November 2017 – user's Blog!

November 29, 2017

10 Outside-the-Box Ways to Use Project Pipelines

When you think of the word “pipeline,” what comes to mind?

If you’re like most business owners, you probably think of the sales process. Leads, opportunities, and new customers are all top of mind.

Although sales pipelines are vital to any company, a “project pipeline” can be equally useful from an operations standpoint. If you’ve never configured a project pipeline in Insightly, think of it as a way to avoid re-creating the wheel. Pipelines are great for things that follow a predictable pattern. As a project advances from one stage to the next, Insightly can even auto-assign tasks to individual users

In this post, I’ll share ten ideas for putting project pipelines to good use.

1. Hosting a Customer Appreciation Conference

Your customer base is growing. To show your appreciation and keep them informed, you’ve started hosting an annual conference. Pulling off this event requires a ton of coordination and planning. The first year had its share of bumps along the way. However, you’ve since developed a rhythm for organizing the conference.

Rather than keeping a handwritten checklist or spreadsheet, why not build a project pipeline? This way, when the conference rolls around next year, you can simply add the new event as a project and, magically, all of the necessary steps are preserved from the prior year. For example, your conference pipeline could have the following stages:

Preliminary planning
Venue planning
Official announcement
Event promotion
Collateral
Day-of priorities
Post-event follow ups

As you complete all of the associated tasks for a particular phase, your project pipeline helps you know what to work on next. After all, there’s no point working on an official announcement until you know where the event will occur.

2. Scaling Your Content Marketing

To get found on the search engines, you need to regularly publish excellent content. This often sounds easier than it really is. Your subject matter experts are too busy to sit down and write 1,000-word posts. Even if they had unlimited time, each writer has a slightly different style. It’s therefore no wonder why so many companies fail to produce content. Too many moving parts, and not enough foresight.

A pipeline can be a great tool for structuring (and scaling) your content marketing efforts. Break the process down into bite-sized, repeatable chunks, such as:

Topic pitch
In-process
Editing
Approval
Publishing
Live

For added firepower, you might try adding activity sets to your content marketing pipeline. This will keep everyone on task and reduce unnecessary confusion.

3. Exhibiting at Trade Shows

Your company exhibits at a handful of important trade shows each year. Although the events are at different locations, they all follow the same general sequence:

Reserving the booth space
Paying the vendor
Making travel arrangements
Ordering swag and brochures
Shipping the booth to the exhibit hall
Traveling to the event
Setting up the booth
Exhibiting
Tearing down the booth
Traveling back
Following up with leads
Evaluating ROI

To deliver a more streamlined pipeline, it might make sense to break this sequence down into less specific phases:

Event sign up
Pre-event planning
Day-of event
Post-event priorities

Remember, you can always link tasks to stages for a more detailed event plan. Traveling back, following up with leads, and evaluating ROI would be logical tasks to associate with your post-event phase.

4. Creating Your Social Media Plan

Social media isn’t just for your middle school niece.

Smart businesses leverage social media to drive conversions and increase customer engagement. One strategy for achieving this goal is to routinely publish share-worthy content. Unfortunately, great content doesn’t fall from the sky.

Creating a social media production pipeline can help you optimize the process. If you aim to produce on a weekly cadence, consider these phases:

Collect content
Draft plan
Approval
Scheduling
Reporting

Depending on your preferences, you might choose to reuse the same project for future social media plans. This would be beneficial if you want to centralize all social media-related chatter into a single record.

If that’s not important to you, just ask your social media manager to create a fresh project each week (incorporating the same pipeline, of course). Is your social media manager somewhat forgetful? Assign a recurring task with explicit instructions and due dates, ensuring no weeks go by without a new social plan.

5. Fulfilling Customer Orders

Order fulfillment is the perfect use case for an Insightly project – especially when combined with a pipeline.

Let’s say that your company offers a variety of handmade leather products. Your catalog offers a few dozen SKUs, and your customers are online retailers and brick-and-mortar shops. When customers place orders, they typically do so by submitting a purchase order for several dozen units.

Although each SKU is unique and has a slightly different lead time, it’s safe to say that production follows this general workflow:

Material sourcing
Production scheduling
Manufacturing
Quality assurance testing
Packaging
Shipping
Payment

It’s also worth noting that as pending deals become orders, Insightly allows you to convert opportunities into projects. This provides a 360-degree view of each customer’s order. Doing so also preserves all related emails, notes, and files. As the order advances through the manufacturing process, your team will have fingertip access to everything they need to do their jobs. No more hunting for information – it’s all right there in the electronic project file.

6. Performing Routine Website Maintenance

The web presents countless opportunities for today’s business owner. However, opportunity is not without risk. The internet is no exception to this rule.

Some business owners falsely assume that websites are a “set it and forget it” proposition. Not so, especially from a web security standpoint. In an age when government agencies and well-known brands are hacked, prudent business owners take steps to protect their online assets. One important step involves keeping your content management system up to date.

A pipeline can help bring order to your web maintenance program. If you’re using an open source CMS, your pipeline stages might look something like this:

Backups
CMS update
Plugin updates
Testing
Backups
Documentation

7. Recruiting Freelancers

It’s easier than ever to hire freelancers. Millions of freelancers are available via virtual work platforms, such as Upwork.com. And, the benefits of hiring freelancers are quite obvious to your business: no long-term commitments, less paperwork, and better talent.

As you add more virtual team members, you’ll need a better way to recruit and onboard them. Project pipelines can help you automate your freelancer management. For example, you could build a pipeline with these stages:

Job post
Invitations
Shortlist
Interviews
Hire
Onboard

As you use your pipeline to bring on more freelancers, Insightly can also automate some of the administrative tasks, too. If you’re a Pro or Enterprise user, you’re able to harness workflow automation to your advantage. Why is this helpful? Well, let’s say you want to automatically send new hires a welcome email shortly after onboarding. Insightly can send emails on your behalf, taking one more task off your overloaded to-do list.

8. Closing Out Your Books

We’ve all heard the saying about the two certainties in life: death and taxes.

Depending on your business model, taxes come due at many different points in the year. Estimated taxes are usually due on a quarterly basis. Sales tax varies by the state you’re in. And, your annual tax returns, always come due on (or around) April 15th.

For the sake of discussion, let’s focus in on your annual tax returns. Although you pay your CPA to “close the books” each year, there’s a fair bit of coordination on your end:

Collect 1099s / docs
Reconciliations
Summary for CPA
CPA work
Review & approve

Since this process only rolls around annually, you probably find yourself reinventing the wheel each year. Once again, a well-structured activity set can help you know exactly what to do next. For the “summary for CPA” stage, you might associate a task that contains links to your reporting template along with detailed work instructions.

Stop starting over each year – put last year’s knowledge to good use!

9. Evaluating Software

Cloud-based software is revolutionizing how business gets done. For every problem, it seems there’s at least several tools that offer a solution.

Some companies make the mistake of having no formal software selection process. Departments are free to define their own internal selection criteria – or, worse, use no criteria whatsoever. To provide a little more structure to your team’s software selection, build a basic pipeline like this:

Needs analysis
ID vendors
Demos
Shortlist
Selection

Even a simple pipeline (like the one outlined above) can provide your team with just enough direction to make an informed decision.

10. Mining for New Leads

Let’s bring this discussion full circle.

As I stated at the beginning of the post, many people associate the word “pipeline” with the sales process. If you’re still having a hard time associating pipelines with projects, here’s an example that might bring it together: data mining for leads.

It’s quite common for sales reps to spend a few hours each week mining for leads. Web forums, social media groups, and industry directories can be excellent sources. Sadly, not every rep knows what to do when instructed to “do some lead research.”

Bring order to the lead mining process with pipelines. The pipeline phases could be as simple as:

Check sites
Add leads
Done

Obviously, you’ll want to spend time building out the first stage and include helpful tips. Would it make sense to trigger an activity set for each site to check? Or, would a single task with detailed instructions make more sense? It really depends on your business, but either solution is better than nothing.

Get Creative with Project Pipelines

I hope that this article has gotten your creative juices flowing. As you can see, project pipelines can really be a game changer when it comes to creating a more systematized business. Now, go out there and get creative with pipelines!

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.

November 20, 2017

8 CRM Features You Might Not Be Using

We all love Insightly. That’s a given.

And, for sales-driven companies like yours, Insightly’s CRM features can be a real lifesaver. Contact management, opportunity tracking, and your Insightly mailbox help you close more deals with less effort.

Though you’re already getting value from Insightly, you might be missing out on some lesser-known features. In this post, I’ll share eight Insightly features worthy of further investigation.

#1: Relationship Tracking

What was the first thing you did after signing up for Insightly?

If you’re like many users, you probably imported all of your contacts, leads, and organizations. You may have even formatted your import file so that certain records (such as contacts and organizations) were linked together. This is a great start, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

For example, let’s say you have twelve different points of contact at your largest customer. (I don’t envy your situation!) Your initial data import helps you know that all twelve people work there, but what good is that information? You already know who they are and what they do. It would be really nice if you could track who reports to whom (among other things).

Insightly’s relationship tracking is exactly what you need. For any contact, you can scroll down to the “links” section and key in a name. From there, you can indicate relationship status (such as “colleague of,” “boss of,” “friend of,” etc.

Have a unique relationship to capture (such as “doesn’t work well with…”)? You can create your own custom relationship in Insightly in your System Settings.

#2: Free Smartphone App

Sometimes it’s easy to become so focused on the day-to-day that you lose sight of potential efficiency boosters. Case in point? Finding time to download the Insightly smartphone app.

The Insightly app can pretty much do whatever you’d need it to while on the go. With the app, you’ll be able to:

Add new records
Search your contacts
Review pending tasks
Filter pending opportunities
Add updates, notes, files, and more
A bunch of other cool stuff

Wouldn’t it be nice to do these things while out in the field – rather than waiting until you’re back to your desk? The information would still be fresh on your mind, and you’d be much more likely to take action. After all, the moment you return to the office, more pressing things always seem to pop up.

#3: Contact Tagging

Perhaps you’ve heard about record tagging, but you’re just not sure how best to use it. It seems like a useful feature, but it’s so open-ended that the possibilities seem endless – a little too endless.

You’re in luck, as I published this tagging guide almost one year ago (time sure flies). Although you can tag leads, emails, organizations, opportunities, or projects, contact tagging seems like a logical place to start. As I pointed out in the guide, it’s wise to first plan out how tags can best fit your contact management needs.

For example, let’s assume that your company loosely classifies client contacts into three general groups:

Decision maker
Influencer
Support staff

Although most of your contacts fall only into one category, some could justifiably be considered both a decision maker and influencer. In this case, you might create a tag for each grouping, making it easier to filter contacts based on influence.

#4: Start Dates on Tasks

A wise person once said, “Work begun is work half done.”

Insightly certainly makes it easier to organize tasks and projects. But, at the end of the day, it’s up to the user to actually take action. Remember, a great plan offers little value unless it is carried out.

Unlike other project management systems that only provide a due date, Insightly allows users to also specify a task start date.

Start dates change the conversation and help teams to set more realistic expectations. Instead of waiting for an item to become past due, a start date protects the integrity of time-sensitive commitments. When an assignee accepts a task, he implicitly confirms that the proposed timeline (start to finish) seems realistic. If the allotted timetable is unrealistic, then both parties should work together and adjust one or more of the dates accordingly.

#5: Teams

Even if your company has very few employees or subcontractors, I’m sure that there’s a basic definable level of hierarchy.

Take, for example, your web team. Just last month you hired two additional CMS experts (Jorge and Rohit) to make ongoing changes on your site. They’ve joined forces with your lead developer (Alexey) who makes all of the “technical” adjustments, such as hosting or DNS adjustments. Since expanding your web team, more things are getting done. You also seem to be repeating yourself more often:

“Alexey, I don’t care who loads the blog post – can you just figure it out for me?”

“Jorge, would you be available to create this landing page for me?”

“Rohit, I thought Jorge was going to fix that responsiveness issue.”

“Can all three of you send me a monthly report, detailing what exactly you worked on?”

Setting up an Insightly team can help you cut through much of the frustration.

Once created, you’ll be able to assign tasks to the entire team with one single action. When delegating to your team, Insightly will ask you if you want to create:

A single task for the entire team – perfect for when you don’t care who takes action, such as loading the blog post.
A task for each team member – useful for when each person needs to take action, such as sending you the monthly summary report.

No more confusion or overlapping conversations. Just assign it to the team, and let Insightly handle the rest.

#6: Voice Notes

You’ve just wrapped up an important client meeting. Although you did your best to scribble down some notes, sadly your handwriting couldn’t pass a 7th grade penmanship test. Obviously, it’s important to get these notes into Insightly ASAP. Each passing moment reduces the likelihood you’ll be able to read your own notes.

Here’s the problem: Keying in several paragraphs of notes (via your smartphone) is a painful proposition. What would normally take five minutes on your laptop could take much more of your time on your smartphone’s QWERTY keyboard.

What should you do?

Insightly’s audio notes feature is here to help. For any contact, organization, lead, opportunity, or project, you’re able to record up to one hour of content (per audio file). Stop fumbling for the next tiny letter on your smartphone’s keyboard – just speak what’s on your mind and move on to the next task.

Bonus: Here are ten creative suggestions for using Insightly voice notes at your business.

#7: Task “Following”

You’re not a micromanager. On the other hand, there are situations that call for added insight into what’s being done.

Take, for example, the important letter that you need to send to your landlord. Your company has an aggressive expansion plan, which means you need a larger facility. You would be willing to stay put for another year, but you would need an amazing deal on rent. You decide to delegate the creation of this letter to your marketing manager, Tom (who is by far your team’s strongest writer). The task is assigned to Tom (don’t forget to include a “start date”!). Several days pass, and you receive no update from Tom. Has Tom started working on the letter? You won’t know unless you log in to Insightly. That is, unless you’ve started “following” the task.

By adding yourself as a follower (just click on the task’s star icon), you’ll receive a notification each time Tom:

Updates the details of the task
Links the task to something else
Tags or comments on the task
Adds a file

Save yourself time and frustration – start following tasks (and other important records) in Insightly.

#8: Project Categories

If you’re like most companies, you probably provide more than one product or service. In fact, you may offer several different lines of products and services. Because Insightly is more than just a CRM (it’s also a project management system), many businesses use the system to coordinate the many moving parts of order fulfillment.

Take my business as an example. My primary line of work is consulting, which generally involves one of three services: preparing marketing plans, producing content, and providing ongoing advice. In addition, I also write books and develop online training courses for the general public. It’s no wonder that I have the following five project categories in Insightly:

Marketing plan
Blog article
Consulting
Book
Training course

Categorizing my projects helps me visualize how I’m allocating resources. It’s also useful for evaluating potential upsells and cross-sells. (Note: You can enable project categories so that they appear in other records, such as opportunities, tasks, etc. This opens up additional economies of scale, particularly when combined with filtering and reporting.)

What works for one client (or vertical) is bound to benefit another.

Which CRM Features Did I Miss?

What’s your favorite Insightly feature? Reach out and share your thoughts!

November 13, 2017

6 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Delegating Work at the Office

A project management tool, such as Insightly, can certainly make the delegating work at the office process much easier. Of course, that statement depends on your team’s approach to using the software. No matter how amazing a tool might be, “garbage in” almost always results in “garbage out.”

With this in mind, it’s usually a good idea to define in-house best practices for delegation. After all, the last thing you want to do is create more confusion than clarity.

In this post, I’ll share six questions to ask before making your next delegation.

1. Is This a Project or Task?

The words “task” and “project” are used quite loosely in today’s business environment. In fact, some might say that they could be used interchangeably. In my experience, however, they are actually two separate things. A task is usually a smaller unit of work and may be performed with minimal instruction or oversight. A project, by contrast, typically involves many different moving parts, team members, and considerations. To successfully complete a project, a team may need to batch together several related tasks.

If you’re an Insightly user, you’ve probably already noticed that the software aligns very closely with the definitions that I’ve just outlined. Although both records share some common features (such as the ability to add collaborators and notes / comments), there are distinctive differences.

To illustrate the differences between tasks and projects, let’s discuss a simple example.

Let’s say that your company is preparing to launch a new website. Some business owners’ first impulse might be to simply assign a task to their IT manager, not knowing what is actually involved with a website re-launch (not you of course!). However, in most cases, a website is going to require cross-collaboration from many different stakeholders. Such stakeholders might include marketing, IT, sales, product, and senior management.

An Insightly project is the perfect solution for this type of work. The team leader can quickly create the project record, upload linked documents or files, add collaborators, and assemble a detailed game plan.

Once the project has been initiated, your project coordinator will then need to rely on his or her team to get things done. For a website re-launch, such things might include:

Collecting input from key stakeholders
Selecting a new web template
Setting up a development server / site
Creating website copy
Editing the content
Designing banner graphics
Implementing tracking code
Testing the development site
Taking the new site live
Inspecting the launched site for any issues
Monitoring web traffic

Each of these could be easily packaged up into an assignable task. To create tasks in Insightly, your project manager would simply open the project, click on “actions” dropdown menu, and assign accordingly.

Once the tasks are assigned, your entire organization gains instant visibility into who should be doing what.

One final note about tasks: a task does not necessarily have to be linked to a project. In fact, many (if not most) of the tasks you assign will have no linkage to another record. Use unlinked tasks to delegate small chunks of value to your team. Examples might include: ordering office supplies, building reports, filing government paperwork, updating payment details, sending invoices, or anything else that is relatively straightforward.

2. Does This Task Repeat or Not?

Since much of your delegation will depend on the creation of one-off tasks, let’s spend some time thinking about specific task-related situations.

A popular place to start involves the frequency of the work being done. Your team is far too busy to waste time creating the same tasks over and over again. Why not set certain tasks to repeat on predefined schedules?

I’ve written at length on this topic in prior posts, so I won’t spend too much time explaining how to configure recurring tasks. I will, however, at least challenge you to evaluate which things happen regularly in your business. Make a list and start building recurrence patterns in Insightly. In doing so, you’ll find more time to dedicate to high value, high impact activities – and, less time spent recreating the wheel.

To get your creative juices flowing, consider the following ongoing responsibilities that are common to many businesses:

Making quarterly tax payments
Filing business entity reports
Paying and collecting sales tax
Publishing blog content
Preparing agendas for standing meetings
Preparing your monthly newsletter
Posting your social media plans
Looking at monthly web traffic reports
Submitting expense reports by month’s end
Completing employee performance reviews

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope it at least helps you identify a few candidates for recurring Insightly tasks. It’s time you stopped wasting so much time on administrative work!

3. Who Should Be Held Accountable?

Assigning a task (or even a project, for that matter) does little good unless someone is accountable for delivering results. And, just because you create an assignment, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your team knows what to do next. You need to put some teeth into your delegation workflow.

Therefore, when assigning work, it is important to specify an assignee. For Insightly tasks, there are two basic options.

Assigning to an individual: This is probably the most common situation, and it’s basically what I’ve been referring to up until this point. You need to have a task done, so you pick a specific person to do the work. In Insightly, just search for the user’s name, pick it from the dropdown, and move on.

Assigning to a team: Insightly also allows you to assign work to a particular team. This can be done one of two ways:

Assigning the same task to each team member – Use this when each team member must complete the same task. For example, you might want each team member to do a final click-through of the development site (before going live).
Assigning one task to the entire team – Use this when it’s OK for any one person from the team to do the work and mark it completed on behalf of the entire group. For example, if you have three web developers working on a project, you might ask for someone to set up the development site (whoever can do it first). This approach, although probably less common, offers additional flexibility – especially for your team projects.

When it comes to projects, you can select a team member to serve as the primary point person (aka “user responsible” in Insightly). In most cases, you should probably pick the person who will be supervising the entire project, delegating related tasks, and coordinating the various other aspects.

4. Is This Project Going to Follow a Predictable Pattern?

No two projects are exactly the same.

However, some projects follow a similar pattern of events. Taking a page out of the sales pipeline playbook, Insightly also allows you to define project pipelines. This feature can be especially useful for companies providing products or services with very tight quality control procedures.

Here is a perfect example: Since I love baseball so much (and, since it’s October!), let’s imagine that your company manufactures baseball bats. Most of your orders come from two key distributors. When a distributor places an order, you have 30 days to source the materials, schedule production, make the bats, package and palletize the units, and deliver to their dock. There are many contingencies that go along with each step and, in the past, you’ve had difficulty with certain departments (which will remain nameless) doing their jobs. To improve your company’s workflow, you decide to set up a pipeline specifically for fulfilling distributor orders.

Once built in Insightly, you can reuse the pipeline for subsequent orders. No more scrambling at the last minute to fulfill an order. Your project pipeline keeps everybody on track, every single time.

Better yet, you’re able to achieve the much-needed visibility that you so desperately crave.

5. Could We Automate the Delegation Within Our Project Pipelines?

For the sake of discussion, let’s keep with the baseball bat example. After you run a few orders through your pipeline, you begin to realize that specific tasks happen during certain phases of production – regardless of order volume. For instance, during the sourcing stage your team must always do the following:

Select the correct vendor
Prepare the purchase order
Route the PO for internal approval
Submit a deposit
Track inbound freight
Pay the balance to the vendor

As we saw in the recurring task section, it’s inefficient for your team to waste time with manual task entry. Unfortunately, these are not technically “recurring tasks,” as they only happen when you have a project going.

Here’s some good news: As an Insightly user, you can harness the power of activity sets to reduce unnecessary administrative work. Simply configure your activity set for the correct pipeline phase, create your task templates, save your settings, and you’re done.

Now, each time a project advances into the sourcing pipeline phase, all tasks will automatically be created on your behalf. You can even auto-assign them to specific users in advance (or do so manually when the project changes phases).

6. How Will We Create Scalable Visibility?

As your team buys into your delegation methodology, you’ll likely witness an explosion of productivity – particularly in the volume of created and completed tasks and projects. This is, of course, great news, but it can also be overwhelming.

Luckily, your Insightly account makes it easy to track and report on your team’s productivity. Jump over to your reports and play around with the various task and project reporting options. Keep in mind that your reports will start out at a relatively high level, but you can always filter and drill down into the exact data points that you need.

Need to find out how many tasks an individual team member has completed? Want to see who is doing the most amount of work?

Insightly lets you build interactive charts and graphs with your data, making it easier to know who is performing – and, who could stand to pick up the slack.

Think Before You Delegate

As you can see, taking a structured approach to delegation can mitigate confusion and improve the productivity of your entire staff. It can also help you achieve even greater ROI from your Insightly subscription.

So, before doing any further delegation, assign yourself a task to think through these six questions. It might just be the most impactful task you ever create!

November 9, 2017

Why Baseball and Sales Have a Lot in Common

“No thanks, we’ve decided to stick with our current vendor.”

Such words are never easy for a sales rep to hear. Despite your hours of preparation, proposals, and in-person meetings, the prospect decided your solution wasn’t the right fit. Was it something you said? Could you have done something differently? How did you not see this coming?

Stop beating yourself up and face a simple fact: We all strike out once in awhile.

My goal with this post is to make you feel a little better about your recent strikeout. So, let’s explore the many similarities between two of my favorite things: baseball and sales.

Failure is More Common than Success

In today’s busy world, it’s hard to find three hours to watch an entire baseball game. Granted, DVR technology can help speed things up. Even then, I usually fall asleep before the last pitch is thrown. When this happens, I’ll typically watch the highlight reel the next day.

Highlight reels are great – they allow us to know what happened in much less time. However, they also present a false sense of reality – home run, triple, exciting play at the plate, more home runs. Highlight reels only show, well, the highlights. By necessity, they cut out at least 90% of the rest of the game. What gets cut out? Boring things like:

Foul outs
Balks
Pickoffs
Ground outs
Pop ups
Errors
Passed balls
Failed bunting attempts
…and, of course, strikeouts

In retrospect, these events seem forgettable to the average fan (which is why they don’t make the highlight reel). Yet, in reality, they account for most of the action. They also tell us an important fact about baseball: failure is more common than success.

Take batting average for instance. What is a “good” batting average? In the big leagues, very few players are able to maintain an average above .300. In fact, Ted Williams, arguably the greatest hitter of all time, was the last person to hit above .400 for an entire season (during the 1941 season).

In other words, today’s best baseball players get out seven out of ten times. And, the best batter of all time, was only marginally better than that (six out of ten).

It’s clear to see how success in the batter’s box relates to what you do in sales. If you call ten cold leads, you might be ecstatic if three bought from you. Like your baseball brethren, you’re accustomed to dealing with failure. It just makes your next “hit” even sweeter!

Not Every Hit is a Home Run

Swinging for the fences can get you into trouble. Sure, you might get lucky and occasionally hit one into the upper deck. You’ll probably also experience more strikeouts in the process. Smart hitters know when to adjust their approach, choke up, and settle for a hard-hit single or double.

Likewise, your pipeline always has a few potential “home runs” waiting for you to close. That six-figure contract you’ve been working on is the perfect example. If you close that deal, your quota will be looking good for months.

Being the sales professional that you are, you know better than to focus only on big deals. It would be nice if they happen, but there are many factors outside of your control. You can’t force big deals through, just like baseball players can’t force themselves to hit home runs.

So, how do you “choke up” and improve your batting average? For starters, you need a way to size up deals. A CRM, such as Insightly, can be a valuable resource for doing exactly that. Insightly makes it easier for you to tell a potential single from a grand slam. When adding an opportunity, Insightly prompts you to specify the deal’s potential value:

Using Insightly’s opportunity report builder, you can then filter deals based on revenue potential. Need a few quick infield hits? Set your filter, identify your targets, and hustle down the first base line.

Slumps Happen (& Pressing Doesn’t Help)

Even Ted Williams went through slumps. All baseball players do – batters and pitchers alike. Unfortunately, there’s no magic cure for a slump. A batter can’t make the ball drop in between two fielders. A pitcher can’t snap a losing streak simply by willing it.

Although slumps are hard to shake, there’s one thing that makes them even worse: pressing too hard. Now, I’m certainly no Ted Williams, but I’ve played in my fair share of baseball games. During that time, I’ve endured slumps that seemed to never end. Going twenty at-bats without a hit certainly makes you question your abilities. Why are my teammates still getting hits? What am I doing wrong? Do I need to practice harder? Is coach going to sit me on the bench if I don’t get things going?

A slump is certainly a humbling experience. It’s also a test of your self-confidence. Worrying yourself silly doesn’t help matters; it only makes things worse.

In sales, you’ve probably gone through several dry patches. For whatever reason, you can’t seem to move the needle. You feel like nothing has changed, but clearly the results show otherwise. When is it time to worry?

Most slumps are caused by nothing more than the law of averages. Ditto for when you’re knocking it out of the park. Good times and bad times tend to average each other out. Just remember that the next time you go on an “o-fer” streak.

It’s a Team Sport

At the peak of my career, I could only get my fastball into the mid-80s. But, for the sake of conversation (and my ego), let’s imagine my fastball hovered around 102 mph. Let’s also imagine that my splitter, slider, and changeup were virtually unhittable.

Even with such a lethal pitch arsenal, it would be impossible for me to single-handedly impact my win-loss record. Throwing a perfect game is pointless unless your team provides run support. It’s a team sport.

The same is true in what you do. Being a superstar deal closer is great, but you also need a superstar team to deliver on the promises you’ve made. You may not have control over hiring decisions, but you can choose where you work. If management doesn’t have your back, then perhaps it’s time to take your talents elsewhere. If they do, you still need a way to hold others accountable. Connecting the sales and delivery functions is a step in the right direction. Insightly can help you do that.

Since Insightly is an all-in-one CRM and project management tool, the transition from sales to delivery is completely seamless. The moment a deal closes, the opportunity can be immediately converted into a new project.

As you stride confidently to the locker room, you can rest easy knowing the team has everything necessary to deliver. All emails, notes, files, and links are preserved, providing a 360-degree view of your valiant effort. “Now go out there and get me some run support,” you think to yourself.

You Need the Right Equipment

Obviously, a hitter must have a bat in hand before stepping up to the plate. What’s less obvious are the many factors involved with choosing the perfect bat.

Ash or maple?
Large or small grain?
Painted or natural finish?
Cupped end or rounded?
Long or short?
Heavy or light?
Pine tar or no pine tar?
Gripped handle or not?
Well-known or lesser-known brand

With limitless combinations, how do batters choose the right bat? Some rely on recommendations from other players. Others do plenty of research, scouring the web for just the right fit. Still others order several different makes and models, testing each in batting practice before making a final decision.

Much like a batter, your company has countless options when it comes to “equipment.” CRMs are no exception to the rule. With dozens of cloud-based platforms to choose from, how can you help your team pick the right CRM software?

Take a page out of the batter’s playbook and start by asking colleagues for suggestions. What do they like / dislike about their current CRMs? Which CRMs have they tried but abandoned? Which features are must-haves? Have they noticed an uptick in “home runs” since implementation?

It’s also wise to do your own homework. What are people saying online? Read plenty of real reviews from real users (check out some of Insightly’s ratings here) and drill down into specific pros and cons. No solution is perfect, but some CRMs definitely stack up better than others.

After building your shortlist, take advantage of free trial offers before making a CRM buying decision. (If one of your shortlisted tools does not offer a free trial, you might want to reconsider it. What are they hiding?)

The Diamond Awaits

I hope this article has, in some small way, softened the impact of your recent strikeout. Stop worrying about it! Let it go! Trust your skills and turn your attention to the next at bat, the next pitch, and the next big play. Your team is counting on you – you can do it!

November 2, 2017

The best of Insightly just got better

New and long-time Insightly users to the customer relationship management platform, recently experienced the latest version of Insightly’s CRM.

From the introduction of visual Kanban drag-and-drop boards to customized list views, customers rave about a variety of product UI and enhancements.

Learn more about Insightly’s CRM by attending our upcoming CEO-lead webinar on Wednesday, November 15th at 9am Pacific Time.

Oooohs and Views

Here’s a preview of our improved user interface.

Kanban Boards

“The new look of the boards is great and we have been enjoying the ability to move things easily between categories (in the Kanban views).”

–Dan Henricson, Enterprise Improvement Solutions

Panel Screen Slide

Hover Display Magic

Custom Fields Logic

Don’t forget to sign up for Insightly’s upcoming webinar on Wednesday, November 15th to get an insider’s look at more features.

November 2, 2017

Insightly releases a modern, intuitive interface packed with new productivity enhancements

Insightly is proud to announce the release of new version of Insightly CRM. The latest version is jam-packed with new functionality and productivity improvements across the board, many of which come directly from customer suggestions and feedback.

↑Watch/Read↓

Flexible and customizable

The new Insightly provides more control over how you see your CRM information. Any list view- customer, lead, or opportunity lists – can be completely customized. Display pertinent information that’s important to your business, show what “Industry” a lead is in or reveal customer type, like “Premium”. You have the ability sort and filter, as well as make any list private or share with your team.

Visual pipelines

Insightly revamped the way opportunities, leads and projects can be displayed with the introduction of the Kanban view. They are shown as cards along a pipeline to indicate the stage they are of the process. Simply drag and drop cards from one stage to another to update its status and kick-off next steps. A warning icon is also displayed for any card that has no future activities assigned reminding you to set up follow-up tasks to push deals or projects along.

Rich, detailed record view

When any lead, contact, opportunity or project is selected the record opens in a slide-out panel, so you can see information quickly without toggling between lists and record details. Pipeline stages are prominently displayed at the top and a summary bar provides highlight information at a glance without having to dig deeper. For example, the summary bar shows information such as opportunity value and how long it’s been in any one particular stage. You’ll be able to identify stall points and help push deals along faster.

Productivity enhancements

Notifications
With the new version, you can be notified of important activities via push notifications on your smartphone, email notifications, AND notifications directly in Insightly CRM. Any task reminders, assignments, or updated records that you follow can notify you wherever you are.

Quick search
Searches in Insightly now happen at lightning speed using ElasticSearch technology. We’ve also implemented faceted search to focus search results by type of record with any search query to find what you’re looking for quickly.

Insight cards
Insightly now surfaces artificial intelligence based “insight cards” when we have suggestions or additional information to help you. If Insightly has detected that a lead is a duplicate, an “insight card” appears to inform you of the duplicate and allow you to consolidate them. Additionally leads, contacts, and organizations show insight cards with the local weather and time for their location, so you can genuinely talk wind, rain or shine.

Built for enterprises

Lambda Functions
Enterprise plan customers get an added extensibility option with AWS Lambda function support. Customers will be able to write and upload custom programming code that runs when data is added or changed in Insightly CRM. These functions help keep multiple systems and data in sync – like updating a marketing automation tool when an opportunity is won in Insightly. Customers can build an integration with just about any other software that has an API.

SAML-based SSO
Insightly now supports SAML Single Sign-On with tools like OneLogin, Auth0, or Okta in addition to SSO with Google Apps and Microsoft Office 365. SAML support enables large enterprises that wish to control which users have access to different software applications, and allow them to share one Windows login password with many applications.

Browser Compatibility

Insightly recommends using the latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox for maximum compatibility. We regularly test our application with these browsers. Please note that the new version on Insightly is not compatible with Internet Explorer.

Make the switch today to experience the new Insightly CRM. Read our Help Center article for a full explanation of all the changes.