Connect the Dots and Find Success

Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly CRM, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

Improve Customer Intelligence with Custom Fields, Tags, and Linking

Have you ever been working on a deal and found you had a common connection with your prospective client? Insightly has a number of ways to capture information to bring these connections to light. Features like linking, tags, and custom fields can quickly present you with valuable intelligence and help you build rapport with someone on your very first call.

With custom fields, for example, you can create a “Referred by” field to track high-level sources like “Customer,” “Website,” or “Spring Blossoms Email.” Tags can be used to label prospects in multiple ways according to their needs, interests, and previous purchases. And when you or someone in your company knows about a personal or business relationship that the prospect has with an existing customer or employee, linking is an important way of not only noting that relationship, but also creating a hyperlink to the other contact records right in your CRM. (Bonus Tip! Using custom filters, you can create lists of contacts or leads based on field and tag values to break down your call lists into more focused segments.) If you haven’t tried out some of these features, give it a go! You’re likely to find a way of improving your process and making more sales.

Reduce Acquisition Costs Through Customer Connections

Marketing, sales efforts, requirements analysis—every stage of acquiring a new customer costs money. Since you’ve already invested in your existing customers, and word of mouth is a powerful tool for growing your business, why not encourage them to help you in expanding your client base? A referral program is a great way to bring in more business while letting your customers feel they are an important part of your efforts. Make sure your customers understand what you’re looking for in new clients through discussions or promotional material, and then reward them when a referral pans out. Referral awards can be as simple as a thank-you card or a movie ticket and will help your customers feel even more appreciated.

Connect Your Dots to Find a Way Forward

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward you can only connect them looking backwards.”
—Steve Jobs

If you’ve ever helped a child with their homework, you probably faced that moment when the kid felt frustrated and gave up, saying, “I can’t do it!” The best solution is often to encourage them to approach the problem from a different angle and help them follow their own way of thinking to get to—and understand—the answer. Like many childhood lessons, this one can serve us well as adults.

If you feel frustrated, blocked, or stuck in a rut, it’s a good idea to reflect on your past experiences to identify what drives you. Take some time to understand the motivations that will help you find your path to a more fulfilling career, better health, or hobbies that help you feel more satisfied. Having trouble staying in shape? You probably haven’t found the right exercise, yet. Can’t seem to finish that construction project? Maybe working on it for a half hour every afternoon will be just the right schedule to make progress. Figuring out how you work best and recognizing that failed attempts mean you haven’t given up can help you find the right course and move forward in life.

Send Us Your Tips

Would you like to share your tips with other Insightly customers? Send them to us!
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About the author: Tony Roma is Insightly’s Content Manager. He’s been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years and spent a good deal of time helping his niece with her homework.