Category: Product News

Previously, you could only import or export Insightly contacts to MailChimp. But, now, you can now import or export both Insightly contacts AND leads from or to a MailChimp list with more of their associated data. And, you can now see the history of MailChimp campaign interactions in a timeline view without leaving Insightly.

When a matching email address is found in MailChimp, Insightly will display:

1. A dropdown of MailChimp lists where the member is listed
2. Subscription information or “Unsubscribed” status
3. Their activity rating
4. How many campaigns have been sent to the selected list
5. Open rate for the selected list
6. Click rate for the selected list
7. Timeline view of campaign events

In addition, our improved integration now supports more field types. So, if you’d like to import email address as well as first and last names, you can now easily do so. And, any custom fields that you may be using in MailChimp can now be mapped to Insightly’s custom fields.

But that’s not all!  For Plus plans and above, we’ve also added the ability to auto-import contacts. So, if your team uses MailChimp to regularly acquire new leads or contacts, you can schedule when to regularly import those items to Insightly. Learn more about it in our help article.

 

You must be asking yourself, what is SOC Compliance and what does it mean for me? Well, SOC stands for Security Organization Controls and it is a security standard developed by the AICPA (The American Institute of CPAs). What this means for you is that Insightly has controls in place to ensure that your data is safe and secure and our SOC 2 certification proves it. For example, in practice, it means that:

• When a new Insightly employee joins the company, there are background checks conducted to ensure they don’t pose a credible security risk.
• When an Insightly employee leaves the company, there are safeguards to ensure that customer data is safe.
• Insightly has reliable and credible business processes in place to resolve system problems that may compromise security.
• Insightly has controls in place to prevent unauthorized third party access.

Not only is Insightly as a company SOC 2 compliant, but the data centers we use are also SOC 2 compliant. So, you can rest easy knowing that any risk of data breaches or system hacks is minimized because we care about your data’s security.

By popular request, we’ve been hard at work improving Insightly so that you have a more seamless workflow and I’m excited to share everything we’ve completed. A quick summary of what’s now available in your account is below.

• Custom Field Availability on Web to Lead/Contact Forms
• Custom Field Mapping (So your custom field data moves from one record type to the next)
• Ability to Delete a Lead
• Ability to Duplicate an Activity Set
• Ability to Duplicate an Opportunity or Project
• Automatically Shift all Tasks & Events When a Project’s Milestone Date is Changed

With all of these improvements together, your new workflow could look like this:

1. Capture a lead or a contact from an Insightly form using custom fields
2. Submitted form creates a lead or a contact with associated custom field data
3. Lead or Contact is assigned to the appropriate person using Lead Assignment Rules
4. The lead or contact interacts with a rep and decides to buy; with each interaction tracked
5. Leads are converted to an opportunity, project, contact or organization
6. Apply a copy of an activity set at the appropriate opportunity or project stage
7. Automatically shift the dates of all project tasks and events when a project’s milestone date is changed

With these improvements, you can now have one seamless workflow where customer interaction data is available at the right time and in the appropriate record type. When you couple these minor improvements with our recently released Lead Assignment Rules, you can make sure leads are automatically routed to the appropriate person or team. And, if you no longer need converted leads, you can delete them individually or in bulk from the lead detail view or the lead list view as shown below.

If you like this update, be sure to like and share it on social media!

For all of our Xero Integration users, I’m happy to share that we’ve also improved it so that it now supports multi-line invoices. So, you no longer need to generate multiple invoices just to send one bill with multiple lines. Simply click “Add a new line” to add another row to your invoice, add the items details and, voilà, you’ve got a multi-line invoice draft!

For our customers in Japan, we’ve added Japanese as a language setting for Insightly, so you and your colleagues can now use Insightly in Japanese. Please note that this addition is still in beta. You can learn more about enabling it in our support forum.

If you like this update, be sure to like and share it on social media!

Without the right tools, assigning and distributing leads can take almost as much time as following up on them. With Insightly CRM’s new lead assignment rules, your leads can be distributed automatically and immediately after they’re entered, improving the speed and accuracy of your entire sales process.

Right now, you might get a lead, add it to Insightly, and assign it to a salesperson. This process is a breeze if your sales process is handled by one or two salespeople. But as your team grows, questions start to come up:

“Who is the sales rep for this territory?”
“Have the leads been distributed evenly across the team?”
“Which of our salespeople handles this industry?”

 

Automate lead assignments to save time

Spend less time and effort distributing leads by letting Insightly do the work for you. Create rules based on territory, company size, industry, or other fields in your lead records and Insightly will route your leads to the proper salespeople every time. Set up different rules for leads that are entered manually, through a webform, or via our API.

Also, when you import a batch of leads, you’ll be able to choose from any of the rules you’ve created. With one less step in the process, the sales team can spend more time on working the leads as they come in.

 

Customized rules to meet your needs

Want to set up a rule for regions? Use postal codes and states or provinces to define your criteria. Are your assignments based on industry or company size? Use the Industry or Number of Employees fields when building your rule. You can even combine multiple fields when setting up your criteria.

With all of the factors that can play into distributing leads, your assignment process is probably different from many of our other customers. We wanted to be sure you have the flexibility to choose from the fields that you use every day.

As you configure a lead assignment rule, you’ll be able to select from Insightly’s default lead fields as well as custom fields that you’ve created. Your rules can be as simple or complex as you need or prefer. And if you’re already using our Advanced Reporting, you’ll be familiar with the filters available for designing your rules.
 

Distribute leads evenly and effectively

Point a set of rule criteria to a team or multiple people, and Insightly will distribute the leads round-robin. No more figuring out if Adam, Debra, and Thomas each got the same number of leads. Just set up your rules and let Insightly go through your criteria step-by-step and do the work for you.

Lead assignment rules will make it easier for sales managers to coordinate work and keep sales teams focused on accelerating sales. So, if your sales team would love one less step in their manual lead management process, give these rules a try.

This new feature is available to customers with Professional and Enterprise subscription plans, and you can try it out with a 14-day Free Trial.

Insightly’s custom fields give you flexibility and control over your CRM information by letting you make a place for your own unique data. Adding fields like billing ID numbers, customer types, subscriptions, or referrals helps you make Insightly your own. Now, you can copy and move custom fields between records, increasing the power of automation to free up more of your time.
 

Automatically copy information with field mapping

 
When you close a deal and convert an opportunity, Insightly can create a new project for you. This automation is also available when you convert a lead. Converting a lead will create a new contact, organization, and opportunity without having to re-enter information. Before our latest update, custom fields were often left behind in this process. No longer!

Using one of our latest features, you can transfer your custom fields from opportunities and leads with opportunity field mapping and lead field mapping. By mapping custom fields from leads and opportunities, their information will be matched up and copied to the new records when you convert the lead.

For example, if you have a field called Region for leads, contacts, and organizations, you can now map it from leads to contacts and leads to organizations. By mapping the field, the regional information you need to assign opportunities or create reports can be copied to contacts, organizations, opportunities, or all three. We’ll even limit the selections to the same types of fields, so there can be no errors in matching up a dropdown list with a text field.

Custom field mapping is also available from opportunities to projects, so your sales team can hand off helpful information to the project team in a snap. With this fast and automatic transfer, you’ll spend less time updating your custom data and feel more secure in knowing that you’re not leaving important information behind.
 

Cloning custom fields for faster setup

 
To use the new mapping feature, the fields in each record will need to match. This means if you’ve set up a Region field as a dropdown list in leads, then the Region field for contacts should be a dropdown with exactly the same options. Does that mean you have to set up a field for leads, then contacts, and then opportunities? Yes. But with Insightly’s new custom field cloning, that process is much, much easier.
 
Instead of manually creating a field once for leads, once for contacts, once for organizations, and so on, you can now clone a field with just a few steps. You’ll find an icon to the right of each custom field that allows you to copy it and all its details to a new record type. This is especially helpful if you’ve spent time setting up a dropdown field with a list of options and want to use it somewhere else.

Once you click the icon, you will select where you’d like the new field to appear. You can also rename it, although keeping your naming consistent will help with mapping.

Any custom field can be copied to a different kind of record with cloning. This will save you the time of repeating the same steps of setting up the original field. Copying the information automatically also prevents manual entry errors when trying to duplicate a custom field.
 

More control over your work

 
With the new ability to clone custom fields and map them between records, Insightly CRM gives you more control over your information and more powerful automation when converting records. We thank all the customers who shared their interest in these improvements. With your feedback and our product team’s efforts, Insightly will continue to make your work easier and help you accomplish more!

Insightly’s product development team has been hard at work improving our infrastructure, so you might have noticed that Insightly’s apps—both web and mobile—are running a lot faster. The geeky details: We refactored our backend using an abstracted service layer to separate our data store and presentation layers. Wow, that was a mouthful!

Without further getting into the technical details, here are some highlights of how these changes improve your experience with Insightly!

Faster response

Under peak loads, Insightly is now roughly 250-300% faster on average. So, when you access Insightly in your browser, you’ll get it in about a quarter or a third of the time than before. Below is an actual graph of our application’s performance throughout one day. The dotted grey line indicates response times prior to our update and the blue line is after our update. As you can see, our application can perform almost five times faster.

Faster mobile apps & API

On average, Insightly’s APIs and mobile app access are roughly 500-1000% faster. If you’re accessing your CRM data from our mobile apps or current API (version 2.2),  you’ll get them much faster than you did before. In this graph of our API’s performance, the dotted grey line is the response time prior to our update and the blue line is after our update. You can see our mobile apps and API perform almost 10 times faster in some cases.

 

Improved reliability & stability

Because our system infrastructure has been re-architected, it runs a lot more smoothly. By reducing variability in response times makes things more predictable. As a result, our operations and development teams can better plan for growth in data from Insightly’s many new customers and your many growing businesses.

This is all pretty technical, but it is truly a major change that helps us stay ahead of the needs of our customers. With a faster CRM and even more new features coming your way, Insightly keeps getting better to make your business more productive and successful.

If you like this update, be sure to share it on social media!

Sending email directly from your CRM is a fantastic way for salespeople to save time and effort. With thousands of customers utilizing this feature, we’ve taken another step to make the management of your business email more effective.

Prior to today’s update, we used our own mail system to send emails from within Insightly on your behalf. Many of our customers have told us they would prefer those emails to be sent from their own email addresses and email servers instead of ours. This provides you with even more control and greater benefits.
 

Connect to your email accounts

We’ve greatly simplified the process of connecting your email accounts to Insightly. On the User Settings > Email Accounts page, you’ll see options for Gmail, Office 365 Outlook, Outlook.com, and an “Other” option to connect to SMTP servers.

You’re also free to connect multiple accounts to Insightly. This is an improvement over the limitation of sending only from the account you log in with. To start using this feature, you’ll just need to connect your email accounts.

If your email server is configured for DKIM or SPF, all emails sent will be signed using those technologies automatically. This direct connection allows us to send emails from your own email server, reducing the chance that your messages will be flagged as spam or junk mail.
 

Choose a “From” address when sending

If you have multiple email addresses and connect them all to Insightly, you will be able to choose a “From” address when composing your message. You can do this even if your email addresses are from completely different email services. The emails come from you at the address you select, so there is no more “via” in the email address when a recipient is reading them. This also reduces the chances of getting caught in a recipient’s spam folder.

 

See Insightly emails in your own Sent folder

Since emails are now sent from the servers of your own email service, you’ll always have access to them in your Sent folder. We’ll still save a copy in Insightly on the Emails tab and link that to the contacts, leads, and organizations of your recipients, but now you’ll be able to view and access those message when you’re working in your email inbox, too.

 

Receive your replies directly

When recipients reply to your message, you will receive their emails just as if you’ve sent the original message from outside of Insightly. If you use Gmail and Chrome, you can save those emails to Insightly using the Insightly Sidebar. Outlook 2013 users with an Office 365 subscription can use our Outlook app to close the loop. And those of you using other email programs can forward replies to your Insightly mailbox.

Our other features for sending email remain the same as always. Insightly will still be able to track clicks and opens per email template, you will still be able to use the same templates you’ve created, and you will still be able to schedule emails to be sent in the future if you have scheduling available on your subscription plan.

These additional options to send personalized email to your contacts and leads without leaving your CRM are just another step we’ve taken to make your work easier and your workday more productive.

With every update, the Insightly mobile team adds features and improves the performance of our Android and iOS apps. This week, the apps have been updated to fulfill a couple of very popular customer requests. From managing your workflow with Pipelines and Activity Sets to finding items faster through search, these improvements are sure to help you get more done from your mobile devices. This is no April Fools’ Day joke!

The mobile app update (version 3.12) is now available for Android. Our iOS version has been submitted to Apple for review and should be available within a week.

 

Use Pipelines on Mobile

Moving your work along a consistent path is a major benefit of using Pipelines. Many customers have been waiting for this addition to mobile, so we are very happy to bring Pipeline management to the Insightly apps. When you’re adding or editing an opportunity or project, you’ll now be able to select a Pipeline and advance from stage to stage as your work is completed.

To change a Pipeline or stage, edit the record you’re viewing, tap the Pipeline and stage fields, and select the new stage. When the stage includes an Activity Set, you will be prompted to configure your dates and assignments, just as you do in Insightly from your web browser.

 

Apply Activity Sets

While we were adding Pipelines to mobile, it made sense to follow with the addition of Activity Sets. Activity Sets create tasks and events using a template that your team has set up for all your Insightly users. They can be used individually or can be triggered when a Pipeline stage is reached.

For customers who add them directly to records like leads or contacts, having this powerful tool on mobile will save time without having to return to your desk. To apply an Activity Set, tap the Related tab, tap the “+” icon, and then select the Set you’d like to use. When your Activity Set includes start dates, end dates, or assignees, every option is available right on the screen.

 

Fast, Powerful Search

In our connected world, we’ve all been trained to find information quickly through search. Finding something in your mobile app should be just as easy and just as fast. We’ve now added a flexible global search at the top of your menu drawer, so you can immediately start finding what you’re looking for with fewer taps.

While you will see every matching record as you type, we’ve also added an option to filter the results by contacts, organizations, and your other record types by tapping an icon. Regardless of which screen you’re on, all searches are faster thanks to full text search improvements introduced by our mobile team.

 
Thank you to all of our customers and users for the valuable feedback you’ve provided through beta testing, our Customer Support and Customer Success teams, and our community. Our product teams are continuing to listen through all channels and continuing to add new features and improvements to our apps at a great pace.

Check your app and make sure you have the latest and greatest!