CRM Blog Posts – Page 34 – user's Blog!

June 23, 2016

If You Can’t Answer This Question, Don’t Buy A CRM System

Sales-Features

A nation’s culture resides in the hearts and in the soul of its people.

–Mahatma Gandhi

Who knew that Mahatma Gandhi knew so much about CRM? But he did. OK, I admit he wasn’t talking about CRM systems when he said this – he had much bigger issues on his mind, like breaking British rule and avoiding a civil war. But Gandhi was right about culture, be it a nation or a business. It does reside in the hearts and in the soul of its people. A nation’s culture defines its people. A company’s culture defines its employees. Just like a company’s CRM culture.

Does your company have a CRM culture? If you want to succeed with a CRM system it better. Here are the three things that define it.

A database culture

A CRM system should be your core database for all operations in your business. Think about it – you don’t do business with companies. You do business with people who work in companies. And you should have a record for every person who does business with you in your CRM database. Sure that means customers and prospects. But it also means vendors, suppliers and partners too. It also means service providers, consultants, job seekers and industry experts. They’re all in there. With notes and data about them. And scheduled and completed activities. And you commit to making sure that this database is as clean as possible all the time. You’ve assigned an administrator to check it and you’ve created alerts and reports to validate the data. You have a database culture because you recognize that a CRM culture is useless without good data to drive it.

A service culture

You require that your CRM database is the primary repository of data for your customers. You want problems, calls and issues logged in. You want to know what your customers are buying and what other products they might be interested in. You want to know when someone is on your website and requests information. You want to know who’s having a problem and how that problem is being resolved. You want to know what opportunities are out there and who’s working on them. You want to know when deals will be closing. You want to know which customers are due to order and which ones may need help. Of course you want new customers. But your first priority is serving your existing customers as best as you can. You lean on technology to provide automation so that both your customers and employees are getting alerts, reminders and other information automatically. You want to make the experience of doing business with your company as quick and enjoyable as possible. You have a service culture. That’s a CRM culture.

A communications culture

You are committed to logging all activities into your CRM system. You insist that your people record their calls and tasks. They schedule next actions. They complete them all. They take notes on calls and notes at appointments and those notes go into the system too. You require that your CRM system is a repository for all email communications. You don’t build barriers and instead insist that all

communications are shared and available for everyone in your company. That way any person who makes contact with someone in your business can be immediately found in your database so that your people know the history. And then you want to make sure that everyone in your database is being “touched” by your company throughout the year. This may be through newsletters, postcards, a phone call, a LinkedIn message, an old-school letter. You have a communications culture. Everyone in your community should be hearing from you just enough so that when they may need a product or service you offer they’ll think of you first.

A CRM culture is not easy. It requires a great deal of commitment. People must be committed to typing up notes after each call and appointment. Sending emails. Replying to emails. Updating fields. Creating new contacts on the go. They must be open to using mobile devices and the cloud. All of this takes extra time – maybe more time than they’re currently used to. But databases don’t just happen automatically. And clean data isn’t easy to maintain. They must know understand from you that if the data isn’t in your CRM system it just doesn’t exist. That’s a CRM culture.

Do you have a CRM culture? Does CRM “reside in the hearts and minds” of your people. If you don’t, then don’t get a CRM system.

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

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

June 22, 2016

CRM, Google Apps, and Xero Help Winsightz Keep Personal Service in Sight

Founded by Winston Faircloth in August 2015, Winsightz helps small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) and nonprofits recapture and retain customers, donors, and volunteers. Through a blend of software and coaching services, Winsightz helps organizations translate business requirements to the right technology solutions and learn how to apply those solutions to achieve their goals.

As a solopreneur, Winston Faircloth found it a big challenge to just keep track of conversations, emails, appointments, leads, and myriad other details. Faircloth found Insightly mentioned favorably on a few blogs, but it was the Google Docs integration that compelled him to give Insightly a try. Using Insightly for relationship tracking allows Faircloth to quickly see interactions, attachments, next steps, and tasks in the queue. And Insightly’s tight integration with Google Docs and Gmail makes creating or updating a contact record or project seamless. When Faircloth learned that Insightly also integrates with accounting tool, Xero, he was thrilled. He loves how Xero brings in transactional data from the bank, credit cards, PayPal, etc., which makes that part of the accounting incredibly easy.

In addition to effective relationship tracking and management, streamlined organization and accounting, Insightly helps keep administrative overhead lean and frees up Faircloth (and his future team) for customer-facing activities. Although still in the early days of his new company, Faircloth feels Insightly is an important part of the company’s journey and future success.

Insightly allows me to take what’s in my head and share it with my employees to help them learn and get up to speed faster. It’s a clean, simple and intuitive tool that helps me stay organized and allows me to provide the best service possible.

– Winston Faircloth, co-founder and president, Winsightz

Find out more about how Winsightz uses Insightly to track and manage client relationships and accounting, and streamline organization. Read the full story – and others like it – in our customer case study library.

June 22, 2016

CRM for All: Business Services

The business services segment is broad and encompasses companies across industries that offer a variety of services including marketing and advertising, consulting, legal services, security and many more. While the sector is large, they all share a common need to keep leads, contact information and projects organized. But using pen and paper, email, Excel spreadsheets and/or Google docs to keep information straight and up-to-date is a recipe for disaster. As a result, many business services companies have quickly realized that what they really need is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. And the benefits of implementing a CRM are endless. In fact, according to a recent survey of Insightly business services customers, 49 percent improved the efficiency of a business process with Insightly. So what was the “aha!” moment when these Insightly customers knew they had found a tool that would change the way they did business for the better? We compiled a list of our favorites:

Guidance Aviation: With Insightly, Guidance Aviation reps have successfully used the data stored within the platform to give students more attention and highlight the benefits most likely to suit their needs. This individualized attention has resulted in consistently increasing enrollment rates for both of its programs.

Hive Business: Insightly has become the 7th member of the Hive Business team. Now, sales and marketing can manage and communicate with clients and prospects simply, quickly, and with complete transparency. The efficiency of the company’s sales process has developed from an unknown to a constantly improving figure that allows the team to have confidence that no opportunity is being left behind.

Peter Greeno Photography: Peter’s business relies heavily on referrals, which means he needs to keep each client happy and satisfied throughout the entire process. With Insightly, he can easily keep track of more conversations with potential clients, and as a result, sales have increased substantially. He’s also saving a considerable amount of time on back-end processes, allowing him to invest those resources to grow his business by investing more time into marketing for the next season.

Sandler Training: After just five months of using Insightly, the Absolute Sales Development team, a Sandler Training center based in Miami, completely overhauled its client management process. Employees were eager to use Insightly because it is easy to add new clients, and the organization benefits from having all customer data in one organized database. The intuitive nature of Insightly’s user interface makes it easy and fast for the team to navigate through contacts and sort them to identify tasks.

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

June 21, 2016

Double Down on Sticky

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

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly CRM, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

Exporting Data to an XML File

Insightly includes an option to generate an XML export with an archive of records from Insightly. The XML standard is used by our more technical customers to capture and save all the valuable links and relationships between entities within Insightly. You can extract even more information through our API. XML files cannot be imported into Insightly. If you would like to export records to a CSV file for importing into another Insightly account, please see our article Exporting data from Insightly to a CSV file.

The link for the XML data export is accessible by any Insightly administrator from the System Settings > Data Export page. When you click the link to export your data, Insightly will send you an email with the data as an attachment within a few minutes.

Data-Export

This week’s tip was provided by Tony Roma. Tony is an Insightly product expert who has been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.

Automate Your Shares

When it comes to sales prospecting, sites like Twitter and LinkedIn can be invaluable tools for connecting with potential and existing customers. If you don’t have a lot of spare time to invest in networking activities, tools like Buffer and Paper.li can become your new best friend.

You can use them to automate your LinkedIn and Twitter feeds by creating a catalog of content once a week, then automating the distribution of that content for the remainder of the week.

Double Down on Sticky

Sticky notes, Post-it notes, paper reminders. Whatever your preferred term or brand is, these ubiquitous squares and rectangles of paper have forever changed the art of leaving notes and reminders for yourself and others.

Before your pitch that bit of paper when you’re reminder goes stale, flip the sticky side down and run it in between the rows of your keyboard to pick up those bits of dust and crumbs from that mid afternoon snack break.

Send Us Your Tips

Would you like to share your tips with other Insightly customers? Send them to us!
If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card!

And if you haven’t tried the best CRM around, check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now.

About the author: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

June 20, 2016

6 Research and Data-Backed Email Tips That Will Save You 4+ Hours a Week

A not-so-fun (McKinsey) fact: the average worker spends 28% of his or her time each workweek managing their email. That’s more than 11 hours a week for those with a 9-5, and closer to 20 hours a week for my poor (rich) 70-hour-work-week investment banking friends.

And that’s just at work. Throw in time spent on your personal email, and you’ve probably burned a day of your week just managing your inbox. That’s a lot of time spent in front of a computer or phone screen, maybe even at the cost of being outside in this beautiful summer5 weather. But it doesn’t have to be that way: here are six email efficiency tips to take back more than four hours a week.

Always-connected means always-interruptible

Push back on push-notifications

On average, we receive over 100 emails a day, which corresponds to a lot of annoying push notification chimes or “silent” vibrations. But how often is the interruption worth it? Rarely. The average person deletes half of their incoming emails, and a vast majority of the rest require no immediate action. And those few emails that do? You’ll often get a phone call moments later leading off with “I just sent you an email…”

These 100+ notifications add up. Every time we get a new email, it interrupts our focus for 64 seconds. That’s nearly an hour and a half of lost focus, all to know the moment you got an email regarding a meaningless FitBit achievement.

The solution is simple: kick push notifications. Turn them off for your email, ESPN, Mint.com, Fitbit, and any other app you use. Or at least limit them during work hours by using Android’s Do Not Disturb/priority alerts feature or iOS’s VIP alerts so you only get notifications that are worth losing a minute of focus for (e.g., emails from your babysitter.) Go ahead and turn off email notifications on your PC too.

Read and reply to email in batches and spend 20% less time on email

Disabling push notifications isn’t effective if you still constantly check or reload your inbox. Like a high school senior awaiting their college acceptance letters, we can tend to check our mailboxes eagerly and often. But we should relax a little. As the New York Times reported, not only does placing limits on how frequently you check your inbox reduce stress, but it also allows you to get through the same amount of emails in 20% less time.

Set aside a few times a day (e.g., when you first get into work, after lunch, before you leave) to go through your inbox and send off batches of email. You’re much more productive when sending multiple emails in a row, rather than as you receive them. With all the newfound time you saved, you can actually do the work or plan for the meeting you were emailing about! (If you need help taking a break from your email, you can check out Inbox Pause.)

Time saved by tips 1 & 2: 36 minutes/day, assuming you spend 20% less time on email and currently spend three hours a day across your email accounts.

Get a reply the first time

Schedule your email to hit the recipient’s inbox at the perfect time

One of the best ways to get a response to your email is to have it hit the recipient’s inbox at the most opportune time, which Boomerang found to be at the start of the recipient’s workday (~6-7am local time). Emails sent at this time are three times more likely to be opened than those sent at 4 pm, so clicking “send later” instead of “send” on that email you draft at the end of the day will ultimately save you from having to write more emails. (Send later functionality is just one feature Boomerang offers for Gmail, Outlook, and Android.)

Make your email easy to reply to, via formatting and brevity.

Like ill-timed messages, emails resembling novels also yield poor response rates. Loquacious messages with long paragraphs aren’t only hard to read, they can also difficult to respond to. This leads to a number of potential issues:

You don’t get a reply (too long; didn’t read) and have to follow-up
You get a reply with answers to some questions but not others, still have to follow up
You get an eventual reply, but it’s too late to be useful.

It’s frustrating taking the time to write out a detailed email, only to see it to fail to garner the answers or actions that you sought. You can improve the chances that someone responds to your email (and that they respond quickly and fully) with these three steps:

Bullet questions when you have more than one
Bold and format keywords and phrases that highlight time-sensitivity (e.g., “Please note that I must have all responses by June 25th, 2016”)
Keep your emails as short and simple as possible. Boomerang found that emails between 50-125 words yielded the best response rates (just above 50%) as did emails written at a third-grade reading level.

Time saved by tips 3 & 4: 10 minutes/day via reducing follow-up emails by a few a day

Be a power-user: harness the power of third-party tools and search operators

Save keystrokes and time: configure text expansion and recurring emails

Email involves a lot of repetition (e.g., answering the same questions, sending the same monthly reminders.) There are two powerful (add-on) features that can remove this tedious side of email, automate your emails, and save time while improving accuracy and consistency:

Text expansion allows you to use shorthand abbreviations to quickly output common phrases, paragraphs, or difficult-to-type or hard-to-remember text such as text with accents/symbols or fax/phone numbers.

It’s a simple concept, yet one of the most powerful ways to save time not only in email, but any word-processing application. Templates are useful, but text expansion applications are even more so because they allow you to weave together different paragraphs more easily than copy-pasting chunks from different templates or past emails when you need to answer multiple questions at once.

TextExpander is a popular text expansion tool for OS X, ActiveWords is a good one for Windows, and there are plenty of others too.

Recurring emails are even better than text expansion if you send an identical email over and over again. Whether it’s a twice-a-month time sheet reminder, a weekly reminder to your office to clean out the fridge, or a quarterly reminder to submit financial report paperwork, there’s no need to type out (and remember to send) the same message each time. Here’s how to easily send recurring messages in Gmail for both a given period (e.g., for the next year, forever) and interval (e.g., weekly, daily).

Learn Gmail’s search operators (even if your label and filter game is on point)

There are people that take immense pride in their multiple inbox, multi-tiered label setups within Gmail. And while I can appreciate their masterful organization, these power-users (and everyone else) should still learn the power of Gmail’s advanced search operators, as searching for emails can be three times as effective as using a label or folder system! Here’s three quick examples on how to save time with Gmail’s search operators:

has:attachment – Hunting for that file someone sent you? You may be good at visually filtering out emails based on whether there’s a paperclip signifying an attachment, but you may be scrolling for pages and pages before you find what you need. Appending “has:attachment” to your search will show only threads with an attached file.

filename:jpg – If you have a lot of emails with attachments, using “has:attachment” still may yield pages of results and take a while to wade through. If you know the filetype (e.g., .jpg, .docx, etc.), you can search specifically for attachments with a certain extension. You can also use the boolean OR operator to search for multiple filetypes if you’re looking for an attached image, but aren’t sure of its filetype: “filename:png OR filename:gif OR filename:jpg OR filename:bmp”

before: yyyy/mm/dd – Say you’re looking for a specific email your best friend (that you email a lot) sent back in 2013. You’d probably have to scroll through hundreds of emails if you didn’t know about/use the “before:” operator. Adding “before:2014/01/01” to your search would return only those results before 2014, so you could start your scrolling/search from 2013. (You could also add “after:2012/12/31” if you wanted to exclude results from before 2013!)

I probably use these three operators the most, but there’s so many more to learn! And then you can try out even more powerful ways to combine operators together with wildcards and booleans to hone in on exactly what you’re looking for.

Tips 5 and 6 will save at least 7 minutes/day, and a lot more for those with jobs heavy on sending and responding to emails!

Have your own tips?

These are my favorite six tips, but there’s a lot of other good tricks out there to save time in email. Leave your own time-saving tactics in the comments!

About the author: Brendan is a data scientist at Boomerang where he dives into data sets and tells stories from the patterns he finds. Boomerang is the leader in email productivity software and has helped millions of people focus on the email that matters, when it matters.

June 17, 2016

Insightly Receives a Category Leader Nod From GetApp

Insightly has been listed as a CRM Category Leader in GetApp’s quarterly ranking, which is designed to help business owners and decisions makers ease the task of finding the right cloud-based solution for their business.

Each app’s score is independent of commercial interests and existing relationships that GetApp has with app vendors. GetApp uses five data points to rank apps based on a combination of its own unique data, as well as data collected from third-party sources. Each data point is scored out of 20, with a total potential score of 100. These data points are based on:

User reviews– based on the number and rating of reviews on GetApp.
Integrations– based on the number of integrations with other apps listed on GetApp
Mobile Platforms– based on the availability of an Android and iOS app and its rating in Google Play and the App Store, respectively
Media Presence– based on the number of followers and fans on Twitter and Facebook, respectively
Security– based on a security survey developed by GetApp, modeled on the Cloud Security Alliance self-assessment form

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

June 16, 2016

Quality vs. Quantity: How to Stay on Your Customer’s Radar

When it comes to content marketing there’s the constant either/or debate—do you push out copious amounts of content: emails, social media posts, blogs; or do you hold out, refine your content and aim for quality?

Of course there are merits to both and some will argue until they’re blue in the face for either side. Time and again it comes down to one main question: How well do you know your customer?

On the quantity side, there is, of course, a sweet spot. HubSpot and Moz did in depth six month studies where they aimed to find the balance between frequency and quality. No one wants to push out mediocre content, but is it better to push out as much content as possible, sacrificing on the quantity, or is it better to keep up on the quality and opt for fewer posts?

Surprisingly, the results were not as cut and dry as you might expect. As it turns out, keeping your customers in constant reach does lead to more sales. Frequent contacts are necessary and can boost your results. However, there is a goldilocks spot where you have frequent enough contacts to reach your customer base and maximize your engagement. Piling on more engagement after that point won’t net the same results.

So, what’s a marketer to do?

Whether you’re looking at B2B or B2C contacts, one of the most important ways to stay on the radar is to be consistent. Consistent, semi-frequent and quality posts over a prolonged period of time will keep you in the forefront of your customer’s thoughts (and keep up your sales). Stay active and regular. Schedule your posts, your newsletter or your customer email to come out on the same days each week. Let your customers learn to rely on you.

Types of contact and content can vary. When you’re talking blog posts, 2-3 a week might be enough, or a regular weekly or bi-weekly email can be a great way to reach your customer base. On the other hand, with social media, the rule of thumb is to post regularly, frequently enough to engage your audience but not so frequently that you overwhelm.

Quality isn’t Universal

Know what quality means for your customers. It is not the same in all industries—there are some universal quality guidelines, but not everyone has the same standard of quality for every post or piece of content. In order to have a killer marketing strategy, you must know your customers.

An internet-based company, marketing, consulting or similar industry might require more attention to research and industry lingo. A small manufacturing company, medical office or other industry may be served by simply sharing research and news with an occasional unique or targeted post. It depends on the audience and what appeals to your customer.

So how do you know? Test, test, test again, of course. Pay attention to your analytics, and use them to guide you. A/B test your mass emails and weekly points of contact. Look at the data to see what appeals to your customer. Listen to customer feedback.

At the same time, don’t live and die by your analytics. Viral content can’t be predicted (or manufactured), and it’s hard (if not impossible) to always know what’s going to strike a chord with your base. If there’s something relevant to the present environment, something exciting happening in your industry, or something unique, fun or creative, share away!

Other ways to bolster your content include sharing guest posts with your audience and expert editorials. Offer how to videos or “interviews with the CEO”. Provide product demonstrations, customer testimonials, and other fun pieces of content to help take the work and dread out of content.

Assuring Quality Content

Have clear guidelines for all your contributors. Everyone from your CEO to your intern should understand the components of what your content needs to look like. Have a style sheet and refer to it frequently. Will your intern write on the same level as your CEO? No, of course not, nor should they. Allow for different levels to target different customers and knowledge bases, but keep the style clear and consistent.

Contributors should understand how to post, where to post and have examples of successful past posts. They should have a timeline, a basic layout and know what the regular CTAs and taglines are for your company. Guidelines will keep things consistent and allow you to shift some of the work of creating content throughout your chain of command.

Guidelines will also protect you when a rogue employee goes off the rails and makes a political post or shares something inappropriate. Provide clear examples of what is appropriate and acceptable for your organization and company and what areas should be either supervised or avoided. This protects you from liability and from offending your audience.

In today’s world of technology, marketing has now become publishing. Every company and organization needs someone who can write for their website, touch their customers online and keep the content flowing for their business. Marketers have to wear two hats—advertising and sales pitches are no longer enough.

Make quality content your priority and post as frequently as possible. Aim for relevant, current and interesting topics and pieces to really engage your customer base and keep your clients reading, clicking and sharing!

June 15, 2016

How to Completely Blow a Sale

Sales-Proposal

Much has been written about the best practices involved with selling your products. Less has been said about what not to do – about the biggest and most disastrous mistakes you can make during the selling process to completely blow the deal. Not that salespeople haven’t figured them out through trial and error. Says William Bauer, managing director of Royce Leather, “I used to talk about my products before I understood the needs or problems my customer had, which was essentially like shooting at a target with your eyes closed and not knowing where the target is.”

For this blog post, we wanted to get specific and figure out exactly where the sales process went wrong. As such, we spoke to a number of lifelong salespeople to find out their biggest and most damaging selling mistakes. Want to make sure you miss out on a sale? Try one of these tactics. But hey, look at the silver lining: At least you’ll get to go home early.

Sell Anything to Anyone

Want to quickly see your sales failures pile up? Don’t worry about finding the right product and matching it to the right customer. Simply try to sell everything you can to anyone who will listen.

“When I started PetInsuranceQuotes.com we were focused on selling anything to anyone,” says Nick Braun, the company’s founder and CEO. “Rookie mistake. For the first two years we were chasing any pet owner who was interested in pet insurance. I suppose we thought we could sell the product to anyone and spent a lot of time, money, and other resources trying to convert every visitor to our website. We realized, after a lot of pain and suffering, that we needed to focus on pet owners who actually wanted the services we were offering.”

Braun says the business’s selling efforts didn’t start working until “we stopped wasting time on tire-kickers and started focusing more on serious buyers. We started to invest our resources into the most likely buyers and doubling-down on our existing customers.”

Selling, says Braun, comes down to following “the path of least resistance.” Don’t try to force a product into a market where it doesn’t work, and vice versa. “Invest in the people who want your service and filter out those who aren’t serous about buying. It’s simply not worth spending your time on people who will never buy. Focus on those who want to buy but need help getting over their legitimate objections.”

Set Prices Based Only on the Competition

Setting prices is a complex problem that can take into account dozens of variables ranging from raw materials costs to seasonal market conditions. Or you can just prepare for a disaster by following the footsteps of RankTracer Enterprise’s David Mercer. Mercer says he simply cut prices to quickly and crudely beat the competition to a sale.

“The biggest mistake we made was lowering our prices in response to the pricing structure of new competitors,” says Mercer. “They burst onto the scene with lower costs, and we responded by lowering our costs. It was a huge mistake because we upset many loyal customers who had been paying higher prices and, as it turns out, people weren’t unhappy with our pricing in the first place. We were seen as good value despite being priced higher. Lowering our costs on a whim, without any real pressure to, actually eroded our value offering.”

It’s an old lesson, but understanding your cost and pricing model and truly understanding what your worth is key in both product and service businesses. Any changes to that model should only be undertaken after they’ve received serious consideration and after other alternatives have been rejected. “Being competitive based purely on price is not a fun game and, more often than not, it’s not one you have to play,” says Mercer.

Wing It

Mike Veny is a speaker who uses drumming in corporate team-building and workshop environments to offer something a little different than the usual routine of trust falls and ropes courses. As a percussionist, it’s safe to say that Veny knows a little something about improvisation. But while impromptu jamming may work on the bongos, in a sales situation it’s a first step toward failure.

“Not being prepared to address objections not only lost me sales, but lost me relationships,” says Veny. “In the past, if someone had a price objection about hiring me, I would become anxious, desperate, and say anything that I could in hopes of making the sale. This never ended well because I came off as a desperate, and it either turned leads off completely or they hired me at a reduced price.” This is strikingly common in service businesses where direct costs are relatively small, leading many to feel that a price cuts may be worth it, since the alternative is essentially making nothing at all.

That’s usually wrong-headed and can lead to long-term damage to a business. So Veny did what any savvy sales professional does and itemized the most common objections he faced, and then developed scripts on how to overcome them. Committing these scripts to memory keeps him on his toes and makes him come off as far more professional — and, he says, has led to a “huge increase in sales.”

Wait Until the Last Possible Moment

Procrastination is rampant throughout many businesses, and if you really want to fail at selling, make it a core value of your sales organization.

Ryan Hulland, president of flooring provider Netfloor USA, relates a sales story that came about during an RFP preparation. “We had a large bid coming up, and it was due at a very specific time of day. We had just implemented new security measures, including new password protection on our computers. Well, the new security worked a little too well. I couldn’t remember the new password, and had no way to access my proposal.”

Hulland had to submit the proposal based on an older draft with details like pricing hastily scribbled in with a pen. Locked out of his computer, he couldn’t even email the proposal to the prospect but rather had to fax it to them, hardly the height of professionalism in today’s digital world. Miraculously, Hulland won the bid – even though the client had to hunt down its own fax machine to be able to accept it.

Delay can be a useful negotiating tactic to avoid appearing over-eager, but it can be a dangerous game if you play it too aggressively (or through simple carelessness). Hungrier competitors can beat you to the punch – particularly if they position timeliness and quick responsiveness as a competitive advantage – and lock you out of sales before you ever get a chance to present your position. In any event, whether or not you want to delay before you submit a bid or other proposal, the key is to be prepared for contingencies and be ready to present or discuss your proposal well in advance of any deadlines.

Don’t Sweat the Details

One killer way to lose the sale every time: Make sure every customer knows he or she isn’t special but rather just another dollar in your coffers.

AJ Saleem, owner and academic director for Suprex Private Tutoring, says his biggest mistake is an all-too-common one: “I sent a discount that I meant for another person to a prospective client. I had originally created that discount because I wanted to give it to a well networked person to refer additional customers. In the end, I was forced to give the new client a discount that cost me around 100 dollars.”

Getting the little things right isn’t hard, but it does take time and conscientiousness. Making mistakes on simple details can cost you revenue — or, at worst, cost you the customer.

Make Broad Assumptions About Your Customer

As a corollary to the previous tip, another surefire way to annoy, offend, or otherwise run your customer off is to assume they are something that they are not. This can often be the result of a well-meaning but misguided attempt to be friendly.

Derek Nadon is sales manager for Dupray, which sells steam cleaning equipment. “Once upon a time,” he says, “I spent a forty-minute phone call thinking that ‘Charlie’ was a man. Charlie had a very deep and raspy voice. Charlie ended up being a woman. She was pretty annoyed that I wasn’t able to differentiate between the genders, and actually got pretty upset about. What did I learn? Do way more research on your potential clients. Figure out the five W’s: who, what, where, why, and when.” Most all, it would seem: who.

Richard Swartz, president of fur retailer Mano Swartz, offers a similar take on this theme. “I was 25 years old and very green as a salesperson,” he says. “I sold a coat to man in his 60s who came into our store with a young woman who was in her late 20s. When I wrote up the sale I said to the man, ‘Your wife is going to love it.’ He looked me in the eyes and said, ‘Son, if my wife finds out, you are a dead man.’

“I learned never to assume anything when selling and, certainly, to keep your mouth shut.”

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.

June 14, 2016

Hot Pavement

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

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly CRM, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

Self-Service for Insightly Users

Insightly has a self-service model that offers many options to learn how to use Insightly CRM more effectively. A good method to answer questions and learn about Insightly is to open one browser window to view information from the following links while working in Insightly in another browser window.

Insightly Resources includes the links below and more, so it’s a great place to select from your favorite kind of documentation and video options to learn about CRM and Insightly.
If you’re interested in tutorials, Insightly University has got you covered. From a general overview to record links to managing projects, you’ll find step-by-step video guides to walk you through Insightly.
Our Help pages include articles to answer hundreds of questions. With a quick search, you’ll always find answers.
And to stay up to date on new product developments, click the Product News section right here on our blog!

Good Calendaring=Smoother Sales Processes

If you have a CRM, it likely has a calendar of some sort, but you need one that really works for your team. It must have reminders, notifications, and recurring tasks as a bare minimum. If it can also include sales pipelines, collaborations with other team members, and the ability to sync with other popular calendars it will work out even better.

Robust calendar features save your team the time of double checking deadlines, tasks, and others’ schedules each day. It also lets them avoid double booking anything by having a completely synched schedule. With reminders and notifications, there is no chance of forgetting about a deadline.

Road Heat

In November 2014, SolaRoad, the first road converting sunlight into electricity, opened in the Netherlands. Along the 100-meter bike path, solar cells are embedded into concrete slabs, protected by a centimeter-thick layer of tempered glass.

A similar concept recently gained momentum in the United States, where Solar Roadways received more than US$2 million from a crowdsourcing campaign to drive its patented solar paving technology to the next level. Back in the Netherlands, the consortium powering SolaRoad will test the path over the next three years to determine its efficiency and durability.

Send Us Your Tips

Would you like to share your tips with other Insightly customers? Send them to us!
If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card!

And if you haven’t tried the best CRM around, check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now.

About the author: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

June 13, 2016

Is It Time to Move On From Spreadsheets?

Many companies use spreadsheets to organize data such as income and expenses, sales and marketing data, and contact files for mailing lists. Spreadsheets aren’t always the best tool for managing certain types of data. They were actually created to mimic old-fashioned accounting spreadsheets, and can be difficult to use for other types of data, such as mailing lists. If you’ve ever typed what you thought was a proper name into Excel and had it change it into numbers, then you know exactly what we mean.

Yet there are still many companies who continue to use spreadsheets to manage project data, sales tracking, and plenty of business tasks that spreadsheets certainly can handle, even if they weren’t designed for it. But problems arise when spreadsheets get messy and too many users are manipulating the data. That’s where a more robust system might be in order.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Spreadsheets

Companies often turn to spreadsheets instead of other data management options for the simple reason that spreadsheet software is widely, even freely available. Google Sheets can be accessed through any web-based connection, and shared easily among employees working with the same data.
Yet spreadsheets have their limitations. Think about the following advantages and disadvantages of spreadsheets:

Advantages

Good for the purposes for which it was built – accounting data.
Software is easily accessible via the web.
Free spreadsheet software is available.
Virtually identical software packages make it easy for users to move from one program to another without a learning curve.
Easy to share among 1-3 users.

Disadvantages

Data must be typed in manually or made into data files, then imported.
One mistake can mess up a big chunk of your data.
Reports can be cumbersome.
Can quickly become huge and unwieldy.
Not effective at visually making sense of your info.
Unless you become a whiz at formulas, it’s difficult to use.
Not much info can reasonably fit into a tiny box.

Excel was created for accounting needs, not data analysis. As businesses began to rely on more data inputs from different parts of the company, they needed more robust tools to manage and manipulate data. Combine that with the need for better data visualization than spreadsheets can offer you, and you’re looking at the future of data: Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

For companies that need faster, better data, or need data from multiple sources such as sales and financial data in one cloud-based application, a CRM system may be right for you. Insightly is a great example, and we’ll use it to highlight a few specific features below.

A CRM consolidates all of the information it receives into a single program. By using a series of menu pages, it’s also much easier to look at than an array of cells on a spreadsheet. Here’s some of the key advantages of using a CRM:

CRM Advantages

Robust Contact Pages. A CRM can pack a lot of information onto a simple screen. With Insightly, for example, each contact has a profile page with a photo (automatically transferred from their email or social media profile), contact details and links to their social media accounts, including a stream of their latest Tweets or updates.

There are also tabs along the top which show your email correspondence with the client, upcoming appointments, notes and documents you’ve saved and more.

Sales Management & Forecasting: A CRM gives you tons of additional tools to track your appointments with clients and monitor the progress of a sale. You can schedule phone calls/tasks and view them on a calendar. Each sales opportunity has a “profile” page where you can view relevant emails and documents and track the probability of winning. This, in turn, lets you forecast your overall sales earning, or view your sales funnel”

Collaboration: Most CRMs today are web-based, which means instead of installing anything on your computer, you log into the program from a web-browser. This means that you and your employees can login from any device and use the CRM simultaneously. If one user updates a sale opportunity, all others will be notified immediately – you never have to risk working off old information.

How Do I Switch To a CRM?

The one good thing about using spreadsheets for client management is that it will be very easy to import your data to a CRM system. Insightly lets you import data directly from an Excel or .CSV spreadsheet.

By the process of “data mapping,” you specify which column in your spreadsheet corresponds to which value in the CRM. In other words, tell the system which column on your spreadsheet says the client’s name, their company, their phone number, their job title, etc. Then, the CRM will “read” your spreadsheet and automatically create new contact and company pages with all their information filled in.

Alternatively, you can usually also import contacts directly from Gmail or Outlook.

Read more about importing data into Insightly.

How Much Will It Cost To Switch?

As a first-time user, you can usually pay next-to-nothing. A lot of CRMs have free editions that are suitable as long as you don’t have too many users or need too much storage.A user counts as anybody who needs a unique login – to assign themselves leads, schedule appointments, and use the software in general.

Insightly, for example, is free for 2 users and up to 2,500 records – a record being anything you need to save in the system, such as a contact, task, opportunity, etc.

I’m Still Not Sure If a CRM is Right For Me

The key strength of a CRM system is that it keeps client information organized in one place – including email correspondence, appointments notes and documents. This makes it ideal for small businesses that have a fairly long sales process (such as realtors, brokers, or remodelers) as well as businesses who have ongoing relationships with their clients (such as suppliers, consultants, or IT services).

You might also consider another option alongside a CRM. Retailers should strongly consider a modern POS system that can help track inventory, employees, and customer interactions. You might also consider project management software – but this is another feature Insightly offers with its CRM.

Even those who run a shop, however, or undergo lengthy projects, may still want to consider a CRM if they’re trying to acquire new clients. There’s really no better solution out there for managing leads. What’s more is you can usually sync up a CRM with other web-based systems, such as Basecamp or Shopify, so that data is automatically transferred and shared between them.

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

Jeremy Marsan is a business analyst and staff writer for Fit Small Business whose areas of expertise include business technology, real estate, and franchising. When not helping small business owners he enjoys many artistic projects, including music performance/recording, blogging, creative writing, and carpentry.