experience and product or service. If we fail to deliver, all was for naught, and the CRM should let us know.

For example, if your customer has a problem, how well do you handle it? Your customer service and help desk efforts have the ability to transform your product or service from “average” to “best”. How long do your customers have to wait before getting assistance? Do they feel that your efforts were sufficient? Was their problem solved? All of these factors can be the difference between losing and retaining a customer.

Some stats to monitor include:

– Number of cases handled

– Number of cases closed the same day

– Average time to resolution

– Average number of service calls per day

– Complaint time to resolution

– Number of customer call backs

– Average service cost per service interaction

– Percentage compliance with SLAs

– Calls lost before being answered

– Average call handling time

While customizing your CRM metrics is a lot of work at the outset, it will pay dividends in the long run. Take the time and energy to optimize from the start, and your customers will divert their own time and energy to your business–with all the benefits that brings. Are you ready to start? Request a demo.

August 4, 2017

How to Scale Your Content Engine with Insightly

Managing content isn’t easy, especially when you have plans to scale your operation.

Without a rock-solid process, the addition of new topics and writers will only compound the issue. Before you can expand, you need to invest in the process itself.

In this post, I’ll show how it’s possible to optimize your content workflow by using Insightly projects and automation.

Map Your Content Pipeline

We marketers aren’t always the most methodical people. Writing a blog post or designing a brochure just comes naturally. But, mapping out an automated content workflow? That sounds a little scary.

With the right tools, building a content pipeline isn’t as intimidating as it first seems. In fact, a tool like Insightly can even make things kind of fun. To get you up to speed, here’s a quick video on how Insightly pipelines work:

Since Insightly is more than just a sales CRM, you can use pipelines to create predictability in your content production. Before spending too much time in Insightly, however, you’ll want to first study how your team currently does things. Here are some questions to consider:

Do blog posts, landing pages, and other web assets follow the same sequential pattern?
If they differ, should you consider creating separate pipelines for each type?
What specific phases does each piece go through during production?
As an item passes into a new phase of production, are there specific tasks or actions that always occur during that stage (such as obtaining sign offs or publishing a piece)?

Work closely with your team to map out the “guts” of your content workflow. It might even make sense to host an in-person meeting during which ideas are thrown onto a whiteboard for easy visualization. Investing this time upfront will help you avoid significant changes later on.

Set Things Up

After studying your current process, it’s time to get busy in Insightly. For the sake of discussion, let’s imagine that your team decides it needs three unique pipelines for:

Blog articles
Landing pages
Other web pages

Since most of what you crank out is blog related, you decide to focus on that pipeline first (wise decision!). To set it up in Insightly, you’ll just jump over to your pipeline settings page. If this is your first pipeline, there won’t be anything listed under “pipeline name.” Give your new pipeline a name, check the “for projects” box, and click “add pipeline.”

Once added, you’ll then want to add your stages. To do this, click “edit stages” and key in your desired production phases. Here’s a very simple example that might make sense for your business:

Congratulations! You’ve just added your first content production pipeline. When that next blog post idea pops into your head, simply add a new Insightly project that utilizes this same pipeline.

Automate Each Step

As you were adding pipeline stages, you might have noticed a drop-down option for activity sets. In case you’ve never heard of activity sets, here’s a quick overview of how they work:

In short, as a content piece moves into a new stage of production, Insightly can automatically create and assign batches of tasks or events.

By now, your brain is probably racing with all of the possibilities. For example, when items are moved to “pitch,” Insightly can do the following for you:

Assign a task to your assistant, Rhonda, reminding her to create and attach a blank collaboration document (within one business day)
Create a task to pitch the article within a week (manually assigned later)
Create a placeholder task for the writer to request pitch approval

Creating an activity set only takes a couple minutes, and it can easily be linked to your pitch stage:

Voila! By linking an activity set to the pitch phase, you’ll ensure that your team (yourself included) avoids overlooking important steps. Each new content piece (aka an Insightly project) is updated with the steps necessary to complete the pitch.

In reality, the pitch phase is probably not the only stage of your content production that could benefit from activity sets. Linking additional activity sets to other pipeline stages can be wise; just don’t try to overdo it. Consider gradually phasing in activity sets and testing each one individually. Few things are more aggravating than automation that creates more confusion than clarity.

Embed Work Instructions into the Process

Auto-assigning tasks is a step in the right direction. But, doing so isn’t a guarantee that the work will be done to your desired level of specification.

Increase the quality of your team’s work output by embedding work instructions into the process. Take, for example, the task that reminds Rhonda to create a blank document. You’ve shown her how to access the shared drive, find the correct folder, copy the template, and use the correct naming structure. With everything else on her plate, however, she sometimes skips a step or two by mistake.

To remedy this problem, update the task template to include a bulleted list of steps. Rhonda will appreciate the helpful reminder when new pitch requests arrive. You’ll appreciate not having to continuously repeat yourself.

Measure Your Production

Insightly also makes it easy to monitor content cycle times, bottlenecks, and other important productivity metrics. Just hop over to your project reports and filter for items within the blog pipeline. Insightly instantly returns a list of sortable content pieces, including those that you’ve recently completed. Drag and drop column fields to slice and dice status information, cycle time data, linked author profiles, and much more.

As your content backlog grows, Insightly’s charting features become increasingly helpful. For example, with a few clicks, the previous table can be converted into the following chart, displaying a visual representation of your content allocation (by status).

No more pivot tables or complicated spreadsheets. Everything you need to track is at your fingertips in Insightly.

Get Scalin’

Each new article magnifies the inefficiency of your current (broken) workflow. It’s time you took the next step and leveraged Insightly’s project management features for the betterment of your marketing team.

Click here to build your first content pipeline in Insightly!