CRM Blog Posts – Page 3

November 29, 2017

10 Outside-the-Box Ways to Use Project Pipelines

When you think of the word “pipeline,” what comes to mind?

If you’re like most business owners, you probably think of the sales process. Leads, opportunities, and new customers are all top of mind.

Although sales pipelines are vital to any company, a “project pipeline” can be equally useful from an operations standpoint. If you’ve never configured a project pipeline in Insightly, think of it as a way to avoid re-creating the wheel. Pipelines are great for things that follow a predictable pattern. As a project advances from one stage to the next, Insightly can even auto-assign tasks to individual users

In this post, I’ll share ten ideas for putting project pipelines to good use.

1. Hosting a Customer Appreciation Conference

Your customer base is growing. To show your appreciation and keep them informed, you’ve started hosting an annual conference. Pulling off this event requires a ton of coordination and planning. The first year had its share of bumps along the way. However, you’ve since developed a rhythm for organizing the conference.

Rather than keeping a handwritten checklist or spreadsheet, why not build a project pipeline? This way, when the conference rolls around next year, you can simply add the new event as a project and, magically, all of the necessary steps are preserved from the prior year. For example, your conference pipeline could have the following stages:

Preliminary planning
Venue planning
Official announcement
Event promotion
Collateral
Day-of priorities
Post-event follow ups

As you complete all of the associated tasks for a particular phase, your project pipeline helps you know what to work on next. After all, there’s no point working on an official announcement until you know where the event will occur.

2. Scaling Your Content Marketing

To get found on the search engines, you need to regularly publish excellent content. This often sounds easier than it really is. Your subject matter experts are too busy to sit down and write 1,000-word posts. Even if they had unlimited time, each writer has a slightly different style. It’s therefore no wonder why so many companies fail to produce content. Too many moving parts, and not enough foresight.

A pipeline can be a great tool for structuring (and scaling) your content marketing efforts. Break the process down into bite-sized, repeatable chunks, such as:

Topic pitch
In-process
Editing
Approval
Publishing
Live

For added firepower, you might try adding activity sets to your content marketing pipeline. This will keep everyone on task and reduce unnecessary confusion.

3. Exhibiting at Trade Shows

Your company exhibits at a handful of important trade shows each year. Although the events are at different locations, they all follow the same general sequence:

Reserving the booth space
Paying the vendor
Making travel arrangements
Ordering swag and brochures
Shipping the booth to the exhibit hall
Traveling to the event
Setting up the booth
Exhibiting
Tearing down the booth
Traveling back
Following up with leads
Evaluating ROI

To deliver a more streamlined pipeline, it might make sense to break this sequence down into less specific phases:

Event sign up
Pre-event planning
Day-of event
Post-event priorities

Remember, you can always link tasks to stages for a more detailed event plan. Traveling back, following up with leads, and evaluating ROI would be logical tasks to associate with your post-event phase.

4. Creating Your Social Media Plan

Social media isn’t just for your middle school niece.

Smart businesses leverage social media to drive conversions and increase customer engagement. One strategy for achieving this goal is to routinely publish share-worthy content. Unfortunately, great content doesn’t fall from the sky.

Creating a social media production pipeline can help you optimize the process. If you aim to produce on a weekly cadence, consider these phases:

Collect content
Draft plan
Approval
Scheduling
Reporting

Depending on your preferences, you might choose to reuse the same project for future social media plans. This would be beneficial if you want to centralize all social media-related chatter into a single record.

If that’s not important to you, just ask your social media manager to create a fresh project each week (incorporating the same pipeline, of course). Is your social media manager somewhat forgetful? Assign a recurring task with explicit instructions and due dates, ensuring no weeks go by without a new social plan.

5. Fulfilling Customer Orders

Order fulfillment is the perfect use case for an Insightly project – especially when combined with a pipeline.

Let’s say that your company offers a variety of handmade leather products. Your catalog offers a few dozen SKUs, and your customers are online retailers and brick-and-mortar shops. When customers place orders, they typically do so by submitting a purchase order for several dozen units.

Although each SKU is unique and has a slightly different lead time, it’s safe to say that production follows this general workflow:

Material sourcing
Production scheduling
Manufacturing
Quality assurance testing
Packaging
Shipping
Payment

It’s also worth noting that as pending deals become orders, Insightly allows you to convert opportunities into projects. This provides a 360-degree view of each customer’s order. Doing so also preserves all related emails, notes, and files. As the order advances through the manufacturing process, your team will have fingertip access to everything they need to do their jobs. No more hunting for information – it’s all right there in the electronic project file.

6. Performing Routine Website Maintenance

The web presents countless opportunities for today’s business owner. However, opportunity is not without risk. The internet is no exception to this rule.

Some business owners falsely assume that websites are a “set it and forget it” proposition. Not so, especially from a web security standpoint. In an age when government agencies and well-known brands are hacked, prudent business owners take steps to protect their online assets. One important step involves keeping your content management system up to date.

A pipeline can help bring order to your web maintenance program. If you’re using an open source CMS, your pipeline stages might look something like this:

Backups
CMS update
Plugin updates
Testing
Backups
Documentation

7. Recruiting Freelancers

It’s easier than ever to hire freelancers. Millions of freelancers are available via virtual work platforms, such as Upwork.com. And, the benefits of hiring freelancers are quite obvious to your business: no long-term commitments, less paperwork, and better talent.

As you add more virtual team members, you’ll need a better way to recruit and onboard them. Project pipelines can help you automate your freelancer management. For example, you could build a pipeline with these stages:

Job post
Invitations
Shortlist
Interviews
Hire
Onboard

As you use your pipeline to bring on more freelancers, Insightly can also automate some of the administrative tasks, too. If you’re a Pro or Enterprise user, you’re able to harness workflow automation to your advantage. Why is this helpful? Well, let’s say you want to automatically send new hires a welcome email shortly after onboarding. Insightly can send emails on your behalf, taking one more task off your overloaded to-do list.

8. Closing Out Your Books

We’ve all heard the saying about the two certainties in life: death and taxes.

Depending on your business model, taxes come due at many different points in the year. Estimated taxes are usually due on a quarterly basis. Sales tax varies by the state you’re in. And, your annual tax returns, always come due on (or around) April 15th.

For the sake of discussion, let’s focus in on your annual tax returns. Although you pay your CPA to “close the books” each year, there’s a fair bit of coordination on your end:

Collect 1099s / docs
Reconciliations
Summary for CPA
CPA work
Review & approve

Since this process only rolls around annually, you probably find yourself reinventing the wheel each year. Once again, a well-structured activity set can help you know exactly what to do next. For the “summary for CPA” stage, you might associate a task that contains links to your reporting template along with detailed work instructions.

Stop starting over each year – put last year’s knowledge to good use!

9. Evaluating Software

Cloud-based software is revolutionizing how business gets done. For every problem, it seems there’s at least several tools that offer a solution.

Some companies make the mistake of having no formal software selection process. Departments are free to define their own internal selection criteria – or, worse, use no criteria whatsoever. To provide a little more structure to your team’s software selection, build a basic pipeline like this:

Needs analysis
ID vendors
Demos
Shortlist
Selection

Even a simple pipeline (like the one outlined above) can provide your team with just enough direction to make an informed decision.

10. Mining for New Leads

Let’s bring this discussion full circle.

As I stated at the beginning of the post, many people associate the word “pipeline” with the sales process. If you’re still having a hard time associating pipelines with projects, here’s an example that might bring it together: data mining for leads.

It’s quite common for sales reps to spend a few hours each week mining for leads. Web forums, social media groups, and industry directories can be excellent sources. Sadly, not every rep knows what to do when instructed to “do some lead research.”

Bring order to the lead mining process with pipelines. The pipeline phases could be as simple as:

Check sites
Add leads
Done

Obviously, you’ll want to spend time building out the first stage and include helpful tips. Would it make sense to trigger an activity set for each site to check? Or, would a single task with detailed instructions make more sense? It really depends on your business, but either solution is better than nothing.

Get Creative with Project Pipelines

I hope that this article has gotten your creative juices flowing. As you can see, project pipelines can really be a game changer when it comes to creating a more systematized business. Now, go out there and get creative with pipelines!

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

November 20, 2017

8 CRM Features You Might Not Be Using

We all love Insightly. That’s a given.

And, for sales-driven companies like yours, Insightly’s CRM features can be a real lifesaver. Contact management, opportunity tracking, and your Insightly mailbox help you close more deals with less effort.

Though you’re already getting value from Insightly, you might be missing out on some lesser-known features. In this post, I’ll share eight Insightly features worthy of further investigation.

#1: Relationship Tracking

What was the first thing you did after signing up for Insightly?

If you’re like many users, you probably imported all of your contacts, leads, and organizations. You may have even formatted your import file so that certain records (such as contacts and organizations) were linked together. This is a great start, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

For example, let’s say you have twelve different points of contact at your largest customer. (I don’t envy your situation!) Your initial data import helps you know that all twelve people work there, but what good is that information? You already know who they are and what they do. It would be really nice if you could track who reports to whom (among other things).

Insightly’s relationship tracking is exactly what you need. For any contact, you can scroll down to the “links” section and key in a name. From there, you can indicate relationship status (such as “colleague of,” “boss of,” “friend of,” etc.

Have a unique relationship to capture (such as “doesn’t work well with…”)? You can create your own custom relationship in Insightly in your System Settings.

#2: Free Smartphone App

Sometimes it’s easy to become so focused on the day-to-day that you lose sight of potential efficiency boosters. Case in point? Finding time to download the Insightly smartphone app.

The Insightly app can pretty much do whatever you’d need it to while on the go. With the app, you’ll be able to:

Add new records
Search your contacts
Review pending tasks
Filter pending opportunities
Add updates, notes, files, and more
A bunch of other cool stuff

Wouldn’t it be nice to do these things while out in the field – rather than waiting until you’re back to your desk? The information would still be fresh on your mind, and you’d be much more likely to take action. After all, the moment you return to the office, more pressing things always seem to pop up.

#3: Contact Tagging

Perhaps you’ve heard about record tagging, but you’re just not sure how best to use it. It seems like a useful feature, but it’s so open-ended that the possibilities seem endless – a little too endless.

You’re in luck, as I published this tagging guide almost one year ago (time sure flies). Although you can tag leads, emails, organizations, opportunities, or projects, contact tagging seems like a logical place to start. As I pointed out in the guide, it’s wise to first plan out how tags can best fit your contact management needs.

For example, let’s assume that your company loosely classifies client contacts into three general groups:

Decision maker
Influencer
Support staff

Although most of your contacts fall only into one category, some could justifiably be considered both a decision maker and influencer. In this case, you might create a tag for each grouping, making it easier to filter contacts based on influence.

#4: Start Dates on Tasks

A wise person once said, “Work begun is work half done.”

Insightly certainly makes it easier to organize tasks and projects. But, at the end of the day, it’s up to the user to actually take action. Remember, a great plan offers little value unless it is carried out.

Unlike other project management systems that only provide a due date, Insightly allows users to also specify a task start date.

Start dates change the conversation and help teams to set more realistic expectations. Instead of waiting for an item to become past due, a start date protects the integrity of time-sensitive commitments. When an assignee accepts a task, he implicitly confirms that the proposed timeline (start to finish) seems realistic. If the allotted timetable is unrealistic, then both parties should work together and adjust one or more of the dates accordingly.

#5: Teams

Even if your company has very few employees or subcontractors, I’m sure that there’s a basic definable level of hierarchy.

Take, for example, your web team. Just last month you hired two additional CMS experts (Jorge and Rohit) to make ongoing changes on your site. They’ve joined forces with your lead developer (Alexey) who makes all of the “technical” adjustments, such as hosting or DNS adjustments. Since expanding your web team, more things are getting done. You also seem to be repeating yourself more often:

“Alexey, I don’t care who loads the blog post – can you just figure it out for me?”

“Jorge, would you be available to create this landing page for me?”

“Rohit, I thought Jorge was going to fix that responsiveness issue.”

“Can all three of you send me a monthly report, detailing what exactly you worked on?”

Setting up an Insightly team can help you cut through much of the frustration.

Once created, you’ll be able to assign tasks to the entire team with one single action. When delegating to your team, Insightly will ask you if you want to create:

A single task for the entire team – perfect for when you don’t care who takes action, such as loading the blog post.
A task for each team member – useful for when each person needs to take action, such as sending you the monthly summary report.

No more confusion or overlapping conversations. Just assign it to the team, and let Insightly handle the rest.

#6: Voice Notes

You’ve just wrapped up an important client meeting. Although you did your best to scribble down some notes, sadly your handwriting couldn’t pass a 7th grade penmanship test. Obviously, it’s important to get these notes into Insightly ASAP. Each passing moment reduces the likelihood you’ll be able to read your own notes.

Here’s the problem: Keying in several paragraphs of notes (via your smartphone) is a painful proposition. What would normally take five minutes on your laptop could take much more of your time on your smartphone’s QWERTY keyboard.

What should you do?

Insightly’s audio notes feature is here to help. For any contact, organization, lead, opportunity, or project, you’re able to record up to one hour of content (per audio file). Stop fumbling for the next tiny letter on your smartphone’s keyboard – just speak what’s on your mind and move on to the next task.

Bonus: Here are ten creative suggestions for using Insightly voice notes at your business.

#7: Task “Following”

You’re not a micromanager. On the other hand, there are situations that call for added insight into what’s being done.

Take, for example, the important letter that you need to send to your landlord. Your company has an aggressive expansion plan, which means you need a larger facility. You would be willing to stay put for another year, but you would need an amazing deal on rent. You decide to delegate the creation of this letter to your marketing manager, Tom (who is by far your team’s strongest writer). The task is assigned to Tom (don’t forget to include a “start date”!). Several days pass, and you receive no update from Tom. Has Tom started working on the letter? You won’t know unless you log in to Insightly. That is, unless you’ve started “following” the task.

By adding yourself as a follower (just click on the task’s star icon), you’ll receive a notification each time Tom:

Updates the details of the task
Links the task to something else
Tags or comments on the task
Adds a file

Save yourself time and frustration – start following tasks (and other important records) in Insightly.

#8: Project Categories

If you’re like most companies, you probably provide more than one product or service. In fact, you may offer several different lines of products and services. Because Insightly is more than just a CRM (it’s also a project management system), many businesses use the system to coordinate the many moving parts of order fulfillment.

Take my business as an example. My primary line of work is consulting, which generally involves one of three services: preparing marketing plans, producing content, and providing ongoing advice. In addition, I also write books and develop online training courses for the general public. It’s no wonder that I have the following five project categories in Insightly:

Marketing plan
Blog article
Consulting
Book
Training course

Categorizing my projects helps me visualize how I’m allocating resources. It’s also useful for evaluating potential upsells and cross-sells. (Note: You can enable project categories so that they appear in other records, such as opportunities, tasks, etc. This opens up additional economies of scale, particularly when combined with filtering and reporting.)

What works for one client (or vertical) is bound to benefit another.

Which CRM Features Did I Miss?

What’s your favorite Insightly feature? Reach out and share your thoughts!

November 13, 2017

6 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Delegating Work at the Office

A project management tool, such as Insightly, can certainly make the delegating work at the office process much easier. Of course, that statement depends on your team’s approach to using the software. No matter how amazing a tool might be, “garbage in” almost always results in “garbage out.”

With this in mind, it’s usually a good idea to define in-house best practices for delegation. After all, the last thing you want to do is create more confusion than clarity.

In this post, I’ll share six questions to ask before making your next delegation.

1. Is This a Project or Task?

The words “task” and “project” are used quite loosely in today’s business environment. In fact, some might say that they could be used interchangeably. In my experience, however, they are actually two separate things. A task is usually a smaller unit of work and may be performed with minimal instruction or oversight. A project, by contrast, typically involves many different moving parts, team members, and considerations. To successfully complete a project, a team may need to batch together several related tasks.

If you’re an Insightly user, you’ve probably already noticed that the software aligns very closely with the definitions that I’ve just outlined. Although both records share some common features (such as the ability to add collaborators and notes / comments), there are distinctive differences.

To illustrate the differences between tasks and projects, let’s discuss a simple example.

Let’s say that your company is preparing to launch a new website. Some business owners’ first impulse might be to simply assign a task to their IT manager, not knowing what is actually involved with a website re-launch (not you of course!). However, in most cases, a website is going to require cross-collaboration from many different stakeholders. Such stakeholders might include marketing, IT, sales, product, and senior management.

An Insightly project is the perfect solution for this type of work. The team leader can quickly create the project record, upload linked documents or files, add collaborators, and assemble a detailed game plan.

Once the project has been initiated, your project coordinator will then need to rely on his or her team to get things done. For a website re-launch, such things might include:

Collecting input from key stakeholders
Selecting a new web template
Setting up a development server / site
Creating website copy
Editing the content
Designing banner graphics
Implementing tracking code
Testing the development site
Taking the new site live
Inspecting the launched site for any issues
Monitoring web traffic

Each of these could be easily packaged up into an assignable task. To create tasks in Insightly, your project manager would simply open the project, click on “actions” dropdown menu, and assign accordingly.

Once the tasks are assigned, your entire organization gains instant visibility into who should be doing what.

One final note about tasks: a task does not necessarily have to be linked to a project. In fact, many (if not most) of the tasks you assign will have no linkage to another record. Use unlinked tasks to delegate small chunks of value to your team. Examples might include: ordering office supplies, building reports, filing government paperwork, updating payment details, sending invoices, or anything else that is relatively straightforward.

2. Does This Task Repeat or Not?

Since much of your delegation will depend on the creation of one-off tasks, let’s spend some time thinking about specific task-related situations.

A popular place to start involves the frequency of the work being done. Your team is far too busy to waste time creating the same tasks over and over again. Why not set certain tasks to repeat on predefined schedules?

I’ve written at length on this topic in prior posts, so I won’t spend too much time explaining how to configure recurring tasks. I will, however, at least challenge you to evaluate which things happen regularly in your business. Make a list and start building recurrence patterns in Insightly. In doing so, you’ll find more time to dedicate to high value, high impact activities – and, less time spent recreating the wheel.

To get your creative juices flowing, consider the following ongoing responsibilities that are common to many businesses:

Making quarterly tax payments
Filing business entity reports
Paying and collecting sales tax
Publishing blog content
Preparing agendas for standing meetings
Preparing your monthly newsletter
Posting your social media plans
Looking at monthly web traffic reports
Submitting expense reports by month’s end
Completing employee performance reviews

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but I hope it at least helps you identify a few candidates for recurring Insightly tasks. It’s time you stopped wasting so much time on administrative work!

3. Who Should Be Held Accountable?

Assigning a task (or even a project, for that matter) does little good unless someone is accountable for delivering results. And, just because you create an assignment, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your team knows what to do next. You need to put some teeth into your delegation workflow.

Therefore, when assigning work, it is important to specify an assignee. For Insightly tasks, there are two basic options.

Assigning to an individual: This is probably the most common situation, and it’s basically what I’ve been referring to up until this point. You need to have a task done, so you pick a specific person to do the work. In Insightly, just search for the user’s name, pick it from the dropdown, and move on.

Assigning to a team: Insightly also allows you to assign work to a particular team. This can be done one of two ways:

Assigning the same task to each team member – Use this when each team member must complete the same task. For example, you might want each team member to do a final click-through of the development site (before going live).
Assigning one task to the entire team – Use this when it’s OK for any one person from the team to do the work and mark it completed on behalf of the entire group. For example, if you have three web developers working on a project, you might ask for someone to set up the development site (whoever can do it first). This approach, although probably less common, offers additional flexibility – especially for your team projects.

When it comes to projects, you can select a team member to serve as the primary point person (aka “user responsible” in Insightly). In most cases, you should probably pick the person who will be supervising the entire project, delegating related tasks, and coordinating the various other aspects.

4. Is This Project Going to Follow a Predictable Pattern?

No two projects are exactly the same.

However, some projects follow a similar pattern of events. Taking a page out of the sales pipeline playbook, Insightly also allows you to define project pipelines. This feature can be especially useful for companies providing products or services with very tight quality control procedures.

Here is a perfect example: Since I love baseball so much (and, since it’s October!), let’s imagine that your company manufactures baseball bats. Most of your orders come from two key distributors. When a distributor places an order, you have 30 days to source the materials, schedule production, make the bats, package and palletize the units, and deliver to their dock. There are many contingencies that go along with each step and, in the past, you’ve had difficulty with certain departments (which will remain nameless) doing their jobs. To improve your company’s workflow, you decide to set up a pipeline specifically for fulfilling distributor orders.

Once built in Insightly, you can reuse the pipeline for subsequent orders. No more scrambling at the last minute to fulfill an order. Your project pipeline keeps everybody on track, every single time.

Better yet, you’re able to achieve the much-needed visibility that you so desperately crave.

5. Could We Automate the Delegation Within Our Project Pipelines?

For the sake of discussion, let’s keep with the baseball bat example. After you run a few orders through your pipeline, you begin to realize that specific tasks happen during certain phases of production – regardless of order volume. For instance, during the sourcing stage your team must always do the following:

Select the correct vendor
Prepare the purchase order
Route the PO for internal approval
Submit a deposit
Track inbound freight
Pay the balance to the vendor

As we saw in the recurring task section, it’s inefficient for your team to waste time with manual task entry. Unfortunately, these are not technically “recurring tasks,” as they only happen when you have a project going.

Here’s some good news: As an Insightly user, you can harness the power of activity sets to reduce unnecessary administrative work. Simply configure your activity set for the correct pipeline phase, create your task templates, save your settings, and you’re done.

Now, each time a project advances into the sourcing pipeline phase, all tasks will automatically be created on your behalf. You can even auto-assign them to specific users in advance (or do so manually when the project changes phases).

6. How Will We Create Scalable Visibility?

As your team buys into your delegation methodology, you’ll likely witness an explosion of productivity – particularly in the volume of created and completed tasks and projects. This is, of course, great news, but it can also be overwhelming.

Luckily, your Insightly account makes it easy to track and report on your team’s productivity. Jump over to your reports and play around with the various task and project reporting options. Keep in mind that your reports will start out at a relatively high level, but you can always filter and drill down into the exact data points that you need.

Need to find out how many tasks an individual team member has completed? Want to see who is doing the most amount of work?

Insightly lets you build interactive charts and graphs with your data, making it easier to know who is performing – and, who could stand to pick up the slack.

Think Before You Delegate

As you can see, taking a structured approach to delegation can mitigate confusion and improve the productivity of your entire staff. It can also help you achieve even greater ROI from your Insightly subscription.

So, before doing any further delegation, assign yourself a task to think through these six questions. It might just be the most impactful task you ever create!

November 9, 2017

Why Baseball and Sales Have a Lot in Common

“No thanks, we’ve decided to stick with our current vendor.”

Such words are never easy for a sales rep to hear. Despite your hours of preparation, proposals, and in-person meetings, the prospect decided your solution wasn’t the right fit. Was it something you said? Could you have done something differently? How did you not see this coming?

Stop beating yourself up and face a simple fact: We all strike out once in awhile.

My goal with this post is to make you feel a little better about your recent strikeout. So, let’s explore the many similarities between two of my favorite things: baseball and sales.

Failure is More Common than Success

In today’s busy world, it’s hard to find three hours to watch an entire baseball game. Granted, DVR technology can help speed things up. Even then, I usually fall asleep before the last pitch is thrown. When this happens, I’ll typically watch the highlight reel the next day.

Highlight reels are great – they allow us to know what happened in much less time. However, they also present a false sense of reality – home run, triple, exciting play at the plate, more home runs. Highlight reels only show, well, the highlights. By necessity, they cut out at least 90% of the rest of the game. What gets cut out? Boring things like:

Foul outs
Balks
Pickoffs
Ground outs
Pop ups
Errors
Passed balls
Failed bunting attempts
…and, of course, strikeouts

In retrospect, these events seem forgettable to the average fan (which is why they don’t make the highlight reel). Yet, in reality, they account for most of the action. They also tell us an important fact about baseball: failure is more common than success.

Take batting average for instance. What is a “good” batting average? In the big leagues, very few players are able to maintain an average above .300. In fact, Ted Williams, arguably the greatest hitter of all time, was the last person to hit above .400 for an entire season (during the 1941 season).

In other words, today’s best baseball players get out seven out of ten times. And, the best batter of all time, was only marginally better than that (six out of ten).

It’s clear to see how success in the batter’s box relates to what you do in sales. If you call ten cold leads, you might be ecstatic if three bought from you. Like your baseball brethren, you’re accustomed to dealing with failure. It just makes your next “hit” even sweeter!

Not Every Hit is a Home Run

Swinging for the fences can get you into trouble. Sure, you might get lucky and occasionally hit one into the upper deck. You’ll probably also experience more strikeouts in the process. Smart hitters know when to adjust their approach, choke up, and settle for a hard-hit single or double.

Likewise, your pipeline always has a few potential “home runs” waiting for you to close. That six-figure contract you’ve been working on is the perfect example. If you close that deal, your quota will be looking good for months.

Being the sales professional that you are, you know better than to focus only on big deals. It would be nice if they happen, but there are many factors outside of your control. You can’t force big deals through, just like baseball players can’t force themselves to hit home runs.

So, how do you “choke up” and improve your batting average? For starters, you need a way to size up deals. A CRM, such as Insightly, can be a valuable resource for doing exactly that. Insightly makes it easier for you to tell a potential single from a grand slam. When adding an opportunity, Insightly prompts you to specify the deal’s potential value:

Using Insightly’s opportunity report builder, you can then filter deals based on revenue potential. Need a few quick infield hits? Set your filter, identify your targets, and hustle down the first base line.

Slumps Happen (& Pressing Doesn’t Help)

Even Ted Williams went through slumps. All baseball players do – batters and pitchers alike. Unfortunately, there’s no magic cure for a slump. A batter can’t make the ball drop in between two fielders. A pitcher can’t snap a losing streak simply by willing it.

Although slumps are hard to shake, there’s one thing that makes them even worse: pressing too hard. Now, I’m certainly no Ted Williams, but I’ve played in my fair share of baseball games. During that time, I’ve endured slumps that seemed to never end. Going twenty at-bats without a hit certainly makes you question your abilities. Why are my teammates still getting hits? What am I doing wrong? Do I need to practice harder? Is coach going to sit me on the bench if I don’t get things going?

A slump is certainly a humbling experience. It’s also a test of your self-confidence. Worrying yourself silly doesn’t help matters; it only makes things worse.

In sales, you’ve probably gone through several dry patches. For whatever reason, you can’t seem to move the needle. You feel like nothing has changed, but clearly the results show otherwise. When is it time to worry?

Most slumps are caused by nothing more than the law of averages. Ditto for when you’re knocking it out of the park. Good times and bad times tend to average each other out. Just remember that the next time you go on an “o-fer” streak.

It’s a Team Sport

At the peak of my career, I could only get my fastball into the mid-80s. But, for the sake of conversation (and my ego), let’s imagine my fastball hovered around 102 mph. Let’s also imagine that my splitter, slider, and changeup were virtually unhittable.

Even with such a lethal pitch arsenal, it would be impossible for me to single-handedly impact my win-loss record. Throwing a perfect game is pointless unless your team provides run support. It’s a team sport.

The same is true in what you do. Being a superstar deal closer is great, but you also need a superstar team to deliver on the promises you’ve made. You may not have control over hiring decisions, but you can choose where you work. If management doesn’t have your back, then perhaps it’s time to take your talents elsewhere. If they do, you still need a way to hold others accountable. Connecting the sales and delivery functions is a step in the right direction. Insightly can help you do that.

Since Insightly is an all-in-one CRM and project management tool, the transition from sales to delivery is completely seamless. The moment a deal closes, the opportunity can be immediately converted into a new project.

As you stride confidently to the locker room, you can rest easy knowing the team has everything necessary to deliver. All emails, notes, files, and links are preserved, providing a 360-degree view of your valiant effort. “Now go out there and get me some run support,” you think to yourself.

You Need the Right Equipment

Obviously, a hitter must have a bat in hand before stepping up to the plate. What’s less obvious are the many factors involved with choosing the perfect bat.

Ash or maple?
Large or small grain?
Painted or natural finish?
Cupped end or rounded?
Long or short?
Heavy or light?
Pine tar or no pine tar?
Gripped handle or not?
Well-known or lesser-known brand

With limitless combinations, how do batters choose the right bat? Some rely on recommendations from other players. Others do plenty of research, scouring the web for just the right fit. Still others order several different makes and models, testing each in batting practice before making a final decision.

Much like a batter, your company has countless options when it comes to “equipment.” CRMs are no exception to the rule. With dozens of cloud-based platforms to choose from, how can you help your team pick the right CRM software?

Take a page out of the batter’s playbook and start by asking colleagues for suggestions. What do they like / dislike about their current CRMs? Which CRMs have they tried but abandoned? Which features are must-haves? Have they noticed an uptick in “home runs” since implementation?

It’s also wise to do your own homework. What are people saying online? Read plenty of real reviews from real users (check out some of Insightly’s ratings here) and drill down into specific pros and cons. No solution is perfect, but some CRMs definitely stack up better than others.

After building your shortlist, take advantage of free trial offers before making a CRM buying decision. (If one of your shortlisted tools does not offer a free trial, you might want to reconsider it. What are they hiding?)

The Diamond Awaits

I hope this article has, in some small way, softened the impact of your recent strikeout. Stop worrying about it! Let it go! Trust your skills and turn your attention to the next at bat, the next pitch, and the next big play. Your team is counting on you – you can do it!

November 2, 2017

The best of Insightly just got better

New and long-time Insightly users to the customer relationship management platform, recently experienced the latest version of Insightly’s CRM.

From the introduction of visual Kanban drag-and-drop boards to customized list views, customers rave about a variety of product UI and enhancements.

Learn more about Insightly’s CRM by attending our upcoming CEO-lead webinar on Wednesday, November 15th at 9am Pacific Time.

Oooohs and Views

Here’s a preview of our improved user interface.

Kanban Boards

“The new look of the boards is great and we have been enjoying the ability to move things easily between categories (in the Kanban views).”

–Dan Henricson, Enterprise Improvement Solutions

Panel Screen Slide

Hover Display Magic

Custom Fields Logic

Don’t forget to sign up for Insightly’s upcoming webinar on Wednesday, November 15th to get an insider’s look at more features.

October 25, 2017

Dreamforce 2017 Eat & Drink Guide

Convention center concessions never win Michelin stars for their wallet extortion beer, shrink-wrapped limp lettuce sub sandwiches, blowfish-puffed chip bags, and hockey puck cookies. Dreamforce may boast best-in-class swag, but you can’t chew on stress balls, chapstick or organic cotton socks.

Don’t hold your caffeine fix hostage to metallic coffee carafes at break-out sessions. Rebel against the stale popcorn scented, air-conditioned keynote hush.

Below is your #DF17 hit-the-street-and-stride guide to the best kept secret foodie destinations of San Francisco, all ’15 minutes or less’ footsteps from the conference epicenter.

*All distances listed are from Moscone Center.

FEAST

Rise and Shine

Equator Coffee & Teas 222 2nd St

10 minutes on foot*

The half-block long, terraced stadium seating cafe atrium is more than enough square footage for mansplaining and sifting through your free trade show loot. Bonus: Their cold brew acts as an emergency filibrator for hungover hearts (and minds).

Blue Bottle 66 Mint St

14 minutes on foot

Get your buzz at one of the Bay Area’s iconic coffee brands; Blue Bottle’s founder was a freelance musician who began roasting beans in a former Oakland potting shed. Sip a cup of hot midnight heaven and sink your teeth into Instagram-worthy avocado toast or an oven-mitt sized Belgian waffle.

Lunch Comas

La Capra 360 3rd Street

9 minutes on foot

You won’t find any bleating she-goats at this tucked-away Italian cafe. Vegetarians salivate over the cranapple brie sandwich and marinated artichoke caprese salad. And carnivorous appetites are known to quote Don Vito Corleone after ordering the Godfather-inspired meatball hoagie.

Soma Eats 186 2nd Street

10 minutes on foot

This centrally located American lunch bistro unites an angry, divided America. Southerners go straight for the deviled egg Peppadew pepper sandwich while big city Yanks hunger for the BLT & Zataar spiced fried egg sandwich. Go ahead… ignore that opinionated a-hole screaming outside on the street and pass your lunch hour in culinary consensus bliss.

Uno Dos Tacos 595 Market St

15 minutes on foot

Ditch Chipotle and discover this taco, burrito and salad bowl outdoor patio paradise. Braised beef tongue. Chicken tinga. Moist pork carnitas. Avalanche on the homemade salsa and smoky black bean sides for a happy mouth explosion of meat and heat.

Dinner Decadence

Salt House 545 Mission St.

12 minutes on foot

Starve yourself by day and per diem binge by night. The $100+ wagyu beef daily special menu entree is the ideal expense account one-night stand. In the mood for something less impulsive? The strawberry jus duck breast or roasted cherry tomato short ribs offer equal lip-licking satisfaction.

Wayfare Tavern 558 Sacramento St.

20 minutes on foot

Plan on doing twice the amount of one-legged plank push ups on your hotel room floor the morning after a meal at this manly upholstered, upscale pub. From the pillowy soft, baby-head sized bread popovers to the burrata whipped potatoes to the Best Fried Chicken in America (Food & Wine Magazine 2016), you’ll experience your very first ‘comfort food’ orgasm.

Cockscomb 564 Fourth St.

15 minutes on foot

Bring a mafia-sized appetite to this expert offal cookery and butchery dining destination. Wood oven suckled whole pigs head. Pine cone, apple and endive smoked duck. For those not keen on eating their childhood storybook friends, choose from an abundance of root vegetable divine and creative cruciferous dishes.

DRINK

You can drink your weight in liquid. And there’s no better week than Dreamforce to win that bet.

Skip the caterpillar crawling, city block long lines to official #DF17 parties and pony up to the nearest bar.

Why Insightly is Like Having Your Own Business Intelligence Internet

The web fuels your company with the timely information and business intelligence you need to stay competitive.

When are our estimated quarterly taxes due this year? How will the new privacy regulations affect how we interact with customers? Which software is the best fit for our exact needs and budget? In which social media groups does our target market engage?

It seems there’s no question too complex for a simple web search.

As powerful as the Internet can be for your business, it’s also a vast and ever-growing ecosystem. With billions and billions of web pages to sift through, there’s clearly more information than you could ever consume.

Luckily, Insightly can help you make better sense of it all. In this post, I’ll share a few tips for converting Insightly into a personal Internet for your business.

Problem: Your Information is Everywhere

At a very basic level, the Internet is nothing more than a collection of linked-together files. Some files are made available as plain text articles with embedded images (such as the blog post that you’re reading!) while others offer more of a multi-media experience (such as videos). Regardless of a file’s format, most publishers aim to provide web content that is helpful, informative, and easily accessible.

Looking at your business, you likely come into contact with dozens of “helpful and informative” pieces of information each day. For example, that 12-page blog article about SEO that your marketing intern sent you can easily be bookmarked for later. Unfortunately, there’s not an easy way to “bookmark” things like:

A spreadsheet containing the names and contact details for your top 100 leads (ranked in order of importance)
A PDF report from your accountant, comparing different profitability scenarios
An email from your recruiter, explaining her top three candidates for your sales department
A private Google Docs file, containing your company’s strategy roadmap (prepared by your business development consultant)
Three recent invoices from a vendor who might be ripping you off
A project plan, containing detailed milestones and tasks for various staff members
Email marketing campaign data from your most recent newsletter

So, how do you deal with things like this? If you’re like most business owners, you probably try to use some combination of inbox labels and cloud or desktop folders. Trouble is, things frequently get lost – and, perhaps even worse, there’s no guarantee you’ll ever remember to follow up.

Aggregate the Information that Matters to You

A platform like Insightly solves this problem by getting your most important information into a usable, consistent format in a single location. Instead of spreading your files across multiple locations (which aren’t connected, by the way), Insightly becomes your one-stop location for business intel – accessible from any web-enabled device. In other words, Insightly becomes your own personal Internet.

With that being said, let’s see how Insightly can solve the challenges mentioned above. (In the interest of brevity, I’ll focus on just a few of the examples that we’ve discussed.)

Spreadsheet with Your Top 100 Leads:

At its core, Insightly is a CRM (customer relationship management) system. Therefore, if you’re using it correctly, your team won’t need to waste time creating lead tracking spreadsheets. Since your leads are already in Insightly, your team should instead just use the “lead rating” field to group important prospects in order. Or, you could always create a custom field to get a pure 1-to-100 sequenced list. Either way, all of this should be done within your Insightly account – not spreadsheets.

PDF from Your Accountant:

Your CPA’s time isn’t cheap. You’ll therefore want to make the most of his or her efforts. In the past, reports like this have sat in your inbox for weeks. Why not forward that email (attachments and all) to an accounting-related Insightly project? In doing so, you’ll get it out of your inbox and into a more action-friendly format. Insightly does the filing and admin work for you, saving a copy of the email and PDF exactly where you need it. For added firepower, consider enabling an automated workflow, ensuring that you’ll actually do something with it in the future.

Private Google Docs File:

Insightly connects to dozens of cloud-based apps that you’re already using, including several document management platforms. So, rather than sharing the doc via email, Insightly lets you “attach” cloud documents to any lead, contact, organization, opportunity, lead, or project record. Just connect Insightly to your document management tool, and you’re good to go.

No more hunting through dozens of online folders or email threads. The info you need is neatly linked to the correct records in Insightly.

Project Plan with Milestone Data:

One of the best-kept secrets among Insightly users is the tool’s native project management capabilities. Insightly is actually much more than a CRM; it’s built to support every step of the customer journey – from lead cultivation through delivery. So, if your team is using an external project tracking tool, your company might be missing out on a golden opportunity to boost efficiency. Insightly collects all of your project-related documentation, project plans, worksheets, and tasks into a centralized hub. Track milestones and project pipelines with much less effort (and confusion).

Build an In-House Search Engine

With everything stored securely in Insightly, now the fun can really begin. Insightly indexes your information, making it searchable by you and your staff. In other words, Insightly serves as an in-house search engine for your business.

Stop and think about the potential impact this could have on your business. Instead of searching one database for an email address and your computer’s folders for a related file, Insightly allows you to search across all record and file types simply by keying in a few words.

Searching in Insightly will return (in real time) any potential matches within your:

Contacts
Leads
Opportunities
Organizations
Projects
Files
Notes
Comments
Tasks
Events

With so many potential matches, however, you might be asking yourself, “How does Insightly decide which records to show first?” The software’s search algorithm takes into consideration a number of factors and logic, returning the records that you’re most likely looking for. For example, if you’re looking for a first and last name, Insightly will rank an exact contact name higher than matches found in notes or comments.

Sometimes, you know exactly what type of information you’re looking for. Doing too broad of a search might be more of a distraction than help. For example, I’m sure that you’ve used a Google images filter to identify a particular graphic or photo. The same can be done in Insightly, thanks to the tool’s intuitive search filter. Remember that project you created to forward reports from your CPA? To search for it, just key in the letters “CPA,” and click the “Projects” tab. Voila! All of your accountant’s valuable insights are now accessible at your fingertips.

As with any other search engine optimization strategy, manually creating “links” between your content is always a smart decision. Insightly makes is easy to link records together, saving your team time and effort. Better yet, Insightly even lets you track why a link exists – such as how one person knows the other.

And, as relationships and circumstances change, you can always edit or remove a link altogether…no IT help required!

Make the Most of Your In-House Knowledge

With a centralized, robust search engine of business intelligence at your disposal, your team will be primed for new levels of efficiency. To maximize the value of this asset, however, be sure to develop an ongoing strategy for keeping things fresh. After all, the world wide web wasn’t built in a single day. Nor did it stop expanding at a certain date in time. The Internet is always growing, always changing. Likewise, your Insightly knowledge base should always be evolving. Gaining buy-in from staff is an important step for building the best version of your in-house search engine.

One final note: It’s likely that some of your team members will be resistant to change. That’s OK, as you’re in this for the long haul. Create detailed work instructions and training videos, explaining how you expect the system to be utilized. Track which team members are the most active, and which team members aren’t holding up their end of the deal. In time, your staff will find that having a “micro Internet” actually helps them complete more tasks, access more reliable information, and achieve more goals.

After all, who doesn’t like to have everything accessible with a simple web search? I sure do.

October 9, 2017

6 Signs It’s Time to Switch from Spreadsheets to a CRM

Your business is doing well. Sales are up and clients seem happy.

In the back of your mind, however, something has been bothering you lately. It’s your sales process. Since opening your doors, you’ve always relied on spreadsheets for managing the pipeline. Leads in one spreadsheet, customers in another. You even have spreadsheets to track tasks, projects, and revenue forecasts.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” you tell yourself. But, something in the back of your mind still wonders. Do you have a broken sales process and just not know it?

In this post, we’ll explore six signs that it’s time to get off of spreadsheets.

1. Your Team Does More Admin Work than Engagement

“Keeping busy” isn’t a guarantee for success. In fact, spending too much time on the wrong things can actually lead to failure.

You obviously know this, as evidenced by the growth of your company. But, as you objectively examine your sales process, is it possible that your team is working on the wrong things – at the expense of customer engagement? If you’re like most companies using spreadsheets, these administrative tasks might consume too much of your staff’s workday:

Scrolling through hundreds of rows to find the right record
Keying in every new lead by hand
Moving closed-won leads to customer tracking sheets
Deleting or archiving closed-lost leads
Building and testing custom filters for segmentation purposes
Reformatting row and column sizes
Deduplicating overlapping records
Fumbling with chart wizards to generate meaningful business intelligence
Troubleshooting the inevitable formatting issue
Training new hires on what to do (or not to do!)

Clearly, your team has good intentions. They’re trying their best to make your spreadsheet-based system work.

As I’m sure you’ve already realized, there is a distinct opportunity cost to such an approach: less time selling and more time on busywork. Do you really want your top reps spending so much time on data entry?

Probably not.

2. Records are Always Inaccurate

Your business depends on accurate and timely information. As each moment passes, your data becomes less reliable. Some of this is natural – circumstances change rapidly in today’s marketplace. However, some of the dependability issues are caused by your spreadsheet-driven workflow.

Do any of these sound familiar?

Typos: It’s difficult to close a deal when you have inaccurate contact information. A mistyped email address or phone number creates another unneeded disruption to your follow-up process. Unfortunately, spreadsheets are breeding grounds for typos. So many cells to update in so little time!

Accidental Overwrites & Deletions: Stop and ask yourself this question: What exactly is a spreadsheet? Obviously, it’s a digital file consisting of rows and columns. There’s also a good chance that it’s a shared repository, accessible by your entire team. Keyword here being “shared.” The moment you share a file (on your network drive or via the cloud), you expose yourself to accidental overwrites and deletions. Granted, some cloud-based services allow you to track (and roll back) changes. Even then, knowing which version to restore is itself a chore.

Double Record Entry: What happens when a lead talks to two or more of your team members on the same day? Double record entry, that’s what. Since it’s impossible to keep your contacts in alphabetical order (given the nature of sales), some reps are less diligent in checking for existing records. It’s often easier to just add a new row to your spreadsheet and move on.

Formula Issues: Not everyone is a spreadsheet wizard like you are. To make sure everything in your spreadsheet works right, you’ve built in all kinds of complex tabulations and display formulas. As your team adds and edits records, things have been known to break.

3. You Have No Idea What Some Reps Do All Day

Most of your reps are rock solid. There are a couple, however, that you’re not so sure about.

Take Billy, for example. Billy rarely gets into the office before 9 am. (He claims to be “networking” at his favorite breakfast hangout.) After spending an hour or two “catching up on emails,” it’s already time for lunch. After an hour-long feast, Billy finally picks up the phone and appears to be making calls. He always forgets to update the deal tracking spreadsheet, which frustrates you to no end. Although, even when Billy remembers to update the sheet, he rarely provides much substance.

Billy does seem to hit his quota each month – but barely. You’re sure that if he would just apply himself more, he could achieve so much more.

Sadly, there’s not much you can do for Billy. At the moment, he only seems accountable to one thing: that is, his monthly quota. Even if you did assign other milestones for Billy to achieve, there’d be no great way to track them.

Alas, poor Billy will continue to drift along as a mediocre sales rep, and you’ll keep wondering why he’s not more motivated.

4. It’s Painful to View Your Pipeline

“I’d like to see open opportunities for our top-performing product, broken down by city, state, and sales rep.”

In a perfect world, you’d ask for things like this. In reality, you know this type of request would be nearly impossible to fulfill. The data is probably available, but making sense of it all is a completely different story.

Why? Here are just a few reasons.

Data Overload: Consider your lead tracking spreadsheet for a moment. That sheet has so many rows and columns of data that just opening it stresses you out. Alternate mailing address? Check. Sister’s married name? Check. Favorite golf course? Check again. But, where are the fields you really need, such as projected close date, probability of close, and product interest? Just finding the right data points can seem like more effort than it’s worth.

Pivot Tables Galore: The fun doesn’t stop once you’ve identified the correct rows and columns. If you’re comparing more than a couple data points, you’ll probably have to brush up on your pivot table skills. Have fun with that!

New Sales vs. Upsells: Since your data is siloed in separate spreadsheets, you’ll likely need to merge multiple data sets to get the answers you seek. After all, selling to existing clients is just as important as winning new business. Your pipeline should deliver a 360-degree view of your sales activity – not only demand for a specific audience.

5. Your Forecast is Always Wrong (Big Time)

A sales forecast should be more than just an accountability guidepost for your sales team. As a business owner, you need a relatively realistic view into the future as to ensure:

Payroll is met
Supplier invoices and bills are paid
Proper staffing changes are implemented to accommodate forecasted demand shifts
The right mix of equipment and tools are in place
Your production team feels like they’re kept in the loop
Existing customers still feel highly satisfied

No sales forecast is ever perfect, but it sure would be nice to get close once in a while! As you know all too well, spreadsheet-based forecasts can be notoriously errant.

A major cause for this inaccuracy involves accessibility of the sheet itself. Perhaps you’ve saved the pipeline spreadsheet out on a network drive. Or, perhaps you maintain a shared Google Sheets file. Either way, it’s practically impossible for your team to provide updates while on the go. (Have you ever tried to update a spreadsheet on your mobile device?) Unlike a mobile CRM, your spreadsheet-based system requires users to be physically in an office and using a computer. During busy weeks, several days may pass before reps have time to make updates.

How can you build a reliable forecast when sales information is stale by at least a few days? You can’t – it’s that simple.

6. Everything Just “Feels” Disorganized

Even if you could miraculously make sales spreadsheets work in your business, there’s one thing they definitely can’t do: organize all of your sales collateral.

I’m talking about:

Proposals
Quotes
Invoices
Presentation decks
Customer business cards
Brochures and whitepapers
Technical drawings
Spec sheets
Email histories

Most likely, you’ve created additional shared drive folders and inbox tags to organize this type of information. One folder for quotes, another for invoices, etc. That’s certainly better than nothing, but I’m sure it’s still a chore to find the right file – especially when you need it quickly.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have everything indexed by customer, lead, or prospect? For example, with Insightly, you can easily build links between a contact and all related correspondence and files. Working on a deal that’s gone through multiple proposal iterations? With Insightly, you’re able to get a full picture of how the relationship has progressed. There’s no need to dig through countless folders and inboxes – it’s all right there at your fingertips.

Even better, Insightly integrates with the industry’s top inboxes and document apps, making it even easier to find and organize your important sales information.

Time to Switch? I Think So

Let’s be honest – your spreadsheet-based system isn’t holding up its end of the bargain. It’s time you at least considered switching to a cloud-based CRM system.

DOWNLOAD OUR FREE EXCEL SALES TRACKER TEMPLATE to easily import your contacts into Insightly.

With the availability of free CRM platforms like Insightly, what are you waiting for?

October 5, 2017

Putting the Relationship Back into CRM

Find out what enterprises can do to go beyond sales force automation to create profitable and sustainable relationships.

Since its inception in the late 90’s, the proponents of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and its community, have been promising a new nirvana of customer centricity. They have been working hard to build software platforms and social technologies to engage them, educate them, analyze their buying behaviors, entice them to purchase and then support them in solving their problems post-sale. But what has CRM really done to make the customer’s experience better than ever, and how has it helped businesses to grow by cultivating customer relationships over time?

Gartner, defines Customer Relationship Management as “the business strategy that optimizes revenue and profitability while promoting customer satisfaction and loyalty. CRM technologies enable strategy, and identify and manage customer relationships, in person or virtually. CRM software provides functionality to companies in four segments: sales, marketing, customer service and digital commerce.”

This definition of CRM clearly does not place the “relationship” at its core. While not inaccurate, it clearly considers the customers as something about which to strategize and optimize for profitability, rather than someone with whom to build a lifetime, personal relationship — arguably the key to long term business success. Tony Kavanagh, CMO of Insightly, explained, “Unfortunately, Gartner’s clinical definition of CRM is the spirit in which most businesses to date have built their customer relationship management systems and processes, using technology as a substitute for the care and attention that every customer expects. Moving forward this will not be good enough.”

Setting up for recurring sales

Sales force automation technology does a great job of converting leads into sales. However. the availability of an ever-increasing number of higher quality alternatives and the ease with which to access them, are placing greater demands on enterprises to cultivate lasting relationships driven by customer needs rather than commissions. The relationship part of CRM needs to address what happens after the money has been collected as much as before.

To address this gap, CRM data needs to facilitate project delivery and improved customization. Project delivery involves tracking the customer engagement with products services after the fact. In an enterprise sales context, this means looking at the timeline, customer satisfaction, trouble tickets in a way that is fed back into the sales cycle. This requires more than just a technology integration, but with empowering sales staff with the processes and mindset to follow up after a commission check has been cut.

When future industrialist Henry Kaiser first came to Washington state in 1906, he offered to be a salesperson for one of the area’s hardware stores. He was initially turned down when the manager said they had enough salespeople. Kaiser countered with an offer to focus on outside sales. He spent his days on construction sites and got to know the needs of the areas contractors, rather than selling products. Mostly he just helped short staff project managers find plumbers, electricians, and carpenters they needed to finish buildings. In short order, he was outselling the rest of the sales people combined as these happy contractors ordered the parts needed for these jobs from him.

Bringing customer insight across channels

It can be challenging creating this level of engagement across multiple touchpoints in a customer relationship. The goal is to make every customer feel like they are the only one, whether there are tens or tens of thousands of them. But customer interactions tend to be orchestrated across multiple channels such as sales calls, support requests, and project collaboration via web, email, chat, text. Customers can get easily frustrated if they feel like they starting from scratch.

Leading enterprises are starting to pursue a new style of engagement called moment marketing that engage customers across channels in a consistent and highly customized manner. The idea came from the mass consumer marketing space, but the concepts apply to enterprise engagements as well. The basic principle is to move from a predefined user journey or sales process to a style of engagement that matches a customer’s needs.

Forrester analyst Joe Stanhope explained, “It starts by bringing these channels and data together where you can mine it with a single customer profile. You start to understand more about your customers. You understand how they have interacted and where they have interacted to personalize engagements and create more relevance for your customers across these channels.”

Every relationship is unique

Quick sales are great for the bottom line in the short run, but are easy targets for upstart competitors. Longer lasting relationships require developing a far deeper appreciation of customers as individuals that goes beyond the traditional views of firmographics, demographics and purchase history.

This could include understanding:

the complex organization hierarchies in which they work every day;
the business partnership they have built;
their professional affiliations and associations;
personal preferences;
opinions; and
other signals expressed on public forums and social media.

Kavanagh said “All these insights, together, help businesses paint a clearer picture of who their customers truly are, allowing them to tailor how they more effectively communicate with their customers over their lifetime, ultimately forging stronger relationships.”

This requires bringing in a more complete view of a contact’s communications history, key relationships, events and tasks, social profiles, sales opportunities and project involvement. Enterprises can leverage this data to employ unique relationship graph engines and complex algorithms to automatically capture the links between contacts, organizations and the business relationships they share and use these insights to build detailed and multifaceted social profiles of their customers. In the long run this kind of approach not only build lasting business, it also strengthens the bonds of professional engagement and nurtures customers for life.

George Lawton is a journalist based near San Francisco, Calif. Over the last 15 years he has written over 2,000 stories for publications about computers, communications, knowledge management, business, health and other areas.

October 2, 2017

10 Creative Ways to Use Insightly CRM Voice Notes

Have you ever tried using the Insightly audio notes feature?

If not, you’re definitely missing out. Insightly allows you to record up to 60 minutes of audio per file. Voice notes can be linked to contacts, organizations, leads, opportunities, and projects. Best of all, free and paid users alike can access this feature.

So, what are some ways to use audio notes? Here are ten ideas to consider.

1. Recapping Sales Appointments

The best sales reps are usually very busy people. With client meetings from sunrise to sunset, there’s rarely a down moment. It’s therefore difficult (if not impossible) for your sales team to type summary reports for each completed appointment.

A more feasible approach could involve the use of audio notes. After finishing a sales call, the rep can easily locate the lead or opportunity record (via the Insightly mobile CRM app). Within seconds, he could be recording a brief explanation of how things went. Once saved, someone from your back office could then listen to the recording and update the record (such as changing the pipeline status).

A task that would otherwise take days to get completed (or never get done at all), could be done within minutes. Most importantly, your organization has the information it needs – and, your sales reps can get back to what they do best: selling.

2. Training Your Sales Reps

Good sales help is hard to find. And, more frustratingly, the really good ones are even harder to keep. (The competition is always happy to pay more!)

Before your top sales talent jumps ship, it might be wise to capture their best practices into audio format. In doing so, you’ll create a more scalable onboarding and training workflow for new sales hires.

What types of audio files could be beneficial? In a perfect world, new team members would probably appreciate a selection of recorded:

Cold calls
Follow-ups with stale opportunities
Upselling examples
Conversations with unhappy customers
Follow-ups with satisfied customers
Testimonial solicitations

Before you turn your star performers loose to create such recordings, be sure to review best practices for recording phone conversations. (You may need to ask clients for permission before recording such conversations, or you could use role play to achieve the same outcome.)

To what type of Insightly record should your sales team attach such audio notes? One option involves creating a never-ending project called “sales training.” As new team members are onboarded, add them to the project and assign new tasks, inviting them to review the recordings.

3. Outlining Blog Posts

Your content marketing always seems to take a back seat to more pressing matters. The moment you sit down to write a blog post, there’s always some new emergency that requires your attention. Despite your best intentions, there’s just rarely an hour in your week to focus on writing.

Audio notes can help you move one step closer toward your next published article. Simply pull out your smartphone, find your “content marketing” project in Insightly, and start dictating. Don’t get too worried about grammar or being concise. Just focus on collecting your ideas. (After all, you’re the subject matter expert.) You can have one of your staff members transcribe and edit the piece later on.

As you use Insightly to capture more of your blog ideas, you may find it helpful to follow a specific dictation pattern. For example, you might start by clearly stating the objective of the post. Once stated, you could then pause the recording until your first supporting point comes to mind. (Sometimes staring at a ticking timer is enough to give you writer’s block!) Repeat this process until you’ve fully developed your thoughts.

4. Interviewing Clients for Case Studies

Recent industry surveys have shown that customers trust online reviews as much (if not more) than word-of-mouth referrals. This is an astounding statistic, and it’s one that your business should be capitalizing on. The development of case studies for your website is one effective method for doing so.

Case studies don’t just fall from the sky. In fact, well-done case studies require substantial effort to produce. Interviewing clients, drafting content, and gaining final approval are just a few of the steps involved.

Luckily, Insightly voice notes can serve an invaluable role in this process. Rather than facilitating the client interview and manually keying in notes, Insightly can do the heavy lifting for you. Just jump into the client’s record and start recording. Your client will likely be impressed by how tech-savvy you are, and you can stay focused on asking the right questions.

Once you return to your desk, you’ll see the audio file in your activity feed. What a great feeling to know that you’ll never misquote another client!

5. Capturing New Product or Service Ideas

Great ideas can come during the strangest moments. For whatever reason, the grocery store checkout line seems to be a particularly fertile source of your ideas. Unfortunately, you rarely have a writing utensil on hand, and your phone’s notepad is a notorious black hole.

Instead, you might try creating a “new ideas” project in Insightly. When genius strikes, you’re then just a tap away from fleshing out an explanatory voice note. You can also customize the naming of your audio notes, making it easier to locate ideas in the future.

For added accountability, you could then assign yourself a date-sensitive task (with an email reminder). You’ll not only have an in-depth explanation of the new idea (in your own words), but you’ll more importantly have a deadline by which you must take action.

After reviewing your original idea and determining it has merit, you might choose to create a new project specifically for implementation. Choose between milestones or pipelines, based on the nature of the idea.

And to think….all of this started with a bag of avocados, a conveyer belt, and a store clerk named Jake.

6. Delegating to Your Team

You know what your team should be doing. If only they’d just do it!

The sad reality is that some instructions get murky when translated from your brain into text format. Just because you’ve assigned a task, it doesn’t mean that your staff will actually understand it.

For projects that are especially important, adding a voice note can help to reduce confusion and increase the quality of work. So, when should you take the added effort to include an audio delegation? Here are some possibilities:

You Need Proof of What You Said: Tired of playing the blame game with staff? Leave no room for error by adding a verbal narrative of what should be done. It’s hard for your team to point fingers when they have access to you in your own words.

Only You Know How to Do Something: There are some things that others in your organization can’t possibly know. (For example, your motivation for starting the business.) Sure, you could type up an email or document with this information. But, that takes time – time that you don’t have. A voice file is a much more efficient way to provide clarity.

You’re Tired of Repeating Yourself: Saying the same things over and over? Say it once in a recording, attach it to a project, and point future questions to this resource.

7. Increasing Engagement During Meetings

“Who is going to volunteer to take minutes at today’s staff meeting?” The room goes silent, until one brave soul hesitantly offers to do the work.

If you’ve ever been put into this situation, you know how difficult it is to take notes and participate in the discussion. You want to share your opinion, but you also want to avoid being the scapegoat for bad recordkeeping.

The next time you’re called on, consider harnessing the power of voice notes. Simply launch a related project or other record and start the recording process. As long as the meeting last less than an hour, you can rest easy knowing that Insightly has your back.

And, if your team is expecting a set of typed meeting minutes, you can just download the recording and transcribe it into document format. (If you’re too busy, simply assign the task to your administrative assistant.) Once transcribed, the typed minutes can be attached as a file to any contact, organization, opportunity, or project.

By providing both audio and typed meeting minutes, you’re sure to impress your colleagues!

8. Handing Things Off

In today’s virtual work ecosystem, aligning schedules and time zones can be challenging. Your team in the Philippines is usually gone for the day before your West Coast staff arrives. This situation forces your West Coast team to waste hours simply determining what has been accomplished.

Audio notes can create a seamless interaction between different teams. Instead of only relying on written updates, an audible summary of the day’s work can expedite the handoff from one worker to the next. (It might be wise to develop a standard naming structure for audio notes, including the day’s date or project number.)

And, unlike shared documents, which are easily overwritten and edited, an electronic archive of voice recordings (in the worker’s voice) creates an additional layer of accountability. If it’s later determined that a major oversight has been made, reviewing prior recordings can help your team identify where things went wrong.

9. Celebrating a Job Well Done

Your team works hard to close new deals. They work even harder to build positive, long-term client relationships. Although bonuses and merit increases are greatly appreciated, sometimes a kind word from management goes even further.

You’ve been known to go out of your way to show your appreciation. Many times, this comes in the form of a brief email. Other times, you’ve shown gratitude during company-wide meetings. Recording an Insightly audio note can be another effective way to show people you care.

Unlike an email (which usually lacks personality) or a shout-out in a meeting (which expires immediately after spoken), a voice recording can be a lasting source of motivation for your team. In addition to being front and center in Insightly, users can also download a copy to their computers. It’s the gift that keeps on giving!

10. Blowing Off Steam

You have a lot on your mind. Keeping customers happy, employees on track, and your business profitable can create significant stress in your life. You need an outlet to decompress. Insightly’s audio notes can serve as one way to blow off steam.

(Obviously, you’re probably not going to want others to access your innermost thoughts. It’s therefore wise to set up a private project, visible only to you, for collecting these types of voice notes.)

So, what are some situations that might necessitate the creation of an audio note? Here are a few possibilities:

Something is Troubling You: Customers can say nasty things. Employees can fail on the job. When problems occur, getting them off your chest quickly can help you move on to more important responsibilities (without completely forgetting about them).

Something Needs Research: A colleague from another company shares a sticky situation that you hope to avoid yourself. Get it into Insightly as a note and figure out what to do about it later.

Something is Broken: Things break. Some require immediate attention, but others don’t. (For example, you can’t figure out why your printer keeps printing everything in blue ink!) Make a note for yourself to solve the problem later – instead of wasting time on it now.

Use Your Voice to Get More Done

Most people can talk a lot faster than they can type. Thanks to Insightly audio notes, you can increase your productivity simply by speaking. No more searching through your computer’s folders or smartphone’s text files for the next million-dollar idea. Everything is intuitively organized within Insightly from the get-go – in your own words.

If you’ve never tried this powerful feature before, it’s time you did so. In time, you’re sure to think of many new and creative ways to put your voice to work!

Oooohs and Views

Kanban Boards

Panel Screen Slide

Hover Display Magic

Custom Fields Logic

FEAST

Rise and Shine

Lunch Comas

Dinner Decadence

DRINK

Grow some chest hair: Scotch, Bourbon, Whiskey

Gain some clarity: Tequila, Mezcal, Gin

Bar ‘hops: Craft beers and breweries

Do the twist: Fancy schmancy cocktails

Whine about it: Vintage tastes