Author: user

As today’s market shifts gears from in-store purchases to the less personable online shopping, retailers are beginning to lose a grip on their most valuable resource, customer feedback.

Key information that only customers can provide is slipping out of reach as consumers grow tired of endless wait times on email and telephone support lines.

The new consumer generation needs a faster and better way to communicate with your company to provide the feedback necessary for your company’s growth.

Live chats have become the new standard for support and are quickly gathering steam as they provide a quick and easy way for customers to contact you both on their mobile or desktop device.

So what’s stopping you? Take your support team to the next level and learn more about your brand directly from the people that help keep it moving. Here’s how to get started:

Choosing a live chat solution

The most important things to look for when choosing a live chat solution are: features, pricing, and compatibility. With a wide selection of free and paid live chats available on the market, a good tip is to sample a few services to find one that works best for your business. Before deciding on a payment plan, keep in mind that many chat providers offer a discount when you pay for a full year in advance. You may also be able to pay a set price for all of your operators if you plan to use an enterprise option.

Develop your support team

The most important task after selecting your live chat solution is to ensure that you have a strong team to manage the chats on your website. Customers enjoy being able to contact you in real-time, but will be drawn away if they are poorly received by your support team.

Take a look at this survey performed by Dimensional Research where it was observed that consumers are “50% more likely” to share bad customer experiences with their friends and social media as opposed to when receiving good service. There are a few main principles to follow as you begin to build out a support team:

• You must always make sure that your operators are well-trained to manage customers effectively, especially when a customer is distressed.
• Take the time to train your staff or hire experienced personnel who have effective customer service skills for your business.
• Remember, your support team is an extension of your business. It is always best to take the time to find the right people for the job rather than to provide a sub par customer service.

Integrating with your CRM

To make the most out of live chat, integrate it with your CRM solution. This cloud networking will allow you to share customer statistics across all of your customer relation software for a quicker and more effective service.

Many live chat providers offer a quick and easy integration process. Insightly’s integration with Tidio Chat gives you the ability to transfer leads directly from the chat into your Insightly panel. You can even send a full transcript of the conversation to your panel for later use.

Now it’s time to take that first step. Are you ready to give your customers the support that they need? You can try out  Tidio Live Chat at www.tidiochat.com, and sign up for free 7-day trial, then you can use the premium subscriptions or free plan.

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

 

About the author: Sebastian Pokora is a Customer Satisfaction specialist at Tidio. He was born in Boston and is  passionate about Blues and Polish cuisine.

 

 

Today’s guest post comes from Erin Mathie and Melissa Bamfo from Business Made Simple. Join Erin and Melissa tomorrow, April 6th, at 11:00 am, PST, for a live Twitter Chat. You can find and follow us at: @insightlyapp #LoveYourCRM. You can also follow Erin and Melissa at: @businessmadesim.

If you don’t have sales, you don’t have a business. The trend in sales is the higher the price, the longer the sales process. Managing a longer, more detailed sales process can be tricky. Insightly  can help you stay on top of all the important details and make a huge difference on your bottom line. Here are 3 essential steps to creating a sales system that pays big.

Lead Collection

Capturing information is the first step in the sales process. This information can be helpful in many ways (market research and understanding your customer) but the most important reason you should collect leads is to market to them. Not everyone will buy from you, but studies show that it takes 5-7 touches before someone takes action to purchase. That statistic is especially true with larger ticket items.

Insightly makes lead capture simple. For online leads, simply integrate an insightly web form onto your website and have your online leads added directly to Insightly. Once they have been added to Insightly,  you can organize and tag them based on custom tags you create.

Maybe you’re old school and collect business cards from your sales prospects. Paid insightly plans include a business card scanner that will enter your contacts information for you. You can also add them individually to Insightly by creating a new contact. If you are adding cards in bulk, simply  input all the data into a spreadsheet and upload them to Insightly. Now that you have their information, use that information to educate them on your product or service. That leads us to the next step of the sales process.

Lead Nurture

When it comes to purchasing a high ticket item, consumers tend to research before they buy. When someone is spending thousands of dollars, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, they want to know they’re getting “the best bang for their buck.” The consumer needs to know they can trust you. You do this by nurturing your lead.

Once a consumer knows who you are, the next step is to educate (nurture) them on your product or service. Companies often use their lead nurture approach as a “lead magnet” to attract and nurture prospective clients. This can be done in many ways, depending on your product or service. Here are just a few:

• Free consultation
• Free trial
• Live workshop
• Online webinar
• Monthly e-newsletter
• Weekly tip email
• Video e-course
• Free content such as swipe files or a template

Mailchimp is a great way to deliver lead nurture content to everyone on your email list. Because Mailchimp integrates with Insightly, you can easily add new leads or contacts to your email marketing campaigns from within Insightly with just the click of a button.

The Insightly email template feature also allows you to send personalized content to the masses. Insightly email templates offers less design elements than Mailchimp, but it’s a great way to deliver essential content to the masses without spending hours playing copy paste or using  BCC and increasing your chances of ending up in the spam folder.

Asking for the sale

For larger ticket items or services, asking for the sale can involve consulting time, developing proposals, putting together bids and estimates, and creating reports. Insightly’s activity sets and pipeline features are great for helping you utilize best practices for each client.  Here’s an example from the real estate industry.

Task Who When

Set appointment to meet with new lead	Eva	Day 1
Book meeting room if not holding at their location	Eva	Day 1
Send pre-meeting survey	Peter	Day 1
Start a folder for client in Google drive–>Clients. Create spreadsheet with client name	Eva	Day 1
Send reminder email to complete survey if they haven’t already done so	Peter	Day 5
Pull properties from MLS based on their survey responses	Peter	Day 5
Add survey results and MLS properties to their client file	Eva	Day 6
Follow up to ensure engagement agreement was signed	Joan	Day 14

 

When you use pipelines and activity sets, your sales process begins to run like a well oiled machine. Set tasks for more custom client activities such as specific follow up dates. Insightly will remind you on the day you need to call a client to follow up. Remember, the fortune is in the follow up.

Larger ticket sales can be a lot to manage, but using Insightly can help you stay on top of multiple opportunities at once. Easily import new leads into Insightly using the business card scanner or their easy upload features. Use email templates and Mailchimp integration to make sure your

leads are being nurtured until they’re ready to purchase. And instead of managing the sales process in your head, activity sets and pipelines can help ensure you utilize best practices to manage every detail.

****Alternate chart for activity set example*******

Day 1

• Eva will set an appointment to meet with new lead
• Eva will book a meeting room if needed
• Peter will send the pre-meeting survey email template
• Eva will create a new client file in the Google Drive

Day 5

• Peter will remind client to complete survey if they haven’t already done so
• Peter will pull properties from MLS based on survey responses

Day 6

• Eva will add survey results and MLS properties to the client file

Day 14

• Joan will follow up to make sure the engagement agreement is signed

 

Today’s guest post comes from Erin Mathie and Melissa Bamfo from Business Made Simple. Join Erin and Melissa tomorrow, April 6th, at 11:00 am, PST, for a live Twitter Chat. You can find and follow us at: @insightlyapp #LoveYourCRM. You can also follow Erin and Melissa at: @businessmadesim.

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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 running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

 

	Handy Work
	As a business person, your sales calls may take you on trips across the globe. When we’re in unfamiliar cultures and surroundings, we can sometimes “put our foot in it” when we don’t understand cultural customs, particularly when it comes to hand gestures. There are lots of “handy” quick reference guides you can bring along that will help you navigate these murky waters. In the mean time, here a few tidbits that will let your fingers and hands do the talking… without being insulting:   Thumbs up What’s accepted as a glaring sign of approval or agreement in the United States is actually used as an insult in Bangladesh as well as parts of the Middle East. The horn fingers In USA “the horn fingers” is adopted by rockers and it is a sign of approval, rock on! However, in a many Mediterranean and Latin countries (e.g. Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Spain, Italy and Portugal) that particular hand gesture is tantamount to telling someone that (yikes!) their spouse is cheating on them. The “V” Sign This sign has two formats: one with the palm faced outwards, and another with the palm inwards. In the US, both ways refer to “victory” and peace. In other places, such as in the UK, Australia, and South Africa, the same gesture with the back of the hand facing the other person is considered to be an extremely insulting.
	No More Google Contacts Duplicates
	We can all agree that duplicates in Google Contacts is tiresome to say the least. Whether it’s from inconsistent data entry input or that your contact wears a few different hats, duplicates can really throw a wrench in your works. Take a look at this example,     I’ve got Henry in Google Contacts three times – once under his first name and email, the second time his full name, email and work number, and the third time under his nickname. Gah! Merge Google Contacts Duplicates Manually The easiest way to get rid of duplicates is to merge them together, and it’s so simple you’ll wonder why you’ve never thought of it before. The first step is to search for and select duplicate Google Contacts entries. Once your search is complete then click “More” on the menu bar above the contacts, then click “Merge Contacts” in the drop down menu.   And this will happen, Great! You’ve got your first duplicate out of the way. But this method works only on a small scale. If you start searching through the all the contacts that you’ve collected over the years, you’ll quickly realise it’s impossible to manually weed out all the duplicates, and if you’re not careful, you’ll accidentally lose some valuable contact information in the process. Merge Google Contacts Duplicates Semi-Automatically You can clean up your Google Contacts en masse, and remain in control of the whole process so you don’t accidentally lose valuable contact information. Go back to Google Contacts and click on “More” in the menu bar. Then click on “Find & merge duplicates” in the drop down menu. This screen will pop up:   Click “expand” at the top to see all the duplicates. This is a really important step, so be sure to check carefully or you run the risk of merging contact details that should stay separate. You then unselect any duplicates you don’t want to merge and then click “Merge” at the bottom of the popup.   Voila! A cleaner Google Contacts list, which makes it so much easier if you want to sync your Google Contacts with your CRM, like Insightly! If you want to learn more secrets about Google Contacts, check out our free ebook “The Ultimate Guide to Google Contacts”   This week’s Insightly tip was provided by Vanessa Rombaut, Digital Communications Marketeer PieSync.
	Don’t Worry, Keep Smiling
	According to Psychology Today, smiling is truly transformational. In fact, research shows us that a smile elevates your own mood as well as the moods of those around us. Apparently, it can even lengthen your life.     The act of smiling activates neural messaging that benefits your health and happiness. It activates the release of neuropeptides (moleculres that foster neuro communication) that work toward fighting off stress. They also facilitate messaging to the whole body when we are happy, sad, angry, depressed, or excited. The feel good neurotransmitters dopamine, endorphins and serotonin are all released when a smile flashes across your face as well, which relaxes and can have the domino affect of lowering your heart rate and blood pressure.   Send Us Your Tips. Would you like to share your tips with Insightly customers? Send them to us! If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card! Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email. Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around. About the author: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

 

Up until August last year, the Hubstaff team didn’t place much focus on direct sales. We assumed there wouldn’t be enough ROI since our product cost is pretty low at $5/user. Instead, we focused on inbound marketing because it’s the kind of channel that got us great results. I feel that this is often the case; direct sales are underrated and take a backseat to online marketing.

Nathan Barry of ConvertKit wrote a post on how he prioritized direct sales as a channel to acquire customers over his content marketing and other tactics. With direct sales, ConvertKit saw a whopping growth of 2605% in the last 12 months. That post inspired us to start allocating some time in direct sales as a growth channel for us. Here are the steps we took, which ultimately contributed to our more than 200% revenue growth in the past 12 months:

1. Building our sales process

I knew we needed to build a sales process that was both efficient and economical, since we’re a bootstrapped company. To make that possible, I had to track my time spent on the project so that later I could compare it with our average LTV (lifetime value) per prospect, and decide if the strategy was worth scaling or not.

Tools used:

1. Hubstaff (free) – to track our time spent on direct sales and to determine if it is a reliable growth channel for us.

2. Building a list of prospects

I began by researching a couple of prospects on LinkedIn, AngelList, and similar websites, then created a contact list. To start with, I had to set some goals in order for me to be able to reach our target of paid customers from this campaign:

1. To get 20% response rate – I wanted 20% of the prospects that I contacted to reply back to me. This is double the industry average, which is about 8-10%.
2. Keep the email outreach process as efficient as possible – I didn’t want to send individual emails to each prospect, but rather sent them in bulk so we could save time.

3. A/B testing our email pitch

Next step for me was to create an email pitch that would get our prospects to reply back. It didn’t necessarily have to be a sales pitch immediately; all we wanted was to get them interested. We tried 3 email pitches:

1. One pitch advertised our product
2. The second pitch sent a very personalized email which involved deep research on the prospect
3. The third pitch sent a short email asking them one question for a research study we were doing

Note: All 3 pitches above had at least 3 followup emails to them. If you’re not following up to the original emails, you’re almost certainly NOT going to receive a reply. There are a couple of tools out there that can help you schedule automatic followups – Rebump, Boomerang and Tout.

Now let me ask you a question: which one of the 3 pitches worked?

Drumroll…

Both pitches 2 & 3. Although pitch 3 had a good response rate (above 20%) v/s pitch 2, pitch 2 was the real winner in terms of acquiring customers. So we realized, a combination of those 2 pitches would probably be the sweet spot for us.

4. Analyzing and optimizing our strategy

A couple of weeks after the campaign started, we went into our time tracking software and looked at the time we tracked on this campaign v/s average LTV of our customers.

We were spending more money on reaching out per customer and moving them across the funnel versus the revenue from the customers acquired by us from this campaign.

Or in short:

Average customer LTV > CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)

 

 

Here’s a snapshot of the hours I spent doing this task in August & September via Hubstaff

However, we didn’t decide to end the campaign, label it as a failure, and look at alternative growth channels. We knew optimization was the key here.

There were 2 things we needed to optimize to make this strategy work:

1. We needed to hire someone at a more affordable rate to help us do the prospect research and reaching out. That would cut costs by a lot.
2. We needed to reduce our time spent on sending highly personalized emails per prospect.

5. Hiring a virtual assistant

To solve the first task, we decided to hire a Virtual Assistant (VA). VAs can be very efficient and the rates are reasonable. But the one thing that’s very critical for them to be successful is to have proper blueprinting & documentation in place for them.

To solve the second task, we worked with our new VA to set up a process for building a highly qualified list of prospects. To make our prospect research laser-targeted, we built lists filtered by industry, company size, location, role of contact etc.

6. Building a list of highly qualified prospects

How did we collect that data? By searching. It’s that simple. All this requires is some patience and hard work.

Tools we used:

1. LinkedIn premium account (paid) – to find target companies filtered by our parameters
2. Rapportive in Gmail (free) – to find the email address of our desired contact in every company
3. Google Sheets (free) – here is the template of our prospect sheet
4. Gmail Mail Merge (free) – to set up highly customized emails based on our parameters

7. Managing tasks after you have an interested prospect

It’s also important to know that you must have a task-management system. You must load every single task into a centralized calendar and make a discipline of managing it. Trust your brain at your own risk.

Tools we used:

1. Insightly (free) – to track your tasks and understand the conversion rate at each step of your sales funnel
2. Google Sheets – Insightly Zap (free) – to automate creating our tasks in Insightly when a new lead in added to our prospect sheet

8. Recording time to our Insightly tasks

What is even more awesome is that Insightly integrates with Hubstaff. All I needed to do was integrate my Hubstaff account with Insightly (<1 minute), and then my Insightly tasks would automatically show up in my Hubstaff timer.

Apart from time tracking, Hubstaff also takes screenshots and monitors our productivity levels throughout the day so we can make sure all of us are being productive.

9. Final Audit

The above optimizations helped us achieve our target of a 20% response rate and acquire some great customers. A month later, we checked our time data in Hubstaff again and found that now our customer acquisition cost was much less than our average LTV, thanks to the optimization we did based on the time data.

With time and sales funnel data showing positive numbers, I can confidently say that this campaign has been successful for us so far. Our company’s revenue has grown by more than 200%, from $287,873 to $883,000 in the last 12 months. We’re a fully revenue transparent company, so you can see all of our numbers in real time.

 

 

Caveat – if you’re not tracking time to your tasks, you’re losing a lot of insightful data that can help you better optimize your sales strategy and efficiently manage your team.

 

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

 

About the Author: Madhav handles growth at Hubstaff. He helps acquire customers with high ROI marketing experiments, action focused analytics and product iterations.

 

 

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 running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

 

	Lights, Camera, Action
	Video is a powerful means to promote your product, service, and brand. If you’re considering flipping on the bright lights, here are some great reasons to get started: Show off a product Video gives people a sense of what the product is actually like, how it feels and what it’s made of. Explain how to do something ‘How to’ videos are a great way to give people some useful information, while also reminding them of your product. Bring testimonials to life You can create more interest and authenticity if you interview people or invite customers to upload videos of them using your products. Create and upload new videos regularly Building a regular audience can give your business prospects a big boost, so create new videos regularly and encourage people to subscribe to your YouTube channel.
	Adding New Opportunity State Reasons
	When changing the state of an opportunity, you have the option of including State Reasons to give you more information about the status of an opportunity. Adding new opportunity state reasons Insightly administrators can add and edit state reasons by following these steps: Go to the System Settings > Opportunity States page. Select the opportunity state for which you would like to add a reason. Type the reason in the text field and click the Add Reason button. Your new state reason will now appear when you change an opportunity to that state. One tricky thing about the Opportunity State Reasons: You can only assign one when you change a state, so change the state to “Suspended,” save the record, then change it back to the original status to add the reason. (Using the Suspended state instead of Won, Lost, or Abandoned prevents a “closed date” from being added to the opportunity.)
	Love Thy Selfie
	Stanford University is a harbinger of many brilliant minds, including one Andrej Karpathy, who developed a learning system called a ConvNet that is designed to study selfies. Yes, selfies. Anybody who’s spent any time snapping selfies knows that capturing that perfect smile or lip pout is not that easy. After ConvNet examined 2 million selfies, it was determined that there is a definitive pattern to poor selfies—bad lighting or getting the camera a little too close to your mug. Thankfully, the time and effort put into ConvNet also produced some information what to avoid in order to improve your self-images: Take selfies in low lighting.Very consistently, darker photos (which usually include much more noise as well) are ranked very low by the ConvNet. Frame your head too large.Presumably no one wants to see such an up-close view. Take group shots.It’s fun to take selfies with your friends but this seems to not work very well. Keep it simple and take up all the space yourself. But not too much space. The cleanest, clearest selfies also had a black and white filter and white borders. As for juxtaposition, the best selfies showed a face in the middle third of the photo, and (surprisingly) were cropped so that the person’s forehead is cut off.     Send Us Your Tips. Would you like to share your tips with Insightly customers? Send them to us! If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card! Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email. Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around. About the author: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

Zeidman Development is a software company focused on the nonprofit industry. The company has been customizing and enhancing leading donor management system, Raiser’s Edge for thirteen years.

As a solopreneur, David Zeidman started out much like any other one-person startup – using readily available tools, such as Google apps, to keep track of prospects, leads, and the various conversations and documents associated with each. But as his business began to grow and he added more people to his team, Zeidman realized he needed another way to keep his team up to date and on the same page.

Zeidman understood CRM solutions are not one-size-fits-all and wanted a CRM built specifically for small businesses’ needs. Since he was invested in Google apps and Gmail, he began looking for a CRM that offered seamless integration with those tools, while also offering a simple user interface at an affordable price. There were very few tools that fit the bill at the time, but eventually Zeidman came across Insightly and has been a satisfied customer ever since.

“Insightly makes our work more efficient by automating things that otherwise we’d spend hours handling manually. It definitely improves our ability to respond and follow up; and the results are much more visible.” – David Zeidman, founder and managing director of Zeidman Development

Find out more about how Zeidman Development is using Insightly for daily marketing and lead generation. Read the full story–and others like it–in our customer case study library.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.