Category: CRM Blog Posts

 

Has your business outgrown your last customer relationship management (CRM) tool? If so, it’s time to make the switch to something new. Are you ready? Is your team ready?

Switching to a new CRM means uprooting old habits and creating new ones. Although this is done with an end goal in mind of something spectacular, it’s not always easy to go through the growing pains. Lack of CRM integration is one of the biggest bottlenecks to sales success.

To make the process work faster and be more effective for you, it’s important to set up SMART goals.

What Are SMART Goals?

SMART is an acronym for the key points that should be woven into each goal you set for your team during this transition. It stands for:

• Smart
• Measureable
• Achievable
• Realistic
• Time-Relevant

Let’s take a closer look at each point when it comes to CRM implementation.

Specific

Before you can start using your CRM, you have to know how you’re going to use the new tool to better your business. Although you probably have a general idea of the benefits of switching to the new system, it’s time to hone in on the specifics.

Specify the following:

• What data points will you input?
• When will you input them?
• Who will input each data point?
• Where will the data be stored? (this will already be defined for you, but it’s still a good idea to write it down in your plan so there’s no confusion)

Then, when you have a clear vision of how you’ll use the system, it’s time to specify your goals with the new CRM.

Get ultra-specific on what you hope to achieve by implementing the new system. Whenever possible, use quantifiable information. For example, a goal of “get more sales” should be replaced by “increase sales by 10% by following up with leads after 3 days, one week, two weeks, and one month.” In this example, you’re specific about how much you want to see your sales increase and how you’ll make that happen using the new CRM.

Measureable

Ever heard the old adage, “what gets measured, gets done?” When goal setting, you have to have accountability by measuring what you accomplished. Without measurability woven into your goals, it’s too easy to lose focus.

Measureable goals are those that you can track with cold hard facts. They are not open to interpretation. Instead, they’re defined in a way so that there are no questions left about whether or not you achieved them.

Here are a few things you can measure with your CRM:

• Value of incoming opportunities
• Value of opportunities won/lost
• How many leads were won at each stage of the pipeline
• Percentage of sales in each category

When goal setting, list all of the relevant metrics you can track in your CRM so you know which data points to measure to track your progress toward your overall goal.

Achievable

Not only should your end goal be achievable, but so should each of the steps your team needs to take to reach that end goal.

Forming new habits takes practice. Every day, your team will need to force themselves to break away from their old way of doing things and learn a new system. This takes work, but with achievable steps incorporated into how you plan to reach your end goal, it feels more doable.

Outline specific actions that should be easy enough for your team to do every day to form these new habits and make your implementation a success. For example, you might set a smaller goal of reviewing reports as a team each week. This goal is certainly achievable and lends itself to greater success learning the system and tracking progress toward your bigger end goal of making more money.

Realistic

Goal setting should be challenging, but the challenge you set forth for yourself should also be realistic. If you expect to see a jump from $10,000 in sales to $1 million in sales overnight, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Keep your goals realistic. By setting your sights too high, you discourage your team right out of the gate. When a goal is realistic, it’s seen as having potential, which makes people work harder to succeed.

Time Bound

Give yourself enough time to make the switch. Expecting immediate changes overnight will only cause you to get frustrated or discouraged when things don’t go quite your way.

Make your goals timely enough to challenge you but also give you enough of a buffer to get set up and learn the new system. Think in terms of how many months it’ll take you to accomplish your goal (at least while you’re getting things set up) instead of weeks.

What Goals Are You Setting For Your New CRM?

Whatever goals you’re setting for your team after implementing a new CRM, make sure they’re SMART. By following this structure, you’ll keep everyone motivated (including yourself) and see the results pay off by tracking non-negotiable data points.

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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.

Sinister service outages, blood-curdling budget constraints, and chilling cyberthreats have long been the stuff of IT nightmares. Now a new survey looks at what’s really terrifying IT pros this Halloween and beyond.

Read the full article at: www.informationweek.com

In our work helping clients increase their online conversions, we’ve noticed a significant, consistent drop in visitors filling out traditional lead forms.

Read the full article at: marketingtechblog.com

 

Your company is always looking for ways to create awareness for itself. SEO, paid advertising, publicity, and direct sales efforts can be instrumental in achieving this goal.

As your company’s brand becomes more visible, however, the flow of new inquiries can quickly become overwhelming. Phone calls, emails, form submissions, and social media inquiries – interest can come from virtually everywhere. It’s a good problem to have. Nonetheless, it is a problem.

As a result, CRM software has become a necessity for growth-oriented organizations. Unlike spreadsheets or paper-based systems, CRMs allow you to segment data and build logical sales pipelines. Two segmentation records, in particular, are vital for most businesses: leads and opportunities.

Unfortunately, many business owners confuse these two record types as one and the same, leading to confusion and inefficiency. In this post, I’ll explain why it’s important to make a distinction between leads and opportunities.

Some Basic Definitions

Let’s start with the basics. The majority of CRM systems draw distinctions between lead and opportunity records. For example, Insightly defines a lead as someone who “might be interested in your products or services, but haven’t yet verified their interest or fit for your business.” On the other hand, an opportunity is typically used for “organizing potential deals and the people or businesses who might contribute to your revenue.”

In other words, leads are those people who have reached out but have not yet been qualified. Opportunities result by qualifying leads (read more about converting leads to opportunities) or from identifying new deals for existing contacts (in which case no “conversion” would occur). Either way, opportunities help you to forecast the revenue in your sales pipeline. They represent money in the bank tomorrow (or the next day).

Personally, I like to think of leads as “potential opportunities.” If I can establish a fit, then I’ll convert the lead to an opportunity (along with a contact and organization record). If the lead falls through, I’ll close it before wasting any more time. This means that for every opportunity being worked, there may be dozens of leads still being qualified. Remember, not every lead becomes an opportunity.

Leads are the Outcome of Marketing Initiatives

If qualified leads become opportunities and opportunities generate revenue, it seems logical to invest in lead generation activities.

What activities are worthwhile? Where do the best leads come from? How can you get more of them into your CRM? These are all good questions, which require a more in-depth answer than what this brief article can provide. To point you in the right direction, I will say that there are countless articles to browse on the topic. Also, at a very high level, most of my clients generate leads through some combination of:

• Writing thoughtful, keyword-rich content
• Creating free downloadable assets, such as whitepapers and ebooks
• Having well-structured websites
• Hosting free webinars
• Guest blogging for other websites
• Targeted email marketing
• Paid advertising and PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns
• Maintaining a positive image on industry forums and review sites

Of course, implementing an aggressive marketing mix takes considerable time and money. Spend time forecasting which tactics will deliver the best return on investment. Lead flow should be a top consideration when answering this equation.

As your marketing starts to work, pay close attention to the types of lead information you’re collecting. If you’re using the Insightly web to lead form, try asking for more (or less) information. You may notice fluctuations in your conversion rates simply by adjusting your required field settings.

Opportunities Define Future Marketing Priorities

Some marketing consultants will tell you that their job is to simply generate leads; successfully closing opportunities is your staff’s job.

While there is some truth in this statement, consultants often overlook a golden opportunity. By routinely analyzing which deals were won or lost, businesses can further refine their marketing mixes and achieve greater ROI.

For example, imagine that you’re running a PPC campaign that is generating dozens of leads per week. At first glance, this sounds great. However, after a few months, you sense that very few leads from this source ever move forward. With a tool like Insightly, you can easily view all recently closed-won opportunities. In a few clicks, you learn that only a handful of the PPC leads became paying customers. The rest were either unresponsive or spam.

In this scenario, a CRM’s value (and the opportunity data within it) is brutally clear. Without it, you’re simply operating on a hunch.

Get More Value from Leads & Opportunities

Leads and opportunities are different (yet related) entities. Both represent future value for your company; that is, only if you maintain a process-focused approach. Leveraging a well-structured CRM helps you to simplify your workflow, create clarity, and maximize marketing ROI.

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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.

 

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Matt Keener is a marketing consultant and President of Keener Marketing Solutions, LLC. Matt specializes in content marketing and strategic planning, having helped numerous Saas (software as a service) companies and other small businesses worldwide. Read more of Matt’s work, check out his book, or connect with him on Linkedin.

Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 4 weekly tips—a tip on running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, a tip on improving your sales, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

 

	Save Ideas in Insightly for the Future
	Ideas occur at the strangest times. A late-night snack, mowing the lawn, picking up your son from Kindergarten – you just never know when genius will strike. Unfortunately, you rarely carry around your trusty notepad. You’ve tried sending yourself an email, but that usually just gets buried and forgotten. How can you capture your ideas in a more structured way so you can capitalize on them in the future? Insightly has you covered. Pop open your mobile app (you can download it here) and tap on “Tasks.” Add a new task and input the basic details. Be sure to specify a due date and enable a reminder. In doing so, you can create accountability for yourself. On the chosen date, Insightly will remember to send you an email alert. For busy business owners and sales professionals, this type of notification can prove to be invaluable. For added convenience, check to see if your mobile device offers voice transcription. This can be very helpful when capturing thoughts in the task’s “description” field. Rather than fumbling with your keyboard, let your smartphone or tablet serve as your virtual assistant. As you add more “idea” tasks into Insightly, it may be wise to define a task category reserved only for collecting your thoughts. By organizing ideas in this way, you can quickly view and prioritize those that add the most value to your business. And, as ideas evolve into new initiatives, consider linking the original task to a project or opportunity. It can be very fulfilling to see how a raw idea translates into a new service, product, or business transaction!
	Seek Integrated Apps
	You’re a busy person. To get more done, you rely heavily on smartphone apps and cloud-based management systems. Although it can be enjoyable to research and test new software, it is also a time-consuming process. Clients, payroll, meetings, and urgent tasks routinely prevent you from discovering the next cool tool. Even when you do have time, you feel overwhelmed by the amount of blog articles and newsletters that promise ROI. Streamline your search by reviewing integrated apps to the software you already use. For example, Insightly offers dozens of native integrations (learn more here) for a variety of solutions: Email hosting providers Accounting software Customer support systems Data management Document management Email marketing platforms Task management Sales administration services If that’s not enough, consider checking out the countless other integrated platforms available on the Zapier app directory. Insightly users can browse dozens of prebuilt Zap combinations. By starting with a list of integrated solutions, you can simultaneously increase your tech IQ and bypass apps that won’t “play nice” with existing systems. The net result? Better technology for your business – with less effort.
	Smile More
	Life is too short to feel like a robot all the time. Smiling is not only the byproduct of a happy life. In many cases, it’s actually a choice – especially when things aren’t perfect (as they seldom are). Stop and think…how often do you smile each day? In today’s productivity-driven world, it’s not uncommon to go several hours without ever smiling. If you work remotely, you may go an entire day. Consider these tips in your quest to smile more often. Pay Attention to Your Smiling Habits – For the next few days, pay particular attention to your facial expressions. Do you find yourself feeling stoic most hours of the day? After work, does this translate into your personal life? Set a Smiling Goal – If you rarely smile during business hours, set an attainable goal of smiling every hour. You’re not trying to win a congeniality contest. Just try to break your bad habit of never smiling. You might even set a desktop reminder to prompt you (although your co-workers might think you’re a little weird – but who cares, right?). Intentionally Do Things that Make You Smile – If you work from home, step away from your desk and hug your spouse or kids. If you’re stuck in a cubicle, close your eyes to recall a funny story from your college days. Either way, taking a 30-second smile break can be both refreshing and good for your long-term outlook.
	Sell What You Love
	Early in your career, you probably took at least one lackluster job just to gain experience (and reliable employment). Now that you’re more established, you’re an increasingly hot commodity. Whether they’ll ever admit it or not, your current employer relies on you to achieve its goals. As Adam Honig at the Spiro blog points out, “You should either be passionate about the product or service you sell, or you should be passionate about how your company compares to others in your industry. If you have no interest in the product, but also have no interest in how you’re different from the competition, then you’re doing your company and yourself a disservice by continuing to work there.” Well, does this sound like you? Do you feel passionate about what you sell or how your company helps others? If you’re feeling a little ho-hum, ask yourself these questions: What product (or service) would I actually be excited to sell? What company (or companies) sell this type of product (or service)? What is my plan for getting this company’s attention? How can I market my work experience for an opportunity to sell what I love? Are there barriers preventing me from making a career move? Remember, effective salespeople are some of the most sought after professionals in business. If you’re good at what you do, there’s no reason why you should keep selling that which you dislike.

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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.

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About the author: Matt Keener is a marketing consultant and President of Keener Marketing Solutions, LLC. Matt specializes in content marketing and strategic planning, having helped numerous Saas (software as a service) companies and other small businesses worldwide. Read more of Matt’s work, check out his book, or connect with him onLinkedin.

 

 

Every entrepreneur knows that businesses that don’t ask for customer feedback do so at their own peril. After all, your company only exists because it fills a need in the marketplace. Those needs change and must expand with your customer’s expanding business. Knowing what’s working and what isn’t about your product or service and responding quickly can mean the difference between success and failure.

Yet so many SMBs lack a rigorous process for collecting customer feedback. Are any of these reasons holding you back?

• Bandwidth — Too big of a project and I don’t have the expertise or time.
• Budget — Software solutions might make it easier, but I don’t have the $$.
• Bang — Results won’t be actionable.

Actually, this can be super easy, and even free!  All you need to do is think about your goals. What would you like to learn from your customers?

Three common customer feedback methods for SMBs

Below are three common goals and simple ways to get the type of feedback you are looking for. You can do it in an afternoon, really!

#1 “I have an idea for a new product or service, and I want to know what customers will think of it”

Easy Feedback Method: Send a one-time marketing research survey

A questionnaire is the way to go because to do this right, you will want to ask multiple questions of one respondent.  Survey platforms offer basic plans for free that will give you a customizable questionnaire and will aggregate responses into useful reports.
We like TypeForm because they offer great templates, including a beautiful, ready-made survey for getting feedback on a business extension idea. The template features all the types of questions you might ask about the new idea and will help you gather good demographic information about your respondents, too. All you have to do is edit the images and text to match your offering and — voilå! — you have a professional survey that is ready to email to customers.  

If you don’t want to send yet another email to customers, or your contact database is incomplete, you can still solicit feedback by posting a link to the questionnaire on your website or blog.

Get some real bang from that survey report. Schedule a time to review results, share them with the team, and incorporate into your planning.

#2 “I want to know how loyal my customers are, and track and improve their happiness over time.”

Easy Feedback Method:  Net Promoter Score (NPS) System

The NPS survey question is quick and simple – On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our product or service? More than two-thirds of the Fortune 100 use NPS to measure loyalty, and drive improvements in customer experience, retention, repeat sales and growth.

NPS is a great option for small and medium sized businesses who want a regular pulse of sentiment. With its simple ranking and open-ended “Care to tell us why?” question, you get feedback on what is most important to customers. This survey gets high response rates because it is so easy for your customers to do.

Detractors (those giving you a low score) will tell you what’s not working, while loyal, high-score Promoters will tell you why they love you so much and what else they are looking for. You get guidance on how to improve your product offering or service — directly from customers. You can reach out and rescue a Detractor. Also, qualitative feedback from Promoters can be turned into testimonials for your website, and Sales will know who is primed for a referral or an upsell.

Modern “drip” NPS platforms can automatically send surveys to a few customers each day or week. In this way you reach out to everyone over the course of a quarter or year, and you won’t be overwhelmed with too much feedback at once.  Wootric is one such platform that offers NPS surveys for free, and can be set up in minutes.

The beauty of the NPS score is that customer happiness becomes a metric that you can track over time.  And with surveys going out automatically, you can stay on top of trends and focus on taking action.

For more bang:  Designate a “customer happiness champion” to partner with you to keep an eye on NPS trends and tackle the broader business implications of what you are hearing from customers.  

#3 “I want to solicit feedback as a way to engage and grow my customer community.”

Easy Feedback Method: Tap into your Facebook or Twitter audience.

If you have a Facebook page or Twitter account, customers may already be using those channels to get your attention when they have a question or a complaint. Social media is also a good place to cultivate brand conversation and engagement. Try using a Facebook poll or Twitter poll to get directional feedback on ideas, and both are free to implement.

You will hear from your most ardent fans, build your community, and be able to monitor your brand mentions. Social polls are best if you have a strong social media following and engagement from your customer base.  

Beyond polls, Hubspot suggests several way to use social media to get instant customer feedback including hosting a virtual focus group, and sourcing blog content by listening for pain points or interests.

Close the Loop with Customers

Hopefully, this afternoon you’ll be well on your way to collecting feedback. Before you install, post, or press “send,” it is important to think through how you will follow-up with the customers that take the time to engage.

That is the one caveat about gathering feedback, customers expect acknowledgement. This doesn’t have to be time consuming, but it should be scheduled and planned for so that you make sure it happens. Here are some ideas:

Marketing research questionnaire: Consider writing a blog post about what your learned through the research. Or send a follow-up email to all of the survey respondents to say thank you. And, be sure they are among the first to know if you do launch that new product or service!

Net Promoter Score:  Closing the loop with NPS can be low touch or highly personal — it really depends on your business.  Some SMBs make time to reach out to individual customers that leave feedback, while others automate a ‘thank you’ through other platforms they use like Zendesk or Intercom.   The NPS system surfaces customers that may benefit from a reach-out, and you can decide how to prioritize.  

Social Media: When you tap into your social media audience, your feedback is now public. You should definitely post survey results and let your network know actions you will take as a result.  But, you have to be ready to react and soften any negative feedback you receive.  Acknowledge negative feedback immediately, even if you don’t have an action plan. When you receive positive feedback, thank the customer and retweet/post the feedback as a great way to counterbalance any nay sayers.

Just Do It

Take the step to connect with your customers.  It will pay dividends in business growth and reputation, often with no out-of-pocket cost.   And, it’s easier than ever.  So, what are you doing this afternoon?

 

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

 

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About the author: Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer and Co-founder of Wootric, is the author of “A Modern Guide to Winning Customers with NPS.” An expert on online business success, she has advised hundreds of businesses on customer feedback management. Jessica holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

At this point, my house is smarter than me.

I’m not joking when I say that I have come to rely upon a half dozen “smart devices” every day. In the morning I check the weather station for the day’s forecast, then might tweak the settings on the air conditioning system if the morning is particularly warm or especially chilly. Various lights inside and outside can be adjusted on the fly, and a phalanx of cameras let me ensure that a) no one is trying to break in and b) the cats aren’t trapped in the closet. All of this is wireless and can be completed via my smart phone, iPad, or any PC – whether I’m in the house or on the road. At this point, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before my electric toothbrush starts ordering its own replacement heads.

How far can smart devices and the Internet of Things go? At the consumer level, there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight. In 2013, Cisco wrote that 10 billion things were connected to the internet, far more than the number of people on earth. But that number pales in comparison to the 1.5 trillion things that could be connected to one another eventually. As far as taking advantage of our internetworked potential goes, we’re still just taking baby steps.

And yet, concerns about the breakneck pace of IoT adoption are leading some to predict an imminent backlash against the industry, for a variety of reasons. One pundit has even given it a clever nickname: The Internot of Things.

Why the Concern?

Arguments that the IoT isn’t going to live up to its promises generally fall along a few similar lines: We’re already bombarded with bleeps and buzzes every minute of the day, thanks to the ubiquity of the smart phone. Now we want to add even more to that overload? Do we want or need to willingly add more complexity to our lives? And is that a good idea, from a security standpoint?

These aren’t unfamiliar arguments. Every time a new technology emerges, naysayers are quick to warn against it, afraid that we will all turn into mindless and unproductive zombies that can’t handle the crush of data. While every generation probably feels the following one can be described this way, the truth is that we’re handling things fairly well so far. The kids of the ‘80s navigated personal computers and cable TV. Today’s Millennials seem to be managing the bizarre world of life-via-cell-phone well enough.

But IoT does represent a different challenge, as prior tech advances generally saw the advent of one device at a time – television, then cell phone, then laptop, then smart phone. Society had time to adapt and figure things out before moving on to whatever was next. Now, many households are like mine, stuffed full with gizmos and gadgets meant to make us smarter about how we live – but which, in reality, require a huge amount of upkeep and troubleshooting just to keep running, and which ultimately demand more than their fair share of attention.

Is humanity going to collapse under the weight of all these devices? Let’s look at some of the biggest concerns surrounding the Internet of Things, and how they’re being addressed.

Information Overload

The question isn’t whether we can check the ambient humidity every 30 seconds. It’s whether we should. IoT devices are a bit more problematic than the traditional trappings of technology because, by design, they are always on, always reporting, always sending us updates. You can shut down your email program or turn off your cell phone, but your thermostat and your smart refrigerator will continue chatting away, collecting data and sending it to the cloud. Many of these devices generate alerts that can be difficult or impossible to ignore, and the issue is compounded when you have a complex IoT environment with dozens of smart devices.

At the industrial level, the problem is slightly different but quite a bit more serious. IoT sensors that are increasingly being embedded into machinery, vehicles, building, and other devices are generating a torrent of data that reports on their condition, 24 hours a day. The problem is that the back end generally hasn’t been built to accommodate this glut of data. Gartner has noted that this will likely cause problems for professionals who “are not prepared for the information-related implications of the Internet of Things” and estimated that a quarter of attempts to make sense of this data will ultimately be abandoned because the process is simply too complex.

Automation tools are being developed – in fact, this is one of the hottest growth areas in technology – but these are likely to find an obstacle in another area…

Compatibility Issues

When you send an email or visit a website, a very mature and well-understood series of steps take place. Devices on the internet communicate with one another through a number of common standards, protocols that keep things running surprisingly smoothly most of the time. The upshot is that if you instruct your web browser to access a web server in Bulgaria, it does so using the same steps it would if it accessed one next door.

All bets are off, however, when it comes to the Internet of Things. The problem with IoT standards is that, well, there aren’t any – not yet, anyway. This is a challenge that many have observed, but which few are interested in meaningfully addressing. The problem? In today’s tech environment, there’s no longer any real incentive to support so-called open standards. Proprietary technologies (think Apple’s iOS or Microsoft’s Windows) use their closed systems to support high prices and keep customers within their “walled gardens.” Given that many of the same companies – Google, Apple, Intel, Samsung, and more – are becoming leaders in the consumer IoT space, these exclusionary strategies aren’t going anywhere.

Standards groups exist, but there are many of them, all rough alliances among various companies that are jockeying to beat out one another. A shakeout will likely come eventually, but no one seems to be in much of a hurry to push things along in that direction.

Security

When it comes to seriousness, the generally poor security of IoT devices is probably the biggest threat out there, and it’s something that both consumers and enterprises need to take with equal seriousness. Security maven Bruce Schneier has been sounding the alarm for years, saying the landscape today looks a lot like the shoddy state of computer security from 20 years ago. “No one’s paying any attention to security, no one’s doing updates, no one knows anything – it’s all really, really bad and it’s going to come crashing down,” he said to Network World in 2015.

It hasn’t come crashing down just yet, but already things are in bad shape. Sensor-filled cars have been hacked, as have door locks, thermostats, refrigerators, and even wheelchairs. If there’s a wireless chip and a computer in it (no matter how primitive), it’s ripe for attack – and eventually some enterprising hacker will get around to finding a way inside.

What we’re likely to see first is a rise in simple pranks. Turning off your refrigerator or cranking up your furnace while you’re on vacation is a nuisance (and potentially hazardous) for consumers, but what happens when IoT sensors in the power grid get remotely shut down, or when hackers manage to send false data to, say, the sensor on an airplane engine? These are scary scenarios that many would rather not think about – but unless things change, something along these lines is probably inevitable.

Privacy

So your smart thermostat knows when you’re at home or away. Your washing machine and dishwasher report to the cloud every time you run a load. Smart door locks know who’s coming and who’s going. Who cares? Because anyone listening in would be able to quickly learn your habits and potentially use that information against you in any number of ways – the most obvious being to plan a home robbery when your devices say you are out of the house.

That’s just one aspect of the privacy implications of the Internet of Things. For a more troublesome example, consider AI systems, such as the Amazon Alexa service, which listen (and/or watch) while you’re going about your daily life. Alexa can play your music and control your lights for you, plus it can tell you about traffic conditions, arrange for a car pickup, or order you a pizza. These are handy time-savers today, as long as all those recordings aren’t being stored somewhere, forever, waiting for someone to download it all and put it on YouTube. Remember, IoT devices like these have to basically be listening all the time, waiting for you to wake them up with a special command. Privacy safeguards exist, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be bypassed by those with malicious ends in mind.

Extrapolating from there, what happens when devices like these get too smart for their own good? Could an Alexa-like device eventually know too much, then begin behaving like it knows best? Maybe Alexa doesn’t think you need another pizza after all the garbage you ate last weekend. Hey, it’s probably nothing to be afraid of. It’s for your own good.

 

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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.

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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.

Have you ever considered gating your content to get leads? Whether you choose to have open-access content or gate it to gather information, there are benefits and drawbacks you should be aware of.

Read the full article at: moz.com