Author: user

 

When it comes to vetting purchasing options from vendors, buyers are relying on recommendations from their peers as well as what’s being said on the internet. But they’re also influenced by another major factor: the quality of the content the brand delivers.

Content encompasses everything from reviews, articles, and social shares to how sales delivers B2B proposals. And 61% of survey respondents agreed that the winning vendor delivered the best mix of content appropriate for each stage of the buying process, according to the 2014 B2B Buyer Behavior Survey by Demand Generation Report.

Though we have the technology we need to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time, sales is still experiencing hiccups in the selling process. Many of our processes and insights still need improvement.

It seems traditional proposal creation and delivery methods aren’t cutting it. For sales to operate effectively in the new market where the type of content is a top priority, they’re going to need tools to inspire and enable customers to act, quickly.

Here are the features today’s sales proposals need to be equipped with to streamline all sales processes from content creation to closing:

1. Interactive Features

Engage customers throughout the buying process by making proposal documents interactive. (Yes, that also means it’s time to ditch the hardcopies and pens for a paperless solution that can support these features.)

Interactive features like video engage the audience’s senses, while smart pricing tables allow buyers to select various options and customize their purchase.

Video

By 2019, 80% of all online consumer traffic will be driven by video, according to research by Cisco. It’s more helpful to see a product or service in action than it is to read about it. Include an introduction or product demonstration video to help break up the text in proposals.

But the power of video reaches far beyond just breaking up text — it’s one of the most effective channels for showcasing social proof to back up your product or service. Create video testimonials to include in proposals. Video testimonials are the perfect way to let happy buyers convey the value of your product or service for you.

Pricing Tables

Accenture found that 42% of sales leaders want to improve their upselling and cross-selling initiatives, yet 82% are not directing representatives to take these opportunities.

Embedding smart pricing tables directly into the document gives customers the autonomy to shop within the sales document itself, without a salesperson having to upsell or pitch them over the phone or email. Buyers can review and select options while the table totals up their order for them in real-time. Furthermore, you can offer optional products and services in addition to your main product, and discount them as a strategy to nudge buyers to add them to their order.

Another great thing to include, if you have access to it, is an ROI calculator that can show buyers how much they will save with your product or service.

E-Sign Options

The days of pen, paper, printers, and scanners are coming to an end. E-signature software is now king.

When a buyer is ready to sign, they need to be guided through the signing sequence. Step-by-step instructions that show them where their authorization is needed within a document makes the process simple and painless but still legally binding. PandaDoc’s software also allows users to draw their signature, choose a font and color of a typed signature, or even upload an image of their signature to be used in documents, which is legally binding.

 

2. Design

More than 40% of sales leaders want to improve their ability to differentiate themselves from the competition, according to Accenture.

To differentiate their company’s brand from that of the competition, sales needs to portray unique, specific visual elements consistently across all marketing and sales collateral. That means everything the public sees coming from the brand needs to look like it’s “cut from the same cloth.”

The visual presentation of your product or service needs to delight the viewer’s senses and capture their imaginations — otherwise they simply won’t be interested in your sales document. Furthermore, sales content must connect personally with each individual buyer, giving them the sense the proposal was made specifically for them.

A 2013 study by Aberdeen called Content Marketing ROI: Quantifying The Value Of The Difference found that half of all content marketing leaders focus on improving the target of their efforts through personalization and situational content. That’s why the ability to customize proposals quickly using a document builder is so important. When applicable, sales should have the ability to add color, images, customize fonts and use company-branded symbols and logos,as well as having a library of pre-approved text to use in a proposal or contract on-hand.

3. Templates

Many automated content creation platforms, like ours, allow users to create custom content to be dragged and dropped into a sales document, or saved in the content library for quick access later.

Templates also allow users to create proposals quickly for sudden buyer inquiries. The faster reps can send information to the buyer, the faster the buyer can react and the deal can close.

In fact, 68% of documents created with PandaDoc were completed within one day, and more than 37% were completed within only one hour. That’s astonishing!

A template builder like this is one of the best tools sales and marketing can have to not only customize proposals as needed but also to work better together by allowing for quick approvals.

In fact, companies that have implemented a marketing automation platform report higher levels of collaboration between sales and marketing and, specifically, a 17% higher collaborative advantage in gaining buyer insight, according to Forrester Research published in 2014.

A company-wide library of authorized templates does more than align sales and marketing, it helps reduce risk. A template library helps prevent conflicts with legal and accounting by using pre-approved content like up-to-date pricing information as well as the approved terms and conditions.

4. Integration

Integrating all software into one platform is a key driver of better team communication and efficiency. The majority (64%) of best-in-class companies integrate their marketing automation platform with their CRM, according to Aberdeen’s study titled The State Of Marketing Automation 2014: Processes That Produce.

Using a software that integrates with all of your team’s sales tools, from CRMs like Insightly to customer support software like Zendesk, is essential to streamline communication on a fast-paced sales team.

But the benefits of integration shouldn’t be limited to streamlining teamwork internally; they should also help enable convenient communication between sales and prospects. Content should be easily accessible via multiple devices so deals can keep moving while everyone is on the go.

With our smartphones always present by our side, it makes sense they’d eventually play a key part in e-commerce. In fact, the Mobile Marketing Association released findings from its new study in March, which revealed mobile to be a strong driver of campaign performance across the entire purchase process. The study found that mobile drove 25% of top-of-mind awareness among buyers.

Anything that brings your sales proposal to the top of prospects’ minds will help drive sales and close deals faster. Given the strong role of mobile in sales, using a mobile-enabled platform to communicate with buyers is a must.

5. Automation

With efficiency as a top concern for sales teams, sales needs to spend less time on the tasks that don’t directly drive sales, yet are required in the sales process. Sales reps spend 37.1% of their time on administrative and post-sale tasks like payment processing and account management, according to Accenture’s 2013 study.

A content management platform can automate extra administrative work like payment processing and document status tracking. With a feature like PandaDoc’s “tokens,” a content creation platform can pull contact information directly from the CRM, and sales can select recipients and send documents faster than ever before. They can even indicate a signing order, which identifies individuals who must sign the document first before another party can.

Automating time-consuming tasks will help free up more time for what sales should be focusing on: selling and building relationships.

6. Analytics

Forty percent of content marketing leaders feel the need to improve their ability to understand the customer’s buying process, Accenture’s 2013 study found.

If sales doesn’t understand what engages the customers or what pushes them to buy, they’ll continue to duplicate sales content that might not be creating the ROI they could be receiving. Sales can gain better insights into customers’ responses to proposals through document analytics available as a feature in an automated content management platform, like ours, for example.

Once a proposal is sent, document analytics can track all activity within the document, including who opened the document and when, what pages were read and how long they spent on those pages, and the ways the viewer interacted with the document. Did the viewer watch any videos? How long did it take them to sign after opening the document? These types of critical questions which are key to creating better and better proposals or other documents can be answered with the help of document analytics.

In fact, our clients have seen a 28%increase in close rates thanks to better decision making through the insights analytics provides, according to our data.

If sales can track a document’s status, they’ll know what point buyers are at in their process, and therefore will know how to approach the buyer when reaching out. Additionally, knowing what features seem to drive clients to buy or sign quickly can help sales build better proposals.

For instance, if analytics shows one subsection of the target audience tends to buy after watching a video of a product demonstration, but another subsection doesn’t even bother watching the videos, sales can remove videos for the second group and purposely place videos at the top of content for the first.

Navigating a fast-paced modern marketplace is tricky — sales isn’t what it used to be. Smartphone-wielding consumers are now more informed and empowered than ever when making purchasing decisions, which means sales needs to create exceptional content to break through all the noise. Keeping up could be exhausting for a sales team. But, not when they have sales enablement software that allows them to deliver what customers want quickly, and work with the team more efficiently.

 

At Insightly, we have a CRM for all kinds of businesses and all kinds of users. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

 

Mikita Mikado is a software engineer, entrepreneur and co-founder and CEO of PandaDoc, makers of all-in-one software that enables easier, faster delivery of high-quality, personalized documents.

 

This is the first of a two-part series on CRM reporting. Next week, we’ll take a look at filtering and organizing your report results.

Once your company has successfully rolled out a CRM, the benefits don’t stop with more sales, higher productivity, and happier customers. Every CRM includes reporting tools to monitor and make sense of your data, leading to business metrics that will help you make smarter business decisions. You can jump right in and start building reports with the tools available to you, but spending a little time planning a report will save you lots of time when building it.

1. Determine the question you’re trying to answer.

   A CRM could include pre-packaged reports, a report builder with a multitude of options, or some combination that allows you modify existing report templates. Clarifying what you’re after with a clear and specific question will help you determine the type of report you’ll create.

   Gene Marks—small business owner, technology expert, author, and columnist—recommends that you ask the following business questions and create CRM reports to answer them:

   • What is the status of our sales opportunities? – Sales Pipeline Report
   • What is that status of our open quotes? – Aged Quotes Report
   • What have our sales guys been up to this week? – Call Report
   • What percentage of quotes have we closed? – Batting Average
   • What sales did we lose and why? – Lost Sales Report

    

   This step will also help you focus on the types of records you’ll use in your report. In Insightly, sales are tracked through Lead and Opportunity records, so you’d start there for sales reports. Work status reports would focus on projects or tasks. If your report requires information from two different kinds of records—organizations and their related contacts, or projects and their related tasks—you’ll select a report that allows you to combine the two.

   (A little tech talk for the curious: Reporting that cross-references different kinds of records is done through a join query, which combines rows from two or more tables. Every database stores information in tables, which you can imagine as more complex versions of a spreadsheet.)

 

2. List the details that you need to answer the question.

   Making a list of information you need to answer your question (names, dates, numbers, etc.) will help you select fields: the basic building blocks of reports. Fields are the smaller bits of information you enter when adding an item to your CRM, like first name, last name, and phone numbers. Think about the who, what, where, and when of the question you’re asking to lay out the field you’ll need.

   Here’s an example of breaking down the details for last month’s sales figures using Insightly fields:

   How much revenue did each salesperson bring in last month?

   Detailed questions	Detailed answers	Field names
   Where do we track deals?	Sales opportunities	Opportunity Name
   Which deals do we want?	Closed deals	Opportunity State
   When did they close?	Last month	Date Closed (Actual)
   What was each deal worth?	Value of deal	Opportunity Value
   Who closed each deal?	Salesperson’s name	Responsible User
   Who is the customer?	Customer name	Contact Name

In our next installment of Reporting 101, we look at filtering and organizing your report results.

Insightly CRM’s reporting offers robust options to make anyone a master of metrics.
Set up a trial account, import your data, and give it a try.

About the author: Tony Roma is Insightly’s Technical and UX Writer. He’s been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years. He’s been working with reports for even longer, and he still has days when building the perfect report is a challenge.

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.

	Fireproof your business
	According to the National Fire Prevention Association (NFPA), in 2014 one structure fire was reported every 64 seconds. Having a fire strategy, including monthly fire drills, in place can protect your employees and your business. Invest in a quality fire-proof safe. Keep in mind that there are two types of fire safes available on the market: Fire safes for paper document storage (insurance papers, wills, checks, receipts, etc) and fire safes designed for data storage or computer media.     Make sure the safe is marked UL Listed rather than simply UL rated and tested. The UL is a global independent safety science company that tests and rates products. A fire safe marked UL Listed means it has passed a series of rigorous tests. A product marked UL rated and tested only means it was submitted for testing. It does not mean that the product actually passed the test.
	Support
	We all need a little help from time to time. Insightly Support includes knowledge base articles, videos, and a community for all Insightly users to find help and share information. Users on our free plan have access to all of these resources; however we do not provide email support to users on the free plan. Email support is available (8 am to 4 pm, Pacific time, Monday through Friday) to Insightly customers with paid Insightly subscriptions. To submit a support ticket: Sign in to Insightly Support using the link at the top of the page. (If you don’t have an Insightly Support account, create one using the same email address you’re using to log in to Insightly.) Click Submit a request and enter the subject and description of the issue, and then select the issue type and emotional state. You may also attach files to your request.     After submitting your request, you’ll receive an automated email confirmation with your ticket number. The Insightly Customer Service team will research your issue and follow up with you via email.
	Keep Your Office Kitchen Clean
	‘Tis the season for office holiday gatherings. Whether you’re catering a lavish cocktail party or hosting a simple potluck, the last thing you want is to have you or your support staff getting sick from improperly handled food or kitchen utensils. Who knew? The ubiquitous can opener (that go-to utensil we have a tendency to use and toss right back into the drawer) is the perfect host for a variety of unwanted bacteria. A quick cleaning fix is as easy as placing the can opener in the dishwasher after every use. If you opt to wash it by hand, do so in hot soapy water, rinsing thoroughly with clean tap water. Pay close attention to the area around the cutting blades to ensure all food particles are removed. Another harbinger of bacteria are sponges. If you have a microwave you can disinfect it by first submerging it in a bowl of water and then placing it in the microwave. The water MUST be heated to a boil before it will kill of the organisms. You can also sanitize sponges by mixing together one part bleach with nine parts water, then dropping the sponge into the mixture for at least one minute. Mix up a fresh batch of the bleach solution for each “sponge bath.”   Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now. 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.

 

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the ultimate source – and application – of big data. Every fact of life has been impacted, from WiFi-enabled cars that send text messages to our cell phones when tire pressure is low, to room temperature we can set on the way home from a trip.

IoT, simply put, is the relationship between devices of any kind and the internet. If you can access and control it with your smartphone, it is part of the IoT. Today. You can get IoT medical devices, home security, FitBits, Chromecast, and a million other devices that communicate over the internet, with the company and with you.

Today’s customers have unprecedented access to companies. Methods of communication include snailmail, phone, email, social media, and online chats. They can troubleshoot their own issues online, and do extensive research on the product, the seller, and the manufacturer. They can also find out how others react to the product they plan to order. And still, most companies fail to meet customer service expectations.

Improving customer service

In the future, IoT will extend much further into our lives. Your air conditioner will send you a reminder when it’s time to change the filter, and you’ll be able to set parameters for service. For example, you might program your refrigerator to maintain a certain temperature, request a diagnostic test from the company when it cannot meet the setting, then have a report sent back to detailing the situation, the fix, and even a quote for maintenance – all automated.

While this is speculative, the technology is already in place. It’s a short leap to expanded data collection and automated customer service.

The impact on customer service will be considerable. Companies will be able to proactively advise customers when a product needs servicing, and recommend new products and upgrades based on individual usage, much in the way cell companies can analyze your bill and recommend a more efficient plan based on your monthly pattern of usage.

Customer relationship management systems (CRMs) already track a wealth of customer data about sales, social media, interactions, and demographics. In the not-too-distant future, CRMs will help you determine predictive maintenance, which will head off upcoming issues, save your customers money, and make you look like a customer service superhero.

Imagine that phone call, “Hello, Mrs. Smith? This is Bob over at Bob’s Awesome Appliances. We had a message from your refrigerator that it’s not maintaining the proper temperature, and an online diagnostic test shows that you need a new thermostat. There are three repair shops servicing your area, and the one with the best reputation for service is A-1 repair. Would you like us to schedule a service call?”

Your sales and marketing departments will benefit as well. They’ll be able to build rapport and make highly targeted offers based not only on what customers purchase, but on how they use the goods they purchase every day. An established pattern of behavior will allow sales and marketing to steer customers to the goods and service that best fit their actual use. And that means a happier, more loyal customer.

The customer point of view

When laid out, data collection sounds intrusive and a little suspicious. Some customers may want to opt out for that reason. However, it’s nothing new. Web services like Amazon, Google, and Facebook have been priming customers for years. Monitoring browsing habits allows them to place highly targeted ads on nearly every page the customer visits, and even advertise in their email box. Location services send push notifications on their phones when they are in proximity to a retailer, and restaurants benefit from search parameters that consider immediate neighborhood first.

Preparing for the next

Even though this is already in the works, some retailers will be caught sadly behind the eight ball when it comes to technology. If you are going to keep up with the times, you should be making preparations now…even if you are not selling internet-connected appliances or smart cars.

Preparing for the future means training your people to fully invest in CRM, including sales, marketing, and customer service. Some tasks can already be automated… using all the features of your CRM and its various integrations now will help you prepare your staff for the what’s coming in the future.

Customer service will inevitably change, but one thing will remain the same: automation cannot replace the personal experience. Your task, as technology puts added dimension and potential at your fingertips, is to use it to raise the bar on personal communications, roll out new products and services based on all the data you’ll be able to collect, and continue to improve. Allowing technology to replace the human touch would most likely prove to be a fatal mistake.

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.

 

Why Small Business Owners Should Consider CRM

Small business owners are pressed for time and don’t often have money to burn – so who wants to add another acronym to the growing list of high-tech tools they use during the work day. CRM? Who needs it?

Well, if you’re trying to grow your business in earnest – you probably do. Today’s CRM tools are not the complex beasts of yesteryear, but are now streamlined tools that can really help your take your small business to the next level.

Not convinced you should jump into the CRM pool? Here are four reasons why any small business can and should give a customer relation management tool a look.

Understand Where Your Sales Are Coming From

As the name suggests, CRM is fundamentally about customer relations. The job of a CRM system is to help you better relate to your customers. What does that mean? Primarily it means developing a deeper understanding about the source of your revenues. Who are your customers? What traits do they share? Why do they choose to buy from you instead of someone else? And what can you do to encourage potential customers to become buyers?

Many small business owners have a minimal marketing budget to work with, so the blunt tools of large-scale advertising and mass media promotions simply aren’t available. Instead, small business owners need to nurture more targeted approaches to reach customers – both new and existing – and a good CRM system can help you develop a strategy for doing exactly that by helping you figure out the best way to market your wares. Detailed reporting options let you slice and dice the information in your sales funnel in the way that makes the most sense for you.

Streamline Communications

With a solid understanding of who your customers are, now it’s time to communicate with them. Even if you only have, say, a few hundred loyal customers, communicating with each one on an individual basis can be a daunting – and perhaps impossible – task. Another goal of CRM is to streamline that process so you know to whom you need to reach out, when to contact them, and how.

The goal here isn’t just to increase and improve communications with customers, but ultimately to increase sales as well. A CRM package will guide you on when to send messages, what the content of those messages should be, and even when promotions might be in order. CRM will help you classify customers by how important they are to your business as revenue sources, so you’ll know whether someone is due for a big discount, or whether some gentle encouragement might be the right way to bring a formerly big shopper back into the fold.

Automate Simple Activities

Does your business send out a weekly or monthly reminder about new products, promotions, or seasonal information? CRM software can take care of this grunt work for you, scheduling messages complete with personalized components and all the opt-out tools you need to remain compliant with anti-spam rules. Auto-responders can also help manage your inbox, letting potential leads know when you’ll get back to them or providing more information about your business, and incoming leads are automatically added to your contact database, saving you time and energy.

The idea with all of this is to offload as many menial tasks as possible, so you can spend less time on mundane (but important) jobs and more time on the more lucrative aspects of running your business.

 

Engage with Social Networks

The rise of social media has made life a lot more complicated for many small business owners. Now instead of just monitoring the telephone voice mail and your email inbox, you need to juggle Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more. It’s not uncommon for some businesses to spend two or three hours per day just managing social media accounts.

Social CRM services can help by integrating all of your customers’ social media accounts into a single system, making it much easier to keep tabs on all of these disparate networks. If you want to reach out to customers on one network or another, a CRM system can dramatically streamline that process.

Conclusions

CRM may sound like a scary acronym, but it doesn’t have to be an expensive or overwhelming undertaking, and many CRM systems let you ease gently into customer relation management without forcing you to upend the way you do business.

You might start with some basic analytics that help you understand your customer base, segue into a few automated email campaigns, then expand your CRM strategy by folding in social media integration and project management. Before you know it, you’ll probably wonder how your business worked without having CRM in your toolbox.

 

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.

	The annual performance review may be going the way of the dinosaur. With big players like Accenture opting to forgo annual performance reviews in favor of regular one-on-one check ins with employees, it may be time to re-think your strategy. Regardless of the size of your workforce, it turns out that people are people and, according to Bob Anderson, senior human resources consultant at Strategic HR Inc. in Cincinnati, Ohio, they prefer a higher touch (not to be confused with micromanagement) environment. “Employees want to know how they are doing,” said Anderson. “A lack of timely feedback and good dialogue with their managers can cause long-term issues and overall job dissatisfaction.”
	Get connected to Insightly integrations with API keys
	Insightly continues to expand its integration offerings, including the recent release of the Xero integration. Before you get started taking advantage of the features of more than a dozen integrations—including DropBox, MailChimp, and Evernote—you need to locate your Insightly API key. An API key enables developers to integrate CRM functionality into virtually any system or application. To locate your API key:   Click the profile icon in Insightly and select User Settings. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and copy the API key, which is a long string of characters. You can now paste the key into the application that you are connecting to!
	The Sweet Taste of Motivation
	Who wouldn’t love some researched-based science as a reason to justify having a well-developed sweet tooth? Well it turns out that there are some very valid reasons why humans have long-since been chasing the “sugar high.” It can temporarily boost willpower and motivation. Research conducted at McMaster University shows that willpower can be severely drained when you use it to complete one task then move on to complete a completely different one.   The good news is yet another research study shows that just swishing a sugary beverage in your mouth and then spitting it out actually boosted the self-control and the willpower of participants to perform tasks such as brain teasers. While you may still feel a few pangs of guilt if choose to down the entire beverage, you can rest easy knowing that just a hint of sugar on your taste buds can give you the get up and go you need. That’s some good food (uh, sugar) for thought.   Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now. 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.

 

So, you’ve got a successful business. Your products and services are resonating well with your customers, and you could run the entire thing on autopilot if you wanted to. But, should you? Chances are your competition isn’t – and you shouldn’t either. For continued success in your business, you must be willing to change and adapt – to roll with the punches. Part of that lies in harnessing the power of customer feedback.

Getting Customer Feedback

Before collecting customer feedback, clearly define what you’re looking for. If you skip this important step, you’ll be blindly asking for feedback, which may make it harder to understand your results…and your customers. Consider the parts of the user experience you want to improve, what you’ll do with the data once you collect it, and the channels that work best for your goals.

There are a number of ways to gather customer feedback, including:

Emails and contact forms: Email is a powerful tool, but to be effective, make sure you’re responding quickly to your customers. 43% of customers don’t provide feedback, simply because they don’t think the business cares, but 81% would leave feedback if they knew they’d get a quick response.

When a new lead joins your email list, include a single question on your autoresponder. Ask them to reply, and then take the time to respond. Such responses are much more likely to be candid and personal, because customers consider the email channel to be private, compared to the public nature of social media. Striking up interesting conversations with customers can result in a wealth of information.

Surveys: Use a combination of short surveys (one or two question polls) on your website and longer, traditional full-length surveys to collect information. Don’t waste time asking questions that won’t help you achieve your end goal. Ask open-ended questions, one at a time. If you use a rating system, keep it consistent. Avoid asking questions with bias/emotional charge. When applicable, use simple yes or no questions. Segment your audience with demographic information to gather relevant data. To encourage participation, offer a bonus – a freebie or a discount – for survey completion.

Usability testing: This method requires considerable upfront planning, but is useful because it can help you uncover issues your customers don’t necessarily know they’re struggling with. It’s particularly useful if you’re trying to get a feature or process just right for your customers.

Social listening: Social media is a great place to get feedback from customers, be they potential customers, new customers, or repeat customers. Engage customers on social media, listen to what they’re saying, and reply to them quickly.

Website analytics: An excellent source of information from your customers, because they don’t have to answer directly. Track what parts of your website customers are visiting, how long they’re staying, where they come from, and where they go next.

For example, if you’re using an FAQ page to help address customer service, you can look at the amount of time people spend there, and the bounce rate (how quickly they leave after arriving at the page) to determine whether or not their questions are being answered properly. Short page visits and high bounce rates mean you’re missing something – but longer page visits and lower bounce rates mean you’re likely giving them what they need to know.

Comment boxes: Adding comment boxes throughout your website gives users a chance to provide feedback that doesn’t interrupt their web experience. Your staff won’t have to monitor them right away, and you can collect the information for use during decision making.

Online reviews: Monitor review sites to find out what people are saying about you. Address negative comments right way to manage your online reputation and improve your customer service. Thank reviewers for their time and for their feedback, whether positive or negative.

Gather feedback at several points throughout the sales process. Website analytics and social listening can be used throughout the cycle to see how customers respond from first contact through post-sale follow-up.

Surveys are effective in the beginning and end of the process – find out what customers want from your product or service or how they use your product or service after buying. The more points of customer feedback you have, the more data you collect, and the clearer the picture you can develop. When possible, collect the data in real-time for a more accurate view of the business as it is right now.

Managing Customer Feedback

With the plethora of customer feedback available, you must have a centralized platform to collect and manage it all, or you won’t be able to use the information as effectively. This is where a customer relationship management platform, or CRM, comes into play. Your CRM can help you keep track of what customers are doing and determine which ones need your attention the most. You can also use CRM data to help identify trends and patterns.

Some CRMs integrate with other apps and tools to make gathering your feedback in one place easier. With a feedback feature, you can create and assign tasks to appropriate personnel. Customer service issues can automatically be routed to the customer service department, usability issues can be routed to the IT/development team, and sales questions can be routed to the sales department

Automating tasks keep all employees apprised of what’s going on with any particular customer at any given time, so the necessary team members can work together to keep the customer happy. You can track response times to gain insight into which employees are the most productive, to facilitate rewarding them for a job well done.

Using your Feedback

Use customer feedback to improve your existing products and services. Your customers are telling you what they want, so listen to them to find out how you can make improvements or additions to your offerings to ensure you’re solving a problem for them.

Since it costs six to seven times more to obtain a new customer than to retain an existing one, it makes sense to use feedback to keep your customers happy. When customers become frustrated with your product or service, or suspect the competition can serve them better, they may stop doing business with you. Monitoring and using feedback ensures you can adjust to keep customers happy.

When customers are happy with their experience with your company, they keep coming back, and they are more likely to refer others to you. In increasingly competitive markets, one of the only ways to differentiate yourself from your competition is to make sure your customer experience is stellar.

Make informed business decisions. If feedback shows customers are frustrated with email response times, improve them. If feedback shows customers want another channel of communication – open one. Your customers make or break your business, so do your best to give them what they want.

For customer feedback to improve your business, it must be shared across all departments. Internal discussion of employee feedback can help employees learn how to better address customer concerns, and reward valuable customers for their loyalty. Perhaps most importantly, customer feedback needs to be applied to the business in such a way that customers can see their feedback being addressed, to know they’re heard.

 

Regardless of the popularity of social media, texting and other forms of messaging e-mail still remains the number one tool for communication in the business world. According to one recent report “…e-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined (exhibit). That’s because 91 percent of all US consumers still use e-mail daily, and the rate at which e-mails prompt purchases is not only estimated to be at least three times that of social media, but the average order value is also 17 percent higher.” E-mail is so prevalent in our society that more than 81% of people are checking it outside of work and a major Presidential candidate continues to find herself in hot water as a result of her use (or mis-use?) of the medium.

But, no offense, you’re using it badly. At least most people I know are. And I used to also. But I think I’ve gotten better. That because for over twenty years I’ve spent a significant part of my day on-email so I’ve learned a few things that have helped me improve my daily e-mail usage. And I’d like to share them here.

Keep it short. If you can’t say it in just two or three sentences then it probably shouldn’t be in an e-mail. This is 2015, the age of BuzzFeed, Business Insider and 300 word ‘snackable’ blogs. No one has the patience to read through your long e-mail. Get on the phone.

Always ask to attach. Never send someone an attachment unless they’re expecting it. Attachments slow down email because of their size. And they create a potential security risk.
Reply. If someone that you know says hello to you on the street you say hello back, right? So why don’t you quickly reply to someone you know who e-mails you? Just a quick acknowledgement – “thanks, not at this time” or “swamped, will get back to you soon” makes all the difference in the world as opposed to the virtual smack in the face to that person you know who when you don’t even recognize their existence. This takes 30 seconds. It makes a difference.

 

No negative emotions. If you’re angry, hurt, frustrated, or experiencing any other emotion that will reflect negatively on you and your relationship keep it out of an e-mail. And for God’s sake…no profanities. I, like everyone else, have sent countless e-mails to people that I’d like to have back. Regardless of Gmail’s latest advancement, you really can’t un-send an e-mail. And God-forbid if that angry reply you wrote at 2AM is copied to others. You’ll regret it come 9AM. Save it as a draft and read it 6 hours later before sending. Here’s what will happen: you won’t send it.

Don’t make me feel like I’m on a list. Sometimes I get an e-mail from someone that’s addressed to the sender because the sender created a list in Outlook and I’m on it. Other times I get an e-mail with no personal greeting and in different fonts throughout the message – clearly a cut and paste job. It makes me feel even more meaningless than I already know I am. If you’re going to send an e-mail to a list of recipients take the time to make it personal. People like a little personal attention – or at the very least some evidence that the sender went to the effort. We are all just little dots of light in a limitless void of darkness and infinity. Does your impersonal email have to remind me of that? Geez.
Have a signature line. Many times I’d like to (gasp!) call you or even add you to my CRM database. If you’re going to e-mail me then help me out with a signature line. It shouldn’t have a lot of graphics (graphics slow down e-mails and cause them to get caught in spam filters). But it should have your company, address, and phone numbers. Every professional corporation requires their employees to do this. So should yours.

Last but definitely not least, check your grammar and spelling. There is nothing that shows ignorance more than an e-mail with bad grammar and mis-spelled words. Seeing “there” instead of “their” or “were” instead of “we’re” makes me flinch. Sometimes I’m not sure if it’s because the sender is uneducated or if he’s just careless. But either way it just looks bad. When you finish composing your (very short – see above) e-mail, take an extra minute to read through it and make sure it’s professional and looks right.
These are the little things that make a big difference in our little world. And let’s face it: e-mail communication remains a big part of our little world.

 

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: Gene Marks is a small business owner, technology expert, author and columnist. He writes regularly for leading US media outlets such as The New York Times, Forbes, Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur. He has authored five books on business management and appears regularly on Fox News, Fox Business, MSNBC and CNBC. Gene runs a ten-person CRM and technology consulting firm outside of Philadelphia. Learn more at genemarks.com

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.

	Banking for Women
	October is Women’s Small Business Month. As we close out the 2015 event and look towards 2016, now is a good time to do a quick refresh on smart ways that you, as female entrepreneurs, can approach your strategy for securing business funds: Explore Your Options–Some traditional banks, such as PNC Bank, have specialized lending programs for women, while non-traditional enterprises, such as Lendio and MoolaHoop, offer small business owners a more flexible approach to funding. Seek Out Women Mentors–The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has a network of more than 100 women business centers across the country aimed at helping women who own small businesses. Don’t be afraid to ask lots of questions and always take advantage of any supplementary services. Build Banking Relations— A banker can help you build strong credit, provide guidance on creating a business plan. and provide access to capital when you’re ready. Building a good relationship with her and educating her on the nuances of your business will help streamline that process.
	Using Tags to Manage Non-Profit Activities
	Using tags and custom fields in Insightly can help address the unique aspects (e.g. managing donor contributions/levels and volunteer rosters) of running a non-profit organization. Using an organization as an example, here is a tip on how to approach tracking program participants. Enter participants as contacts and then use tags to put them in appropriate groupings that you can then use for targeted follow up. For example, some participants start out as clients then become volunteers and/or interns. Others join the advisory council. By creating a tag for each role (e.g. Intern-2015), each event/training attended (e.g. 2015-09-15_Attend), and donor (e.g. Donor-Tier1), you can tell a lot about a contact by glancing at his/her tags. You can also create tags for specific skill sets (e.g. Skill-EventPlanner) and interests (e.g. Issue-Environment). Using tags will make it possible for you do targeted outreach to individual people, too. It might get confusing to use projects for things besides a specific event, a grant, or a single training program. Opportunities are probably best for tracking potential events and grants for which you’re applying. To create a tag, click the Manage Tags link at the top of the record.   Type the tag name and click the name from the list or press the space bar. You can remove a tag by clicking the X to the left of the text. Note: If you have multiple words in a tag, you can use the underscore or some other character to separate them; for example: one_word_two_words or red.words.blue.words. Click the Save button.   This week’s Insightly tip was provided by Jon Randall, director of operations at the non-profit organization, Our Voices Matter.
	Handy Work
	October 15th was “Global Hand Washing Day,” a reminder to all of us that as we enter the start of the cold and flu season, now’s the time to ramp up our hand washing efforts and etiquette. Here are some convincing statistics provided by the US-based Centers for Disease Control. Did you know that hand washing can reduce the risk of respiratory infections by 16% or that more than 50% of healthy persons have Staphylococcus aureus living in or on their nasal passages, throats, hair, or skin? Researchers in London estimate that if everyone routinely washed their hands, a million deaths a year could be prevented. There’s plenty of hard science to back these factoids up. Here’s the recommended technique for hand washing: Wet your hands with clean, running water (warm or cold), turn off the tap, and apply soap. Lather your hands by rubbing them together with the soap. Be sure to lather the backs of your hands, between your fingers, and under your nails. Scrub your hands for at least 20 seconds. Need a timer? Hum the “Happy Birthday” song from beginning to end twice. Rinse your hands well under clean, running water. Dry your hands using a clean towel or air dry them.   Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now. Send Us Your TipsWould 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.