Managing documents for sales processes or business agreements can take a lot of time and effort. Things can slow down even further when you’re trying to coordinate stakeholders and get your documents signed. With our newest integration, you can create these documents faster and easier by connecting Insightly CRM to PandaDoc.
PandaDoc has created a platform that significantly speeds up the process of creating and tracking proposals, quotes, and other sales collateral, as well as getting electronic signatures. The integration with Insightly takes the CRM data you’re actively viewing and merges it into a prepared document template, greatly reducing the time it takes to get a contract or other documents into the right hands.
If you’ve used mail merges or document templates before, you can understand the general idea behind PandaDoc: Create a template, add your fields, and send the document when it’s ready. You’ll also be surprised at how simple it is to create new documents with the Insightly-PandaDoc integration.
From your PandaDoc account, you’ll create templates for your day-to-day business documents, like proposals, contracts, and quotes. For your fields, you’ll use tokens as placeholders for information that will be merged from Insightly, such as first name, last name, and email address.
We’ve provided a full list of available Insightly tokens based on the records you’re already using in Insightly. You can even use the custom fields you’ve added to Insightly in your documents.
After your Insightly administrator enables the integration on your account, you’ll see the PandaDoc icon under the Files subtab on your contacts, leads, organizations, projects, and opportunities. Click the icon, log in to PandaDoc, and select one of the templates you’ve prepared.
Insightly will merge the information from the contact or lead you’re viewing right into the template to create a new document. You can make your final edits through the PandaDoc interface and then send or save the file. We’ll even pull in linked contact information if you’re viewing an organization, opportunity, or project.
Once you’ve saved or sent the document, you’ll have a link right in Insightly to click through to the document in PandaDoc. It’s a convenient way to view the status or activity of a document related to a record that you’re viewing.
This integration can change the way you create document templates and help you track documents as they’re created, sent, and signed. If you’re ready to save time and manage your documents in a more streamlined way, set it up and give it a try.
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!
Go With the Flow…
If you perform well under pressure but are easily distracted by the dozens of other projects you’re juggling, finishing that marketing plan or blog post swiftly can be, well, a bit challenging. If you’re game to sweat it out under a different type of pressure, there are apps out there that will put your writing focus to the test: Flowstate or The Most Dangerous Writing App.
In a nutshell, these two apps allow you to select a time increment in which to complete a writing task. If you don’t keep that keyboard moving for the duration of your session – here comes the scary part – your progress will be erased! Go with the flow for the entire session and your prose will be safe.
Fast Pass to Adding New Items in Insightly
You can add a new contact, opportunity, project, task, event or organization from any page in Insightly with just one click. This little shortcut is to the left of the search box at the top of the page and is labeled with a plus (+) icon. Just click the icon to bring up the menu.
Insightly remembers the last ten items you viewed, and creates a list of those items so you can quickly jump between them, or jump back to them and continue where you left off between sessions. You can access the Recent Items list on the right side of the central search box at the top of the page. Just click the icon and the list will pop-up. Initially it won’t be populated, but as you view items like contacts, projects, opportunities, organizations, tasks or emails – the list will add those items in.
This week’s tip comes from our resident product expert, Tony Roma. Tony’s been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.
Feeling Lightly Blue
We love our smartphones and tablets and laptops. In fact, it’s hard to imagine life without them. But, are they loving us back? Recent studies show that the light emitted from these devices can be disruptive to our sleep cycles. Research from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America found that those who read on a light-emitting device like an eReader were sleepier come morning time and they took longer to wake up.
So what’s the remedy? Power down those devices 90 minutes before you tap out for the night and you will likely enjoy a noticeable improvement in the quality and length of your sleep. If you want to take it a step further, Lighting Science offers a variety of products that are designed to address the needs of round the clock lighting while keeping the needs of our biology and circadian clocks in mind.
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.
It’s that time of year! Maybe you’ve been waiting all winter for this season’s newest CRM feature launches, or you’re just starting to learn what CRM can do for you. No matter where you stand, your small to medium business (SMB) is living, breathing and ever-changing. It deserves CRM features that grow and change with it, and you deserve to know how to save time and money using the season’s latest and greatest features.
Advanced reporting
Have you heard about Xero? A cloud-based accounting software designed to perfectly fit into the SMB’s toolkit, Xero has partnered with Insightly to give you all your reporting in one place. Integration gives you the ability to see the full dollar value of a customer, through features like the Lifetime and 12 Month Value snapshots, without having to flip between software.
Xero also automatically imports and sorts your bank statements, giving your team real-time numbers to collaborate on, as well as invoicing, bill pay and more.
Sidebar for Gmail
Gmail users, rejoice! With the Insightly Sidebar Chrome extension you can save and get to important emails, projects, key customer information and more straight from your Gmail account. Like the previous feature, this gives you access to all the information you need without having to open up a new tab or application. The Insightly Sidebar extension puts your CRM in your Gmail inbox. And you don’t even need a Google Apps for Work account to make it happen.
Custom fields and filters
Many SMBs use unique information categories or terminology that just doesn’t fit into the CRM’s default fields or filters. Now you can create custom fields to improve categorization and sorting of your contacts, projects, opportunities and more. You can now sort and filter by, for example, tracking or reference numbers, projects specifications, referral information or birthdays. You can filter by these fields and, when you export data from (or import to) Insightly, those custom fields will remain intact. The same applies to leads that are converted—the information carries over already sorted. Hallelujah!
Business card scanner
Remember that business card your last new contact gave you? Where did it end up? Maybe it’s tucked away safely in a folder but chances are you have a lot of other things to worry about. With the business card scanner (and a rear camera) you can take a photo of that bad boy from Insightly’s iOS or Android app and have a CRM contact or lead created for you.
Provided the card is in English, Insightly will send an email confirmation for each card you submit saying the record was created successfully, that it already exists, or that there was an issue transcribing the card. From there the transcribed information is verified by real people and you can later set permissions to one card or a group of cards.
Mass emails
No more exporting email addresses and then switching to an email app—you can now email customer and lead groups directly from within Insightly. You can also create email templates for everyone on your account to use, and schedule emails to send automatically. Your emails will be sent from the email address you use to log in to Insightly.
It’s spring cleaning season and updating the features in your CRM arsenal is one of the easiest ways to freshen up and get your SMB on the right foot for the rest of the year. Whether you choose just one or incorporate them all, know that these awesome features will help you get (and keep) your business on track to thrive for seasons to come.
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.
Being on social media is an absolute must nowadays for every business. From sharing updates about the organization, to building relationships with customers, to addressing customer service issues, social media offers a unique medium to speak with customers. But for some, social media can seem like an unknown, scary activity that can be overwhelming to implement and manage. As a result, a lot of small business’ social media accounts have few postings and minimal followings, or worse, they don’t have any social presence at all. If you’re looking to kick your social media efforts up a notch, follow these best practices to get you started.
Complete your profiles
At the very least, your profile should have a photo, which should be a high-res image of your company logo. Beyond that, fill in the profile section as much as possible with your company’s service or product, a brief history, mission statement, and contact information.
Understand each network
Effective social media isn’t all about cat videos and selfies. Facebook has a different culture than Twitter and LinkedIn, so it’s important that you understand the distinction. Spend some time listening, observing, and learning the nuances of each community..
Be responsive and accessible
If your followers are asking questions, answer them promptly. If there will be a delay in providing the answer, let them know you will get back to them as soon as you can. You cannot foster an open dialogue if you aren’t responsive.
Consistency is key
Determine which social media channels will yield the best results and most engagement with your target audience and then work with your team to determine when you’ll publish on each channel. Here is a general guideline:
Twitter: 3-5 tweets a day
Facebook: 1 post a week
LinkedIn: 1-2 posts a week
Be personable
Your followers want to know there is an actual person behind the tweets and posts. Talking about topics that aren’t specific to your business and product will help to make this distinction.
What’s most important to understand is that being active on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn isn’t going to single-handedly close more sales for your business, although it may be a byproduct. Your killer social strategy is a way to build relationships with your customers, create awareness about your product or service, and improve customer satisfaction and experience.
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!
If You Create it They Will Comment
Developing an online community is a powerful way to communicate and build relationships with your customers. In fact, 71% of companies surveyed report that they useMuch like a living organism, communities do need to be curated and tended to regularly, so before you take the plunge, consider the following:
Commit to the Cause
Few people enjoy being weighed down by endless rules, but in a community setting with an open forum, order and civility must prevail. What you want to avoid is becoming overly sensitive or defensive. Customers can provide valuable feedback that can help you improve your product or service, so listen and don’t try to stamp out negative/constructive input. It will make your brand appear inauthentic.
Appoint a Community Leader
Part police-person, part diplomat, part mentor, it can be challenging to act as community leader. Despite its challenges, it’s a worthwhile effort as it gives you a great deal of insight and interaction with those you can truly advocate for your brand. Constantly assess how you feel you are doing in the role and ask for help and feedback from your peers.
Understand Your Demographic
It may seem obvious but sometimes we can get so caught up in the excitement of our own business ideas that we forget who we are trying to reach. Conduct surveys before and after you launch your new community. Companies like SurveyMonkey and Typeform offer free versions of their survey builder platform.
Community members usually fall into a variety of camps: Avid users, casual observers, and those who need help solving a challenge. Your avid users can be a great source of knowledge and they want to share. Make an effort to authentically engage with your super users and show your appreciation.
Workaround of the Week: Bulk Editing Contacts for Mass Emails
If you want to send a mass emails to select contacts (and update the “date last contacted” information), you can start by filtering just those contacts you want to include on your mass emailing list.
I created an organization titled “MailChimp” (the service I use). I then link this “organization” to the contacts I send mass emails to. This allows me to filter my contacts using the MailChimp link. Once I have my selected my contact list, I’m ready to bulk edit the contacts to reflect the last date contacted via the following steps:
Click the “Select All” box to the left of the “Search Contacts” window and the click the pencil icon.
Select the “Change Field Value” box (this activates the drop-down window)
Scroll to the “Date Last Contacted” (or whatever you’ve chosen to name it when you added the custom field). Select your date, click “Save Bulk Edits” at the bottom of the page, and you just bulk updated your “Date Last Contacted” peeps!
This week’s tip comes from Insightly user, Jeffrey House.
You say tomato. I say, save time. If you find yourself racing around trying to accomplish multiple tasks, but feeling as if you’ve accomplished very little, the Pomodoro Technique might be right for you.
The Pomodoro Technique is a proven and popular time management life hack developed by Francesco Cirilloin the late 1980s. The main purpose behind the technique is to work in short time bursts (25 minutes) and take regular breaks. Taking short, 5 minute breaks helps keep the mind fresh. The other key principle behind maintaining focus with the pomodoro technique is effectively managing distractions. Here’s how:
Every 4 sessions take a longer break, perhaps 15 or 20 minutes
Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around.
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.
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.
Science doesn’t lie: You only have seven seconds to make a first impression, at which point the person opposite you has already decided whether or not you’re worthy of further attention.
In a sales setting, the stakes are high, and chances are a prospect will decide whether or not to continue exploring a relationship with your company in less than a minute. That puts a lot of pressure on you to develop a perfectly-honed “elevator pitch” that can engage and excite a potential customer in virtually no time at all.
It would take a lot longer than an elevator ride to comb through all of the good advice on crafting your elevator pitch, so let’s boil it down to the essentials. I talked to a number of experts who’ve spent time in the trenches – er, the elevators – to get their wisdom on how to pitch your idea quickly and clearly. Here’s the inside line on the very best advice you’ll find on the topic.
Start Strong
With every word you speak, you increase the possibility of losing your prospect. Start with your absolute strongest and clearest message points up front. In most cases, you have one sentence to sway the balance for or against you. “Your opening line will mostly determine your success,” says Steve Hatmaker, Jr., who does digital marketing for Seismic Audio. “Snag your listener’s interest and make them want more.”
Get Super Specific
Brilliant Growth website consultant Alexandra Velez has gotten the pitch down to a science. “Every 130 words equals a minute, so a 15 second pitch is about 30 words. Choose wisely!” she says. Every word is critical, and one of the best word choices, she adds, is to use numbers or quantities to add weight to your pitch. Consider “We reduce pain” vs. “We reduce joint pain by 50 percent in three weeks.” Quantifying your pitch gives it gravity and demands it be taken more seriously. “There’s a tendency to be company oriented rather than customer oriented in pitches,” she adds, so remember to speak primarily to your prospect’s likely paint points, not necessarily your service or product offerings.
Eject the Jargon
“One very simple key to mastering the pitch is to eliminate all industry jargon,” says financial advisor Pedro Silva. “Words like ‘leverage,’ ‘negotiate,’ ‘manage aspects of,’ and so on come across as pompous. Picture asking a pilot what he does for a living and hearing, ‘I negotiate thrust and acceleration to provide lift sufficient to transport goods to new and existing markets.’ Sounds fancy, but, at the end of the day, you’re a pilot.” Your time-crunched audience does not have time to do the mental gymnastics required to figure out what paradigm you’re shifting. Use simple language to keep your message crystal clear and accessible.
Minimize to an Extreme
With your core message finalized, it’s time to pare it down to the absolute minimum length you can. Ovation Communications president Kerri Garbis says to use what she calls the Tweet Test: “If you can’t distill what your company does or product is into 140 characters, you might not be so clear on the message yourself. Remember – people can, and hopefully will, ask you follow-up questions. There’s no need to include every detail about your company in your pitch.” The sentiment is extremely common. Remember what Richard Branson has said: “If it can’t fit on the back of an envelope, it’s rubbish.”
End on a Question
Green Vine Marketing founder Shane Robert offers an interesting strategy: End your pitch on an engaging question. “You can never sell your product or service in 15 seconds,” he says, “so don’t try. Instead, structure your 15 second elevator pitch for a sale that you can close: another 30 seconds of conversation. The easiest trick for doing this is turning the spotlight back on them with a relevant, engaging question, which feels like a conversation, putting your prospect at ease.” Remember: Most people would rather talk than listen.
Pitch for the Long Term
Be honest: As Robert notes, you aren’t going to close your deal on that elevator ride. What you want is a business card, a phone number, or another type of invitation to keep talking. “People think they only have 15 seconds to give an elevator pitch. Engagement is the great equalizer. If your prospect is engaged, the pitch can go on for as long both parties’ schedules permit. So how do you be engaging? My greatest successes have only come when I was actually passionate about what I was pitching,” says online video producer Edward Sturm.
Practice, Practice, Practice
The beauty of the elevator pitch is that you never know when the opportunity to pitch your business will strike. Always be prepared to deliver your message at any time by practicing relentlessly – either in a mirror or on video. Bonus tip: Have a co-worker or spouse surprise you with a “Pitch me!” prompt at random times to test your readiness.
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: Christopher Null is an award-winning business and technology journalist. His work frequently appears on Wired, PC World, and TechBeacon. Follow him on Twitter @christophernull.
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!
Scoring Points With Your Customers
In the last quarter of 2015, online shopping cart abandonment rates reached a staggering 75.45% across retail, travel, and fashion. So what’s driving us as consumers away? Pricing. Have you ever shopped for an airline ticket, found what you thought was a great deal, only to be shocked and dismayed after all of the taxes and fees were added on? While you can’t control tax rates on products and services, you can create your own incentive program — a fun and creative way to keep customers happy and engaged. Here are few ideas:
Point System
Programs like those favored by the airlines have long been popular and successful.. Whether it’s a discount, a freebie, or special customer treatment, set up a program that helps your customers work towards earning a certain amount of points that they can redeem for rewards such as gift cards or special discounts.
Offer Fee-Based VIP Rewards
Charging money for the privilege of joining a rewards program may seem counter-intuitive, but sometimes a one-time (or annual) fee that offers customers extra perks can be beneficial for both business and customer.
Play Games
Who doesn’t love a good game? Turn your loyalty program into a game to encourage repeat customers and — depending on the type of game you choose — help solidify your brand’s image. Companies like Influitive offer a “gamified” online platform that help you build out comprehensive engagement communities that keep you in close contact with customers.
Using Insightly with MailChimp
If you have a paid Insightly subscription, Insightly integrates seamlessly with your MailChimp account. For those of you not familiar with MailChimp, it’s an online newsletter/marketing platform that’s well worth checking out. With this integration, you are able to import contacts to Insightly from your MailChimp account and export contacts from Insightly to any of your MailChimp lists. Insightly will copy contact names and email addresses between the two systems.
Your MailChimp account can be set up to communicate with Insightly on a per-instance basis. This means that you only need to set up the Integration once with your own account information, and then all your users will have access to the feature. To set up your MailChimp integration, please follow these steps:
Log into Insightly using an administrator account, select the profile icon, and then navigate to your System Settings > MailChimp Integration page.
In another browser window, log into your MailChimp account and navigate to the API Keys page. If you have a key in your API keys list, copy the long string of characters to paste to Insightly. If you do not have an API key, you will need to create one. (See MailChimp’s About API Keys article for all the details.)
Return to the MailChimp settings page in Insightly and paste the key in the MailChimp API Key text box, then choose a Contact Email Option. This determines which email address from your Insightly contacts will be used when you send a contact to a MailChimp list.
The default email option isFirst Email Address Listed, which will select each contact’s first address whether it is labeled as a work, home or other email address. Click theSave Settingsbutton to complete the setup.
This week’s tip comes from our resident product expert, Tony Roma. Tony’s been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.
Go Take a Hike
The next time you feel the urge to “step outside for a bit of fresh air,” you’ll be pleased to learn that it may have a more profound affect on your overall sense of well-being than you likely realized. There is a caveat, however. Research conducted at Stanford University revealed that taking a hike 90-minute hike in nature can alleviate negative thinking, depression, anxiety, binge-eating, and more.
The study, which included taking measurements of neural activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex, found that people who enjoyed a 90 minute hike in nature showed reduced rates of neural activity associated with common stress reactions such as rumination. Sorry city dwellers, while you might enjoy a brisk walk downtown to get the blood flowing, the ambient sounds of traffic, crowds, etc. don’t tone down the neurons. Looks like nature reigns supreme once again.
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.
It sounds great on the surface. You have a new tool in your business to help your sales team inch the needle forward and grow your business. But how does it all work? How do these features translate into real dollars and cents?
Insightly is one of the easiest small business CRMs to use. It’s also one of the most robust. There are many features that will help you close more sales and help your company profit. Here are eight of the best ways to get more out of your CRM and see the profits roll in.
Become a Magnet for New Leads
Leads are the catalyst to new business. Without them, your sales will flop. Still, in today’s digital age, it’s hard to know when someone is looking at your website. How do you reach them? How can you capture every lead landing on your website so you never miss an opportunity?
The answer is found in Insightly’s web to lead and web to contact form.
This unique feature of your CRM creates an attractive form to put on your website. When a customer fills it out, your CRM automatically collects all the pertinent information. All that’s left for you to do is determine if the lead is qualified and decide how you can convert this prospect into a sale.
Move Leads Through Your Sales Funnel With Finesse
It takes finesse to turn a hot lead into a sale. You want to make it looks seamless as the lead inches through your sales funnel toward signing a final deal with your business.
Insightly makes this process effortless for your team. From defining the value of the new business to setting up the necessary activity sets, your team can take full advantage of incoming sales opportunities.
Retain High Paying Customers
Congratulations! You signed a new customer. Now you can kick up your heels and celebrate, right? Not so fast.
Consider the signed contract the sound of the gun at the starting line of a race. You can’t sit at the starting line and not attempt to make it around the track. You still need to run the race and sail through the finish line to win.
Much of the sales process happens after the contract is signed. Customers are spending good money with your business and they want to feel important. It costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain a current customer, so retention is vital.
Nothing helps retain high paying customers better than a strong relationship. Use your online customer relationship management tool to build the connection. Create a communication plan and have an account manager follow up with customers regularly. The more you reach out, the faster you can address any misunderstandings, nipping a potentially harmful situation in the bud.
More importantly, reaching out to check in with your customers shows you care. This isn’t something customers are used to these days. The more you communicate, the more your customers will feel appreciated and respected.
Beat Expectations
Regular communication and outreach is great. Still, one of the fundamental ways you can retain your current customers is by exceeding expectations.
When your customer starts working with your business, he or she is expecting a certain deliverable, wants a seamless experience and wants to be impressed by whatoffer.. If you don’t that customer will go to the competition. If wowed by what you had to offer, he or she will become loyal to your company for the long haul.
Gather customer feedback in Insightly and use it to continue improving your product or service. Pay close attention with a goal of learning how you can exceed expectations.
Beating expectations can also lead to more sales. When a customer has a lukewarm response to what you deliverthey move on without thinking much about your business. But, when impressed by what you have to offer, that customer is more likely to tell a network of friends and spread the word about what you did.
Dig Deeper Into Your Customer’s Life
People’s lives are more public than ever these days. Profiles on social networks expose the details a person is the most proud to show off. Tapping into these profiles is customer relationship gold.
With Insightly, you’re able to use your contact’s email address to detect every social media profile related to that person. See what your customers are tweeting. See what they’re posting on LinkedIn. Watch their Facebook newsfeeds to see what they find funny, interesting or infuriating.
By keeping a steady pulse on your customers’ public social chatter, you continue to strengthen the relationship and loyalty. When it comes time for your customer to renew with your business, you can bet you’ll win the contract without much effort because you’ve already built such a strong connection.
Always Be Prepared
Sometimes, meetings happen when you least expect them to. You run into a customer at a coffee shop and need to show you’re tuned in to his world. What do you do?
Insightly’s mobile CRM is a lifesaver in these situations. Instead of fumbling through your brain before your first cup of coffee, you can take a quick glance at your notes. You’ll appear genuinely tuned into your customer’s personal and professional life without much effort.
Train Your Team
All of this sounds great, but what happens if your team doesn’t jump on board as quickly? Change is hard. That’s why Insightly put together a team of customer success specialists. They’ll walk you and your team through the important steps of setting up your account, training key players on how to use these features and getting everyone up to speed on all of the important features.
The Insightly support team takes a hands-on approach so you don’t have to. Consider this your golden ticket to sail past the awkward introduction period and move straight into better sales and support.
Get Detailed Reporting
These features sound great, but how do you know they’ll work for your business?
With Insightly’s data-driven SMB CRM, you can always get the reports and insights you need to see how well your sales and support teams are doing. Get real time snapshots of your business and break down insights about your customers. These reports help you keep a pulse on your current customer relationship status while also helping you identify new opportunities to attract more business moving forward. Advanced Reporting is now even more robust with the recent release of its connectivity with Microsoft Power BI, a suite of business analytics tools to analyze data and share insights. You can monitor your business and get answers fast through visually-detailed dashboards that are available across multiple platforms,
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.
Project management can be considered almost an art. From start to finish, multiple moving parts and people involved can make it difficult to keep on track. Most projects go bad because there is a breakdown in communication between team members or there’s a lack of planning on the part of the project manager. So how can you make sure your projects are completed without a hitch? We’ve come up with the top three project management mistakes and our advice on how to avoid them.
Mistake No 1: Putting the wrong manager in charge.
One project manager isn’t going to be the right manager for every project. Project managers are often chosen based on their availability for the project — not necessarily their skill set. Putting the wrong manager on a project can mean failure even before it gets off the ground.
The solution: Instead of taking the easy way out, really look at the available project managers and chose the one that has the skills to get the project done right.
Mistake No. 2: Lacking communication.
Communication can be one of the most important factors in successfully managing and executing a project. Often times, when there isn’t enough talking happening, misunderstandings arise. As a result, deadlines are missed, time is misused, projects fall apart and dollars are wasted.
The solution: Project managers should have a set date and time for the team to meet each week. During these meetings, everyone should come prepared to give a detailed update as to where things stand from the week prior and their plans for the week ahead. Doing so will keep everyone on the same page and aware of others’ priorities.
Mistake No. 3: Micromanaging.
Don’t babysit your employees. No one likes to have a manager at their desk every moment of the day asking for updates.
The solution: Rather than constantly checking up on your team, use software that can allow employees to proactively provide updates and remind them of tasks and deadlines. This will allow you to take a more hands off approach to project management while still ensuring that things will stay on track or alert you when deadlines are missed.
Mistakes are inevitable, but by being aware of the most common ones and putting processes in place to avoid them, you can make sure your project runs smoothly and on time.
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!
Feng Shui for Your Desktop
Feng shui (pronounced “fung shway”) is the ancient Chinese practice of arranging physical objects to attract positive energy. It’s based on the idea that everything in a person’s surrounding environment affects his or her inner life.
Wealth and Prosperity
The back left corner of the desk represents prosperity. Target this space to attract money and abundance. Plants are a great option, but if lack the green thumb touch, try placing a valuable item such as a jar of change in this corner.
Family
A family photo, according to feng shui principles, fits well on the left center of the desk. A wood frame enhances the energy of this particular space.
Health
Sitting idle at a desk does little to improve fitness; however, there are a few ways to promote health even while working. Keep the center area of the desktop free of clutter to attract good energy to the area.
Deleting Emails and Email Templates
If you’re doing a little data maintenance in your Insightly account or need to remove records to downgrade your subscription, you can delete emails and email templates by using the bulk editing options on the Emails tab.
Click the Emails tab in the left navigation bar.
Select a subtab from the Emails page. (If you’re upgrading from a free trial to an “ineligible” plan, you’ll select the Email Templates tab.)
Tick the boxes next to the items you’d like to delete, or tick the Select All box above the list to select all the items on the page.
If you have more than 50 records, you’ll see a message asking if you’d like to delete all the records. Click the link in the message if you’d like to select them all.
Click the trash can icon that appears above the list and then click OK on the confirmation message to delete the selected items.
Insightly Tips are provided by our resident product expert, Tony Roma.
5 Tips for Success in Sales
Coaxing your prospect is no longer an acceptable sales practice for the 21st century. It’s a fact of modern day customer care–they may want to buy, but they definiteley don’t want to be sold.
Here are 5 tips to help you stay connected to your customers in an authentic way:
Have genuine conversations with your prospects about their needs and concerns. Selling is about identifying and satisfying the needs of your prospect.
Be authentic. Develop sales conversations that are a natural fit for you.
Know and understand the buying cycles driven by your consumer.
Develop sales methods that attract (pull) rather than seduce (push) your consumer.
Align your sales efforts with market segments that are growing.
Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around.
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.
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.
