Improve your agency’s efficiency by using an integrated project management plan.
Read the full article at: www.workamajig.com
How to Build a More Integrated Project Management Plan
The Best CRM Software of 2017
We test and compare leading customer relationship management (CRM) software solutions to help you choose the right one to optimize your customer interaction.
Read the full article at: www.pcmag.com
Female Founders: How to Lead With a CRM
Each year, International Women’s Day marks a time to step back and reflect on the progress made by women in the professional world – and to take note of changes still to come. The UN’s theme for International Women’s Day 2017, “Women in the Changing World of Work: Planet 50-50 by 2030,” seeks to build momentum for gender equality, female empowerment and inclusive, quality education for all. The 2030 agenda lays out key targets and goals for such initiatives, including ending discrimination, violence and harmful practices against women around the world by 2030.
As dynamics in the working world shift, some themes remain constant for all business owners and professionals: productivity, organization and creativity are key ingredients for success. The below female business leaders are using CRM systems to maintain those values and improve their bottom lines in the process:
Chris Kay Fraser, founder at Firefly Creative Writing: In 2014, Fraser began using a CRM system to organize the sometimes-chaotic details that small businesses navigate daily. With operational concerns in check, she could spend more time approaching clients creatively, engaging with their own creative work, and finding her own time to write – making her a more effective writing coach for her clients.
Erin Mathie and Melissa Bamfo, co-founders of Business Made Simple: As a company that works to help small businesses simplify operations and run smoothly, it’s critical for Business Made Simple’s co-founders to maintain the same practices internally. A CRM offered a way for Mathie and Bamfo to improve workflow and task management while maintaining a clean, full sales pipeline.
Lindsey Fish and Lucy Chapman, partners at Little Fish Event Management: Collaboration and information sharing are key to the success of any small business – especially when the employees work remotely. Fish and Chapman streamline their projects using Skype, Google Apps, Mailchimp and Insightly CRM to maintain sustainable databases, capture leads, send reminders and track client conversations.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
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Is a CRM Right for Your Non-Profit Organization?
Is a CRM right for your non-profit organization?
For most organizations, business growth is defined by revenues won, customers served, mergers and acquisitions, and, sometimes, public market share performance. Non-profits, on the other hand, track a different kind of bottom line: funds raised, constituents served and social reach, for example.
Still, both types of organizations must plan for growth in a similar way. They initiate, nurture and grow relationships with audiences, which may include consumers, donors, volunteers or prospects. They use resources wisely and pursue goals aggressively. And, they carefully pick technology solutions that deliver the highest return for their investments.
Can CRM solutions benefit non-profit organizations in the same way they serve small businesses? Recently, Insightly surveyed 248 non-profit professionals to learn how they use CRM for to manage projects, grow contacts and expand influence to further their missions. If you’re wondering if a CRM is right for you, consider the below findings from the survey:
- Issues with organizing information are the No. 1 donor management problem for non-profit organizations.
- More than half of survey respondents said a CRM helped raise their productivity between 10 and 49 percent. One-third of respondents saw a productivity bump of more than 50 percent.
- Non-profits must close deals to bring in revenue to support their missions – and managing those client relationships is a primary function for a CRM system.
- CRM systems increased efficiency and efficacy of donor management for the majority of survey respondents, which helped encourage new donor contributions as well.
- Nearly 60 percent of non-profits surveyed saw a return on their CRM investment within three months of implementing the solution.
Any new solution adopted by a non-profit shouldn’t simply aim to improve how the business runs – it should help run it better, so the organization’s reach within its community can grow. Learn more about how non-profits find success with CRMs by downloading our e-book: “Increase donations and give back more: How non-profits use CRM to fulfill their missions.”
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
Share love, share Insightly: Refer Insightly, Receive a Reward.
Are You Abbreviating Your Sales Day?
Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11
Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 4 weekly tips—a tip on running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, a tip on improving your sales, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!
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Track Sales Appointments in Insightly |
| Your sales team is (or should be) focused primarily on closing deals and generating highly satisfied customers.
Those are pretty lofty goals without a proper plan for the day-to-day. For this reason, both management and sales reps need tangible, short-term benchmarks to help them stay on track. One commonly tracked metric involves the number of sales appointments set and/or made. If you’re using Insightly, you can easily keep track of past and upcoming appointments (along with other important sales KPIs). Here’s how to get started:
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Always Have Your CRM Handy |
Most CRMs offer a mobile app for their users. (Insightly is no exception – download Insightly’s apps here.) Unfortunately, your phone is already bogged down with dozens of other apps. Is it really worth installing another app that you may – or may not – use? Having your CRM just a tap away can be incredibly useful, particularly for small business owners. Here are a few reasons to consider: Capturing ideas: Whether you’re at a ballgame or stuck in line at the store, you never really know when genius will strike. By capturing ideas as tasks or projects in your CRM, you can easily link to other related ideas, assign users and due dates, and upload handwritten notes. Better now than later! Maintaining better customer notes: These days, most smartphones offer some type of voice dictation. The problem is that you have to save the file on your phone, find it, email it to yourself, and then remember to actually use it. A better approach is to capture voice notes directly on the contact’s record in your CRM. No busywork later on. Digitizing business cards: How many business cards have you lost or misplaced over the years? A good CRM mobile app will let you scan in business cards, instantly creating new leads on your behalf. That’s especially important at trade shows or networking events.
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Get Affirmation on Your Calendar Events |
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You’re moving at a mile a minute. Clients never seem to stop calling. Emails and to-do lists fill your every waking moment. Needless to say, going this quickly can sometimes lead to careless oversights. To create structure for an otherwise chaotic work life, you probably already use an online calendar. Employees, contractors, and clients routinely send invitations that automatically post events to your calendar. Such inbound invitations are great because you’re not the instigator. You simply click the accept button, and technology handles the rest. If the event’s time or date was entered incorrectly, it’s ultimately not your problem. Of course, there are many other events for which you’re solely responsible. In fact, other people may not officially be “invited” via your calendar – but, they still expect you to show up. For example, when:
Such events can easily be entered incorrectly, which makes them equally easy to overlook. When the appointment rolls around, you probably find yourself asking questions such as, “Is this appointment really at 4:30 – or did I just enter it incorrectly again?” Avoid all of this confusion by making a habit of using the event’s title and/or description to double confirm the details with yourself. The likelihood of entering a wrong date/time twice on the same event is nearly impossible.
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Cut Back on Sales Admin With Abbreviations |
Cut Back on Sales Admin with Abbreviations Sales is a game of numbers. All things being equal, more calls lead to more discussions. Discussions lead to opportunities, and opportunities convert into sales. Every second spent on unnecessary administrative work is a second wasted. However, your company does need reliable information input into your CRM system. There are many ways to make your sales team more efficient. In addition to leveraging activity sets and lead assignments, it’s also wise to standardize how your team captures information. For example, simply reducing the number of characters keyed into your CRM can make a noticeable impact. To illustrate this point, open up a document and key in this phrase: “I left a voicemail with the customer.” By my calculations, that takes about 5 seconds to key in. Now try this: “LVM.” Less than a second, right? Just think about the hundreds of voicemails reps leave per year. Assuming a conservative 500 voicemails per rep, each team member could save 30 minutes annually in non value-added time. Multiply this across all team members and common phrases, and it really starts to add up. Here are a few possible abbreviations to try:
Alternatively, you could try using tags for some (or all) of such phrases. It’s really up to how your organization uses its CRM system.
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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.
Share love, share Insightly: Refer Insightly, Receive a Reward.
About the author: 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, check out his book, or connect with him on Linkedin.
3 Powerful Tips To Get Your People Using Your CRM System
My company has implemented hundreds of powerful customer relationship management (CRM) systems over the years and, without question, the number one obstacle that our clients have faced has been getting people, especially their salespeople, to use their system. Some companies don’t consider CRM systems to be “mission critical” like accounting, inventory or payroll systems so the level of urgency is not the same. Those are the companies that generally fail with CRM. The ones that succeed adopt CRM as culture and know that having a great CRM database will improve their company’s value and profitability.
But the reality is that a CRM system is just a database and to have a great database you have to do the work – more work then maybe before. The benefits are substantial, but it takes a while before some people see them. So you have to figure out a way to get your sales and service people using the system, particularly during the first few months, or things can quickly derail. So how do you get them doing this? Here are three simple, yet powerful tricks I learned from smart clients. They all worked.
The Voicemail Trick
Not all salespeople are technical. But that doesn’t mean they’re not good salespeople. The last thing you want to happen is your CRM system getting in the way of them making sales. One of my clients, a distributor of delicatessen meats, had this problem. Their salespeople were old school and tech-averse. But management needed to know their activities. The solution? A compromise. Management set up a company voicemail and told their salespeople who didn’t like doing data entry to “call-in” their activities every day and…just leave a message. A high school kid was hired to listen to the messages each evening and update the database. That way the salespeople could focus more on selling and management still got the information they needed in their CRM system.
The Lead Trick
Ask any salesperson what’s most important to their livelihood and they’ll tell you it’s leads. “Give me a lead and I’ll close the deal,” a salesperson at one client told me. OK, that’s a little over-optimistic. But the truth is that a good marketing person will generate leads and a good salesperson will take those leads and sell. A good manager? She’ll make sure those leads only get distributed through her company’s CRM system. That way salespeople are forced to go into the CRM system to get those leads and provide the necessary data to get credit for the sale. The way to any good salesperson’s stomach is through his wallet – so start putting leads into your CRM system and watch him go there to get his meals.
The Alert Trick
All good CRM systems, like Insightly, enable their users to setup alerts and reminders so that appointments and tasks aren’t forgotten and nothing falls through the cracks. But alerts can do much more. Alerts can ensure that your salespeople are fully using your CRM system. Say you’re a sales manager and you’re getting alerts sent to you every hour because one of your salespersons isn’t following up on a lead, completing an activity or returning phone calls on time? What if you’re getting an alert because that same salesperson isn’t updating crucial status fields on a timely basis or even logged into the system in 24 hours? You’re trying to run a sales group, you’ve invested in a CRM system, and this clown isn’t even using it? Kind of annoying, isn’t it? Yes it is. It’s also kind of career-limiting for your salesperson, if you get my drift.
Will either of these three tricks solve the problem of getting your people using your CRM system? Yes…as long as their complemented by one other thing: you. As the executive, manager or business owner in charge of the system you’ve got to be the one to put your foot down and stand behind it. You’ve got to be the person who declares that your CRM system is every bit as important as your accounting or inventory system and that, in the words of one client of mine “if it’s not in the system it doesn’t exist!” In the end, it’s your system and your investment. You’ll only get out of it what you put into it.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
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About the Author: 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 Washington Post, 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
Business Tools We Love (And Recommend)
Every business needs a little help to run smoothly and efficiently. And while Insightly’s CRM is one of the best tools to help you keep track of everything, there are several others that come in handy. Many of the tools in this list integrate with Insightly, to save you time and effort.
QuickBooks
Accounting can be a nightmare, and if you’re a small business, chances are you don’t have an accountant on staff to help. QuickBooks helps you manage income and expenses to make tax time easier. If you’re not already using another platform to handle your expense billing and sales invoicing, you can use QuickBooks to handle that, too. Not only does it integrate with our CRM, it also works with TurboTax to help at the end of the year when it’s time to send out W-2s and 1099s to employees and contractors.
Dropbox
Cloud storage provides a backup copy of important files, but also makes files accessible from anywhere there’s an internet connection. Dropbox offers both free and paid accounts. You can choose the one that best fits your business and upgrade accordingly as your business grows. Plus, integration with Insightly allows you to link files in Dropbox to contacts, organizations, opportunities, and projects to simplify your workflow.
DocuSign
Whether you need clients to sign contracts, or just want to simplify the employee onboarding process, DocuSign provides a quick, easy, and secure platform to handle all of this digitally. No need to waste time emailing, faxing, or mailing back signed copies. Send documents to clients in seconds and get electronically signed copies back in no time from desktops or mobile devices. Once documents are prepared, you can create workflows that work best for your business to help you automate as much of the process as possible.
Zapier
Zapier is an automation tool that cuts down on repetitive, tedious, time-sucking tasks. While it will take some time to set up your zaps, or actions, it’s a set and forget situation. Zapier works with more than 600 apps, including Insightly, and can do a number of things such as:
- Create Insightly contacts from Google Contacts, MailChimp subscribers, Gmail emails, and more.
- Capture form submissions and send them directly to Insightly as contacts
- Send Insightly tasks to other project management platforms like Trello, Todoist, and Asana
- Help you manage social media
- Help you manage your mailing lists
With Zapier, it’s also possible to delay workflows, so you can automatically send follow-up emails to new contacts, or get tasks notifications on due dates. It’s also possible to schedule your automated task creation so you don’t have to worry about making time to do certain chores on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Microsoft Power BI
Reporting is a necessary part of business, but it can be painstaking to spend hours putting the reports together. With Microsoft Power BI, you can expand on the existing reporting tools in Insightly without having to manually transfer or copy and paste data from Insightly to Microsoft. The free reporting tool allows you to analyze and visualize data from your CRM to make it easy to generate reports. Once the reports are generated, they can easily be shared with anyone else in your organization. Records you see in Insightly are also visible in Power BI, so you can create any number of reports to help keep you on track to reach your business goals.
UserTesting
Understanding the user experience is critical for anyone in eCommerce or online marketing. With UserTesting, you have everything you need to find out what your website users are doing and thinking when they visit your website. This platform allows you to see videos of actual users giving you feedback as they use your website, mobile app, or even a prototype of a new web-based product/service. Investing in user experience testing can help you validate decisions at any point through design and development, allow you to influence stakeholders to justify user experience improvements, and develop more effective, targeted products.
A business is only as strong as the team behind it, and when a team is running themselves ragged focusing on minute details of operation, they can’t focus on the big picture. Invest in these tools to streamline everything, and use that extra time to focus on other key areas like product development and customer service.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
Share love, share Insightly: Refer Insightly, Receive a Reward.
5 Ways to Celebrate National Salesperson Day
In this day and age, it seems like there’s a holiday for everything. National Rubber Duckie Day, National Gum Drop Day, Tell a Fairy Tale Day – you name it, there’s probably a date dedicated to it. Perhaps one of the lesser known, but one of our favorites, is National Salesperson Day.
Thanks to sales training guru Maura Schreier-Fleming, the first Friday of March has been dedicated to celebrating salespeople throughout the U.S. for the last 17 years. Dishing out some well-deserved recognition can help to boost team morale, while also serving as an opportunity to improve performance.
Here are our top five ways to show your team appreciation this year:
- Recognize the greatest.
Who are some of the greatest salespeople you’ve heard of? For those in the industry, Mary Kay Ash or Joe Girard might ring a bell.
You don’t have to be the creator a billion-dollar cosmetic company to possess (and showcase) some of the same characteristics of some of the well-known industry salespeople. Take a minute to read up on some of these sales tips to help you and your team better your skills. Here are a few:
- Despite being more than 100 years old, Dale Carnegie’s book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” is still a top read for sales trainees and is used in college curriculums throughout the country.
- Love to laugh? David Olgivy was a big fan of “wise-cracking” to make a sale.
- Joe Girard holds a Guinness Book of World Records title for selling more than 13,000 Chevrolet models in 15 years. Legend says he found his sales inspiration at a funeral.
- Brush up on your selling skills.
Do you know what kind of salesperson you are? Regardless of your “selling style,” there are four traits every successful salesperson should embody. Whether it’s being direct with your prospects or having the speediest response time, there’s always room for improvement. For some additional sales tips, listen to our VP of sales Mark Ripley’s two keys to success on The Sales Whisperer.
- Incentivize and reward your team.
Ever notice those pink Cadillacs rolling down the street? You can thank Mary Kay Cosmetics for that. To increase morale, Mary Kay Ash was known to give her employees an incentive for meeting or surpassing their goals.
While lavish gifts simply aren’t in the cards for most businesses, there are other ways to motivate employees. Consider holding a contest where the person with most sales or most creative pitch wins a free lunch or extra day of paid vacation.
- Thank your customers.
Onboarding and retaining repeat customers is a difficult feat. However, those sales teams that can do so are on the fastest track to success, so don’t forget to thank your customers. After all, sales wouldn’t go through and revenues wouldn’t increase without them!
- Treat yourself.
Disclaimer: We’re not saying you should go crazy like Tom Haverford and Donna Meagle from “Parks and Recreation” (your wallet might regret those velvet slippers and cashmere socks).
Praise from colleagues is great, but the most rewarding recognition comes from yourself. To celebrate your own successes, make sure you’re giving yourself some time to unwind. Take a brain break and go for a walk, meet some colleagues for lunch or spend a few minutes catching up with your friends and family over the phone.
To all the sales teams out there, happy National Salesperson Day.
Learn how Insightly can make your sales soar.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
Share love, share Insightly: Refer Insightly, Receive a Reward.
Project Planning: A Step by Step Guide
This project planning article provides a step-by-step approach to creating a simple project plan at the beginning of a project.
Read the full article at: www.projectsmart.co.uk
Taxation With Good Representation
Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11
Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 4 weekly tips—a tip on running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, a tip on improving your sales, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!
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Provide New Insightly Users the Exact Access They |
| Your company is growing, which means you’ll need to staff up and accommodate the increased demand. With each new team member, you have an important decision to make about what information they should (or should not) access.
Insightly has several options available to you, but you’ll need to first decide which permission setting (“simple” or “advanced”) is right for your business. Here’s a quick recap of the differences: Simple Permissions:
Advanced Permissions:
Insightly profiles are particularly useful for companies with aggressive staffing ambitions. Unlike certain other CRMs, Insightly allows you to define common access profiles. As new people come onboard, you can instantly assign an existing access profile, thereby streamlining the onboarding process.
Standardize your user management with Insightly!
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Streamline Your On-boarding Process |
Big companies invest considerable resources into the onboarding of new hires. The reason? Employee retention is an increasingly important metric that directly impacts productivity and profitability. Simply stated, it’s not cheap to recruit, interview, assess, train, and compensate workers. Therefore, providing a smooth onboarding process increases the likelihood of a successful, long-term hire. Aside from working closely with your HR team (which might be you!), what else can you do to provide seamless onboarding? Technology can be your friend here, especially Insightly’s activity set feature. As we’ve discussed in previous posts, activity sets serve as prebuilt task templates, ensuring every step of a given workflow is accounted for in advance. When it comes to your onboarding, you might consider building an activity set with the following tasks (among others):
Each task within the activity set can be assigned to a team member at your organization. If, for example, your IT guy is always responsible for setting up new email addresses, configure the task to always assign to him (regardless of how many times the activity set is used). Or, you can choose to manually assign a task when the set is applied. An automated onboarding process helps new hires hit the ground running – faster. And, you can get back to more important matters.
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Make Tax Day Easier on Your Accountant |
Did you know that tax day is not April 15th this year? According to the IRS, “The filing deadline to submit 2016 tax returns is Tuesday, April 18, 2017…In 2017, April 15 falls on a Saturday, and this would usually move the filing deadline to the following Monday — April 17. However, Emancipation Day…will be observed on that Monday, which pushes the nation’s filing deadline to Tuesday, April 18, 2017.” Despite the extra day or two to file, February is still a great time to get organized. By now, most of your 1099s and charitable statements have arrived. Likewise, you’ve closed out December’s sales and expenses. Everything is there waiting for you to take action. Of course, you could put everything in a folder and hand it to your accountant. This might seem like the easy option, but it could create headaches later. Simplify the process for your CPA (and yourself) by considering the following:
Finally, don’t just assume your accountant does flawless work. Be sure to double check his or her work!
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Automate Your Sales Training |
Good sales reps are hard to find. In the long run, they’re even harder to keep. Headhunters and recruiters (even competitors!) are always luring away top performers. Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do to change this. Sales talent is in high demand. Although you can’t stop reps from leaving, you can try to maximize their productivity while they’re on your payroll. One strategy for doing this is to consolidate your training process. Even the most experienced sales reps can take several weeks (if not months) to get up and running. What can you do to improve your sales training process? Here are a few ideas: Implement a Learning Management System: A learning management system (LMS) is software that hosts your in-house training materials. Look for systems that allow users to log in, view materials, and take proficiency tests. Move to Video-Based Training: Scheduling time with the right people can be challenging for new hires. Bypass this issue by encapsulating important training into video format. Upload the videos to your LMS and turn new reps loose. Update Your Battle Card: Who are your top competitors? Why does your company have the upper hand? What weaknesses do you have? Your battle card is a vital resource for new team members. Organize the Chaos: You can further enhance any process by leveraging activity sets. With one click, new sales reps can be assigned several important training tasks to achieve. Include links to your LMS and other relevant documentation.
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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.
Share love, share Insightly: Refer Insightly, Receive a Reward.
About the author: 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, check out his book, or connect with him on Linkedin.
