Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11
Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!
Swipe Right to Hire Smart
The Tinder dating app may be best suited for the millennials, but the concept of “swiping right” is gaining traction in the world of employment. The app is called Switch (available for both Android and iOS) and it was designed to make hiring a simple and straightforward process. Employers can upload open positions, and then begin browsing through qualified candidates who are presented based upon your job description and keywords.
If you like what you see, swipe right to “like” a prospect, or swipe left to take a pass. If there is mutual interest between employer and prospect, the Switch app puts you into a direct contact loop through chat or email.
Navigating From Previews to Details in the Insightly Sidebar
Rolling your mouse cursor over an item in the Sidebar will display the preview window in the Sidebar (for contacts) or to the left of the Sidebar.
When click the Display inside Sidebar arrow icon, the Sidebar will display the selected record in more detail.
Making the Friendly Skies Even Friendlier
If you travel via airplane for business and you can’t afford the wide open spaces of business or first class, Soarigami could become your new best travel companion. The product, which looks a little bit like a paper airplane, folds out (like a piece of Origami) when you need it, and then neatly folds up again when you don’t. When open, you simply attach Soaragami to the armrest, then enjoy the benefit of a barrier that separates your arm-space from your neighbor’s arm-space.
Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around.
Send Us Your Tips. Would you like to share your tips with Insightly customers? Send them to us! If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card! Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email.
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.
Photo by samuiblue, courtesy of Freedigitalphotos.net.
As great scientific discoveries so often do, psychology’s newest secret is finding its way into the business world.
To improve employees’ performance, contentment and health – i.e. overall wellness, leaders are beginning to harness a discovery that shifted how psychotherapy is practiced.
It’s only the beginning…
What’s the big secret?
I call it “Mind Exercising.”
A Mind Exercise is a strategic meditation that guides your attention through specific shifts with the intention of achieving and maintaining “real life” results.
Think of Mind Exercise as meditation’s high-performing cousin. You can Mind Exercise to improve your tennis game, customer service style, sales results or personal relationships.
Brain scientists have concluded that how and where you direct your attention produces measurable changes in your brain’s structure, physiology and function. A changed brain produces changed results.
The impact of Mind Exercise is not only theoretical or intellectual; it’s psychological, physiological and practical too.
How does it work?
Mind Exercise works like physical exercise. Just as the right physical exercise can improve your body’s strength and function so you perform better at particular tasks, the right Mind Exercise can improve the strength and function of your attention so you perform better at particular tasks.
How much practice produces measurable results?
Let’s look at examples of meditation research results that relate to changes to the brain that have been found in meditators.
Eight weeks of strategic meditation has been shown to increase the thickness of the hippocampus—a pair of thumb-sized structures located in the center of your brain that are vital to your ability to learn and remember.
When you manage your stress effectively your hippocampus can generate roughly seven hundred new brain cells every day. When unmanaged stress accumulates your hippocampus cells can shrink and die.
A shrinking hippocampus is associated with stress-related conditions such as anxiety and depression, and lifestyle choices like being sedentary and eating junk food. Your performance is negatively impacted in very real ways when you don’t manage your stress effectively.
What are other important findings?
Improvements in attention and concentration, (i.e. less mind wandering), have been repeatedly found in empirical research on meditation’s effects.
The average attention span of a human being has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013 (National Center for Biotechnology Information, at the U.S. National Library of Medicine).
Where does Mind Exercise come in?
Meditating with the intention of achieving a specific goal — Mind Exercising — is meditating strategically to change your “real life.”
With the right practice, you can reduce stress and access your ideally focused state of mind and body for performing at specific tasks that are important to you.
My clients typically set five to twenty-minute appointments with themselves throughout the day to complete Mind Exercises that relax their brain and body and strategically reconnect them to their personal, real-life, intention.
Mind Exercising can improve performance of teams as well. Group objectives are integrated into a customized Mind Exercise sequence that team members complete on a schedule. The exercises align team member’s mind-body state with their intention to produce clearly defined results.
Strategically applied habits of mind can lead to increased productivity, propagating a virtuous circle of improving performance and propelling teams toward shared goals.
What’s the rub?
The rub is that research indicates a variety of specific requirements must be met to realize many of the benefits of meditation. My experience is that the same criteria apply to benefitting from Mind Exercise.
While the benefits of meditation and Mind Exercise are significant, developing an effective practice is a commitment.
What’s the best way to begin?
Since maintaining your Mind Exercise practice after the initial fun and excitement of learning something new wears off is a challenge, it helps to clearly understand how your brain is changing, and how that will benefit you if you keep it up over time.
I developed an online learning format to guide people through the sequential steps my clients and patients take when they begin a Mind Exercise practice. You can complete the steps free at BeYourPurpose.com anytime.
Dr. Sean Sullivan consults to organizations about brain training and Mind Exercise and maintains a performance-focused psychology practice awarded as, “One of the Top Psychology Practices in San Francisco in 2015,” by OpenCare. Dr. Sullivan is the author of two popular books about Mind Exercising: The Mind Master’s Silence Journey and Be Your Purpose. Join Dr. Sean live on Periscope to meditate and Mind Exercise.
About the author: Dr. Sean Sullivan consults to organizations about brain training and Mind Exercise and maintains a performance-focused psychology practice awarded as, “One of the Top Psychology Practices in San Francisco in 2015,” by OpenCare. Dr. Sullivan is the author of two popular books about Mind Exercising: The Mind Master’s Silence Journey and Be Your Purpose. Join Dr. Sean live on Periscope to meditate and Mind Exercise.
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.
Photo by Stuart Miles, provided by Freedigitalimages.com
A new year always arrives with new challenges — and new opportunities. While 2016 will see the continuation of some long-running trends – mobile tech will continue to dominate, Millennials will grow as an essential market, online video will keep rising in importance – a number of issues impacting small business owners are just now beginning to emerge.
Here are five new, big trends that small businesses will face in the coming year and beyond.
EMV Liability and A Shifting Payments Landscape
In late 2015, you might have been asked by a retailer to slide your credit card into a slot instead of swiping it through the reader like you’ve been doing for years. In October 2015, liability for fraudulent purchases formally shifted from credit card issuers to retailers unless they adopted EMV technology, which is embodied by the tiny chip embedded in new credit cards. While controversial, EMV is designed to improve the security of credit cards and make them harder to counterfeit, but if you haven’t upgraded your card readers – or don’t use them properly – you could be on the hook for major losses down the line.
Note that EMV impacts everyone, so even if you’ve been using a mobile card reader like one from Square or GoPayment, you aren’t immune from the new rules. Upgrade mobile readers now (Square’s is here) to stay protected.
Minimum Wage Hikes and Other Labor Laws
More than 20 states have set higher minimum wages for 2016, and some regions have dramatically hiked the amount workers must be paid. Seattle famously pushed its minimum wage from $11 to $15 in 2015, which has left many small businesses – especially restaurants – scrambling financially. Preliminary data has shown Seattle restaurant jobs on the (slight) decline vs. the rest of Washington, leaving some to wonder about the ultimate economic impact the law will have in the years to come.
Minimum wage isn’t the only thing employers will contend with in the HR universe. New rules like California’s Fair Pay Act, the federal mandatory sick leave order, and potential changes in overtime exemption rules all threaten to upend the way employers budget for labor costs. The upshot: Watch for big moves toward automation, kiosk-based customer service, and other human-free systems across all business lines.
Same Day Delivery Entices Customers
In a world where music and movies are available for instantaneous download, consumers are becoming increasingly impatient with lengthy waits for physical products to be delivered, and Amazon’s popular Prime subscription delivery service has made consumers even more fanatical about getting stuff fast. The next step is same-day delivery, which Amazon is also testing, along with a whole cadre of get-it-now instant gratification services.
The upshot of all this is that delivery speed is rapidly becoming an area where businesses can generate a real competitive advantage. Can your business speed up the way it reaches customers in 2016, either directly or through a partnership that’s already built out an infrastructure?
Hackers Love Small Businesses
A sea change is underway in the world of online security: Now more than ever, small businesses are being targeted by hackers and other, surprisingly coordinated, online criminals. It’s easy to see why: While large companies represent potentially massive windfalls to attackers, small businesses have fewer resources to protect themselves and are less likely to even be aware they’re under attack. Last year, Symantec research found that 60 percent of all attacks targeted small and medium sized businesses, and a typical successful attack can cost a business hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.
The smart move for 2016 isn’t necessarily to bone up on constantly-evolving security tactics but rather to outsource security to someone who already does. So-called managed security service providers are on the rise and can offer a level of protection that few small businesses can achieve in-house.
Laser Targeting of Potential Customers
Broad advertising (like TV and radio) isn’t going anywhere, but the days of “spray and pray” ad campaigns are rapidly coming to an end. Facebook already lets you target potential buyers with laser-like accuracy, based both on demographics and their stated interests, and newer technologies are taking this even further. Want to reach all the moms who live in a seven-mile radius from your store? You’ll be able to reach them directly, by name, with a series of cross-device ads – and even send them mobile messages through beacon technology should they wander near your shop.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
About the Author: Christopher Null is an award-winning business and technology journalist. His work frequently appears on Wired, PC World, and TechBeacon. Follow him on Twitter @christophernull.
Whether you’re running a B2C or B2B company, your customers’ experiences with you and your team can define success or failure. Happy, satisfied customers stick around, working with vendors or service providers to solve their problems. Unhappy customers look elsewhere. And most turn to competitors. Keeping your customers engaged, satisfied and coming back for more means prioritizing the relationship with both a customer-focused culture and technology that promotes account information sharing.
Prioritize consistent service and delivery
Anyone on your team that interacts with customers needs access to the most recent, relevant account information. When your teams have updated account details, they provide better service and answer customer questions quickly. Your customers don’t want to explain every detail of their account to someone every time they make a call or send an email. Technology that helps you provide consistent service levels makes customers comfortable and supports faster, more efficient problem solving and support. Anyone who’s ever sat on hold with the cable company, understands this concept.
Measure the effectiveness and outcome of interactions
The channels for customer interaction seem to grow every day. Social media, email, phone calls and other dialogue produce meaningful insights and outcomes that define customer service. A negative tweet can’t only be the concern of the social media team. Every time a customer reaches out to your business, the sentiment they share should be measured, shared and analyzed. Overarching customer experience initiatives depend on information sharing and also the improvements to services or products as a result.
Remember, you’re dealing with people
You aren’t managing accounts or clients. You’re working with people. People respond to personalized service and businesses that actively try to improve their lives. Sharing customer information throughout your company – and making it easily accessible – ensures that employees can speak to customers on a personal level. More than anything else, a personal connection keeps customers engaged. Personalized service will make your company stand out from the pack and attract prospective customers looking for something more from the companies they give their money to.
Customer relationships are the heart of any business. It’s not easy to keep every detail in mind. However, a CRM solution promotes information sharing, and a companywide commitment to service creates an atmosphere of long-term customer retention and satisfaction.
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.
Internal automation may not be at the top of your small business’ 2016 priority list. One big reason being small business owners are busy, and integrating and implementing another software can seem daunting, especially for those that identify as being technologically impaired. Fear not, though. Automation gives small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) the chance to reach the next level of success by streamlining day-to-day activities and – most importantly – saving time.
Ditch data entry
Timing is everything when it comes to winning business. Rather than inputting data manually into spreadsheets, automation relieves users from this duty and even makes for more complete data capture since there’s no risk of human error. Tools like Torpio or Zapier can automate tedious dual data entry. Application programming interface (API) technology allows employees and business owners to automate data retrieval and modification, freeing up valuable time for employees to spend on more important activities.
Automated pipelines = $$$
Not only does automation cut down on time spent on data entry, it can also improve the efficiency of your workflows. Users can create sets of tasks and events associated to specific activities. Now, these can be applied in one batch rather than having to manually add each every time the specific event happens. For example, when a real estate agent is in the process of selling a house, there is a standard series of tasks and events that are repeated for every sale. With a defined activity set, these tasks are automatically assigned, saving time and ensuring the process moves forward. As projects move through the pipeline and into the subsequent stages, automated activity sets are immediately populated and assigned. With this streamlined process, deals close faster without important details falling through the cracks. This all leads to the ability to take on more business with increased efficiency. And more business means more revenue.
There’s a consistent demand to keep pace with the latest and greatest in terms of technology, especially for SMBs that compete against bigger organizations. By investing in automation, SMB owners and employees can spend less time and effort on tedious tasks, and more time on what needs to happen to move business forward.
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.
Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11
Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!
A Stepping Stone for Women Entrepreneurs
A 2014 business report, commissioned by American Express OPEN, illuminated an interesting fact– women start companies at a rate 1.5 times the national average but account for less than 10 percent of founders at high-growth firms. What’s the major obstacle? Securing venture funding.
Here’s a bit of good news for US-based women entrepreneurs looking for that elusive “unicorn” of funding. 2016 could be a game-changing year for you. Project Entrepreneur – a media partner of Mashable – is sponsoring a competition that will get three women into a powerhouse mentorship program for one year along with a US$10,000 grant and a 5-week crash course about the ins and outs of getting a company off the ground.
Using Filters in Insightly Reporting
When creating or editing a report, adding filters will affect how many records appear in the results.
For example, you might want to create one report of all new contacts in the state of California, and another report of new contacts within a sales region that covers a few scattered cities. Each of these reports will need different filters to display the correct information.
Basic filters
If your report only needs one or two conditions to capture the information you need, you’ll be able to set up your filters by following these steps:
Drag and drop fields from the Report Fields list to the Filters and Parameters area, or click the Add a Filter Row link. You may add up to 8 filters.
Enter the operators and values that match your requirements. In this example, we want to see what Tony is working on, so we’re filtering tasks assigned to Tony AND with a status of In Progress. Filtering is not case-sensitive.
Click the Advanced Reporting button to access the custom reports.
As you add each new parameter, choosing the AND or OR Boolean operator will change your results. UseANDto narrow your report and find records that match all of the values you enter. UseORto broaden your results to include matches for either the first value or the second value.
If you have more than two filters and are mixing AND/OR operators, uselogic filters to get the correct results in your report.
This article is part of theInsightly Reporting Guide. Be sure to review the guide for the full overview of Insightly’s reporting features.
Going Off the Grid
Smartphones, laptops, wireless air cards, fitness trackers, —the list goes on and on. We love our gadgets, especially those gadgets that keep us connected to other people and distant places, sometimes too much so. One of several dozen purveyors offering summer camps for adults Digital Detox offers a variety of options to help participants “Disconnect to Reconnect.”
Activities range from traditional summer camp fare such as archery all the way to Lego building, to primitive skills and stilt walking. Camp season runs from mid-May through late August and there are camp locations in Mendocino, California, Cold Spring New York, Hendersonville, North Carolina, and Marble Falls, Texas. Your job is to have fun and the one hard and fast rule you must follow are: No digital technology (including wearables), no work talk, no watches, and no ambient light sources such as glow sticks.
Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around.
Send Us Your Tips. Would you like to share your tips with Insightly customers? Send them to us! If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card! Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email.
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.
When you’ve got tons of leads zooming by your head, it’s important to stay organized so you can maximize your conversion rate. These super simple tips will help you be efficient in following leads down the pipeline and boost sales as well!
Define Activities & Campaigns at Each Stage
Your lead’s needs change as she moves into your pipeline from opportunity to prospect, to customer, and hopefully, repeat customer. Make sure you’re delivering content and marketing campaigns at every stage of the pipeline to match her ever-changing requirements.
When she first enters the pipeline, you can ply her with informative emails to help her make the decision to purchase from you. Once she’s become a customer, move her to a different email list based on her purchase and behavior details. She’ll need more sophisticated communication at this stage to build on the relationship you’ve established.
Track Prospect Value
When you know how much a given opportunity is worth, you can allot the appropriate resources to nurturing the lead or existing customer. For example, if you have a customer who made a small one-time purchase, you might not need to spend as much time nurturing that relationship as one who signed up for $60,000 worth of services for the year.
Tracking sales opportunity value allows you to prioritize your efforts and decide where your time spent will have the most impact.
Make it a Team Effort
You may not be the only person on your sales and marketing team who needs to touch a lead in the pipeline. CRM is great for teams in that you can assign a task to a team member, make sure it’s done before the deadline, and track conversations around a given sales effort.
With project management integrated into your CRM, you can see, at a glance, the status of any project (and you can definitely consider a sales opportunity as a project).
Use Reports to Your Advantage
With all the rich data you can get about closed sales, funnel analysis, and even why customers say no, Insightly reports are among some of the best tools you can use to tweak future sales strategies.
Reports help you identify patterns. If you notice a trend of people are saying no due to price, you can try a campaign with a discounted offer to see if you can boost sales conversions. If people are unsubscribing from your newsletter, you can assess why it isn’t providing the value you want.
Knowing what works (and what doesn’t) arms you to be smarter in your sales tactics in the future.
Each of these tactics is incredibly simple to implement with Insightly, and can show huge results within a short period of time.
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.
When a small business looks at investing in a CRM platform, there are always going to be many features to choose from. The most basic CRM features allow a small business to maintain their database and organize their contacts, but there are other CRM features that can truly help a small business to succeed. By investigating the potential of other CRM features, a small business can maximize its ROI when it purchases a CRM platform.
Photo by Stuart Miles
Social Media Integration
Small businesses make sure that their CRM software offers integration with social media platforms. Social media can tell you what types of content your business contacts enjoy, what types of products they endorse, and keep you up to date on any personal items that could help you to develop a stronger customer bond. Your CRM platform needs to have the ability to integrate with social media if you want to learn everything you need to know about your clients.
Versatile Access
Compare Business Products tells us that a CRM that is not able to be shared across the Internet or across multiple computing platforms is not a very helpful tool at all. Your CRM needs to be accessible via the Internet to help satellite offices and to allow employees to work from home. Access using mobile devices is essential for field personnel and for anyone working your company’s trade show booth at important industry events.
Robust Project Management
When Insightly talks about its product offering, it talks about much more than just managing contacts. It talks about developing interactive projects that include customer milestones and critical customer contact information. A good CRM platform allows you to develop various marketing events for specific customers and then offers the ability to track those events and make changes along the way.
A good CRM software platform includes project management features such as integrated scheduling, budgeting, and the ability to develop specific contact lists for each project. You should be able to analyze the data from each marketing project and determine better ways to segment your customer base and develop much more effective marketing plans
Sales Pipeline Tracking
When a small business can see exactly where every opportunity in the sales pipeline is in the sales process, then it becomes easier to follow up on those opportunities and close deals. A CRM platform without a sales pipeline tracking mechanism is almost useless to a small business. With sales tracking, a small business can better organize its limited resources and get better results each time.
Insightly can be the most cost-effective business tool for any small business, provided that the small business owner maximizes the functionality of the Insightly CRM platform. Check out the pricing on the various Insightly programs and decide which one is right for your business. Then talk to an Insightly expert to determine which features you will need to add to get the very most out of the Insightly online CRM solution.
George N Root III is a professional freelance writer who has expertise in topics such as Internet marketing, business, advertising, and personal finance.
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.
Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11
Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!
Clear Off Your Digital Desktop
Every year I promise myself I won’t let the condition of my computer desktop get out of control. And every year, sure enough, file creep sets in and I struggle to locate the icon associated with the document I need, let alone actually see the wallpaper I’ve selected as a desktop background. It’s frustrating and at times embarrassing when someone catches a glimpse of the chaos.
Photo by zirconicusso.
According to psychologist Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, having a cluttered desktop can have a negative affect our ability to focus. Following a few simple tips such as limiting the number of browser windows you have open, selecting a desktop background that won’t obscure icons, and deleting or hiding every desktop icon you don’t use on a regular basis can improve your productivity.
Creating a Custom Report in Advanced Reporting
With Insightly’s Advanced Reporting, you can pick and choose which fields to display in a tabular report, filter and summarize them by specific values, and save and share the reports you create. If you have a paid subscription, you can also set up schedules and alerts for reports.
To create a new report:
Go to the Reports tab in the left navigation menu.
Click the Advanced Reporting button to access the custom reports.
Click the New Report button in the upper right. You can also select a report type from the Insightly template folders on the left
Select a report type from the list. You can search the list by typing in a record name, like “Project” or “Lead.” We’ll select Project Activity for this example, where we’ll produce a report of tasks in progress for each project.
Through the Looking Glass
The advent of contact lenses was a game changer for many. It cleared the way for us to not only have better vision, but to also move away from the misguided stigma of being the nerd or the shy one hiding behind our spectacles.
Photo courtesy of Stuart Miles.
Well, glasses have become quite the fashion statement which means you can you leverage this purposeful accessory to create your own unique style. You can also improve the overall health of your eyes by wearing glasses instead of contacts. Contact lenses, which cover the cornea of the eyes, decreases the oxygen supply which makes your eyes more susceptible to inflammation or dry eye syndrome. Research also shows that wearing glasses suggests a higher degree of intelligence.
Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around.
Send Us Your Tips. Would you like to share your tips with Insightly customers? Send them to us! If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card! Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email.
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.
In our busy, interconnected world, where we can chat in real time from and to location in the world, it’s easy to forget the value of an in-person connection. Conferences take us out of the daily grind, while still offering full industry immersion. They offer an atmosphere where you have opportunities to learn new processes and share ideas with interesting people who speak your language.
As a small business owner, you may wonder if taking several days off from business to attend a conference is doable…or even worth doing. That depends on what the conference offers and whether you can afford to take the deluxe route. Not every conference is well-equipped to welcome and nurture small businesses.
Here’s why you should consider it…and why you should be cautious.
Gain actionable advice
Every business person, no matter how experienced, can use fresh ideas. Small business owners often work alone or with a small group, and can easily become bogged down by outdated ideas or miss growing trends. Attending a conference exposes you to new ways to improve your business and become more productive.
Meet new vendors and suppliers
You’re thinking “Ugh! Salespeople. No thanks.” But industry vendors bring new and innovative products to trade exhibits at conferences and conventions. It’s a great way to discover the best new products and services on the market.
Build authority
One of your marketing goals should be to build authority and trust. Even if you’re not a speaker, attending a conference offers you opportunities to show your knowledge and impress influential people in your industry. In fact, consider being a speaker to extend your reach and show your depth of knowledge to competitors and people interested in your industry.
Find talent
Great employees can be hard to find. Among the crowd will be ambitious college students, people looking to change careers, and people who are unhappy at their current jobs. You may meet someone who will revolutionize your business in the future.
Build your network
A strong ability to network can be one of your greatest assets in business. Your network supports you, provides answers, and keeps you informed about the latest industry news through social media. They may be your indirect or direct competitors, but they are also the people who know most about your industry. You may run into collaboration opportunities or get new customers by referral when you can answer a need your competitor can’t.
Reap the benefits of consumer research
You may not have the resources to do consumer research, but your big competitors do. You can learn from their experience, and use the information to better target your market and develop new products to answer customer needs.
Learn new skills
In addition to insight and new ways to do things you’re familiar with, most conferences will offer information about new approaches, like SEO and inbound marketing techniques.
Get Inspired
Your job can get pretty routine. Same people, same tasks, same old same old, week after week. It’s easy to lose sight of the passion and vision that drew you to the industry. Attending a conference can spark your creative process and give you the impetus to shake things up and start something new.
Sharpen your competitive edge
You can’t beat the competition unless you know what they’re doing. Attending a conference gives you an intimate view of what the leaders in your industry are up to. Since you get to rub elbows with customers, competitors, and vendors, you can gain tremendous insight from casual conversations.
Collect swag, meet celebrities, and have fun
Small business owners work way too hard! Conferences are as fun and lively, as they are enlightening.
You’ll come home with plenty of swag, try some free snacks, have a few drinks, maybe take a dip in a hot tub or take a turn at terrible karaoke. How often can you have a blast, take away knowledge, contacts, and ideas, and write it off on your taxes?
You may even get up close and personal with industry leaders and celebrities. Converse with the most well-known people in your industry or even meet a celebrity connected to your industry in some way or simply hired as a draw.
Choose your Conference Carefully
Big conferences that attract and cater to large businesses don’t always have small business at heart, and small businesses can suffer as a result. If budget concerns mean you have to buy a more affordable package, you may miss out on some of the sessions you most want to see.
Before you book your tickets, make sure you know what you’re getting, and plan what sessions you want to attend. If you’re new to conferences, consider a smaller gathering to get started and pick up some contacts to avoid getting lost in the crowd.
In the planning stages, do your homework. Find out which social media contacts are attending and make casual plans to meet up. Even if you’re taking a team, having social groups to break away ensures that you don’t negate the benefits of networking by remaining isolated.
Conferences are an exciting way to break your routine, enhance your knowledge, and build your network. The key to getting the most from your investment is to choose the conference that will most benefit you – and plan ahead for success.
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.
