Category: CRM Blog Posts

If you’re a cloud solution provider working on improving your business, or an ISV looking to expand your reach, you should check out the 2015 Partnering in the Cloud Survey from the Cloud Technology Alliance. This survey of 87 resellers and ISVs provides insights into how solution providers select vendor partnerships and take cloud solutions through both the Google and Microsoft channels.

Image courtesy of nokhoog_buchachon at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

The report will help you understand metrics and best practices to help you increase sales, better manage your portfolio, and select vendors and develop vendor relationships. With details about product category investment and profitability, the information contained in the report will be valuable to anyone who is reselling or deploying Google Apps for Work and Microsoft Office 365 integrated solutions. The survey responses paint a picture of the decision process and results that the participants have experienced and where they expect to be in the next year.

As part of the Cloud Technology Alliance, an organization of the top independent software vendors in the cloud office space, Insightly works hard to provide solutions that help small and mid-sized businesses grow and succeed. Our participation in the Office 365 Quickstart Bundle—along with Skykick, Smartsheet, Xero, and BetterCloud—is a good example of how ISVs can come together to provide resellers with an integrated cloud solution to drive sales through the Microsoft channel.

If you’re a cloud solution reseller, download the report to review the recommendations that will help your business grow.

 
About the author: Tony Roma is Insightly’s Content Manager. He’s been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.

Nothing makes less sense than the average marketing budget. It costs at least 6 times more to land a new sale than to sell to an existing customer who already knows and trusts you, which means your profit margin is way higher with customers already in the funnel. Most businesses should know this, and yet the average business spends only 12% of their marketing budget to romance repeat customers.

With all the data available today, there’s just no excuse for that. Is it possible they don’t know how to use their data? Or is using customer data just that inexpensive?

Advantages of Reaching Your Own Customer Base

Your customers already know you. They know you’ll deliver what you promised, and they like you enough to still be customers. You have an established trust relationship.

Your customers are your best cheerleaders. Word-of-mouth and online reviews are what’s driving purchase decisions, and it’s something your customers volunteer for. You don’t even have to ask. If they’re happy, they’ll tell their friends. It’s really that simple.

An old customer will spend more than a new one…and will keep spending. What’s more, if they are happy with your marketing and customer service, customers won’t leave even if your competitors pitch lower prices.

The Not-So-Secret Secret: Segmented Lists

When you delve into Insightly customer data, it’s easy to break out lists with specific characteristics. For example, you might want to find all customers who recently purchased a specific product and invite them to check out a related product.

Of course, not all businesses sell products. Service providers that specialize in a single or suite of products can segment by date and level of service to touch base on a schedule and ask if the customer is satisfied, send polls about how they can improve, or share news about coming features.

Making the Magic Happen

Enticing your existing customers is all about data-driven marketing. When you understand your data, you can tell them what they want to hear, offer quality information, and tap into what they really want.

Everything you need to know is in your Insightly CRM and its integrated apps. Gather information from invoicing, social media, email opens, click-through rates, and conversions. Your data can tell you which headlines and subject lines work best, and inspire you to narrow your target to send the most powerful emails to only a select list—full of people who are waiting to hear it.

The Adobe Digital Index Report shows how skewed marketing funnels really are. Key findings indicate that repeat customers in the U.S. represent only 8% of site traffic, but account for 40% of the revenue.

Which means businesses need to attract 5 to 7 new leads to equal the revenue of every existing customer. So why would any business spend so much of their marketing budget trying to attract new business while taking existing customers for granted?

Fix your funnel by diverting more of your marketing budget into your existing customer base. You won’t regret focusing on your biggest fans—the customers who already know and trust you.
 

Use your CRM to manage your funnel and keep existing customers coming back. Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or jump in and 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!

	Hire the Right Person
	As your company grows and you see increased demands on your staff (maybe that’s just you, right now), you’ll start thinking about which areas of your business need more attention and hiring someone to cover those responsibilities. When you’ve posted a job listing and the resumes start rolling in, how do you narrow down your candidates? Looking at basic, required skills seems like a no-brainer, but judging a person’s personality traits and knowing if they’re a good fit for your company can be trickier and more important. As you start interviewing, start out skeptical of the candidate and of some your own assumptions; you may find that you’ll be able to provide minor skills training to make a good match a great employee for the job. If you’re expanding a team, evaluate what makes the good team members so good, as you may want candidates with similar qualities. During interviews, ask questions that give you an idea how the candidate would handle the duties and pain points of the position. Know what your company’s core values are, and pay attention to the values and personality that come across in your conversations. The person you hire should not only be able to get the job done, but also get along with everyone involved to reach your common goals. Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
	Take a Look at Your System Settings
	If you’ve been using Insightly, then you’ve probably already found the right people to be your administrators. Admins have the ability to customize Insightly for all of your users through the System Settings page, where they can do everything from creating new custom fields to disabling features your company doesn’t use. For example, if you don’t fine the Social Profiles or Leads features useful for your business, you can turn them off so they’re not in the way of your visual workflow. The System Settings page includes many functions and features that give you control over workflows, fields, and users. There are too many to list in a short tip, so check out your settings page and search Insightly Support for settings you’d like to learn more about.

Shop Around for the Right Deal

When you make a decision to buy a big-ticket item or a long-term service, there are many wise steps to take toward making the right purchase at the right price. So set your budget, decide which features you really need, and then get down to the comparison shopping. The internet provides you with an abundance of tools to shop around, whether it’s Yelp reviews of shops where you could make a purchase or Amazon reviews of different brands of a product. The Better Business Bureau—or your local version of it—is a good way to check on a company’s reputation. Talk to your family and friends about their experiences and opinions. Pay attention to the pros and cons you hear and read about, since another person’s priorities will not be the same as your own. Be smart about the whole process, too. You don’t want to invest too much time on research if it’s only going to save you a few dollars, but it can be worth it to prevent buyer’s remorse in the long run.

 

Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now.

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: Tony Roma is Insightly’s Content Manager. He’s been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years and writing for quite a bit longer.

If you’ve got a customer relationship management (CRM) system you’re probably using it mostly for sales and marketing. And that’s understandable because CRM systems have generally been sold as a sales and marketing tool. But you’re missing out. You’re missing out on maybe 50% of what a great CRM does. Because most CRM systems today have the capacity to track service activities. And the smart business owners I know are using their CRM systems as much for service as they are for sales. Why? Because keeping customers happy is the best way to grow sales. And to do this, they rely on these four customer service metrics.

Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

1. Open Issues

   What are the issues? Where are the problems? No one likes to hear of these. But they’re critically important. You can’t ignore them. The smart managers I know seek out problems instead of pretending they don’t exist. To do this, they demand a report (sometimes daily, or at least a few times a week) of open issues. It’s easy to track problems in your CRM system. You can schedule and code a service issue as a simple open task. Or, depending on your system, you can create tickets, calls, incidents or issues as a separate thing to track. It doesn’t have to be complicated. But you do want to make sure you’re tracking a few key things: the customer (of course), the issue, who’s working on the issue, when it was opened, when it’s expected to be resolved, what tasks have been done and what tasks are scheduled. Maybe a customer is so significant that it requires the owner’s call. At the very least you won’t be embarrassed if you hear from a customer and you’re not even aware they’re having a problem. A problem could be an opportunity to sell them more services or products, or at the very least show them how important they are to you by giving them extra attention. You’ll never know this without an open issues report.
    

2. Closed Issues

   Sometimes issues are opened and closed and you might never hear about it. In many cases that’s a good thing because it’s important to get problems fixed as quickly as possible. But you still want to know. You want to understand what problems are occurring. And, every month or so, you want to ask for a Closed Issues report and look at the metrics there. Who was having the most issues? What type of product was generating the most problems? Is there a pattern? Could this lead to more problems at other customers? Knowing the problems you’ve had each month and the customers who had them will significantly help you improve your company’s quality and responsiveness.
    

3. Time To Resolve

   Some of my clients include this metric on the Closed Issues report mentioned above, while others like a separate report showing each issue and how long it took to resolve it. This is critical too, because no one likes to wait around for a problem to be fixed. This report is sometimes combined with an alert or workflow because although it’s important to know that a particular issue took a longer time than average to fix, it’s more important to get alerted while this is occurring in case you need to expedite or get involved. You may decide to have service level agreements for your customers, where those who desire can pay extra to be classified as “Gold” customers, entitled to additional and quicker support. If this is the case, it’s even more important to understand the time it takes to resolve product issues and to get alerted if these customers are involved.
    

4. Customers Without Contact

   This is a metric that I learned the hard way. I learned this when a good client of mine left us and went to another firm because he felt he was being ignored. It’s not enough today to just wait for a customer to call. Good companies stay proactively involved with their customers throughout the year. Customers that get ignored will tend to feel ignored and seek TLC from someone else. So configure your CRM system to either generate a report or send you an alert when a customer hasn’t had contact from your staff, either in the form of a phone call or appointment, after a certain period of time (I use 6 months). That way you can be certain that these customers without contact don’t fall through the cracks and potential revenue goes walking away.
    

See? Your CRM system isn’t just for sales and marketing. It’s for customer service too. And having a few key customer service metrics will enormously help you keep your customers happy. And, wait… isn’t that what sales and marketing is all about too?
 

Track your customer interactions with Insightly tasks and notes. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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

Insightly Support officially turns two months old on July 13th! To celebrate, we’re giving away an official Insightly T-shirt, a $25 Amazon gift card, and a San Francisco treat to the customer who has the greatest number of helpful contributions to the Insightly Community at the end of July.

Now is the time to participate if you’re new to our community. Start sharing your Insightly knowledge if you’re a seasoned user!

The winner will be determined by the number of their posts and comments. A post can be a question, a tip, product feedback or a feature request. A comment can be useful input to a conversation or a simple “thank you” acknowledging someone’s help.

Here’s how to enter:

1. Go to Insightly Support and click on Ask a Question.
2. Now that you’re in the community, you can create a new post by clicking the + New Post button. Or, click on an existing post and add your comment. Note: Here’s where you’ll be prompted to sign in, if you haven’t already. If this is your first time using Insightly Support you’ll need to create a login using the same email address you use to sign in to Insightly.
3. If you’re writing a post, add a title and details. Choose the appropriate topic from the drop down.
4. If you’re writing a comment, go to the comment box below the last comment made.
5. Click “Submit” and you’re done!

Enter your posts and comments by 11:59 p.m. PST on Friday, July 31, 2015 to qualify for the giveaway. Only helpful posts and comments will count towards your total and please abide by our Community Guidelines when posting. Winners will be selected on Monday, August 3, 2015 and notified by email.

If you haven’t already participated in the community, this quick tutorial will show you how easy it is.

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!

Keep Your Sales Pipeline Flowing

Sales are the lifeblood of business. Make sure you keep them coming by getting your leads off to the right start. Building a sales pipeline is about finding leads and winnowing them down to hot prospects who are likely to become customers. For the very top of the sales funnel, get out there and meet people at events attended by potential customers. Be active on social media and on sites where they hang out. Have a form on your own website where visitors can send you their information (more on this below). Get leads into the funnel. At the same time, you’ll always be narrowing down your list of sales leads to hot prospects. Ask the right questions right from the beginning to determine if you’ve got a qualified lead. Once you know someone is a prospect, pick up the phone and follow up. Cold calling can be difficult for many people, but email just doesn’t have the power of a good phone call. By communicating with your leads and following up until you know where things stand, you’ll continue to bring in the sales and grow your business.

Add a Webform to Your Site

If someone is visiting your website and is interested in your business, make it easy for them to request a follow-up call with a webform. Insightly’s Web to Lead and Web to Contact features give you the ability to create a simple HTML form which you can copy-and-paste onto your site. With the form on your business’ web page, your visitors can submit their contact information, and the form will pass it through to Insightly and into your workflow. New leads or contacts are created instantly and are automatically tagged as “Web Leads” or “Web Contacts.” With the data entry and tagging done for you, you can create saved custom filters to see all your new leads and work through your sales process right from Insightly!

Start a Conversation with Someone New

Friendships are important, yet it’s not uncommon for our social circles to shrink as we get older. This isn’t too surprising as the responsibilities of adulthood take up more of our time. Nevertheless, it’s important to continue cultivating new friendships, which are an important factor in maintaining a higher quality of life. Many of us, especially introverts, aren’t very enthused about the idea of talking to random strangers, yet we’ve all recognized the benefits of a new connection at one time or another. There are no shortage of ways to start a conversation and the key to the most successful ones is to ask open-ended questions that will get someone talking. “What do you do for a living?” or “How about this weather?” are the kind of small talk that won’t provoke interesting answers or provide insights about someone. Ask them about things that matter: their opinions, hobbies, families, pets. Asking for help is another way to have someone engage in conversation. No matter which approach you take, remember that a conversation is a two-way street, so make sure you’re listening and responding through reactions or follow-up questions. You never know where a conversation will lead, and you’ll never know if that stranger will become a friend unless you engage them.

 

Start a conversation with Insightly and discover a CRM that will help you manage your To Do lists and your leads. Check out our features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now.

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: Tony Roma is Insightly’s Content Manager. He’s been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.

Image courtesy of vectorolie at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Life is easier with the help and interaction of others. Sure, there are times when people drive us crazy. However, those are also the times we need someone to talk to. As we go through our career and life, we meet other people who can be helpful or whom we can recommend, and they usually give us business cards.

I often see a mini-tower of business cards on people’s desks. (No, the business card isn’t going away.) Personally, I like them. When I see the name on a card, I can remember the conversation or the situation where we saw each other. Keeping track of those contacts can feel like a part-time job. I often hear: “I don’t have time for it!” I get it.

So try spending 15 minutes at a time on managing your contacts’ cards and go for progress, not perfection. I’m going to share some ways I manage my business cards and use Insightly to stay connected. (Tip: I often work on my database when I’m watching a silly TV show.)

1. Ziploc bags
   • Place the cards you get at events in a Ziploc bag.
   • Write the date of the event and the name of the event on the bag.
2. The 5-minute sort
   Just sort. Don’t get into action mode, yet. Organize the cards you receive into categories:
   • A = Action. You owe them something: an introduction, the name of a restaurant, a referral. This action can get done and it’s over. One of my favorite reasons to do this is that I’ll get on their radar, but I’m not asking for anything. Yet! 🙂
   • B = Schedule a call or coffee. There was enough of a connection that you’d like to continue the conversation. In general, I suggest a 10-minute call (people are more likely to say yes to that.)
   • C = Who knows? I used to think the folks in this category were less worthwhile to follow up with. I now know that they are most likely an introvert and just think a bit more before they take action.
3. LinkedIn invitations
   I used to be quite strict about who I connected with on LinkedIn. Now, I find it’s simply a great way to keep track of current information. My suggestion is that you write a customized LinkedIn invitation (this is difficult to do on your phone, so wait until you’re at a computer). Here’s an example:

   (Their name),

   I enjoyed our conversation at ________ (fill in the name of the event). I look forward to crossing paths again.

   Best, (your name)
    

4. Insightly’s business card scanner
   If you’re a paid user of Insightly, I encourage you to use their business card scanner on the iOS or Android app. This makes inputting data into the Insightly CRM fast and easy.
5. Reminders
   Add a task to remind you to check in after you make an introduction or have a coffee. Just meeting someone isn’t enough. You need to stay in touch.
6. Then what?
   I put the Ziploc in a shoebox and that becomes a tickler file as well. I know, it sounds old-fashioned; however, I find the tactile experience with business cards is still useful. I create a task with Insightly to check on people every few months.

Staying visible is key to your success. Make it easy!

 

The business card scanner on Insightly’s mobile apps will help you manage your contacts using Diane’s tips. Take your business card management to the next level and check out our pricing page or sign up for a free trial right now.

 

About the Author: Diane Darling knows the value of relationships and how to build them. The author of McGraw-Hill’s definitive book on networking, The Networking Survival Guide. Diane speaks and trains thousands of people each year on ways to build relationships, leading to opportunities and growth.

Hubstaff is a time-tracking application that allows businesses to track the work of teams and individual team members, get better visibility into workflows, and report on the progress of their tasks and business goals. By extending its functionality with an integration to Insightly, Hubstaff has proven valuable to Insightly customers in need of time-tracking functions. Hubstaff recently spoke with one of those customers, Amanda Ray, the social media and sales manager of VideoMedicine.

VideoMedicine is a telemedicine platform that connects patients to doctors all over the world, with the primary goal of increasing access to healthcare. As a rapidly growing company, they were in need of software that would help them manage projects and track the time spent on tasks.

VideoMedicine started using Insightly for managing, organizing, and assigning tasks. By utilizing Hubstaff’s Insightly integration to connect the two applications together, the company was able to improve productivity while saving time and saving money. “With this integration, you gain not only valuable time management tracking, but also the ability to organize and assign tasks internally,” Amanda says.

After realizing the benefits of using Insightly and Hubstaff to track where time—and money—is spent, Amanda concludes that “there is no better way to streamline productivity.”

We’re always happy to see Insightly customers finding their way to success by improving efficiency and productivity. It’s even more gratifying to see that progress for a company that’s doing such important work.

Read Hubstaff’s full case study for all the details:
Case Study: How VideoMedicine manages their global network of doctors

 

Learn more about the Hubstaff-Insightly integration.
And if this is the time-tracking and CRM connection you’ve been waiting for, sign up for a free Insightly trial.

 
About the author: Tony Roma is Insightly’s Content Manager. He’s been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.



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!

Consistency is Good for Business

Consistent positive results are great for business. To get there, consistent business practices will help your customers and your staff stay on board and contribute to your company’s growth. When customers have repeated positive experiences, they’ll attribute more value to your brand which leads to repeat business and higher profitability. Track your efforts and results to figure out what’s working and then make winning practices a part of your day-to-day operations. With a clear plan that’s communicated throughout your company, your staff will never be confused about how to measure and reach goals that you’ve set. With a cohesive team focused on a clear brand strategy, both your reputation and business will be sure to grow.

Use Pipelines to Manage Your Processes

Last week, I wrote about how Insightly’s activity sets can create groups of tasks for you. When you have sequential steps to follow for a sales process, marketing communications, or any other business process, Insightly’s pipelines feature helps you clearly lay them out in stages. You can even tie an activity set to a pipeline to automatically create and assign tasks when a stage is reached. By setting up a pipeline, everyone on your staff can clearly see the next thing that needs to be done in a project or an opportunity and even get notified when tasks are assigned to them. Insightly’s pipelines are a great tool for keeping everyone in sync and getting things done in an orderly fashion.

Achieve More by Making a List

If you haven’t heard it already, multitasking is a terrible way to get things accomplished and consistently move toward your goals. By not focusing on one thing in a given period, you’re wasting time and possibly damaging your ability to concentrate and to manage your emotions and thoughts. So, if you have to pick one thing to work on next, how do you choose? Prioritizing is always a challenge, but when it comes to your own life, think about what is most important to you and work from there. If you love to travel, maintaining your financial and physical health is important. If artistic expression brings you joy, you’ll need to get painting supplies or sign up for that stone carving class. Make that first decision and then write out a list that will get you to where you want to be. Reorganize the list based on urgency and dependencies (you can’t enter the art contest until you’ve finished the painting), and then start working it—one thing at a time!

 

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

 

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: Tony Roma is Insightly’s Content Manager. He’s been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net.