Converting Sales Intelligence into Stellar Software Features

As the founder of a successful software company, I’m sure you’d agree that some of your most impactful feature ideas have originated as customer requests. And, with thousands of users relying on your app each day, it’s safe to say that you never run short of ideas.

The big question is this: What’s the best way to ensure that customer sales intelligence is fed to your development team – without getting lost in the shuffle?

In this post, we’ll explore a few ways your CRM can help.

Saving (& Tagging) Email Conversations

I’d wager that most of your company’s customer interactions occur through email. For example, your customer success team is constantly responding to questions that hit your support inbox. Likewise, your ticketing platform, which is also email-based, is packed full of bug fix requests, training inquiries, and feature enhancements.

With so many emails to respond to, it’s no wonder why feature requests sometimes get overlooked. The customer success team is primarily focused on solving issues and reducing churn. Noting new feature requests, although important, is rarely at the top of their to-do list.

One simple way to begin harvesting feature ideas – without disrupting your support team’s workday – is to save a copy of each email into your CRM. If you’re using Insightly, there are several ways to accomplish this, one of which includes the use of the Insightly Sidebar (specifically the use of the orange Insightly send button). As your team follows up with a customer, a copy of the email is saved securely into your CRM and linked to the appropriate contact record.

Assuming that you’ve adjusted your settings so emails are visible to others, your product team can now begin auditing support emails for viable feature requests. Although this may seem daunting at first glance, keep in mind that email records are searchable in Insightly. In the search box, just key in the word “feature,” and Insightly will display a few search options. (Obviously, other keywords may be more appropriate for your business.)

Voila, you now have a filtered view of emails correlated to that search term.

From there, each email can be reviewed for its usefulness and viability. If a feature request has merit, applying a feature-related tag could be a logical way to organize ideas for sequencing into development.

Forwarding to a Dedicated Project

If you’re concerned about saving every single support email into your CRM, I don’t blame you. On one hand, it certainly would be nice to save every customer interaction in one location. On the other hand, doing so could cause frustration among your sales reps (who are the primary users of your CRM).

A less invasive approach might involve forwarding select emails into your CRM. Granted, with this model, you’re still facing the same issue you face today. That is, your support team is just too busy. For this approach to work, you may need to create some type of gamification or incentivization program.

Here are a few possibilities:

Award a $25 bonus for each feature captured by a customer service rep (you might want to set a cap on this).
Create some type of competition, offering certain perks for the person who sends the most features each month.
Offer a larger bounty if a feature is put into development and deployed. Would a $250 bonus get their attention? Probably so.
Set a minimum requirement per month, similar to how banks place credit card minimums on tellers. Same basic concept.

Once you’ve gotten the team’s attention, it’s time to put this initiative into practice. But, how can you keep it easy for everyone?

I would recommend setting up a dedicated project in Insightly titled, “Feature Requests.” In doing so, you’ll notice Insightly creates a project-specific email address. Now, any correspondence forwarded to that inbox will be saved and automatically linked to the project.

Before going any further, it might also be wise to host a brief training session. During the training, be sure to show users how to mask the lengthy Insightly mailbox address. This can be done by creating a contact in the user’s email address book, such as: “Feature Request.” Once configured, users can simply begin typing “Feature….” into the “To:” subject line to quickly pull up the mailbox address. This is much easier than constantly copying and pasting the email address from a notepad or spreadsheet.

As ideas are submitted to the linked project, your product development team will enjoy instant access to a streamlined view of all feature inquiries.

If a feature is worth adding to the development backlog, the email can actually serve as the starting point for a new task or project. Converting the email to a task or project can be done in just a few clicks. (Conversely, if something seems redundant or not worth pursuing, the email record can be deleted to avoid clutter.)

Check Out Integrated Solutions, Too

So far in this article, I’ve focused primarily on using your core CRM functionality to get customer ideas into the development pipeline. Although I won’t go into extensive detail, it might also be wise to explore third-party integrations between your ticketing software, email inbox provider, and your CRM. Insightly users can check out the list of available integrations here. In addition, you could explore building your own integrations with a tool like the Zapier platform, which has dozens of connectors to popular support apps.

Connect the Dots Between Customer Feedback & Development

Your customers love your software, which is why they’re so passionate about being part of the development cycle. By capturing and reviewing their feedback in a more systematic way, you’re sure to capitalize on the free consulting work that they’re essentially providing you. 🙂

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.

April 17, 2018

Why Businesses Need Business Intelligence

If you’re like me, you probably spend a considerable amount of time reading blog articles, perusing whitepapers, and watching webinars. To remain competitive in today’s fast-paced business environment, we have no other option than to try and stay one step ahead. (Thankfully, there’s an infinite number of educational resources online to help us achieve that goal.)

Lately, in my research, I’ve experienced a growing number of experts who throw around the term “business intelligence” – or “BI” for short. Taken at face value, “business intelligence” sure sounds nebulous enough. In reality, BI is changing how companies make informed decisions.

In this post, we’ll dive into the topic of BI and explore how you can put it to good use.

What Exactly is BI?

BI has been defined a thousand times over (and by many people, who are smarter than me). That being said, allow me to break it down in a way that makes sense for busy entrepreneurs (such as myself). BI typically refers to a general category of software tools that are especially useful for visualizing important metrics. In other words, an effective BI application will take your historical and real-time data and present it in a way that’s both engaging and informative.

Business intelligence tools come in all shapes and sizes. Some are entirely dedicated to data modeling. Others, such as Insightly, incorporate aspects of BI into a much broader feature suite. Either way, as illustrated in the following screenshot, BI software gives the business owner fingertip access to a number of vital KPIs.

Sales KPI tracking is certainly a common use case for BI technology, but it is by no means the only use case. Companies use business intelligence software for almost everything imaginable, from tracking churn to customer satisfaction and on-the-job safety.

How Can Businesses Benefit from BI?

Like anything else, BI is what you make of it. If your company makes an investment in a business intelligence system but then promptly forgets about it, you’ve obviously wasted your time. On the other hand, if you start with the intention of streamlining your goal tracking and decision making, BI can be an excellent resource for your organization.

Take, for example, your sales process. I’m guessing that you’re already tracking the following data points:

Total booked sales revenue
Sales revenue, broken down by each sales rep
Current value of your deal pipeline
Stages where deals are stuck
Top reasons deals are lost

If you’re using a CRM, this data is readily available to you. The big question is not what to track – rather, it’s how to track it (and present it in a meaningful way).

By harnessing the power of BI, small business owners can bring new life to data that would otherwise be less insightful. Instead of waiting on a virtual assistant to manually refresh a spreadsheet, team leaders and department managers can gain instant access to the information they need. Furthermore, they can drill down with the click of a mouse, yielding more answers and less confusion.

So, Why Aren’t More Businesses Using BI?

If BI software is so powerful, why aren’t more small and mid-size business owners utilizing it? Good question.

As a consultant, I’ve had the opportunity to work with clients across a wide spectrum of industries and markets. From my perspective, the following issues seem to be the most common impediments:

Affinity for Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets are essentially free to create. They’re also easy to share with collaborators. With spreadsheets being so familiar, why venture into unknown territory and mess with a business intelligence package? It’s a question that business owners no doubt wrestle with.

Data Silos: Data silos present a very real issue for organizations of all sizes. With sales records in one database, newsletter stats in another, and customer support tickets tracked elsewhere, simply creating a 360-degree view of each customer’s journey can be enough of a struggle. Tying all of these disparate data silos into a separate BI platform is, therefore, unrealistic for most companies.

Lack of Technical Resources: Even if a company has a relatively clean data structure, few businesses have the technical know-how to deploy a business intelligence app. API documentation, security protocols, and data warehouses can be daunting to even the most experienced of IT managers.

Budgetary Constraints: BI tools usually come with some type of subscription or download fee (although some are free). There’s also the cost of hosting, maintaining, and supporting a BI application. When weighed against more pressing priorities, it’s easy to understand why business intelligence drops to the bottom of to-do lists.

More Pressing Matters: Speaking of more pressing priorities, just keeping the lights on and customers happy consumes 99% of most business owners’ brainpower. Deploying a BI tool, though desirable, seems more of a luxury than a necessity.

Solving the BI Puzzle for Businesses

For the reasons we’ve discussed, third-party BI tools are simply not feasible for a sizable percentage of the small and mid-size business world.

And, perhaps that’s why a solution like Insightly is particularly intriguing. Unlike a third-party tool, that may require extensive setup and technical expertise, Insightly’s solution is native to the user interface. Free and paid users alike enjoy out-of-the-box dashboards, consisting of cards that can be dragged and dropped.

In addition to lead and opportunity dashboards, Insightly users even enjoy project dashboards.

By leveraging a CRM that offers built-in business intelligence capabilities, smaller companies might be able to bypass the headaches commonly associated with BI.

Better Intelligence, Smarter Decisions

At the end of the day, your company is in the business of efficiently and effectively serving its constituents. A business intelligence system can help you achieve this goal, but only if the tool delivers more value than the resources it consumes. Smart business owners should seek out BI solutions that provide powerful insights without creating new internal problems.

April 10, 2018

7 Things Consultants Would Rather Do than Work on Taxes

Certified public accountants aren’t the only ones feeling stressed this time of year.

Consultants (like me!) and business owners of all types are doing their best to close out last year‘s books, get feedback from their accountants, and file accurate returns. In my experience, preparing for April 15th (or, as this year’s calendar falls, April 17th) requires a quantifiable amount of work and brainpower. Also, it usually involves writing several painful checks.

Although we can’t change the reality of tax day, we can at least dream. So, in the spirit of dreaming, here are seven things that you’d probably rather be doing this time of year.

1. Billing Time to Clients

In the consulting profession, the name of the game is maximizing billable hours and minimizing non-billable stuff.

Working on your taxes is particularly frustrating for two big reasons. First, every hour spent on your taxes is one that can’t be billed to someone else. There’s a clear opportunity cost associated with this situation. If you spend eight total hours on your taxes and your rate is $50 per hour, you’ve essentially “spent” $400 (and that doesn’t include what you’ll pay your CPA).

To make matters worse, it’s not like working on your taxes is a very gratifying experience. Gathering 1099s, pulling last year’s P&L statement, reviewing expense categories, and preparing summary sheets for your CPA isn’t exactly complicated work. It just consumes a lot of time – time that might be better spent (in a perfect world) on something more valuable to your business.

2. Prospecting & Networking

It’s hard to maximize your billing potential without a full book of business. As I’m sure you’d agree, one of the best ways to build a solid book of business is through networking.

In today’s fast-paced consulting world, there are a limitless number of ways to generate new opportunities for your business. Here are just a few ideas that could yield meaningful results with relatively minimal effort:

Asking for referrals from existing clients
Offering new services to existing clients
Networking through consulting marketplaces, such as Upwork.com
Engaging in LinkedIn groups
Attending local networking events
Traveling to conferences and workshops

If any of the previous ideas caught your attention, consider creating a task to circle back soon. Would an April 18th start date make sense? I’m thinking so.

3. Continuing Education

“It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

I’m sure you’ve heard it said many times. But, is it really true? For successful consultants, I’d say a more accurate statement goes as follows:

“It’s what you know, who you know, and what you do about it.”

Knowing a bunch of smart or well-connected people is no doubt important. Your clients appreciate the introductions you’re able to make. But, where does that leave you? You’re not in the business of simply playing matchmaker. Without the right mix of knowledge and skills, clients will find it difficult to keep you around for very long – despite the great connections you bring to the table.

Smart consultants find time to keep learning, thereby making themselves more useful. Unfortunately, some consultants put continuing education on the bottom of their to-do lists. Balancing the many client expectations and seasonal demands (such as taxes!) is challenging.

Continuing education can wait until next month, right? On the other hand, December will be here faster than you think!

4. Creating New Passive Income Streams

In reality, consultants are in the information business. Clients need information, and you’re more than happy to give it to them (for an hourly fee, of course).

Here’s the big problem with the consulting model: There’s way more clients in the world than you have hours. Even if you doubled your number of billable hours, hired a team to support you, and raised your rates, you would only be scratching the surface of what’s possible. For these reasons, some consultants package their knowledge into passive income streams. Here are a few examples to get your creative juices flowing:

Paid Webinars: Webinars can be an excellent way to share your knowledge with hundreds of clients at once. What if you could get 100 clients to simultaneously pay for the same hour of your time? That would have a pretty big impact on your bottom line, wouldn’t it?

Online Training Courses: Some topics are evergreen in nature, which can make for perfect online training courses. In your field of expertise, what are the most common challenges your clients face? Would the creation of an online course help solve their problems while enhancing your profitability and personal brand?

Books: With self-publishing on the rise, it’s easier than ever to become an author. Authorship can help establish you as a thought leader, but it can also serve as an incremental revenue stream.

5. Spring Cleaning of Your Records

Like the dust that has collected under your couch all winter, your CRM could probably use a good old-fashioned spring cleaning. If you weren’t frantically looking for that missing 1099, you might have time to take care of the following:

Adding New Contacts – Not everyone you’ve met in the last year has made it into your CRM. For example, your thought leadership efforts have really started to pay off in several LinkedIn groups. Likewise, you have a stack of business cards from last month’s trade show. It sure would be nice to get them added to your contact database.

Merging Duplicates – You try your best to keep clean records, but some things slip through the cracks. Making time to deduplicate your contacts, tasks, projects, and other records can make you feel more productive and less strung out.

Closing Old Opportunities – Some clients are just too nice to tell you “no.” This can lead to a CRM full of opportunities that will never materialize. Being realistic and closing low-probability opportunities (despite never getting a firm “no”) can help you reduce clutter and refocus attention to higher probability deals.

6. Analyzing Your Financials (Rather than Just “Doing” Them)

It’s easy to get caught up in the minutia of tax season. Did my accountant remember to include my SEP IRA contributions when calculating adjusted gross income? Is the new laptop that I purchased last year being amortized or expensed fully? Questions like these are important to ask when ensuring accuracy, but frankly they’re not all that useful from a strategic standpoint.

If “doing” your taxes wasn’t such a major undertaking, there might be more time to ask value-focused questions like these:

What percentage of income originated from consulting versus passive income streams?
Which of my services are most profitable?
Which of my clients are most profitable?
Is my business exposed to unnecessary risk by serving too few / too many clients?
Could I actually be losing money by refusing to outsource certain tasks?
Should I be saving more for retirement?

Sadly, for many consultants (myself included), such strategic questions are frequently overshadowed by the nuts and bolts of meeting the mid-April deadline. By the time May rolls around, these questions are long forgotten – until maybe next tax season.

7. Just About Anything Else!

When you finally get around to cracking open that 75-page packet from your CPA, you know you’re in for at least an hour of tedious review. When you take on projects, you do them well. It’s just who you are. Signing off on your taxes is certainly no exception.

As the packet continues to stare you down, it’s easy to get intimidated or find other matters that take precedence:

“It’s been a while since I backed up my computer.”

“My office plants look a little stressed. I should probably give them a quick drink.”

“I’ve been meaning to descale my coffee machine.”

Before you know it, it’s the end of the workday. Your taxes will just need to wait until tomorrow. Let’s hope tomorrow isn’t too late!

April 4, 2018

Everything New in Insightly’s April 2018 Release

Right on the heels of last month’s Dashboards, we’ve got a new release that gives admins incredible power to customize Insightly CRM to mirror the way your business works.

Here’s a look at the six key features in this month’s release.

System Settings Redesign

Availability: All Plans

The System Settings page is now organized into logical parent categories, such as Security, Objects and Fields, and User Interface, with child categories appearing under each one.

Settings functions are now searchable, so admins don’t have to scan the page to find what they’re looking for.

We’ve introduced sortable list views to settings such as Users and Workflow Processes, allowing admins to quickly sort lists and focus on what’s important.

Custom Fields are now live in Objects and Fields. Read on to learn why.

New Custom Field Types

Availability: All Plans

We’ve added five new custom field types available to all Insightly customers.

Multi-Select Dropdown
- - Select more than one option in a dropdown!
Date Time Field
- - Include date and time in a date field
Percent Field
- - Designate a field as a percentage
Auto-Number Field
- - Automatically generate a unique number as a record is created
Lookup Field
- - Link to another record within a custom field

Additionally, we’ve added decimal functionality to all number value fields.

Field Dependencies

Availability: Professional

Sometimes you have two dropdown fields that relate to each other, and you want to control what options are available in the second one.

To illustrate, let’s say a company sells two different models of cars (Big, Little), and two different models of trucks (Big, Little).

Without Field Dependencies, here’s how the company might define their dropdowns:

Dropdown 1 “Type”:

Car
Truck

Dropdown 2 “Model”:

Little Car
Big Car
Little Truck
Big Truck

This seems like an acceptable solution until we consider a company with, say, 10 categories of products, each with 20 different SKUs. In that case, Dropdown 2 would have 200 options(!), much to the frustration of anyone who has to fill out the record.

Here’s how it works with Field Dependencies.

Dropdown 1 “Type”:

Car [selected]

Dropdown 2 “Model”:

Little Car
Big Car

If you’re so inclined, it’s also possible to chain together as many of these dependencies as you need.

Page Layouts

Availability: All Plans

This is the big one.

With this release, Insightly admins can use the new drag-and-drop interface to design one or more* custom Layouts for each object. Layouts affect the appearance of records when users viewed, created, or edited. This feature is extremely valuable for data security, data accuracy, and end user experience.

Functionality includes:

Add/Remove fields from Highlights bar
Reorder fields
Hide or remove non–required fields from view
Create, rename, reorder, & hide sections of custom fields
Make any non-required field read-only
Make any field required

*On Professional Plan

Layout Assignments

Availability: Professional

With this feature, you can now design functional layouts and assign them to the right user or group of users in your organization.

Insightly customers using Advanced Permissions can create up as many Page Layouts as needed. Then, these custom layouts can be assigned to Advanced Permissions profiles.

From then on, users who bear that profile will only see what they need to see: Sales reps see sales fields, Service reps see service fields. It also applies read-only and required fields settings to that user group for enhanced security and data integrity.

We at Insightly are super excited for this release, and hope you are too. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

As always, we’ve got deep documentation in the Insightly Help Center to help you get started. And if you’d like a demo of any of these Professional features, someone on our Sales team would be happy to help: sales@insight.ly.

April 3, 2018

Create the CRM playbook of your dreams

You’ve taken the first step in the right direction by getting a CRM like Insightly onboard. If you want your sales team to get the most out of their CRM you need to make sure there are clear guidelines in place in the form of a CRM playbook. Not having a playbook which maps out clear guidelines for your CRM is a sure-fire way to CRM-failure, Gartner analyst Ilona Hansen said in a report that “The inability to develop, document, and execute a clear CRM strategy is a major, if not leading, cause of CRM failures.”

By creating strong guidelines you’ll have a framework that will support your business objectives. It also helps with employee training and onboarding.

Your CRM playbook should cover three main facets:

Your CRM vision

This isn’t some hocus-pocus mystical look into the future, nor is it some corporate mumbo-jumbo that is said in meetings and then forgotten about. A CRM Vision tells everyone across your business what the purpose of the CRM is and what goals they are aiming for using the CRM.

In essence this step is about defining the importance of the CRM in business terms and ensuring that his vision is rolled out across your organization.

Your CRM Vision should be specific and actionable. Don’t use vague mission statements that are too abstract to apply to your day to day business.

You can take a couple of approaches to this:

Define key goals and objectives in terms of operational excellence, product leadership, or customer personalization.
Define by Tactical CRM which focuses on customer data to drive short-term profitability (for example by implementing cost-effective customer acquisition initiatives)

But most of all ask questions and create definitions that make sense to your business. Like how does your business define a lead? What information should be in your CRM? Who has access to the data in your CRM?

Now is also a great time to review unused features of your existing CRM, such as Insightly’s project management function. These extra features can help you and your team reimagine the CRM vision and how different teams across the company can work together by using CRM software.

However you define your vision, you must make is clear your CRM is not just a fancy tool that holds customer data, but it is a tool that is helping your teams reach a definite goal.

Your CRM Strategy

If you’ve been using a CRM for awhile, you probably know how messy the records can get inside the system. That’s why you need to come up with a CRM strategy that has simplicity and customer experience at its heart.

How does simplicity and customer experience go hand in hand? Well, imagine you’ve got a CRM full of customer data which you never delete or clean. You’ve probably got duplicate customer records of duplicate customer records, stagnating on a system that grows more difficult to use as they years pass by. Your outbound sales efforts are doubling up on the same work, marketing are blasting prospects with two or three of the same email because of murky data. What’s a business to do?

Simplify! Get rid of bad data and make it a high priority to only have clean, up to date data in your CRM. Your personalization efforts will be more successful because your data is clean and up to date.

You can start by eliminating duplicate data. Insightly CRM has a feature to prevent and merge duplicates.

You also need to enforce business-wide data entry standards. The key to maintaining a clean CRM database is uniform data entry. Make sure your team know the importance of correctly filling out required fields in your CRM, if a field is only partially filled out, then duplicate records can easily occur again. Insightly has required fields that your team need to fill out in order for a record to be saved.

Sometimes you need extra fields or tags to hold all the required information your teams need to succeed. If this is the case, make use of custom fields and custom tagging features, and make them required fields. This will ensure that essential information is uniformly represented with your CRM.

Your CRM as a Team Unifier

Another sticking point is when you’re using Insightly with other apps to help you run your business. If you’re using an accounting app, a marketing automation app and a VoIP app, you’ve got a lot of customer data floating around that needs to be consolidated so that your teams can get a 360° view on your prospects and customers.

But as Gartner analyst Jason Daigler noted “Creating, maintaining and leveraging a single view of the customer is hard to achieve internally.”

Some businesses try to consolidate this information by using import/export functions (which never really keeps data up to date), one-way data pushes (a duplicate breeding ground), or ad-hoc scripts their tech team dream up.

There is another solution, and that is by using a third-party data synchronization app, like PieSync, that connects your apps together and keeps them updated in real time with the latest prospect and customer data.

By synchronizing your data across your entire you SaaS stack, you’re unifying your teams and ensuring that everyone has access to the most correct, up to date, customer data, no matter which app they are using.

There are many more points to cover for the perfect CRM playbook, but hopefully these three are enough to get you started.

Vanessa Rombaut is the Content Manager at PieSync and a featured writer in various tech publications and websites. The PieSync Blog In the Pipeline has been named The Best Marketing Blog 2017.