Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!
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Use Custom Filters for Informational Reporting |
| Insightly includes a number of analytical reports on our Reports tab, giving you easy access to summaries and totals for your opportunities and completed tasks. But if you’re looking for informational reports for your contacts, leads, opportunities, organizations, or projects, we include custom filtering options on each of these tabs to help you get to the information you’re looking for. You can create filtered lists on the fly or save filters to share with your team, allowing you to monitor or refer to the lists later. Just select the Filter option above the list and click New Filter to select the fields you’d like to filter by and enter your matching criteria.
Creating a custom filter can help you segment your contact list by region, multiple criteria, or other demographics—a great way to focus your efforts and maintain client relationships. When filtering on the Opportunities tab, you’ll see a total value of the opportunities you’re viewing right at the top of the list. (Bonus Tip: You can even export your filtered list to a CSV file for mail merges.) With this ability to drill down and focus on records that match what you’re looking for, informational reports are right at your fingertips.
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Take the Time to Look at Your Customer Analytics |
| If you’ve looked into implementing business intelligence (BI) at your company, you’re probably thinking BI means big data and big bucks. The truth is that business intelligence concepts can be implemented at any stage of growth with tools that are well within reach of small and mid-sized businesses. By researching the goals of other companies’ analytics efforts, you can find good ideas about how to focus your work and where to dig into the data you have.
If you determine product improvement is an area you’d like to focus on, organize your sales data and customer feedback in a way that informs your future product development plans. If higher customer loyalty or satisfaction is your goal, put together some reports with information from your CRM, social network feeds, and customer service inbox. Try to be objective as you put this information together. Sometimes it’s difficult to get past our own pet ideas and hear what our customers are telling us, but stepping back and seeing the story through the lens of information that you have at hand can help you improve business across the board.
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Chart Your Goals to Understand Your Progress |
| Data isn’t just for business anymore. The current wave of mobile technology has a band on every other techie’s wrist and a health app on every smartphone to count the steps we take through life. It doesn’t matter whether you use a mobile device, a spreadsheet, special software, or a chart scrawled on lined paper, keeping visual track of the progress toward your goals can help you grasp exactly where you’re at and where you’re headed.
Trying to lose weight or bulk up? Seeing your calorie intake and exercise time falling and rising day after day can help you identify which days of the week you tend to slack off, giving you the opportunity to come up with a strategy to address the weak spots. Working hard to pay off that debt or save for that next smartphone with a fancy tracking app? Updating a graph as your debt falls and your savings balance rises can be a great motivator as you watch your financial situation change over time. Writing down goals helps us stay focused on them; tracking our progress towards those goals provides regular reminders of the incremental changes we can achieve—a good reward in and of itself. |
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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.
Image courtesy of Naypong at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
