CRM Blog Posts – Page 4

September 21, 2017

6 Reasons to Stop Using Your Inbox as a To-Do List

Whether we’ll admit it or not, our inboxes can be addictive.

After all, checking email is as easy as tapping an app or refreshing a web browser. Is there a new and exciting business opportunity waiting for you? Will your web developer finally send an update on the shopping cart project? Is your realtor ever going to sell your house? Checking email gives us hope that our dreams will soon be realized.

Addictions aside, email inboxes actually make a terrible to-do list. Sadly, many businesses use email to structure their work days. Despite the prevalence of affordable project management apps, some people just can’t break free from the shackles of email.

In this post, we’ll discuss six reasons why you should stop using your inbox as a to-do list.

1. Your Inbox Doesn’t Care About Importance

There are only so many hours in a work day. As a business owner, you rarely run out of things to keep you busy. Pitching new clients, dealing with employee issues, and developing game-changing strategies are all in a typical day’s work. With so much on your plate, you can’t afford to waste time on non-value-added stuff. In fact, you take great pride in your ability to efficiently identify (and solve) most problems that pop up.

With that being said, why do you spend so much time jumping between emails? Granted, it’s impossible to know when an important email will pop up. Keeping close watch on your inbox makes sense from that standpoint. On the other hand, I would wager that 90%+ of the emails you receive are less than important. If your inbox is anything like mine, you probably get a ton of stuff like this:

Industry newsletters
Emails from sales reps, who are trying to sell you things
Promotional emails from your vendors
Alerts from social media
Low-priority requests from colleagues or clients

Worst of all, your inbox doesn’t put the most important things at the top. As additional emails arrive, important requests sink further down into obscurity.

Sure, you can try to keep pace by deleting and archiving unimportant messages. However, is this the best use of your time? Probably not.

2. You Can’t Mark an Email as “Done”

Let’s assume that you’ve somehow devised a process by which only “important” messages make it to your inbox. To do this, you unsubscribed from all non-essential messages, set filters to auto-forward any administrative emails to your assistant, and convinced customers and team members to reach out sparingly (good luck with that!).

Now your inbox is the perfect to-do list, right? Not so much.

To illustrate my point, let’s say that you have the following emails awaiting your attention:

Subject: Select the Company Picnic Venue

Subject: Please Sign Up for an Insightly Trial

Subject: Finish Slide Deck for Next Week’s Proposal

Being the productive person that you are, you’re able to complete these tasks in less than an hour. Unfortunately, all three “tasks” are still sitting in your inbox. What should you do with them now? Delete? Move to a folder? Do you need to respond to each person, indicating that you’re done? If so, how much time will that take?

Wouldn’t it be nice to just mark your tasks as “done,” and then move on with your life? Sadly, email doesn’t work that way.

3. Delegation is Messy

To add another layer of complexity, not every task fits neatly into a single email exchange.

Take, for example, the selection of a venue for the company picnic. What seemed like a relatively straightforward decision has quickly evolved into dozens of separate email threads. Shortly after sending your confirmation email, you received several additional emails from staff at the venue. Their accounts receivable department needs you to make a 25% deposit by the close of business. You also received a 12-page PDF, containing all sorts of parking information, menu options, and other important details. And, to top things off, the venue’s Executive Director wants to connect for coffee later this week.

All of these things can (and should) be delegated to someone else on your team. Here’s the problem: delegating from your inbox is messy.

Forwarding messages to your accounting department and virtual assistant won’t take much of your time. Problem is, there’s no guarantee that they’ll remember to follow up. Their inboxes are overflowing with tasks, too.

Alas, you bite the bullet, stop what you were doing, and spend another hour on administrative work.

4. Your Inbox Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

You finally get to a good stopping point on the picnic stuff, and you check your inbox for the next thing to tackle. Great news awaits, as you learn that another hot prospect wants a proposal. Even better, the slide deck that you just finished for a different client can be easily adapted for this new prospect. Both essentially want the same service, but you’ll need to make a few adjustments (such as updating the client’s name, logo, and key assumptions).

At this point you think to yourself, “Aha! Finally something that I can delegate to my administrative assistant!” So, you find the related email threads and forward them along. You even walk over to your admin’s desk to stress the importance of this project.

A few days pass, and your administrative assistant stops with a troubled look on his face. He’s clearly confused by the assignment, as evidenced by his questions:

“So, which deck is the one that still needs to be updated?”

“Are we keeping the color schemes the same? Or, should I update the background colors to match the prospective client’s logo?”

“Speaking of logos, where do I find a copy of their logo?”

“What is the due date for this task?”

“Did you want to proofread a digital copy of this before I print it out?”

“Where should I save the finished copy once it’s done?”

Once again, your delegation plan has been foiled. Your team is normally very competent, so why is this project creating so much confusion?

As effective as your staff may be, they’re not mind readers. They’re looking for you to provide the necessary information to do their jobs. Just forwarding a bunch of disjointed email conversations only tells part of the story.

5. There’s Software Designed Specifically for Organizing To-Dos

By now, I hope you’ll agree that your inbox is letting you down. If so, you might be asking yourself what (if anything) you can do about it.

There is good news – as I alluded to at the onset of this post, there are many online software tools that can structure your company’s work. Insightly, which is perhaps best known for its sales management features, also provides a suite of integrated productivity tools. Let’s look at how Insightly could solve many of the headaches we’ve discussed.

Sequencing Important Work: Unlike your inbox, Insightly brings clarity to your most important tasks. Assign due dates, priority, completion, and status with a few clicks.

As due dates and priority levels are defined, it becomes much easier to see the “big picture.”

Tracking Completed Tasks: A task tracking system, like Insightly, will also fulfill your desire to check things off your list. Marking a task “done” is as easy as clicking a button.

Want to see a historical archive of the great work you’ve done? Jump over to your “completed tasks” view for a detailed review.

Delegating to Others: Getting the rest of your team into Insightly can also be beneficial. Rather than delegating from your inbox, Insightly provides a more structured workflow. Create tasks to occur on a one-time or repeating basis, thereby making the very act of delegation natively more efficient. To assign work to others, just select the correct team member from an intuitive dropdown. Connect the task to additional contributors or larger projects.

You can even add detailed notes to ensure your team is always in the know. No more excuses!

Connecting Sales & To-Dos: For added context on sales-related tasks, you can easily link items to opportunities in your pipeline. Within a click or two, your team has access to information that would otherwise only reside in your brain.

6. The Rest of Your Team is Following Your Lead

Leadership comes from the top – even when it involves juggling mundane tasks.

By continuing to rely on your broken inbox-dependent process, you’re telling the rest of your team to do likewise. Is this the best use of their time and your resources? I think not.

Take the bold step toward a more streamlined approach to productivity. Your team will thank you – and so will your bottom line.

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.

September 6, 2017

Why Data Silos are Bad for Business

Growing up in rural Indiana, I’ve seen many silos in my lifetime.

In case you’ve never been to the heartland, farmers typically use silos to store silage (feed for dairy cattle and other animals). Silos are often sealed airtight to control moisture levels and prevent pests.

Where am I going with this discussion? How do Hoosier silos relate to data silos in your business?

Physical structures aside, “data silos” are increasingly challenging for today’s technology-driven companies. Like their agricultural brethren, data silos are very common for gathering things (in this case, information). Sales information in one silo. Projects in another. Email histories scattered across dozens of inbox silos. Even knowing which silo to look in is daunting.

And, unlike dairy cows, that eat whatever they are given, your team members are hungry for real-time access to everything in your silos. Unfortunately, it’s all sealed airtight and buried among a million other data points.

In this post, we’ll discuss tips for identifying silos in your business.

Survey Your Data Landscape

Some business owners don’t realize the data challenges they’re facing – until it’s too late.

A rogue employee, a server meltdown, or even a time-sensitive client proposal can be the reality check that drives many into action. Luckily, you’re reading this article and have the luxury of developing a proactive strategy.

Before you can build a cohesive data strategy, it’s important to first identify where silos exist in your business. Although doing so may seem easy enough, data silos can be less apparent than you might expect. Silos of information can, of course, exist in obvious places, such as databases or shared network folders. However, they can also exist in less obvious places, such as the brains of your employees, on smartphone devices, or even in physical file cabinets.

A smart business owner routinely takes a step back to examine his company’s entire information footprint. Only then can he develop a realistic plan for creating a more scalable and collaborative environment.

To get started, try asking yourself some simple questions. Here are a few off the top of my head:

Question: If your top-grossing sales rep unexpectedly quit, what systems would you need to comb through in order to ensure a seamless transition to his replacement?

It’s quite possible that you’d at least need to check:

Your CRM (customer relationship management) system
Email folders & sent boxes
Various deal tracking spreadsheets
Saved voicemails
Proposals saved to your network drive
Invoices saved to his old work station

Question: What marketing systems does your company use to achieve its goals? If you needed to build a “complete picture” of your marketing processes, where would you have to look?

Marketers (like me!) love to use the latest software and tools that deliver results. However, unless you’re strategic in the use of such tools, you can have data strung out everywhere:

Email campaign analytics (opens, clicks, opt-outs)
Social media stats (top-performing posts, shares, likes, favorites, followers)
Web traffic data (unique visitors, goal conversions)
Direct mailing lists
Form submission histories
CPC budget and performance results

Question: In what ways do team members collaborate with one another? Is this collaboration being documented in a centralized location, or is it remaining in isolated buckets?

On one hand, you want to encourage a flexible and creativity-inducing culture. On the other hand, allowing too much leniency will inevitably spread information across countless medium. Do any of these sound familiar?

Instant message conversations
Shared documents in your Google Drive account
Email attachments
Handwritten meeting notes
Text message exchanges

Question: How do team members structure their work days? What tools do they use to delegate and create accountability?

There are countless productivity apps on the market. Some offer a to-do list-style interface, while others take a kanban board approach. In fact, your team is probably using several of them to organize:

Recurring and one-off tasks
Projects that contain major milestones
Sequential workflows
The delivery of your goods or services

Fewer Silos, Greater Business Value

By now, you might feel overwhelmed just thinking about the many places where data is hanging out – and, what to do about it. Fear not, as you don’t have to solve this problem overnight. As with anything else in your business, you’re a master of going from good to great. You’ll handle it like the pro that you are.

I’ll save the “how to knock down silos” discussion for a future blog post. However, as I recently pointed out in this post, repositioning your CRM as an “integrated information hub” can be an effective starting point for bridging some of the disconnected silos that plague your business. For example, a tool like Insightly, which can connect to your email inbox, document management system, marketing systems, and countless other apps, pulls your most important information under one roof. And, since Insightly offers a number of built-in project management and workflow features, you might even be able to run the proverbial backhoe through a few outdated silos.

As you begin the process of consolidating or tearing down data silos, never lose sight of the bigger picture. Remember your primary motivation for undertaking such a momentous project should always be focused on one or more of these goals:

Fewer Excuses, Less Confusion – Empower your team to do their jobs. Fewer logins and learning curves should result in less confusion and greater productivity.

Better Customer Alignment – Merging project and sales data into a single hub should make it easier to serve your most important stakeholders: those customers who are paying the bills.

More Reliable Data – With fewer silos to sift through, your team will have fewer legacy databases to keep current. This should help boost the accuracy of your business intelligence, allowing you to make more informed decisions.

Cost Savings – Who knows…you might even be paying for a silo that hasn’t been accessed in several months or years. Consolidation could represent a cost savings opportunity, both in the short term and long term.

Watch Out for Silos in Your Business

Let’s face it…you’re not a farmer. Why are you keeping your most important business information in isolated concrete pillars? Give your team the data they need most. It’s time to recognize where silos exist in your business, develop a consolidation plan, and put your business information to better use.

August 23, 2017

6 Tips for Building a More Collaborative Virtual Team

Big businesses aren’t the only ones benefitting from virtual teams.

Thanks in large part to freelance marketplaces, such as Upwork.com, traditional brick-and-mortars, mom and pops, and startups are now able to rapidly staff up with team members from across the globe.

Although virtual teams offer a number of tangible benefits to your business, they do have their share of distinct challenges. In particular, many companies struggle to create a truly “collaborative” virtual culture.

In this post, we’ll explore a few best practices for using Insightly to boost engagement among your virtual workers.

1. Get Everyone In the Same Place

Emails…group chats…random to-do lists…shared project documents…customer tracking spreadsheets.

Unless instructed otherwise, remote workers have a tendency to spread information across multiple systems and inboxes. Although productivity may seem high, it’s impossible to know for sure. After all, you don’t have time to dig through the many different apps they’re using. Likewise, it would be wasteful to ask each team member to manually cobble together a report. Unfortunately, you’ll just have to assume things are operating smoothly.

Solving this problem requires you to first take control of the situation. Even though your team has your best intentions in mind, reliance on overlapping systems or siloed datasets is no longer going to cut it. You need everyone working from the same system and database.

A system like Insightly can get everyone on the same page. Your sales team can hit the ground running by centralizing all of their customers, leads, and deals. Customer emails, notes, invoices, and quotations are also accessible from any web-enabled device.

Everyone else will love the built-in project and task management functionality. Since each team member has his or her own unique Insightly log in, you can create a greater sense of accountability. Assign due dates, define recurrence patterns, and indicate priority for each task. No more handwritten sticky notes or “forgotten” assignments.

Note: Insightly also allows you to configure teams, letting you assign and manage view permissions in fewer steps.

2. Differentiate Between Projects & Tasks

Some initiatives require more collaboration than others.

For example, rebranding a website involves much greater thought and coordination than scanning a stack of paper documents. Launching a new product line is more complicated than invoicing a client. Some initiatives require multiple iterations, meetings, and collaborators to achieve the greater goal. In other words, not every delegation is as simple as making a one-time request. You therefore need a process for managing the many moving parts.

At the heart of this discussion is the differentiation between “tasks” (individual pieces of work) and “projects” (larger initiatives or desired outcomes). If you’re planning on using Insightly, this terminology is natively built into the application. In fact, you can “link” individual tasks to a larger project, making it easier to see the specific steps required to arrive at your end goal.

Projects can be structured one of two ways in Insightly. For initiatives following a sequential pattern (such as onboarding a new customer), using a project pipeline might work best.

For less predictable projects (such as an expansion into adjacent markets), you might consider using one or more milestones. Milestones allow you to set goals, assign dates, and group together related tasks – without the rigidity of a sequential pattern.

With milestones, pipelines, and tasks, your team will feel more organized and less scattered. As the business owner, you’ll appreciate the enhanced visibility into your company’s work-in-process, bottlenecks, and completed work.

3. Integrate, Integrate, Integrate

Migrating your project and sales processes into a single web-based application is a great starting point. However, even the most robust of platforms can’t do everything. Your team will still rely heavily on their email inboxes, document processors, marketing tools, and other third-party apps.

A highly integrated platform, such as Insightly, can offer the best of both worlds. Insightly actually acts as the “hub” for everything else your team uses.

Take, for example, your marketing consultant who uses the MailChimp email marketing software to build and send the company newsletter. He’s doing a nice job, but he occasionally forgets to prepare the summary reports that you need. This situation reduces the productivity of your strategy sessions and creates unnecessary friction for the entire team.

How can you make this problem go away?

One possibility is to connect your Insightly and MailChimp accounts. Insightly’s innovative integration pulls in highly valuable marketing analytics into each lead or contact record. Once enabled, you’ll be able to see real-time MailChimp data without ever leaving your Insightly account, such as:

Campaign history
Click rate
Open rate
Engagement history
Opt-in / subscription date
List membership

Problem solved! Now, your marketing consultant can stay focused on the next newsletter, and you have the information you need.

Better yet, Insightly integrates with dozens of other best-in-class apps. The possibilities seem endless.

4. Build “Links” Between Internal (& External) Relationships

Organizational charts become murky as you grow your team of freelancers, part-time staff, consultants, and employees. Who reports to whom? Solid line or dashed? The questions never seem to end.

It’s time to scrap the diagram software and leverage the info that’s already in Insightly. If you’ve already added your team as Insightly users, you can easily use relationship links to track your organizational structure.

Each user can be linked to other internal (or external) team members, offering a 360-degree view of who knows whom. Insightly’s relationship dropdown lets you identify:

Boss / direct report relationships
Client / consultant relationships
Colleague relationships
Other unique relationships

This type of linking also comes in handy for tracking your customer relationships. By tracking the organizational hierarchy of your customers, your sales reps and support staff will be more equipped to deliver an unbelievable experience.

5. Free Up More Time for Collaboration (with Automation)

Just because something needs to be done, it doesn’t mean that a human has to do it. As workflow technology and artificial intelligence become increasingly prevalent, business owners are seeking ways to maximize their investment in human capital – virtual team members included.

A tool like Insightly can help you maximize ROI from virtual staff via automation.

To illustrate my point, let’s look at your current web lead management process. If you’re like many business owners, your web developer probably configured your site to send email alerts for new leads. New lead data is keyed in by your virtual assistant, the lead is assigned for follow up, and then your reps finally reach out. All of this occurs over several hours (or days), during which leads can go completely cold.

By leveraging Insightly automation, you could build a better lead management model. How does the following workflow sound?

The lead fills out a form on your website.
Insightly automatically parses the lead information and creates a new record.
Insightly immediately sends an email that “looks like” it came from your sales rep.
Insightly assigns the lead (and a follow-up task) to the correct rep.

Instead of wasting time on data entry, your virtual assistant can finally get around to organizing your backlog of game-changing ideas. In addition, your reps can engage leads with much less effort.

6. Monitor Productivity

There’s an additional benefit of using a self-contained management system like Insightly: better business analytics. Each task, project, contact, lead, opportunity, and event is a trackable piece of data that’s easily modeled within Insightly’s intuitive reporting dashboard.

Perhaps you find yourself asking these questions:

Which team members are completing the most tasks?
Who is delegating the most work to other users?
What are our bottlenecks?
How long did certain milestones take to complete?
Who has the most overdue tasks?
Which projects are requiring the most effort?
How many leads can each sales rep manage per month?

If your virtual team is using Insightly correctly, you should be able to answer these questions within seconds. Better yet, you’ll be able to sort, filter, and customize the reports to your exact specification. Just drag and drop, and Insightly gives you the data that you need.

Columnar reports can also be converted into highly engaging charts and graphs. This saves you (or your assistant) the effort of exporting and charting the data. Once again, Insightly does the busywork for you.

Get a More Collaborative Virtual Team

Your virtual team adds value to your business. No question about it. However, there’s always room for improvement. By leveraging a cloud-based business management system, such as Insightly, you can boost engagement and take their value to an entirely new level.

To learn more about Insightly, click here to compare the features that best fit your virtual team.

August 21, 2017

Bedrock Data Announces Sales and Marketing Automation System Integration with Insightly

On the heels of Insightly’s announcement of a major release of its CRM featuring a redesigned technical architecture and user interface that helps sales team improve productivity, Bedrock Data is now featured as an Insightly integration service. They offer successful marketing automation system integration of Insightly with some of the top software used by companies worldwide.

Bedrock Data allows Insightly customers to setup a multi-directional integration between Insightly and one or more systems, to ensure consistent customer and prospect data across the frontline systems in an organization.

Top integrations include Insightly and HubSpot; Insightly and Marketo; and Insightly and Pardot – all of which leverage Bedrock Data’s pre-built integrations to allow companies to setup and manage expert-level integrations with no code.

This helps extend the Insightly vision of building lifelong customer relationships, by serving prospects and customers with a well aligned experience across a company’s sales and marketing touchpoints.

Bedrock Data’s marketing automation system integrations help Insightly users in a variety of ways.

Marketing communicates to customers & prospects in the right way

The 1:1 relationship that companies are looking to build with customers, needs to extend to all marketing communications. To ensure companies communicate to their customers as customer (and not a brand new prospect “off the street”), and that those communications are tailored (based on their preferences, business factors such as industry or size, etc.), marketing needs that CRM data to be accurate, complete and up-to-date in marketing automation systems.

Salespeople are informed for conversations based on the customer’s interactions with marketing

A customer or prospect interacts with a company through many digital means – visiting the website, registering for a webinar, downloading content, reading emails. Providing salespeople with the right snapshot summary of marketing interactions helps them best prepare for an informed conversation with customers or prospects. Bedrock Data uses custom fields in Insightly to map in key marketing data, so that salespeople get the right summary information at their fingertips in the CRM system they are using every day. No extra clicks, no new interfaces to learn.

No delays in sales or SDR follow up with new prospects

There are many different ways a prospect can signal to a company that they want to engage. Some – like filling out a Contact Us form on a website – signal they want immediate engagement. A marketing automation-Insightly integration ensures that when prospects are ready to engage, that information is fed directly to sales reps or SDRs so they can take immediate action. When engaging with today’s modern, digital buyer, you definitely don’t want to be stuck uploading spreadsheets between systems to communicate – as that will only cause errors and delays.

Marketing has insight around effectiveness for making investment decisions

Marketing is a key conduit between a business and the lifelong relationships of their customers; making the right marketing investments based on what your customers appreciate, goes a long way towards furthering these relationships.

A marketing automation integration is at its best when feeding sales opportunity, pipeline and closed won data back from the CRM to marketing automation, to help marketing teams make decisions on their resources around what’s effective: answer questions such as: What types of initiatives are prospects responding to? What is leading to sustained growth and profitable return?

Bedrock Data feeds that data from Insightly based on the marketing automations – each which have their own way of using that data. For HubSpot, it’s a Lead Source reporting showing top sources of customers. For Marketo, it’s powering their Revenue Cycle Analytics reports around program effectiveness. And for Pardot, it’s the Customer Lifecycle Report.

Thanks to Bedrock Data, these are all now compatible with Insightly – with no code required to setup and manage the integration.

Interested customers can explore Bedrock Data’s Insightly connectors.

August 10, 2017

How to Measure Customer Relationships with a CRM

You know your business needs to build long-term customer relationships to succeed. So, you implement a CRM to help manage the process company-wide, watch the data start flowing in, and wait.

And wait. And wait.

Unless you’re paying attention to the right metrics, you may never figure out whether your customer relationships are growing the way they should. While you may have chosen the right path with a CRM, it is imperative to then devise a CRM strategy so that you can identify and measure important milestones, and then track progress and results along the way. This will let you know where to adjust your approach to ensure that your efforts are truly encouraging the long-term customer relationships you’re trying to build.

The best way to measure customer relationships is to view them in the context of who on your team is interacting with the customer and how the CRM can track those particular aspects of the customer lifecycle. By looking at the relationship through this lens, you can more accurately measure your efforts and their effectiveness.

Marketing

Let’s start at the top – your marketing team. In terms of the customer lifecycle, marketing’s primary goal is first to raise awareness of your product. Your marketing efforts are often the first point of contact with a potential customer and (hopefully) the beginning of a customer relationship. As such, the first way you can use CRM to fine tune your marketing team’s efforts is to track the effectiveness of campaigns throughout the various stages of the marketing funnel.

The most obvious number to keep track of is return on investment (ROI). Whether your marketing campaigns are easily quantified paid advertisements or more elusive grassroots outreach programs, they both share one common goal – generating sales. A CRM can help measure campaign ROI by tracking leads generated, lead conversion rates, and resulting sales compared to the cost of the marketing efforts.

While you might think that the marketing funnel ends with a sale, further down your marketing team works to keep existing customers engaged. If existing customers become disengaged, they are more likely to discontinue using your service or purchasing your product, and acquiring a new customer can often cost many times more than retaining these existing customers. CRM can help here by tracking customer retention rates in comparison to specific marketing efforts. Is your newsletter subscription base dwindling alongside your customer numbers? Are your discount offers and deals going unnoticed? A properly implemented CRM will tell you where your marketing efforts are missing the mark.

Finally, you will want to keep a close eye on lifetime customer value – this is how much your business will earn from a single customer over the lifetime of the relationship. By examining this particular number, you can determine where and when to offer discounts and deals to existing customers. Knowing when to make a deal can be the difference between revenue lost or gained over the long haul.

Some stats to monitor include:

– Number of campaigns

– Number of campaign responses

– Number of campaign purchases

– Revenue generated by campaign

– Number of new customers acquired by campaign

– Number of customer referrals

– Number of web page views

– User goal completion rate on the web

– Time per website visit

– Customer lifetime value

– Cross-sell ration

– Up-sell ratio

– Email list growth rate

Sales

In most representations of the funnel, the next step after marketing is sales. Your sales team has an integral role when it comes to the customer relationship. This is arguably the lifeblood of your company and there are a number of important metrics you can track with your CRM to improve sales efforts.

First, how long is your sales cycle? By tracking how long it takes from the time you identify a sales lead to when you close the deal, your sales team can reflect on their efforts and see what works and what doesn’t. On this same vein, you can track sales closing rates – that is, how often does a lead become a sale – and evaluate not only members of your sales team, but also the channels through which those prospects arrived.

Next, your CRM can track key sales activities, such as outbound sales calls or inbound passive inquiries. Perhaps sales are lacking because your team is spending too much time on each call rather than maximizing the number of calls made. Or inversely not spending enough time on each call. Either way, you can see these effects by tracking outbound sales calls over time and analyzing the trend. Similarly, trends in inbound sales inquiries can point to effective or ineffective marketing campaigns and sales techniques.

Some stats to monitor include:

– Number of prospects

– Number of new customers

– Number of retained customers

– Close rate

– Renewal rate

– Number of sales calls made

– Number of sales calls per opportunity

– Amount of new revenue

– Number of open opportunities

– Sales stage duration

– Sales cycle duration

– Number of proposals given

Operations

Finally, once you’ve secured the customer relationship, you will want to track how effectively you deliver projects. If we return to the funnel, we’ll see that it often ends at the sale, but this is far from the truth. In order to keep that customer and build a lifelong relationship with them, we need to always consider them as somewhere along the marketing-sales-delivery continuum. Delivery is when we make good on the promises made in our marketing and sales efforts and provide the customer with an excellent experience and product or service. If we fail to deliver, all was for naught, and the CRM should let us know.

For example, if your customer has a problem, how well do you handle it? Your customer service and help desk efforts have the ability to transform your product or service from “average” to “best”. How long do your customers have to wait before getting assistance? Do they feel that your efforts were sufficient? Was their problem solved? All of these factors can be the difference between losing and retaining a customer.

Some stats to monitor include:

– Number of cases handled

– Number of cases closed the same day

– Average time to resolution

– Average number of service calls per day

– Complaint time to resolution

– Number of customer call backs

– Average service cost per service interaction

– Percentage compliance with SLAs

– Calls lost before being answered

– Average call handling time

While customizing your CRM metrics is a lot of work at the outset, it will pay dividends in the long run. Take the time and energy to optimize from the start, and your customers will divert their own time and energy to your business–with all the benefits that brings. Are you ready to start? Request a demo.

August 4, 2017

How to Scale Your Content Engine with Insightly

Managing content isn’t easy, especially when you have plans to scale your operation.

Without a rock-solid process, the addition of new topics and writers will only compound the issue. Before you can expand, you need to invest in the process itself.

In this post, I’ll show how it’s possible to optimize your content workflow by using Insightly projects and automation.

Map Your Content Pipeline

We marketers aren’t always the most methodical people. Writing a blog post or designing a brochure just comes naturally. But, mapping out an automated content workflow? That sounds a little scary.

With the right tools, building a content pipeline isn’t as intimidating as it first seems. In fact, a tool like Insightly can even make things kind of fun. To get you up to speed, here’s a quick video on how Insightly pipelines work:

Since Insightly is more than just a sales CRM, you can use pipelines to create predictability in your content production. Before spending too much time in Insightly, however, you’ll want to first study how your team currently does things. Here are some questions to consider:

Do blog posts, landing pages, and other web assets follow the same sequential pattern?
If they differ, should you consider creating separate pipelines for each type?
What specific phases does each piece go through during production?
As an item passes into a new phase of production, are there specific tasks or actions that always occur during that stage (such as obtaining sign offs or publishing a piece)?

Work closely with your team to map out the “guts” of your content workflow. It might even make sense to host an in-person meeting during which ideas are thrown onto a whiteboard for easy visualization. Investing this time upfront will help you avoid significant changes later on.

Set Things Up

After studying your current process, it’s time to get busy in Insightly. For the sake of discussion, let’s imagine that your team decides it needs three unique pipelines for:

Blog articles
Landing pages
Other web pages

Since most of what you crank out is blog related, you decide to focus on that pipeline first (wise decision!). To set it up in Insightly, you’ll just jump over to your pipeline settings page. If this is your first pipeline, there won’t be anything listed under “pipeline name.” Give your new pipeline a name, check the “for projects” box, and click “add pipeline.”

Once added, you’ll then want to add your stages. To do this, click “edit stages” and key in your desired production phases. Here’s a very simple example that might make sense for your business:

Congratulations! You’ve just added your first content production pipeline. When that next blog post idea pops into your head, simply add a new Insightly project that utilizes this same pipeline.

Automate Each Step

As you were adding pipeline stages, you might have noticed a drop-down option for activity sets. In case you’ve never heard of activity sets, here’s a quick overview of how they work:

In short, as a content piece moves into a new stage of production, Insightly can automatically create and assign batches of tasks or events.

By now, your brain is probably racing with all of the possibilities. For example, when items are moved to “pitch,” Insightly can do the following for you:

Assign a task to your assistant, Rhonda, reminding her to create and attach a blank collaboration document (within one business day)
Create a task to pitch the article within a week (manually assigned later)
Create a placeholder task for the writer to request pitch approval

Creating an activity set only takes a couple minutes, and it can easily be linked to your pitch stage:

Voila! By linking an activity set to the pitch phase, you’ll ensure that your team (yourself included) avoids overlooking important steps. Each new content piece (aka an Insightly project) is updated with the steps necessary to complete the pitch.

In reality, the pitch phase is probably not the only stage of your content production that could benefit from activity sets. Linking additional activity sets to other pipeline stages can be wise; just don’t try to overdo it. Consider gradually phasing in activity sets and testing each one individually. Few things are more aggravating than automation that creates more confusion than clarity.

Embed Work Instructions into the Process

Auto-assigning tasks is a step in the right direction. But, doing so isn’t a guarantee that the work will be done to your desired level of specification.

Increase the quality of your team’s work output by embedding work instructions into the process. Take, for example, the task that reminds Rhonda to create a blank document. You’ve shown her how to access the shared drive, find the correct folder, copy the template, and use the correct naming structure. With everything else on her plate, however, she sometimes skips a step or two by mistake.

To remedy this problem, update the task template to include a bulleted list of steps. Rhonda will appreciate the helpful reminder when new pitch requests arrive. You’ll appreciate not having to continuously repeat yourself.

Measure Your Production

Insightly also makes it easy to monitor content cycle times, bottlenecks, and other important productivity metrics. Just hop over to your project reports and filter for items within the blog pipeline. Insightly instantly returns a list of sortable content pieces, including those that you’ve recently completed. Drag and drop column fields to slice and dice status information, cycle time data, linked author profiles, and much more.

As your content backlog grows, Insightly’s charting features become increasingly helpful. For example, with a few clicks, the previous table can be converted into the following chart, displaying a visual representation of your content allocation (by status).

No more pivot tables or complicated spreadsheets. Everything you need to track is at your fingertips in Insightly.

Get Scalin’

Each new article magnifies the inefficiency of your current (broken) workflow. It’s time you took the next step and leveraged Insightly’s project management features for the betterment of your marketing team.

Click here to build your first content pipeline in Insightly!

July 6, 2017

Delivery: The Culmination of Your Sales Cycle

“We deliver on our promises.”

You’ve probably heard companies that tout similar mottos. On the surface, this type of tagline can almost seem clichéd. Clichés aside, delivering on promises is a fundamental part of being in (and staying in) business. Unfortunately, some companies mistakenly focus too much effort on their sales pipelines at the expense of downstream delivery.

In this post, we’re going to look at a few common delivery models and how they differ. We’ll also discuss a few tips for leveraging CRM technology for a more scalable delivery of products and services.

Physical Goods

Let’s start by examining something we all love: stuff.

Whether it’s the latest gadget, a yummy pizza, or a flashy new sports car, there’s a certain level of excitement we humans get by exchanging hard-earned cash for something tangible.

For manufacturers and retailers, getting stuff into the customer’s hands isn’t always as straightforward as it seems. In some cases, it may involve selling directly to end users. In other situations, selling through third-party resellers or franchises may make more sense. Whether you sell to consumers or other businesses, the sale of “stuff” tends to follow one of two models: direct or through distributors and/or dealers.

Let’s briefly review each model and consider a few examples for each.

Direct-to-End User Model

There are certainly perks involved with the direct distribution model. For starters, the vendor has a highly accurate feedback loop with end users. This, of course, makes it easier to adjust the product mix and develop new offerings. Since there are no “middlemen” to account for, the vendor may also be able to maximize its margin potential. On the other hand, some direct-to-end user firms operate under tremendous margin pressure – especially those offering a commoditized item.

Here are a few fictitious examples, along with a few less-than-creative slogans for illustrative purposes. (Please note: Few businesses operate in a purely “direct” or “indirect” ecosystem. Also, “B2C” is an abbreviation for “business-to-consumer” and “B2B” represents “business-to-business,” but I’m sure you already knew that.)

B2C

Uncle Joey’s Pizza & Delivery – “Uncle Joey’s famous pie…in 30 minutes or less.”
Tri-State Botanical Nursery – “We grow the best plants in the Tri-State area.”
Grandma’s Handmade Silk Tie Shop – “Stop by and find the perfect tie!”

B2B

City Iron Foundry – “We’ll cast just about anything you need!”
Reliable Software Associates – “Join 10,000 happy customers who use our platform.”
Industrial Medical & Safety – “Our best medical supplies, direct to your business.”

A direct distribution model typically relies on a high-volume, high-touch sales and support model. By assuming more control over the pipeline, the supplier also takes on greater responsibility for acquiring and servicing the accounts.

As one might imagine, many B2C companies follow a traditional retail model (be it in-person or online). A standardized (or somewhat standardized) product is made or created, the customer pays for the item, and the process repeats itself. In some cases, the “sales cycle” (if you can call it that) may only take a few minutes (or seconds, especially if done online). In such cases, a CRM may offer the most value for tracking new product launches, managing customer contact information, and encouraging future repeat purchases.

When it comes to delivery, B2B firms tend to see even more value from a CRM. Take, for example, our iron foundry example. The foundry has a team of sales reps, each of whom is actively working a lead list. When a lead converts into a new paying customer, the foundry must then flawlessly fulfill the order. By leveraging a tool like Insightly, which lets you instantly convert opportunities to projects, the company can move seamlessly into order fulfillment mode. All prior emails, notes, design specifications, drawings, and documents are brought over from the originating sales record. Now, the engineering team can hit the ground running without pestering the client for duplicate information.

Indirect Model

In theory, a purely direct model sure sounds great. In reality, it’s difficult for most businesses to pull off – especially if the company desires expansion beyond a specific geographic region or niche.

For this reason, many companies choose to sell their products through third-party wholesalers, distributors, agents, dealers, merchants, and other entities. By tapping into a pre-existing distribution model, manufacturers can expedite brand awareness and – most importantly – sales.

Here are a few example companies that fit into the “indirect” supply chain. These organizations add value to the marketplace by selling products from one or more manufacturers, usually within a specific area and/or product category.

B2C

Texas Tom’s Auto Dealership – “All your favorite brands…with deals the size of Texas!”
Crafty Catherine’s Online Shop – “Everything you need for your next big project.”
Corey’s Computers & Parts – “Gadgets you want for prices that you’ll love.”

B2B

Downtown Promo Products – “Ad specialities, gifts, tradeshow items…and more.”
Top Office Furniture & More – “More than just desks and executive chairs!”

With an indirect model, there are at least two points of delivery to be tracked. First, the manufacturer is responsible for ensuring timely delivery to its downstream distribution partners. Whether items are to be manufactured just-in-time or fulfilled from an existing inventory, a project-conscious CRM (such as Insightly) can be tremendously helpful. As new purchase orders are received, they can be uploaded and linked to a fulfillment project. Production, post-production, shipping, and customer communication can be built into the project pipeline, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks. In addition, individual tasks can be assigned to team members, creating additional accountability and clarity.

For downstream distribution partners, delivery can vary greatly based on the business model and customer type. A computer retailer, for example, usually maintains a standard inventory level. Upon paying for a product, the customer is then free to take immediate possession of the item (except in rare circumstances, such as specialty orders or out-of-stock parts). By contrast, a promotional products company has a much more complicated delivery model. Even after a customer places an order, there could be several weeks of back-and-forth prior to delivery. Obtaining written approval from clients, working with manufacturers and pad printers, and coordinating freight are just a few of the many related tasks.

The more complex the delivery model, the more vital your CRM becomes. Be sure to look for a CRM that not only tracks your projects and tasks, but one that will also allow you to save and link your email correspondence. Digging through your inbox is not the most productive use of time. Get everything in one place – and never lose an important client approval again.

Services

Time to shift gears and look at services.

We live in an increasingly service-driven economy. But, unlike products which have an easily defined cost of goods sold, services can be a bit more difficult to quantify from a profitability standpoint.

To ensure profitability, it’s especially important for service-oriented businesses to have a finely tuned delivery model. Time is money, and every minute wasted is money down the drain.

Note: Before we look at specific service model examples, I’ve chosen to categorize services into two models: recurring and limited engagement. I suppose one could categorize services as “direct” and “indirect” (as we did in the product section). However, a frequency-based explanation seemed more logical for this discussion.

Recurring Model

Keeping existing customers happy is often times easier than winning new business. Existing customers represent a known entity and can be easily upsold. New customers can represent new levels of risk and uncertain profit potential. For these reasons, some service-oriented companies focus on a recurring service model.

Not every recurring service model is identical. Some companies will bill on a straight hourly basis. Others will bill on a monthly retainer. Still others will batch together a hybrid of hourly and a la carte add-on services. Regardless of how billing is done, the goal remains the same: provide clients with more value than what they are paying for.

Let’s look at a few example companies engaged in a recurring service model.

B2C Examples

Larry’s Lawn Care Company – “Keeping your lawn trimmed, green, and beautiful.”
Community Preschool & Daycare – “Caring for children as if they were our own.”
Upper Storage Facility – “Put all your extra stuff in storage – for a few bucks a month.”

B2B Examples

Matt’s Social Media Super Stars – “Get more likes and shares with Matt’s team of stars.”
Bob Smith Commercial Insurance Agency – “Working to protect your business from risk.”
XYZ Web Hosting – “Your website, our servers = faster load times.”

In each example, continued engagement with the client is dependent upon the service provider’s performance. In the case of a lawn care company, brown yards and out-of-control dandelions are a sure-fire path to lost revenue. Likewise, a social media company that forgets to schedule posts will find itself looking for new victims…I mean clients.

With so many ongoing clients to keep happy, how can companies consistently deliver? A tool like Insightly can be a great solution for keeping everything balanced. Insightly allows you to set up recurring tasks, which can be linked to existing customers and organization records in your CRM. Once you’ve set up a task to repeat, Insightly will help you remember to follow up in a timely fashion. You can even have Insightly send you email reminders as due dates approach, making it even easier to deliver on your promises.

Limited Engagement

Not every service model fits neatly into an ongoing engagement. In fact, some companies never deal with the same client twice. It’s not because the service provider did a bad job – rather, the nature of the business simply does not necessitate future services.

Let’s take a quick look at a few examples of what I like to call “limited engagement” service providers.

B2C

Smith Home Realty Agency – “Your house…sold in 60 days or less!”
Western Kentucky Tree Trimmers – “Tree down? Let us handle that for you.”
Lucinda’s Auto Body Shop & Paint – “Your best choice for your busted-up vehicle.”

B2B

Tax Crisis Audit Partners – “Let us take care of your worst tax nightmare.”
Quad-County Machine Shop – “Quad-county on-demand machining services.”

Limited engagement service providers may have the most complicated delivery model. Each customer probably has a completely different situation, requiring a highly customized plan of action. Although in certain instances it may be possible to follow a sequential project workflow, limited engagement service providers may realize more value from Insightly milestones. For example, a realtor needs to simultaneously draft the listing, build the social media plan, and collect high resolution photographs of the property. Insightly milestones allow her to do all of these things at once – without losing track of the bigger picture. Each milestone can have linked tasks and due dates, helping her to delegate with less effort.

Or, take the machine shop as another example. “Machining” is a rather broad service set, leading to a diverse group of customers and projects. Again, milestones can provide the machinists with the flexibility that they need. Instead of being forced into a pipeline that doesn’t make sense for their business model, milestones accommodate delivery planning and adapts to the dynamics of their customer lifecycles.

Deliver with Better Technology

Whether you’re a boutique advertising agency or an online retailer, one thing is for sure: delivering on your promises is an important part of what you do each day. Don’t just hope that things will work out as they always have.

Put your delivery model into a more scalable format with Insightly.

June 6, 2017

Time Management Secrets for Marketing Consultants

Time management secrets are essential for marketing consulting success.

Right-brained or left-brained? Creative or analytical? Strategic or tactical?

Marketing consultants have a fine line to walk between ideation and execution. On one hand, we must continuously develop innovative ideas that keep clients ahead of competitors. On the other hand, we also must be highly efficient in the implementation of campaigns and programs.

Luckily, technology is here to help.

1. Strategically Examine Your Work

Before spending too much time on the technology aspect of this article, let’s first step back and examine the bigger picture. If you’ve been in business for very long, you probably have a good feel for your business model. But, have you ever paused to specifically consider the commonality of your client engagements?

To do this, pull out a whiteboard or notebook and list your most important clients near the top. Below each client’s name, answer these questions:

What is the nature of my relationship? (hourly, fixed retainer, per deliverable, etc.)
What services do I provide within the framework of this relationship?
How much do I usually bill for each service?
Do any of these services follow similar production cycles, regardless of the client? (i.e. pitching, drafting, writing, editing, etc.)
Which steps in the production cycles are known to cause bottlenecks?
What do I (or others on my team) regularly forget to do?

What’s the point of doing this exercise? In the context of this discussion, you’ll be setting the groundwork for designing more effective workflows in your project management system. From a broader perspective, you may also identify new upselling opportunities. What works for one client typically works for several!

2. Divide Your Work into Two Camps

I’ve often heard experts compare marketing to an engine. Before you start your vehicle’s engine, you must first put in the right type of fuel. As your car takes you where you need to go, the fuel tank begins to run low. Unless you want to be stranded somewhere, you must continuously refill the tank before reaching empty. And, it’s always wise to have a qualified mechanic to run diagnostics and recommend ongoing preventative maintenance.

Like your car’s engine, your client’s marketing engine depends on you to fuel it. Quality content, wise SEO decisions, clean and mobile-friendly web design, and effective branding are just a few of the important ongoing responsibilities. Much like the mechanic, you also keep a close eye on performance by reviewing web traffic reports, lead data, email analytics, acquisition costs. You use this information to recommend exciting new initiatives, aimed at optimizing performance.

Although there are many moving parts, most tasks usually fall into one of two categories:

Repeating
One-off

Before going any further, make a list of your tasks that repeat. As you look at the many services you provide, it may be surprising to see how many occur on a recurring basis. Unless you’re already using project management software, simply remembering to do these tasks on time can be a chore. Looking at my own to-do list, I must admit there are many recurring responsibilities, such as:

Monthly

Prepare newsletters
Develop content plans
Review and interpret website traffic reports
Send invoices

Weekly

Review and approve social media plans
Publish blog articles
Prepare for 1×1 meetings
Check weekly SEO analysis reports

Daily

Provide feedback to web developers
Provide feedback to graphic team

Identifying your repeating tasks is relatively straightforward. But, what about things that are less predictable? For example, if you’re a digital marketer, you’ve probably helped a client promote a whitepaper or two. At first glance, this seems like a one-time engagement. In reality, although the specific whitepaper is new, the process typically follows a similar pattern. Spend time listing out the steps you typically follow to help bring a downloadable asset to fruition. Your list might include:

Gather content
Edit copy
Ask for client input on draft
Design the layout
Create landing page & thank-you page
Build email nurture sequence
Enable CRM integration for web leads
Seek client’s final approval
Set up goal tracking in analytics package

Go through this process for any other work that requires a specific production workflow but does not necessarily occur within a predictable time frame. Examples might include:

Launch a new website
Promote a webinar
Design a brochure
Write a guest blog post
Produce a training video
Deploy a new CRM system
Implement a marketing automation package

3. Create Standardization with Technology

Now that you’ve documented how your time is spent, the fun can really begin.

A system like Insightly can help create work standardization while simultaneously reducing your propensity toward forgetfulness. To illustrate, let’s see how client invoicing can be streamlined with Insightly.

Most of your clients prefer to be billed monthly. However, you have a few on bi-weekly billing. With everything else on your plate, keeping these dates organized is more challenging than it seems. Forgetting to invoice a client is not only bad for your cash flow, but it also sends the wrong message about your project management skills. If you can’t even send an invoice on time, how can you be trusted with other more important matters?

Automate your client invoicing by setting up repeating tasks in your project management system. For clients on a monthly schedule, you might just set up a single recurring task (to avoid unnecessary task clutter). In Insightly, that might look something like this:

Now, let’s take care of your handful of customers who prefer bi-weekly billing. Set the task to first occur on the next due date and select a repeat schedule of “every two weeks.”

Once set up, each completed task will automatically trigger Insightly to create the next instance on your behalf. Remembering to invoice clients on time just got a lot easier.

By automating your repeating tasks, you’re likely to find new time in your schedule. Reinvest some of this time into building more scalable operations for your business. If you’re using Insightly, you might pre-populate an activity set for each important process.

Recalling the whitepaper example from above, we discussed how the production of such an asset follows a specific, predictable process (gather content, edit copy, design the layout, etc.). Regardless of the whitepaper’s theme, these steps must be followed each and every time. It therefore makes sense to create an activity set to serve as a template for your milestones or project pipelines.

Once created, the activity set can be applied to all future whitepapers that your team produces. Instead of wasting time to figure out what happens next, all of your steps are clearly laid out with a single click.

4. Commit to a Disciplined Work Life

As a marketer, you’re an expert at juggling a lot of things at once. Client meetings, phone calls, emails, and webinars are just a few of the many priorities in your busy workday.

Without a disciplined approach, it can be easy to get very overwhelmed. After all, your clients count on your expertise to grow their businesses. To provide prudent and timely advice, marketers must possess expert-level prioritization skills.

How can you achieve this for your consulting business? Digitizing your to-do list (as outlined in the three previous steps) is a great place to start. Unlike handwritten notes or even a spreadsheet, a project management system helps you to visualize your daily workload. By assigning due dates for yourself, your tasks can be automatically sorted by due date or priority. Log in, get your plan, and stay focused on what’s most important.

It’s important to note that any to-do list (be it digital or paper-based) is only as good as what you make of it. Failure to check it regularly will cause you to only feel further behind.

To avoid this situation, set a goal of checking your to-do list at least daily (preferably in the morning). Identify that which must be done today; anything else can happen as a second priority (or be pushed back to a later date). As you complete tasks, be sure to mark them as “done” in your project management software. This step is particularly important for repeating tasks, as to ensure future tasks get created by the system.

5. Delegate First (When Possible)

An idle task represents a missed opportunity – particularly if it involves work that requires group collaboration. When facing a list of a dozen or more tasks, give preference to those that can be delegated.

For example, let’s say your task list is packed full of (among other things) client infographic ideas. Although you’re not the person who will design the graphics, each concept does require your attention. Before the designer can do his job, you must first scope out the idea, provide detailed instructions, and explain your overall vision. Making this type of delegation doesn’t require a significant investment of your time. But, with everything else on your schedule, it’s natural to push it off for later. Unfortunately, in doing so, your graphic designer will be twiddling his thumbs instead of adding value.

With a rock-solid project management system, you can expedite your delegation process, thereby increasing the likelihood you’ll actually do it. With Insightly, delegating is as easy as updating the assigned user, adding your comments, and saving the record. You can also indicate progress completion, priority, and/or status.

Of course, on unusually hectic days, it may not be possible to find time to delegate. Time management can be well intentioned but not always feasible. That’s OK. Just to be sure to set aside delegation time on your “normal” days (if there ever is such a thing) and always look for things that can be delegated downward. In doing so, you’ll keep others busy, improve your team’s output, and make your workload seem much more attainable.

6. Create Accountability

Even the best of plans are worthless without proper accountability.

As the days and weeks go by, you may be tempted to fall into your old routines. Don’t let this happen to you! Instead, seek technology that can serve as your accountability partner.

For example, Insightly can actually remind you when important tasks are almost due. By enabling task reminders, you can make sure that nothing slips through the cracks. For visibility into tasks assigned to other users, consider building a task report that tracks overdue tasks by owner. Advanced users can even opt to automatically receive emailed reports. Customize the delivery frequency to fit your business model and availability.

From a bigger picture perspective, it’s also wise to incorporate a retrospective process into your project management workflow. Not every project goes as planned, which means there are probably valuable lessons to learn.

As you peruse your list of completed projects (and/or associated tasks), consider these questions.

Did we finish behind, ahead of, or on schedule?
What caused the deviation from our original plan?
Were there certain tasks that held up the process?
Are certain team members consistently clogging things up?
Could some tasks be merged into fewer items, thereby creating less clutter?
Was the client satisfied with the outcome?
How much downtime was attributed to delegation delays?
At the end of the day, was this project profitable for our business?

Of course, an in-depth retrospective doesn’t make sense for every work product. Depending on your business model, it may be best to spot-check at random. Or, it may make more sense to review closed projects over a certain budget or hour amount. Either way, define a process for your business and stick to it. Use this information to further optimize future work and technology decisions.

Better Time Management = Happier Customers

Clients don’t pay you just for the sake of paying you. Rather, the goal for any consultant is to deliver more value than what the client pays. Making the most of every minute, hour, and day with better time management will ensure clients always see you as a net positive asset.

Thankfully, technology continues to provide innovative solutions to even the most difficult productivity challenges. Make time to regularly identify your bottlenecks, map more efficient workflows, and deploy software features that can bring your vision to life.

May 24, 2017

5 Smart CRM Shortcuts to Impress Your Clients

Consultants are in the business of looking smart in the eyes of our customers. (Whether we are actually smart might be somewhat debatable!)

With client priorities dictating every waking moment, consultants can sometimes fall into the trap of overlooking their own business workflows. Although it’s important to keep your customers top of mind, it’s also wise to constantly refine your own operations.

In this post, I’ll share five easy ways that you can use Insightly to streamline your consulting business – and make a lasting impression with customers.

#1: Onboard Clients in a Couple of Clicks

Today is a great day. Before you sipped your first cup of coffee, you received word that another new client (we’ll call them “Smith Company”) has decided to accept your proposal. This represents an excellent opportunity for your firm, and you’re obviously very excited.

As you’ve done many times before, you head over to your Insightly account, find the opportunity record, and mark it as “won.” For good measure, you even convert the opportunity to a project. After adding a few notes to the new project record, you move on to the next item on your to-do list. Perhaps this afternoon you’ll have time to officially get things moving for the new client.

Unfortunately, your day doesn’t go exactly as planned. An existing client has an unexpected emergency pop up, sending you into an all-day meeting. A different client keeps pinging you, consuming any excess brain power you can muster. Smith Company is just going to have to wait until tomorrow.

More than 24 hours pass before the team at Smith Company receives your canned “welcome” email. At this time, you also assign a few tasks to your project manager. You even add a task for yourself so that you remember to schedule a kickoff call. The folks at Smith Company respond quickly to your email, and the ball is in motion.

There’s nothing necessarily “wrong” with your current approach. But, wouldn’t a more expedited process reduce client wait time and make you happier? Sure it would! Here’s how Insightly can accommodate that.

By leveraging the power of workflow automation, Insightly can do all the administrative work on your behalf. For example, you could configure an Insightly workflow to do the following:

Instantly send a prebuilt onboarding email template to your contacts at Smith Company
Assign tasks to your project manager
Assign yourself a reminder to schedule the kickoff call

In a matter of clicks, you could instantly set the wheels in motion when the deal closes – rather than manually doing the exact same thing a day (or more) later. Smith Company would certainly be impressed by your attentiveness, and your project manager could get to work sooner.

#2: Respond to Leads Faster (with Better Info)

Streamlining the customer onboarding process is a great first step, but what about automated lead engagement? Despite being an important part of your future viability, courting new business can be rather distracting to your workday.

Once again, Insightly email templates can come in handy here, too.

Stop and think about the most common questions that leads ask you. In my line of work (marketing consulting), these are the most common ones I get:

How much do you charge for content marketing services?
Can you send me some examples of your work?
Do you have experience developing marketing plans?
Can you help me with my social media?
I need help with my website – can you point me in the right direction?

For the better part of a decade, I’ve answered questions like these countless different ways. And, I’m ashamed to admit, I usually just fire off a quick, one-off answer. A better approach would leverage the power of Insightly email templates. So, as new web leads come in via a web-to-lead form, answering questions becomes as easy as clicking the “Actions” dropdown, selecting the appropriate template, and sending the message.

By building response templates for every common question, you could save hours of time each year and avoid forgetting key details.

Had I followed my own advice from day one, I would have probably saved dozens of hours. Lesson learned!

#3: Host Better Meetings with Tags & Pipelines

Clients love to have meetings with you. After all, your advice matters to them. The most direct way to get such advice? You guessed it….meetings!

The simple act of meeting preparation can be very time consuming. You never know when clients will expect you to run the show, so the prudent consultant always has a few discussion topics up his or her sleeve.

By living and breathing Insightly, you can ensure there’s always something to talk about with clients. Pipeline views and tags are particularly useful for structuring meeting conversations. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

As you know, most clients love to see the progress you’re making. You could talk until you’re blue in the face, but showing a visual representation of such progress can be much more impactful. For work utilizing pipelines, Insightly natively builds a visual representation in your project dashboard. Before the meeting, just filter your projects to show only those that apply to the given client. Voila, you have a dynamic explanation of the client’s initiatives, which can be provided as a screenshot or through browser sharing.

Likewise, tags can help you structure a meeting agenda in minutes. This is especially true as your list of client-specific projects grows beyond more than a few. For projects that require in-depth discussion, you might create a tag called “stuck” or “to discuss.” Filtering for that particular tag presents a list of pre-filtered discussion topics, making you look like a genius.

#4: Capture Client Ideas from Your Inbox

Your clients send you plenty of ideas. Here’s the problem: they always seem to forget about their ideas shortly after emailing you.

Luckily, they have you to help keep everything organized!

One way you can achieve this goal is by setting up a new project, specifically for collecting their ideas.

As new ideas arrive in your inbox, just forward the email to the project-specific email address. Insightly will automatically link your forwarded email to the “idea bucket” project. Then, the next time you chat with the client, you’ll have a real-time feed of all their latest ideas.

Stop digging through your inbox for an email you’ll never find. Instead, make a habit of getting each new idea into Insightly as quickly as possible. Your clients will thank you, and you’re bound to yield new revenue-producing opportunities – simply by clicking “forward.”

#5: Create Accountability with Recurrence Patterns

You can’t do your job without clients providing some level of input. All of the best strategies in the world will fail unless your customers are willing to do their part, too.

Many of these client responsibilities, especially for longer-term relationships, tend to happen on a repeating pattern. For example, in my life as a marketing consultant, I’m constantly asking for the following:

Topics to include in the monthly newsletter
New features worth mentioning on social media
Quarterly budget approvals
Ideas for upcoming blog posts
Updates from product development teams

Granted, some of these could be addressed in your ongoing meetings with clients. In reality, most meetings tend to focus on new ideas – rather than ongoing responsibilities.

One way to create accountability is by setting up repeating tasks and email reminders in Insightly. In a perfect world, your clients would have their own instances of Insightly, allowing you to assign work directly to them. If your clients use a different system (or none at all), the next best solution is to assign the tasks to yourself and forward (or auto-forward) the email reminder to the appropriate stakeholder.

Take a monthly newsletter for example. As an outside consultant, it’s literally impossible for me to come up with 100% of the content by myself. I need input from inside team members in order to do my job and produce an engaging work product. If a newsletter needs to go out during the last week of each month, setting a repeating monthly task for mid-month could be helpful. This way, there’s plenty of time to collect the information I need to hit the deadline. Internal stakeholders will also appreciate the grace period, rather than a last-minute fire drill.

Maximize the Usefulness of Your Insightly Toolbox

As you can see, a tool like Insightly offers endless possibilities for the efficiency-minded consultant. Invest time in getting to know the best practices for using Insightly more efficiently. You can even watch free videos and recorded webinars, packed full of tips for maximizing the usefulness of your Insightly account.

Now go out there and really impress your clients – with less effort!

May 17, 2017

5 Time-Wasting Business Habits & How to Avoid Them

Time goes by much too quickly.

As the leader of a growing business, you know this to be all too true. Days and weeks continue to zip by in a flash, and your strategic priorities seem no closer to implementation.

Although you can’t slow down time, you can identify time-wasting habits that may have formed in your business. Overcoming these habits can free up new time and resources, making goal achievement more feasible.

In this post, we’ll discuss five common time-wasters – and how to overcome them.

1. Constantly Jumping Between Email, Chat, & Social Media

In a perfect world, you’d never be bothered during work hours. Instead of constantly putting out fires, a targeted focus on your ever-growing to-do list could yield significant value.

Unfortunately, your work life is far from perfect (so is everyone else’s by the way). Customers are always emailing you directly. Your team is not shy about pinging you with questions. New sales inquiries and support problems frequently require your input. And, your social media followers always appreciate your pithy thought leadership. All of this is, of course, encouraging news for your business. Clients increasingly trust the brand you’ve built. But, servicing so many requests can quickly grow tiresome and even serve as a distraction for your company’s future growth. Spending every waking hour jumping between your inbox and discussion forums diverts your attention away from your goals.

How can you gain greater control over your schedule without missing opportunities? Here are a few ideas:

Set aside “distraction-free” time each day: Set your IM status to “do not disturb” and close your inbox. Put your smartphone in a different room. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and spend 30 minutes on something you deem to be important. Try this for a couple days and measure the impact. I think you’re going to like it – and, you might even be surprised by how little you’re actually missed!

Study the sensitivity of your response time: Does each request deserve an immediate answer (by you)? How many of your emails are truly “urgent” in nature? Study these types of questions, and you’ll be more likely to identify how much “distraction-free” time you can get away with.

Look for additional things to delegate: Just because you’ve historically done something, it doesn’t mean you should keep doing so. Does it make sense to hire additional staff or freelancers to ease the burden? Perhaps you already have staff who could fill this role? It’s worth considering.

2. Capturing & Organizing Minutes from Meetings

Speaking of things worth delegating, how much time do you spend on glorified administrative work? For example, what percentage of your week is consumed by the seemingly simple task of organizing your own meeting notes?

If you said “not much,” think again.

Let’s say that you typically have between eight and twelve meetings each week (we’ll call it ten on average). You usually create a meeting agenda, share it with your team in advance, and then use the document to capture meeting minutes. After the discussion is over, you spend about fifteen minutes trying to make sense of your notes. You look for any action items and manually enter each one into your project management system. By my math, you’re spending over two hours each week (or 150 minutes to be exact) on post-meeting administrative activities! This is not to mention the time you’re spending during the meeting by trying to multi-task as both scribe and participant.

Here’s a better approach:

Step 1: Before the meeting, identify a related project or customer record via the Insightly mobile app.
Step 2: On the “related” tab for the record, tap the “+” symbol and select “Note with recording.”
Step 3: Let Insightly record the discussion and link the recording to the related entity.
Step 4: Have your administrative assistant listen to the audio transcript and add new tasks on your behalf.
Step 5: Enjoy the additional time in your busy work week!

Optimizing your meetings is only the beginning. With a tool like Insightly, you’re bound to identify other administrative tasks that can either be eliminated, streamlined, or delegated.

3. Waiting for the Next Assignment

Although your to-do list is always overflowing, the same isn’t always true for other members of your team. Granted, some staff members take the initiative and find ways to add value without being asked. Others, however, prefer to take a “wait and see” approach, hoping that you’ll find something for them to do.

Idle staff can be doubly wasteful to your organization. With the proper instruction, they could be helping you work through your overwhelming backlog. This would not only ensure their time is well spent, but it could help you move your vision forward – faster. Instead, idleness is reducing output and inhibiting the realization of your strategic agenda.

To reduce the risk of downtime, it’s important to take a proactive approach to project management. For example, you might:

Tag your projects: People can’t help you if they don’t know what’s on your mind. Consider tagging certain projects that may benefit from team involvement. Doing so will make it easier for staff to view and sort that which is important to you. They can even volunteer for specific tasks, allowing you to expedite the implementation of certain strategic initiatives.

Encourage group discussion: Sometimes a project just needs a healthy discussion to get liftoff. Set up a recurring monthly (or biweekly) calendar invitation, during which your team can collectively review and discuss your tagged projects.

Automate recurring tasks: Just because a specific task is marked as “completed,” it doesn’t mean that it’s done forever. What types of activities does your organization do on a repeating basis? Examples might include: monthly bookkeeping, preparing social media plans, and pulling sales reports. Configure repeating tasks to keep your team on track and avoid downtime.

4. Moving Data From Your CRM to Other Systems

You need timely and accurate data to make informed decisions. And, although you spend much of your day in your CRM, there are other software apps you use to run your business. Exporting, importing, and de-duplicating data lists isn’t exactly the best use of time.

How can you streamline the data management aspect of your business?

For starters, it’s important that you fully understand the native potential of your CRM. For example, some Insightly users overlook the fact that the system offers accelerated sales management and project management under one roof. By simply utilizing the built-in project aspects of Insightly, users can bypass the headaches of porting data between systems. When an opportunity is marked “won,” a new project can be created in less than ten seconds. This is especially useful for business models that require a high-touch fulfillment model.

Naturally, it’s unreasonable to think that your CRM can fulfill every aspect of your technological needs. Even after maximizing the use of a tool like Insightly, your organization will probably still rely on:

Eternal inboxes
Document sharing apps
Accounting & bookkeeping software
Email marketing systems
Scheduling calendars
Customer ticketing software

Before you export another customer data CSV file, it’s worth a look at the native integrations to your CRM. Insightly, for example, offers dozens of easy-to-enable integrations. And, if that’s not enough, you could leverage the power of the Zapier platform and potentially connect your CRM to more than 750 third-party tools.

With each newly enabled integration, your staff is bound to save hours of frustrating, non-value-added administrative work. You’re also in a better position for avoiding data headaches and oversights.

5. Relying Too Heavily on Your Desktop (or Laptop)

Unless you’re a millennial who grew up with a smartphone in hand since childhood, you probably prefer to do certain tasks via your desktop or laptop computer. There’s a certain sense of comfort that comes from your oversized monitor and ergonomic keyboard.

Despite the appeal of a traditional office setting, you and your team might actually be wasting time.

To illustrate this point, let’s imagine you have a busy day scheduled for tomorrow. You’ll be attending an executive networking event at 7:30 am, which is immediately followed by a couple of important on-site client meetings. After that, you’re meeting a potential new hire for lunch. Your afternoon calendar is fairly open, which seems like the perfect opportunity to regroup from the busy morning. Unfortunately, when you arrive back at your desk, a new emergency has arisen. Updating your CRM records will have to wait until tomorrow morning (hopefully there won’t be a new emergency then!).

In this scenario, which depends upon being at your desk and doing work, you’ve let a full day slip by before any follow-up action can occur.

A better approach might have looked like this:

After each event, pull out your smartphone and pop open the Insightly mobile app.

Find the related record and add a voice note (see above) to summarize your notes.

If immediate action is required, assign a task to one of your team members (or yourself!).

Close the app and move on to your next meeting.

By following this process (which takes five minutes or less), you’ll save yourself time later in the day. In addition, your staff can help coordinate the many follow-up activities before you ever get back to your desk. It’s the best of both worlds.

What Other Time-Wasters Do You Struggle With?

Struggling to overcome other time-wasting habits in your business? The first step to improving your situation is to realize a problem exists. Only then can you begin matching technology and other best practices to solve your newfound inefficiencies.