User Adoption: 5 CRM Best Practices For Insightly (Part 3)

This is part 3 of a 5 part blog series.

Part 1 Backup & Security
Part 2 Data Integrity
Part 3 User Adoption
Part 4 Dashboard Reporting
Part 5 Ongoing Support

You just purchased Insightly for your business, you love the layout, all-in-one sales and project features, and you’re ready to introduce the new system to your organization. You’ve customized your workflow, imported your data, and connected your apps. Maybe you’ve even implemented the new page layout and dashboard reporting features too. Everyone has seen the presentation and all nod their head in HUGE approval. Fast forward one week, you login, and your activity reports show practically nothing. Silence.

Thoughts that might come to mind… What did I do wrong? Do they just need more time? Is this the right software for us?

Chances are we didn’t have an effective rollout strategy!

Here are seven tips to help cultivate good habits with your users:

1. Leadership

Before buying your CRM, you should have surveyed your users, defined their needs, and included one or two of them in the buying decision to increase organization-wide buy-in. Everyone needs to have a vested interest in the decision.

If you’re already using Insightly, ask your organization’s leader to say a few words, “Insightly is our new tool for getting business done. If it’s not in Insightly, it didn’t happen.”

2. Training

Tailor the training to each specific user or department.
Training is mandatory.
Don’t just show them how the system works, let them drive and add context to their new daily workflow using “what if” scenarios.
Ensure the trainer is from the same department and knows the software and the user’s workflow inside and out.
Once training is complete, provide ongoing support and easy access to new training sessions, cheat sheets, and internal chat for fast support from your trainer(s).

Stay tuned for Part 5 when we go into detail on “Ongoing Support”!

3. User Engagement

Instill in the minds of your users that Insightly is required to get the job done. Here are a couple of ways to help enforce the new rules:

Eliminate other tools used for doing business. If users are still gravitating back to spreadsheets, explain the benefits of Insightly and drive home that Insightly is the one source of truth for everyone in your organization.
Integrate Insightly with other applications used to complete their job. For example, the only way for a sales rep to get paid is by closing an opportunity and sending a contract to the client through PandaDoc.
Don’t overwhelm them with too many options or tasks. Make it easier on your users to focus on the right records, data, and required fields by combining these three features: Custom List Views, Advanced Permissions, and Page Layouts.

For example, a sales user will create Custom List Views to see only profitable opportunities with a high probability of closing. Next, using Advanced Permissions, they’ll only see the opportunities they have ownership over and records their role is allowed to access. Once Advanced Permissions are set, we use Page Layouts to customize the sales role experience even more by showing only the required fields in a logical order for closing the opportunity. Throw in Workflow Automation and now they have less fields to complete, messages to send, and buttons to click!

4. Self-improvement

Give your users reports and dashboards relevant to their specific role showing them how they add value to the organization. After your user displays consistent engagement with Insightly, show them how to build their own reports and dashboards.

Allowing users to regulate themselves is a key tool for management in optimizing overall production.

5. Invest in your users

Find the best Insightly user in each department and direct them to periodically visit other users in the office to give support, tips, and best practices on Insightly. If your team is remote, ask your team leader(s) to include Insightly coaching and user activity reports in their meetings.

6. Gamification

Heat up your team’s competitive spirit by offering prizes for increased user engagement. If you have access to a big flat screen, install the tv in the middle of the office within everyone’s eyesight. Next, share a dashboard report on the screen showing what reps are generating hot leads or closing the biggest deals in Insightly!

7. The Wall of Help

Some people call it, “The Wall of Shame”, I call it, “The Wall of Help”. Create a report showing the most inactive users by the amount of times they log into Insightly and amount of lead, opportunity, or activity records created every week. If you find a user trailing behind in “The Wall of Help” for longer than two consecutive weeks, reach out to them, ask them what’s going on, and help them.

Stay tuned for Part 4 where we explore more best practice tips for Insightly CRM and reporting tools:

Insightly Custom List Views
Insightly Advanced Reports
Insightly Dashboard Reports
Insightly Mobile Dashboard Reports
Time Tracking & User Login Reports
Accessing Insightly Data with 3rd Party Apps
Microsoft Power BI Dashboard Reports

In the meantime, I encourage you to review best practices Part 1 Backup & Security & Part 2 Data Integrity.

About the Author:

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

April 24, 2018

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.

March 27, 2018

Selling Points for a More Agile Sales Force

Despite your dream of an agile sales force, 2018 is shaping up like every prior year in recent memory. A handful of sales reps definitely do their own thing, while everyone else tries to make the best of your CRM.

“No thanks, my spreadsheets are working just fine. Just look at my close rate!”

Spoken like a true sales pro.

And, apparently like most of his customers, you once again bought Joe’s pitch. After all, it’s hard to argue with Joe’s infamous spreadsheet – although, you would like to take a closer look at his calculations (but that’s another story).

Your gut tells you that total CRM adoption is a key component to becoming more agile. Unfortunately, Joe and his minions refuse to buy in. If you could convince Joe to make the switch, his direct reports would naturally have to follow suit.

Here’s a bit of advice: It’s time to stop talking to Joe about your goals. Instead, put things in his terms. You need to prove to Joe why becoming more agile will impact his personal bottom line. In other words, you need to make a compelling sales pitch of your own.

Here are three selling points to weave into your pitch.

1. More Prospecting Time

“Joe, what if I could get you an extra 90 minutes of prospecting time per day?”

Well played. Now you’ve gotten Joe’s attention.

Prospecting is the lifeblood of any sales function, and Joe knows that all too well. According to Joe’s own spreadsheet, each hour spent on prospecting typically yields him ten new leads. If your promise holds true, Joe could connect with an additional 75 leads per week. And, based on Joe’s self-proclaimed close ratio, he’d surely expect an even healthier paycheck.

Joe nibbles on the bait, but he’s predictably skeptical and demands additional information. Rather than extolling the many virtues of your CRM, you take a more subtle approach. This time, you move into a series of questions, aimed at better understanding Joe’s exact needs and objections.

You: “Let’s talk about sales emails. What if we had a system to organize all of your sales email templates. Rather than copying and pasting, the system would send out personalized messages for you. You’d just have to click a button or two. You could also drill down and see which leads have opened and clicked your messages. Would a system like that be helpful, Joe?”

Joe: “That does sound interesting. A big part of any sales rep’s job is to send follow-up emails. I could see where that might be useful.”

Wow, that was easier than you thought. You decide to move on to more questions.

You: “I know that preparing for the weekly sales meeting creates a lot of administrative work for you. What if we could take reporting off your plate?”

Joe: “Sign me up!”

You: “OK, and speaking of administrative work, what if I could prevent the marketing department from ever bothering you again? I know they’re always asking you to provide updated contact lists for the newsletter.”

Joe: “I’d be interested in that, too. Marketing just assumes it’s easy for me to access that information. I have to create a pivot table, which takes at least an hour. For the record, I don’t think newsletters work, anyway.”

For the moment, you’ll focus on the positive and ignore Joe’s negativity about email marketing.

You: “Oh, and one more thing. I know you especially dislike coordinating post-close details. What if we could automate that workflow for you, too?”

Joe: “Handing that off would save me at least two hours each week…”

You’re making progress with Joe. He just doesn’t know it yet.

2. Better Visibility (& Less Friction)

Joe leads by example, which is, in some ways, very beneficial to your company. No one can pitch a deal quite like Joe, making him an excellent sales coach for new hires. Unfortunately, Joe’s uncouth reliance on spreadsheets trickles down to the rest of his team. Joe’s protégés want to be just like him, spreadsheets and all.

Although he routinely downplays it, you’re fairly confident that Joe has mixed feelings about his team’s performance. In particular, you know that Joe is annoyed by his millennial reps’ unwillingness to provide deal updates.

To confirm your suspicions, you start another line of questions.

You: “Let’s pivot for a moment and talk about your direct reports. I’m curious to get your thoughts on how they’re performing.”

Joe: “It’s really hard to say. Several have tremendous raw talent, but they consistently fail to track their deals. I’ve shown them a million times how to update our tracking sheets, but some just don’t seem interested. This makes it difficult to prepare for our weekly sales meeting. I usually have to track each one down individually and ask for a pipeline status update. Even then, I rarely have enough information to speak intelligently at the meeting.”

You: “What if I had a way to solve that? I’m thinking of a report for each of your sales reps that looks something like this…”

Pulling out your tablet, you pull up the Kanban sales view recently built by Joe’s counterpart, Steve. You point out that this view makes it easy to get a bird’s-eye view of every deal in Steve’s pipeline. No more guessing about what his reps are working on – it’s all right there, just a tap away. The view also makes it easy to filter deals by a variety of criteria, including deal owner or potential sale amount.

Joe pauses to examine the pipeline view. You can tell he’s intrigued, but now he’s on to you.

Joe: “I thought I told you I wasn’t interested in messing with a CRM.”

You: “I’m not trying to force you into anything. I’m just curious what you think about this type of deal view in general.”

You can tell Joe is torn. Time to move in for the close.

3. On-the-Go Access

As Joe struggles to conjure up any objection to Steve’s Kanban sales view, you pose a simple question:

You: “Joe, I realize change is hard. I really do. But, putting your objections aside, wouldn’t it be nice to have in-the-field access to customer information and deal notes?”

Joe shrugs, points to his head, and says, “It’s all right up here.”

Of course it is, Joe. Of course it is.

You: “Be that as it may, what about the rest of your team? You just admitted that they’re failing to track deals. Why do you think that’s the case? Clearly, something’s not working.”

Quite a predicament Joe has gotten himself into. On the one hand, he knows as well as you do that something needs to change. On the other hand, there’s his pride to consider.

A dramatic pause ensues. Then, Joe finally decides to speak.

Joe: “I’m a big person, and I’m never afraid to admit when I’m wrong. Just because something works great for me, it doesn’t mean everyone can pick it up quite as effectively. I can see where letting them use their smartphones out in the field could solve a lot of problems. Maybe it’s time we get these rookies set up in your CRM.”

You decide to look past Joe’s epic ego moment and pounce on the opportunity.

You: “Let’s do this. For the foreseeable future, you keep using your spreadsheet to track your own deals. But, for your direct reports, let’s start the process of getting them into the CRM. We can use Insightly’s CSV import templates to get everything transferred over quickly. Ideally, I’d like to get deal status reports in your hands within the next 30 days. Do we have a deal?”

Joe: “Sounds good. I’m glad you’re finally starting to see things my way.”

Feeling good about the compromise, you exchange a chuckle and walk out victorious.

A few days later, Joe makes the big announcement at the weekly staff meeting.

Joe: “I’ve decided that it’s time to get you all set up in the company’s CRM system. We’re putting together a timeline now, but the goal is to have you fully transitioned within the month. I’ve personally vetted the system, and it’s definitely going to help you close more deals. You’ll be able to access everything you need from your smartphones, including the ability to provide updates on deals and contacts. By this time next month, there will be no excuse for missing or incomplete sales records.”

Wow, nice sales pitch Joe. Glad you had the idea!

Agility May Require Some Salesmanship

As we saw with Joe, achieving an agile sales force may require a little salesmanship on your part. It may also require some compromise.

Don’t assume that everyone on your staff will buy in on day one. Of course, as the business owner, your goals are very important. Perhaps equally important, however, are the motivating factors of your key team members. For those “Joe’s” of the world, you’ll probably need to peel back a few layers of objections – just as any good sales pro would do.

Happy selling!

March 20, 2018

How to Convert “Doers” into Sellers in the Sales Process

Each new customer represents a world of upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Unfortunately, for some companies, the sales process halts within moments of a deal converting into an account. Although there are many possible explanations for this issue, a common cause stems from the divide between sales and frontline operations.

In this post, we’ll explore a strategy for bridging the divide by turning your frontline team into your best sellers.

Why Doers Should Be Your Best Sellers

It’s 9:07 am, which means your implementation team should be knee-deep into an onboarding discussion with your newest client (a regional chain of coffee shops). As a well-respected web consulting firm, your company prides itself in providing rapid turnaround time, excellent coaching, and, most importantly, websites that deliver results.

As you take another sip of coffee, you can’t help but wonder what is actually being discussed. You own the business, so it’s certainly within your purview to pop into the conference room and listen in. Giving it more thought, you decide to just wait until lunch when you’ll see Dominic, your most experienced project manager.

Noon rolls around, and you stroll to the break room. Sure enough, there’s Dominic having his usual ham sandwich and pretzels. You pull up a chair and start a casual conversation. As the discussion moves toward work topics, you feel your blood pressure begin to rise.

You: “So, Dominic, how was your call this morning with the coffee shop chain?”

Dominic: “It went fine, but things have been moving slower than most projects. They’re still recruiting some graphic designers to help with the rebranding process. Their in-house IT staff is also trying to connect their analytics software to the new site, but they keep running into issues.”

You: “Did you mention that we could handle all of that for them?”

Dominic: “I did, but they never got back to me on it.”

As Dominic gets up to recycle his empty soda bottle, a flood of questions race through your mind. How much are customer-caused delays costing us in overhead and lost time? Why didn’t Dominic push harder for the cross-sell opportunity? What other opportunities are we missing out on? What, if anything, might have motivated Dominic to actually follow up again?

Clearly, frontline team members like Dominic have the most in-depth understanding of customer needs at your company. By the nature of their jobs, they live and breath the intricacies of each customer’s unique situation. Clients trust their judgment and (usually) listen to them, which puts them in an especially powerful position to make recommendations – including those that involve additional services.

Sadly, as we saw with Dominic, few team members ever fully capitalize on the opportunity.

Planning a Paradigm Shift

Back at your desk, you decide to log in to your project management system and create a new project called “Operation: Frontline Selling.” The goal of this project will be to explore and (hopefully) correct the situation uncovered in your chat with Dominic. In reality, you’ve known this has been going on for a while, but now is the right time to take action.

Using the project’s description as a virtual notepad, your first step is to gather everything that’s going through your mind:

Designing a “house account” bonus program
Company-wide CRM access
Training for frontline workers
Emphasis on reporting & KPIs
New pipeline

At first glance, it seems like a rough list of random ideas. But hey, it’s a start. Before closing the project, you set yourself a task reminder to work on this again tomorrow.

Providing Access to the Whole Story

The next morning, you have a renewed spring in your step. Operation: Frontline Selling has been on your mind since yesterday, and you already know what your first move should be.

Wasting no time, you jump into your project and create three initial milestones:

Coordinating an in-person meeting with your leadership team
Providing frontline workers with CRM access
Offering CRM training to new users

Scheduling the kickoff meeting can be easily delegated to your administrative assistant, which you promptly do. However, the other two milestones will require some additional thought. To make your project successful, frontline workers are going to need the same access to customer information as your outside sales team. But, how much information do they actually need? Should the company consider utilizing role permissions to find the right balance? These are all questions that must be answered.

At the kickoff meeting, you share your vision for this new program. You reiterate that your ultimate goal is to have everyone at the company – especially frontline staff – be engaged in the selling process. You’ve even outlined an intriguing incentive policy, which your operations manager finds particularly interesting.

After a healthy discussion with your management, everyone seems in agreement on the next steps:

Finalize the program (bonus requirements, etc.)
Scope out in-house opportunity tracking best practices
Announce the program
Work with IT to onboard and train new CRM users
Define goals and KPIs

Luckily, you’ve already started a project in Insightly, which can be easily shared with each member of your leadership team.

A few additional milestones later, and the meeting is brought to a close. The team agrees to reconvene again in a few days and aims to go live late next week. It’s no doubt an aggressive timeline, but it seems doable.

Simplifying the Collection of Opportunities

Having volunteered to “own” the opportunity tracking milestone, you begin toying with several different use cases. The more you think about it, the more you’re convinced that the company needs a dedicated pipeline specifically for in-house deals. You watch a few refresher videos on how to set one up (such as this one).

Using Dominic’s aforementioned situation as the case study, you map out what appears to be the perfect pipeline for your internal sales process. Here’s a quick recap of what you’ve come up with:

Opportunity Creation: When an upsell or cross-sell opportunity presents itself, team members will simply find the person’s contact record, click “Add New Opportunity for Contact,” link it to the correct company, enter the relevant details, and select the in-house pipeline.

Opportunity Routing: Using a series of activity sets and workflows, you’re able to automatically assign and route new opportunities to the correct account manager. The sales team can then promptly follow up and work with the opportunity’s originator to advance the deal.

Opportunity Collaboration: By designing a pipeline that relies on both frontline staff and your sales team, you’re able to create greater accountability and redundancy – all of which is completely transparent in each opportunity record. Did a sales rep forget to follow up? Did the opportunity’s originator fail to provide useful information? Your new process gives you the information you need to move your company forward.

Celebrating Accomplishments

As exciting as pipeline automation might be, you’re also going to need a simple way to track the program’s overall success. After all, an automated sales pipeline is only useful if people are actually using it.

Since you’re planning on using a dedicated pipeline, it should be a breeze to track opportunity volume and revenue impact. Department heads can easily customize, save, group, and subscribe to the reports they need to push for results.

For example, let’s say you want to monitor how many opportunities are being identified by your old pal, Dominic. Just jump into your library of prebuilt Insightly reports and get customizing. Within a few minutes, you’re able to save a report that shows every opportunity that he has originated.

Better yet, Insightly can even be configured to email you on a predefined schedule or when a certain threshold is met. This helps you stay on top of Dominic’s productivity without having to manually log in, create new reports, and search for your answers. Insightly does the work for you, allowing you to stay focused on more pressing matters.

And, when the company finally closes its first $10,000 deal originated by Dominic, you’ll be ready to send him a personalized congratulatory message!

Your Doers Can (& Should) Be Selling

As we’ve discussed in this article, it is possible to integrate your frontline staff into the selling process. Doing so, however, requires a well-crafted vision from the top along with a decisive cultural shift. It also demands a nimble CRM that can easily accommodate an outside-the-box sales pipeline.

If your company is missing out on opportunities with existing clients, it’s time you took control of the situation. As the old saying goes, “It’s easier to sell to existing customers than new ones!”

March 13, 2018

Business Takeaways from Last Year’s Bracket

As college basketball season draws ever closer to its culminating event, offices around the country are beginning to buzz with bracket fever.

Who will be this year’s Cinderella story? Which #2 seed will be upset by a #15? And, perhaps most importantly, whose bracket will reign supreme?

At your office, this time of year is marked by both excitement and fierce competitiveness. Unlike some offices that run pools involving money or prizes, everyone at your company is motivated by one thing alone: bragging rights.

And, when it comes to bragging, no one is outdone by your old rival, Mitch. Mitch, a self-proclaimed “bracket genius,” does things a little differently than you. (OK, he does things a lot differently than you.) Constantly running his mouth is a good example. Creating near-perfect brackets appears to be another. Personally, you’re a little tired of Mitch’s antics. For once, just once, you’d like to beat Mitch at his own game and claim bragging rights for a year.

As you create your plan for beating Mitch, it might be healthy to do a retrospective on last year’s miserable showing. And, as you harken back to last year’s results, you might be surprised by the many business lessons hidden deep within your bracket.

Here are are just a few.

Takeaway #1: Intelligence Trumps Gut Feelings

Last year was a busy year for you. Your wife had a baby, you moved into a new home, and your oldest son started Kindergarten. With so many changes, you didn’t have much time to watch college basketball. As a result, when it came time to filling out your bracket, you found yourself scrambling. Sure, you went through the motions and read a few sports columns from “the experts,” but ultimately you were operating on a gut feeling.

Clearly, your “gut feeling” didn’t work out so well.

Mitch, conversely, had spent hours watching countless basketball games and taking meticulous notes. He had an in-depth understanding of each team’s players, defensive strategies, offensive plays, and coaching philosophies. In short, no amount of last-minute cramming stood a chance of competing with the amount of knowledge amassed by Mitch.

Although watching endless hours of basketball won’t be in your near future, last year’s experience did teach you something important about information management. That is, the guy (or gal) with the best data has the unfair advantage.

Pausing to apply this lesson to your sales career, your thoughts immediately go to your CRM records. For years, you’ve been using your CRM to track contacts, leads, and opportunities. But, could you be missing out on features that might help you accelerate sales? Could prebuilt reports and dashboards make the data already in your CRM more useful?

Takeaway #2: Work Smart, Don’t Just Work

Within moments of submitting last year’s bracket, you began second-guessing yourself. “Did I pick enough upsets?” “What if I don’t get any games right?” “Am I destined for embarrassment?” The questions never stopped coming.

Feeling uncertain about your primary bracket, you decided to spend the remainder of the afternoon filling out extra brackets. To cover all your bases, you first created an “all upset” bracket, in which every lower-ranked team defeated a higher-ranked team. Your next bracket was the exact opposite, giving the nod to every favored team. A dozen or so brackets later, and you finally felt somewhat confident about your chances. “Surely one of these will beat Mitch,” you thought to yourself, just as the clock struck 4:29 pm.

Alas, even with all the extra brackets, you didn’t break the top ten mark.

What can we learn from this?

Simply doing work (ie filling out brackets) for work’s sake is a complete waste of time. Now, I suppose you could argue that your efforts weren’t totally in vain, as you did aim to increase your chances of winning. On the other hand, as has been said many times: a goal without a plan is just a dream.

As you look for ways to apply this lesson to your work life, seek out those tasks that present minimal value or have no clear motivation. Do you really need to be doing them? Could they be automated by a robot or delegated to a different team member? Or, should they instead by realigned into a more strategic project?

The desire to achieve value should dictate the work that gets done, not the other way around.

Takeaway #3: Technology Can Reduce Procrastination

Another contributing factor to last year’s embarrassing defeat was procrastination. March is always the third month of the year – it never changes. Despite that fact, you waited until the night before tipoff to begin your bracket. Had you started a week or two earlier, you might have been able to do more research. Or, perhaps you could have invited Mitch for coffee in hopes that he would reveal some inside tips. (Mitch really gets chatty when he’s had two cups of dark blend.)

Sadly, you kept pushing things off until it was too late.

The good news is that you learned another hard lesson: technology can help overcome your tendency to procrastinate.

Take, for example, something that’s more important than your bracket but also happens once a year: submitting your annual sales plan. Like clockwork, on December 1st, your sales manager expects to have it on his desk by 9 am sharp. And, also like clockwork, you put it off until November 30th. When 9 am rolls around, you’re completely exhausted, grumpy, and not interested in anything other than sleep.

Instead of waiting until the last minute, why not leverage technology to hold yourself accountable? Set yourself a repeating task and specify a start date of mid-November and a due date of November 30th (or before). Now, you’ll give yourself plenty of time to get things done while combatting your affinity for procrastination.

Mitch Can Be Beat

In reality, you might never beat Mitch at picking basketball teams. Here’s the good news: you can beat him in the sales game. Keep on learning, continuously refine your processes, and never stop looking for lessons in everything – even in your brackets!

March 1, 2018

Insightly’s latest release surfaces insights, speeds up admin tasks, and increases CRM adoption

In the latest update to Insightly – customers can experience a number of enhancements aimed to help provide visualized information to make better decisions and reduce time spent on administrative activities like updating records. These improvements enable users to easily navigate through the system, add the information they need and see at a glance critical data that is most relevant to them.

Dashboards

The new release includes dynamically-rendered dashboards to enable you to see your data they way you want. With over 42 different data visualization options and a simple, drag and drop interface anyone can create a dashboard in seconds. Read more in depth on what the customization options are for building a variety of dashboards.

New bulk edit functionality

Update your CRM faster than ever before now with bulk edit functionality across every record type. You can create a list of leads, contacts, organizations and more and bulk select them all to perform a variety of actions. For example, select a batch of leads that came in from a trade show and add a “tag” for the tradeshow name: “Construction Expo.” Or perhaps you have a list of customers you called and need to update their record with a note that you’ve called them, it’s as simple as selecting all and adding a note to each record.

Recent items view

We’ve updated lists view for Leads, Contacts and Organizations to display the most recent items opened. This means easy access to the records you use most, you no longer need to search for a particular record that you frequently visit. Save time and have the customers you frequently work with at your fingertips, or leads you are currently working always on your list.

Gmail Add-on

For our G Suite users, there’s a new Gmail add-on available for your inbox. We know most folks live inside their inbox and having CRM information in your inbox can help provide context during a conversation and help save time on admin work like creating a new lead or contact in the system. With the Gmail Add-on, Insightly users can view people in a given thread, add new people to Insightly on the fly and search the CRM databases all directly from inside your Gmail.

New Recaptcha on web forms reduce dirty data

Insightly’s web-to-lead and web-to-contact forms allow you to seamlessly capture leads from your website and automatically create them in Insightly. Now with the release of reCAPTCHA, you can rest easy knowing internet bots won’t be able to send bogus information through the forms cluttering the CRM with dirty information.

New mobile app home tab

We’ve updated our CRM mobile app in the latest release to allow you to customize your first experience when using Insightly on the go. You can customize your screen with new options that include showing relevant information like Today’s Tasks, Recent Activity and Recently Viewed information so you can easily know at a glance what needs to get done, what’s going on and access important information.

Availability

These new product updates are available today across all Insightly CRM plans. If you haven’t already, in order to access the latest release be sure to update your account to the latest version by navigating to system settings and switching to the New Insightly Experience. Learn how to switch here.