Chintaro Software is an Australian based service that helps accommodation providers better manage their properties. The company’s software is used by more than 170 Australian and New Zealand housing providers for tenancy, property and financial management and stores data about tenants, properties, assets, inventories and work-orders, helping managers track communications, future upgrades, scheduling, inspections and maintenance, among other tasks. The company, which is family owned, also assists its clients with implementation, support, training and ongoing services to ensure that they’re making the best use of the technology.
But is Chintaro making the best use of its CRM technology? The company uses Insightly, which they implemented more than a year ago. And, based on my conversations with them, I think they’re using it pretty well. After migrating their data from an older system (a “big headache,” said Annie Reeves, one of the company’s owners) they adopted Insightly as their primary sales tool and rely on it to track leads and opportunities. With less than five users on the system, they were able to get it up and running fairly quickly and without much training or support. And the system has become a valuable resource for making sure that all potential sales are in the pipeline and monitored in detail. And it’s working. Nothing falls the cracks. All opportunities are pursued to their resolution, good or bad (less bad than good, thankfully).
But Insightly is not the only system that Chintaro uses. The company uses Xero for its accounting and Harvest for time tracking. And they use FreshDesk for all customer service and support activities. These systems, all excellent- but they operate independently of each other. So for now, things are OK. But as the company grows, this lack of integration will likely cause a loss of productivity and a higher frequency of errors. Like all of us, there are plenty of ways that the company could be using its technology better. But if I had one objective to fulfill there in the next 12-18 months, it would be integration. Why not take advantage of all the benefits that a cloud based application like Insightly can offer?
Here are four critical applications Chintaro should integrate with their Insightly system.
Help Desk.
As mentioned before Chintaro uses FreshDesk, which is an excellent cloud based help desk system. But because it’s not integrated with Insightly neither sales or service knows what each other is doing. And it would be awkward for a sales person to be discussing the benefits of an upgrade when there’s a big support issue happening at the same time. Chintaro should consider hiring a developer to use Insightly’s API (application programming interface) to, at the very least, display open and closed support tickets from FreshDesk inside of Insightly. And although it would painful to leave FreshDesk, great support applications like SupportBee not only provide powerful email and task tools for tracking all support issues, but also integrates with Insightly out of the box.
Time and Billing.
The company is also happily using a cloud based application called Harvest to track the time employees spend on projects. But, like FreshDesk, this critical system is not integrated with their CRM system so both sales and service people are in the dark as to the status of ongoing projects. Hiring a developer to integrate the two applications may also be a solution here. Another is to look hard at TimeCamp, an excellent time and project management application that is not only cloud based but, like SupportBee, integrates with Insightly out of the box. This way prospects that have been nurtured into customers through Insightly can now be carried forward towards implementation (and ultimately to support) with important data stored in one place for all in the company to see.
Proposals.
Annie admits that her sales team spends a significant amount of time generating proposals for prospective clients, mostly using Word and Excel documents. The entire process can be not only be made faster and more productive with an add-in tool like Proposable, but communications, tasks and other important activities can be tracked against each proposal and integrated with Insightly. Proposable creates very polished looking documents, syncs contacts back and forth with Insightly and automatically creates and tracks opportunities in the CRM system.
Marketing.
Annie’s company sends newsletters, but it’s not as consistent as she’d like it to be. My recommendation is to spend the time necessary to segregate her database into groups of people (customers, prospects, products owned and products of interest) and then create an ongoing schedule of newsletters and other communications to keep these groups up to date on important information that will help them with their businesses. This means sending out multiple bulk emails on a varied, but consistent schedule and then tracking the results to see what’s working and what’s not. The best way to do this is to integrate their Insightly system with a good email marketing application like MailChimp and then, most importantly, put someone (I suggest a local university student with a marketing interest) in charge of the process.
How to get this all done? People will be needed. Good Insightly developers and consultants can be found on LinkedIn and UpWork. Great integration and automation tools, like Automate.io, can help move data back and forth between Insightly and the applications noted above, as well as many others.
Great companies create processes and systems to increase their value. Different systems doing different things erodes value. By making Insightly its core database, Chintaro can then build out integrations to its other important systems and build a top flight technology infrastructure that will create value and position the company for future growth. It’s all about the missing links.
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About the Author: About the Author: Gene Marks is a small business owner, technology expert, author and columnist. He writes regularly for leading US media outlets such as The Washington Post, Forbes, Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur. He has authored five books on business management and appears regularly on Fox News, Fox Business, MSNBC and CNBC. Gene runs a ten-person CRM and technology consulting firm outside of Philadelphia. Learn more at genemarks.com
