CRM Gift Guide for Your Sales Reps

Your sales reps add a ton of value to your business.

With your sales department playing such an instrumental role, you might want to consider giving them an extra special gift this holiday season. No, I’m not talking about a premium subscription to the ‘jelly of the month’ club. I’m talking about turbocharging your CRM. Give your sales reps the full suite of tools they’ve been asking for.

Here are a few CRM gift ideas that are sure to be a hit at this year’s company holiday party.

Gift Idea #1: A More Visually Appealing Pipeline

Sales reps spend most of their time following up on individual leads and opportunity records. To ensure that your sales team is always working on the most important deals, you’ve probably built custom views and reports in your CRM. This is a great start, but it’s easy for reps to feel overwhelmed. A never-ending list of names and organizations is hard to get excited about. It can also make it difficult (if not impossible) to see the bigger picture, which directly impacts their motivation.

A more engaging pipeline could be exactly what your reps have always secretly hoped for. But, how can you deliver a more visually appealing pipeline? One option would be Insightly’s innovative Kanban-style sales board.

Kanban Sales Lead Pipeline

Unlike most pipeline tracking platforms, which offer nothing more than a “snapshot” of the status quo, Insightly’s Kanban view allows your team to create, edit, and convert deal cards on the fly. Instead of drilling down into each lead or opportunity, making adjustments, and then clicking “back,” records can be modified without leaving the master Kanban view. In addition, cards can be moved to the next (or prior) pipeline stage with a simple drag and drop.

A Kanban approach to sales offers several tangible benefits. At a practical level, record editing is significantly expedited. Perhaps even more importantly, it offers an at-a-glance overview of what should be worked on first. And, to be honest, it’s just more fun than a boring lead list report!

Gift Idea #2: A Conversion-Friendly Signature Line

Have you ever calculated the total number of emails sent by your sales staff each year? The numbers might be astounding.

Here’s a quick, back-of-the-napkin example. Let’s say that you have a dozen sales reps and each one sends 30 emails daily. Now, multiply this by 260 work days, and you’re rapidly approaching 100,000 emails. Check out my math:

12 sales reps

x 30 emails

x 260 work days

______________

= 93,600 emails

That’s 93,600 unique touchpoints with your best prospects. You’ve already invested significant effort perfecting your marketing newsletter templates – why not also give your reps a more consistent (and conversion-friendly) signature line for outbound sales emails?

Most CRMs offer customizable signature lines. For example, Insightly makes it easy for you to include staff photos, add custom hyperlinks, and modify the HTML code. Of course, it’s best to provide staff with a standardized template for making these edits (that’s where your gift comes in). If this sounds like something your reps would appreciate, think through these questions as a next step:

  • Who would develop the HTML code for the signature line template?
  • Do we need to bring in a professional photographer if we plan to use headshots?
  • Is now also a good time to adopt an online appointment scheduling tool?
  • Should we have a graphic designer mock this up before handing it off to be coded?
  • Would incorporating our company logo into the signature line be beneficial?
  • What special offers or programs (such as a referral program) should we link to?
  • Which UTM parameters should we utilize so we can track signature line clicks?

Gift Idea #3: A Library of Vetted Email Templates

Working in sales can sometimes feel like the wild west. Everyone is digging for the same gold, and there isn’t a moment to lose.

Continuing with this analogy, your sales team wants to spend more time panning for gold; unfortunately, too much of their time is spent on other activities (such as responding to email and composing new pitches). How can you help them free up time and find more gold nuggets?

This gift idea might be the perfect solution for your situation: a library of vetted email templates.

Now granted, your longest tenured reps already have their “go to” email templates. But, what about the new hires you’ve onboarded in 2017? Chances are, they’ve had to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch.

With a CRM like Insightly, creating a library of sales templates is simple. Just click the big red button and add your template. Once created, each new email template is automatically shared with each user on your account.

Email Template Gallery

For the sake of discussion, let’s imagine your team struggles to cross-sell existing customers. Give the gift of simplified cross-selling with an optimized series of email templates. Here’s how:

  1. Create a diagram with the optimal follow-up pattern.
  2. Identify how many emails are needed.
  3. Work with your top cross-selling team members to craft the ideal messaging.
  4. Run the content past your editorial manager or content team (grammar counts!).
  5. Create the email template(s) in your CRM (Tip: Use a logical category structure).
  6. Show your team how to make the most of your creative gift idea!

Want to know if your gift is being appreciated? If you’re using Insightly, you’ll be able to see how many times each template has been sent, delivered, opened, and clicked.

Gift Idea #4: Lead Assignment Rules (without Drama)

“Why does he get all the big leads?”

Ever heard one of your sales reps mutter something like this? It’s definitely an annoying question to deal with. You do your best to be fair, but there’s always someone there to question your judgment. Sadly, with a manual lead assignment workflow, it’s difficult to escape.

An automated lead assignment workflow can reduce turf wars and improve relationships among staff. As an added benefit, you’ll also remove one additional bottleneck from your sales pipeline. No more waiting on a manager to review and delegate leads. Let the power of AI (artificial intelligence) do the “thinking” for you.

For example, if you’re a Pro or Enterprise Insightly user, you can build lead assignment rules to immediately assign new leads. Mix and match (using “and/or” logic) a variety of criteria, such as:

  • City
  • State
  • Zip code
  • Company size
  • Lead source

You could also go with a pure “round robin” rule that rotates lead assignments evenly over time. Either way, by automating your lead assignment rules, you’ll be out of the drama.

After all, who could blame a robot for being unfair?

(On second thought, maybe this gift idea is more intended for you!)

Gift Idea #5: Post-Order Automation

Your sales team loves selling. It’s what they do best.

Here’s what they don’t like: dealing with the many post-sale details.

Currently, after a deal closes, your order fulfillment team takes over and begins tracking delivery in a spreadsheet. This works to a certain extent, but your sales reps inevitably get pulled into countless internal discussions. Much of the information that is needed resides in your CRM, but your fulfillment team finds it easier to pester the sales staff.

It’s time to draw a line in the sand and expect greater post-sale efficiency. How? For starters, your fulfillment team needs to trade in its spreadsheet for a more robust project management system. If you’re already an Insightly user, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn that the system also offers a built-in project tracking tool. There’s no additional charge for using this feature, and, sales records can be seamlessly converted to “projects.”

Convert Opportunity to Project

Depending on your fulfillment model, your team can harness the power of milestones and pipelines to ensure an ideal customer experience. You could also consider mixing in workflow automation rules to further cut down on administrative back and forth.

Best of all, your staff will have access to the “full story” of each customer’s journey. Sales notes, emails, attachments, conversations, and other important information remain fully intact when the record is converted to a project. This allows your fulfillment team to get the answers they need – without bothering your reps!

Give the Gift of Efficiency this Holiday Season

Your sales reps have ambitious goals for 2018. To make this a reality, you must continuously find new opportunities for optimizing their time. Committing to a more streamlined CRM setup could be one viable path.

So, before you stock up on novelty mouse pads or coffee mugs this holiday season, consider the gift of a more efficient CRM. Your sales team will love you for it!

matt-keener-2

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.

5 CRM Best Practices for Insightly (Part 2)

This is part 2 of a 3 part blog series.

Part 2 provides you with guidance on managing duplicate records and bring best practices together with a worksheet to help implement processes in Insightly CRM.

Part 3 will explore dashboard reporting. 

Part 1 provided a technical overview of backup, security and support CRM best practices.

Dealing with duplicate data in a CRM

According to a 2015-2016 survey report from Experian Data Quality, “Duplicate data, in particular, jumped from 32 to 51 percent.” This is hardly a surprise due to the rapid growth of data, nonetheless it is a serious problem for many organizations, contributing to a poor customer experience, decreased efficiency, and misinformed decisions.

Insightly already detects duplicates when creating or importing new records, but sometimes these duplicate records sneak into your CRM usually because of human error, lack of internal resources, poorly implemented software, and even user permissions (see User Permissions).

5 ways to deduplicate records in Insightly

  1. Smart Merge is an Insightly feature that finds duplicates with similar sounding or spelling of names, and gives you a thorough way of merging all related record objects for contact, lead, and organization records.
  2. Dedupely integrates with Insightly to find duplicates for almost all your major record types using a variety of criteria customizable to you, and optionally, offers automatic duplicate merging.
  3. Look to standalone data utilities like Excel for a complete duplicate scan. This may require programming to build a deduplication algorithm for your organization and to get your data into the tool for analysis (see Version History & Backups). Once you have identified your potential duplicates, manually merge your Project, Opportunity or Task records. SmartMerge will do a fantastic job at taking care of the rest!
  4. The Deduplication Insight Card within Insightly automatically detects a duplicate within open lead records and displays an in-product alert showing the matching duplicates.
  5. Insightly’s new AWS Lambda functionality lets you create a function to run a deduplicate check against all record types within Insightly. If it detects an email match, Insightly will flag that record as a duplicate.  

 

Here is a chart showing the available features, record types, and related record objects from each tool:

Features SmartMerge Dedupely Other
Automatic Merging
Covers Edge Cases
Customized Scans
Record Types SmartMerge Dedupely Other
Contacts
Leads
Opportunities
Organizations
Projects
Tasks
Related Record Objects SmartMerge Dedupely Other
Contact Links
Emails
Events
File Attachments
Follows
Lead Link
Notes
Opportunity Links
Organization Links
Project Links
Project Milestones
Tags
Task Links

 

(Click here for more up-to-date information)

As you can see we have a great set of tools to deduplicate records! However, this is not enough. We need to setup best practices and processes for decreasing the creation of duplicates and increasing the accuracy of matching more potential duplicates.

General best practices for data management include:

  1. Train users to develop good habits for avoiding duplicates when creating or importing new records. When using Insightly CRM mobile, Gmail or Outlook Sidebar, use the search feature before adding a new record as the duplicate detection feature is only available on the web version.
  2. Create data entry rules and train your users how to enter in data using the correct format. Insightly does not offer customizable required fields or validation rules, so try to use custom drop down menus instead of free text fields. When users accidentally enter the wrong format, you can update your data to the correct format using Zapier’s Formatter App, Insightly’s Workflow Automation feature, or manually using the bulk edit or bulk update import tools.
  3. Get up-to-date information. Here are three ways to get this valuable information into your database:

Contact update form

Get information straight from the customer whether in-person, over the phone, or via email. This is hands down the most accurate way to get up-to-date information.

You can automate this process by creating a Zapier integration for Mailchimp and Insightly. Mailchimp’s Update Profile Link allows subscribers to update their contact information and preferences. When subscribers update their profile, Zapier updates your contacts in Insightly with the new information. Watch my CRM Contact Profile Update Form Integration Tutorial.

Profile enrichment tools

These tools enrich your data by validating and pairing your contact records with relevant information online using sources like social media profiles, company websites, list provider databases, and even from your email client. Collecting data that is updated often, such as email signatures, is going to be the next best way to get up-to-date information

 

Use Evercontact to automatically scan email signatures from your Office 365 Outlook or Gmail email client. Then let PieSync handle the rest by synchronizing any updated contact records with Insightly. I recommend reading, The Ultimate Guide to Outlook People By Piesync.

The next best integration for data enrichment is to integrate with a tool like Clearbit. With Clearbit’s Zapier integration you can automatically enrich Lead, Contact & Organization records with relevant information compiled from hundreds of data sources. This will help keep your data accurate and updated. Watch my CRM Contact Profile Enrichment Integration Tutorial

Manual updates

Many businesses have forms and documents stacked away that have yet to be transcribed into the database… Create custom filtered list views to find incomplete records and request the record owner to manually update the missing fields. This can be processed more efficiently with the use of the bulk edit and bulk update import tools.

  • Find patterns in your data and fill in the blanks. This is especially effective for email addresses.

For example, if all of an organization’s email addresses are in this format “firstname@company.com”, we can make an educated guess and apply this format to all other contacts in that organization with missing email addresses.

  • Never delete data. You may have incomplete records, but it is likely the data is of value to your organization and may be completed in the future.
  • Enforce your data entry rules for any data source integrated with Insightly such as list providers or software integrations. When creating new records in Insightly check for duplicates first. If the record is a duplicate, you will need to update the record instead of creating a new one.

In addition, multiple software integrations may result in duplicates because the integrations do not always play nice together. Try creating one workflow automation process or software integration at a time.

Measure, revise, and repeat

  1. Create a standard operating procedure for finding duplicates and merging records. You can start by asking the right questions such as:
  • What fields in our database hold information related to the record’s identity i.e. name, email address, phone number, etc.?
  • Do we need to “normalise” all those fields before checking for duplicates?
  • Will analyzing those fields allow us to find more potential duplicate records?
  • Can we use third party tools to scan our database for potential duplicates?
  • Do we need a full duplication analysis report?
  • How do we identify the “winning” record?
  • What data will be transferred to the “winning” record?
  • What leftover data do we need to save from the “loser” record(s)?
  • How do we manage lost links and objects after merging records?
  • Is manual or automatic merging the best option for our organization?
  1. Backup your data before and after each duplicate merge. If you are using Dedupely’s Automatic Merging tool, then look at backing up your data every ten minutes with Flatly.io (see Version History & Backups).
  2. Monitor your deduplication analysis reports. Identify what record types have the largest duplicate rate and which fields are often incomplete. With the right business intelligence, you can find the source of those duplicates. Then you can create a resolution to revise your software solution, training material, and data entry rules.
  3. Clean your database often.

Action Plan

Take the time to plan an effective data management strategy and procedure for cleaning your database. By doing so, you will allow for a better customer experience, increased efficiency, and more informed decisions.

Go to the Best Practices & Discussions forum in the Insightly Community, where I posted the CRM Best Practices for Insightly Worksheet. This post has everything you need to setup your best practices in Insightly along with more helpful tips to secure your CRM investment.

After implementing these best practices for your organization, I encourage you to leave feedback in the Insightly Community. With your help, my fellow Insightly Heroes and I can continuously improve the best practices for all Insightly users.

Stay tuned for Part 3 of “5 Best Practices for Insightly CRM” where we provide more helpful tips on dashboard reporting. 

To be continued…

 

About the Author:  

Micah Feldkamp is an Insightly Hero and CRM consultant specializing in Insightly software implementations.

6 CRM Integrations to Use More in 2018

In this post, we’ll explore six CRM integrations for Insightly worth trying in 2018.

Your CRM is doing some amazing things these days. In addition to tracking all of your leads, contacts, sales opportunities, and tasks, you’ve even deployed a few outside-the-box project pipelines. Yes, your CRM sure is a vital asset for your business.

As helpful as your CRM has become to your business, you may have only scratched the surface. After all, Insightly integrates with more than 40 different web apps, many of which you’re probably using.

Slack Collaboration App

Since launching in 2014, the Slack app has achieved unbelievable growth. In fact, more than 9 million professionals in over 100 countries use Slack each week. Why has Slack become such a staple for businesses? Riding the popularity of the social media revolution, Slack simplifies communication and, frankly, makes it more enjoyable. For many companies around the world, Slack has become the central “hub” for anything worth talking about.

Insightly’s integration with the Slack platform creates a seamless bridge between digital office chatter and your CRM. If you’re an Insightly user (at the Plus plan or above), this integration allows you to do the following in Slack:

  • Search for records and add notes
  • Update opportunity states
  • Create new records
  • Add tasks with reminders
  • Stay in the loop with opportunity and project updates

To read best practices for using Insightly’s integration with Slack, click here.

Bedrock Data Integration Platform

Let’s be honest – your company uses a lot of different Saas (software as a service) tools. For starters, you obviously rely on Insightly for sales and project management. In addition, you also subscribe to an online webinar platform, email marketing system, and support ticketing software. And, if you’re even remotely involved with eCommerce, that’s probably just the tip of the iceberg. With so much of your customer information spread across disconnected online databases, keeping your records clean can be a challenge.

The Bedrock Data integration platform allows you to connect your various systems – without programming or developers. Once connected, you’ll be able to manage integrations from Bedrock Data’s intuitive dashboard. The system also takes deduplication off your to-do list by continuously checking for new updates.

Click here for a quick demo of the Bedrock Data solution.

JotForm Online Form Builder

Looking to automatically capture web leads in your CRM? Insightly’s web-to-lead form can be an excellent starting point. If that doesn’t meet your needs, you might want to consider a third-party platform, such as the JotForm platform. With more than 2.5 million users and 200 million form submissions to their credit, JotForm is a very reliable solution for today’s digital marketer.

Enabling Insightly’s integration to JotForm can be especially beneficial for companies with many landing pages. Clone, customize, and integrate forms to Insightly in a flash. The integration makes it easy to match form fields to those already in your CRM. JotForm even allows you to hide certain fields on your form (such as page or campaign-specific details), helping you achieve greater ROI from your marketing efforts.

Learn more about connecting Insightly to JotForm.

Quotient Quote Generator

Getting customers to “sign on the dotted line” isn’t always easy. That’s especially true when they can’t understand how to read your quote.

The Quotient app solves this problem, delivering an engaging quote directly to your prospect’s inbox. Once a quote is sent, Quotient lets you know when:

  • The lead has opened your quote
  • Follow up should occur next
  • Your quote has been accepted

Insightly’s integration with Quotient connects the dots between your proposals and contact records. As new quotes and acceptance emails occur, the integration ensures everything stays up to date in Insightly. Better quoting, better recordkeeping, happier customers.

Click here to read more about Insightly’s integration to the Quotient app.

Google Drive Online Storage Service

Companies of all sizes (big and small alike) leverage the Google Drive online storage service. Why? Well, for starters, Google Drive makes it so much easier to share and collaborate. Unlike traditional spreadsheets or documents, which must be emailed back and forth, Google Drive files are fully shareable with anyone. Better yet, everything is stored securely in the cloud, reducing the likelihood of information loss.

If you’ve used Insightly for very long, you may have noticed that the Google Drive icon is built into the “Files” section of your records. Enabling the integration only takes a few seconds (just click the icon to allow access). Once enabled, you’ll be one click away from your most important Google Drive files. Stop messing with multiple browser tabs – enable Insightly’s integration for Google Drive today.

Everhour Time Tracking Software

Wondering how much time your sales reps spend on administrative work (instead of selling)? Now you can find out by enabling Insightly’s integration for the Everhour app.

Everhour embeds natively into your Insightly account. As your sales associates follow up on leads and opportunities, the Everhour app tracks how much time was spent on what. Need to see which deal is consuming the bulk of your team’s time? Want to learn how many hours are spent on deals prior to close? With Everhour and Insightly, you’ll have the answers you’ve only dreamt of.

Continue reading about Insightly’s integration with Everhour.

Create a More Integrated CRM

Ready to make 2018 the year of integrations for your business? Get started today and try out the 40+ integrations available for Insightly CRM. Productivity, document management, email marketing, time tracking, and marketing automation are just a few of the more popular integration categories. You might be surprised by all of the possibilities!

5 CRM Best Practices for Insightly (Part 1)

This is part 1 of a 2 part blog series.

Part 1 provides a technical overview of backup, security and support CRM best practices.

Part 2 will provide you with guidance on managing duplicate records and bring best practices together with a worksheet to help implement processes in Insightly CRM.

Data integrity is key to a good CRM user experience.

Insightly continues to go the extra mile to build product features designed around data security, protection and permissions.

Significant Insightly CRM updates (2016-2017):

 

Version History & Backups

Insightly has passed a major data provider audit and is now SOC2 Type 2 compliant. Plus, Insightly offers a Recycling Bin feature to restore deleted records from the past 30 days.  In a recent release, Insightly now also tracks the opportunity change history and displays a full audit log of what was changed and by who within the opportunity record. See information like who updated the forecasted Close date and when the change was made.

In Insightly, there are three main ways to backup your data.

  1. API v2.2 allows you to get almost all of your data with the exception of some system & user settings. While API v2.2 requires programming work, there is an automated backup service that connects to the API called Flatly.io. Flatly.io recently updated their software to get all available Insightly data and settings backed up to a storage service of your choice every 10 minutes. Lastly, you should take into account how many API calls you are making per day. The daily API throttling limits vary depending on your plan.
  2. Data Exports give you most of your data in the form of XML files. Some objects, related links between objects, and fields are not available or may be incomplete.
  3. Reports will help complement the Data Export, but unfortunately both tools combined, still do not offer a complete export of all the related links and fields for each object. File, Event, Task, Project, and Opportunity History Reports will offer the most significant amount of information not found in the data export.

Here is a chart showing a general view on the availability of objects and settings objects from each source:

Objects API v2.2 Flatly.io Data Export Reports
Comments
Contacts
Emails
Events
File Attachments
Follows
Leads
Milestones
Notes
Opportunities
Organizations
Projects
Tags
Tasks
Users
Settings API v2.2 Flatly.io Data Export Reports
Activity Sets
Countries
Currencies
Custom Field Groups
Custom Fields
Email Accounts
Email Signatures
File Categories
Instance
Lead Assignment Rules
Lead Conversion Custom Field Mappings
Lead Sources
Lead Statuses
Notifications
Opportunity Categories
Opportunity Conversion Custom Field Mappings
Opportunity State Reasons
Permissions
Pipeline Stages
Pipelines
Project Categories
Relationships
Task Categories
Teams
Team Members
Web to Contact Forms
Web to Lead Forms
Workflow Processes

(Click here for more up-to-date information)

Get the data you need and backup your data often. In the event of a cyber attack, user error, or audit, all versions of your data will be physically in your hands.

Interested in automated data backup with Flatly.io?

Use coupon code CLREFERRALSCOM when signing up for 10% off first month’s subscription.

Advanced Security

As of September 6th, 2017, Insightly only had Single Sign-On (SSO) access with Google G Suite. Today, users can have SSO access to Insightly via their Microsoft Azure AD panel, Office 365 portal, and/or identity provider (IdP).

Google G Suite & Microsoft Azure AD both complement Insightly with these 10 advanced security features:

  1. SAML-based SSO Compatibility*
  2. OAuth SSO Compatibility
  3. Two-factor Authentication (2FA)
  4. Self-service Password Reset
  5. Restrictions Reusing Expired Passwords
  6. Required Password Length
  7. Monitor Password Strength
  8. Risky User Sign-in & Activity Alerts
  9. User Sign-in Audit Reports
  10. Session Timeout

*Insightly offers SAML-based SSO compatibility only on the Enterprise plan and is compatible with all IdPs that support SAML.

Whether or not you integrate Insightly with Google G Suite, Microsoft Azure AD, or an IdP like OneLogin, reset your password(s) at least once every 90 days. This will automatically increase your security level.

User Permissions

Insightly has two ways of managing user permissions: Simple & Advanced. Both features do a great deal to protect customer data.

Insightly’s Advanced Permission feature does not currently apply on files uploaded directly to Insightly.  However, if you wish to put in place that extra level of control, use one of Insightly’s native-integration services like Dropbox or Google Drive.  By storing Google Drive, OneDrive or DropBox rather than directly in Insightly.

While advanced permissions helps protect your data, permissions may deactivate the duplicate detection feature when creating or updating records. This only happens when the user creating or updating the record does not have visibility permissions to the possible matched record(s). The only way to clean up the duplicates is to merge the records.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of “5 Best Practices for Insightly CRM” where we provide more helpful tips and insights on deduplication best practices!

To be continued…

 

About the Author:  

Micah Feldkamp is an Insightly Hero and CRM consultant specializing in Insightly software implementations. Click here to see Micah’s interview with Data2CRM.