We originally developed Insightly as a CRM and project management application for consulting and service companies that don’t use CRMs in a traditional B2B sales model. As our original customers have grown and demand for Insightly has expanded among larger organizations and enterprise divisions, we recognize the need to provide functionality that specifically supports sales organizations, but without the added expense. Insightly will continue to add features and plans that support our users at every stage of their business. That’s why over the course of this year you’ll see several new features to support the needs of sales professionals including:

• Lead Management – quickly import, tag and assign leads within Insightly. Users can review lead source, rating, industry and number of employees, as well as lead status. Available now.
• Insightly Business Card Scanner – available for both iOS and Android, Insightly Business Card Scanner allows users to quickly scan, save, tag and set permissions for a single business card or a batch of cards. Once saved, scanned card details are transcribed from image to text and verified by real people for accuracy. Coming later this month.
• Mass Email – with this feature, users can now “mass email” a group of customers or leads directly from Insightly, eliminating the need to export email addresses and switch to an email application. Available later this month.
• Email Templates – users will also be able to create email templates or customize pre-built templates directly in Insightly. To be released with Mass Email later this month.

Our new pricing and plans start as low as $12 per user per month. In addition to our popular free account, Insightly customers can now choose from four unique plans and price points suitable for growing small businesses, as well as departments within larger organizations. Regardless of a business’ size, there is an Insightly plan that fits its budget and meets its needs.

All our plans support unlimited users, custom branding, Google contact calendar sync, Office 365 and Outlook calendar sync, and integrations with MailChimp and Quickbooks Online. Users also benefit from the trusted service we’re known for, including our comprehensive knowledgebase, onboarding materials and responsive email support.

Small or large, every business can benefit from our intuitive online CRM. Want to know how?
Try us out with a 14-day free trial.

Over the last year, Insightly customers have seen more and more features added to our world-famous CRM at a regular pace. It’s rare for us to announce functionality that hasn’t been released yet, but we are so excited about our greatest achievement in CRM automation that we couldn’t wait to share our progress any longer. We are pleased to announce our latest advanced research project: Insightly Procaptinate.

Insightly Procaptinate is a telekinetic interface for Insightly that captures and transcribes your thoughts to CRM records during meetings, phone calls, and even while you’re sleeping. Office productivity will be exponentially increased during all activities, including napping. And users who experience regular work dreams can now make those hours count toward the success their business, taking working from home to the next level.

By sensing EEG, ECG, and CRM electrical impulses through sensors on the subject’s scalp, Insightly Procaptinate autopsychically creates Insightly entries to save time, lower the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome, and capture thoughts that may otherwise be missed with slower process like taking notes with pen and paper or on archaic keyboards. Insightly Procaptinate users will get more work done, day and night.

Using off-the-shelf materials repurposed to help the user focus and magnify brainwave signals, Insightly Procaptinate was modeled after Earth’s natural water cycle.

“We’re cloud-based software, after all,” said Laura Jameson, an Insightly Marketing Manager whose focus is split between customer interaction and futuristic product development. “Evaporation, condensation, precipitation—it’s pretty basic really. Capture work thoughts in the cloud before they drift away and then rain them down into your CRM.” (Laura is located in our San Francisco, California offices, where the state is experiencing its fourth year of severe drought.)

We’ve been able to recruit one in-house volunteer and are currently testing Insightly Procaptinate at employee workstations…

And during phone calls and meetings.

There’s still lots of work to do on the project. Currently, Insightly Procaptinate weighs 15 pounds and must be moved to a location within 2 feet of an electrical outlet where users want to capture their brainwave activity, such as an office desk, meeting room, or nightstand. It can plug into a computer’s USB port and also interfaces with Insightly’s iOS and Android apps via headphone jack or Bluetooth 9.7, which hasn’t been invented yet, but we’ll be ready for it.

Our goal is to shrink down the contraption to under 8 pounds for mobile use and reduce the many side effects experienced by our tester. We expect we’ll be able to ship it to customers by April 1, 2052.

We hope you’re as excited about this development as we are, and we hope to bring you exponentially higher productivity in the far, far future.

Insightly CRM: Think good thoughts!
 

Get a jump on the future. Check out Insightly’s currently available features and sign up for a free trial today.

 
About the author: Tony Roma is Insightly’s Content Manager. He’s been helping businesses implement software solutions, improve their work processes, and think about the future for over ten years. You can contact him at marta@insightly.com.

We’ve got big plans for 2015, and we’ll be upgrading our database this Saturday, February 28, to prepare Insightly for new features in the coming months. Insightly will be down for maintenance for a maximum period of three hours between 9AM PST and 12 Noon PST. We apologize for any inconvenience this downtime causes you and thank you for your patience.

You can also subscribe to our status updates via email, SMS, or RSS feeds. Just click the Subscribe button on our status page at status.insightly.com.

Insightly’s mobile team continues to update our apps to keep our customers’ productivity and efficiency improving with every release. Android users recently got a boost with a new version, and iPhone and iPad users now have a few new features to match.

The recent Insightly iOS app update (v3.3) includes:

• An updated and more informative view for all records. Whether you’re viewing a list of tasks or a contact’s details, you’ll find more and easier-to-read information.
• The ability to add files and pictures from your device or camera to Insightly.
• A clear view of opportunity values in the list and detail views.
• That important and seemingly invisible thing every mobile update has: Improvements for performance and stability. (Trust us, this is good stuff.)

If you’re using an iPhone or iPad and haven’t tried the Insightly iOS app, download it and give it a spin!

 

Insightly has always included a comprehensive calendar to give you a bird’s-eye view of your Insightly events, tasks, and milestones. We’ve even offered a calendar sync for customers to display those items in Google Calendar, but did not have an option to display your external calendars in Insightly until now. We realize that our customers want to manage calendars in the same way they want to manage their customer information—with everything in one place.

Today, we’re excited to expand your options with the ability to sync Microsoft Exchange and Google Calendars to and from Insightly.

 

A New Calendar Sync Experience

Our new calendar sync allows customers on paid plans to sync Insightly’s calendar to their Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange calendar, which is used by programs like Outlook. This update also displays your Exchange and Google Calendar items directly in Insightly to let you view meetings and appointments created outside of your CRM. This makes for better scheduling and easier management of your day-to-day events. When setting up sync options, customers can choose to sync only Insightly events or to include tasks and milestones in the sync process.

Expanding Outlook Connectivity with Microsoft Exchange

Our Insightly app for Outlook 2013 has been a big hit with customers who use Outlook 2013 for email, and the ability to sync Outlook calendars through an Exchange server will be welcome news to those of you who have been asking for this feature. Customers with calendars on an Exchange server can quickly set up their calendar integration and sync calendar items by entering their Exchange credentials in their Insightly settings. We’re very happy to expand our integration for Microsoft products with this new feature.

Instant Sync of New Items

When sync is first enabled, Insightly will sync all Insightly calendar items from the last two months and all future items to your Exchange and Google Calendars. New Insightly events will instantly be saved to your main calendar, and if you have task and milestone syncing enabled, those items will be synced to two separate calendars created in your calendar app. Events are synced in both directions, while tasks and milestones are synced only from Insightly to your external calendar.

Set Up Your Sync, Today!

Customers using the previous version of calendar sync will have their sync settings automatically reset, so if you’re using an Insightly paid plan, access and enable the new Insightly Calendar Sync from the User Settings page and bring your calendars together!

We’ve released an updated version (3.3) of the Insightly Android app with an improved experience to make your mobile CRM access easier:

• You can add files and images to Insightly from your camera and photo library.
• When adding a contact, you can add the contact title and organization without leaving the contact screen.
• The Add button on lists has been moved to the lower right to give you more space to view items.
• View the value of your opportunities.
• When viewing records, the title bar will give you more options, such as marking a task complete.
• Contact images and details are more visible in both the details view and the list view.
• You’ll have an easier time viewing saved emails with the new sorting options.
• Great improvements to performance and stability.
• We’ve improved the look and feel of the app by implementing more of Google’s Material Design language.

The Insightly team continues to work hard at adding more features and functionality to make every day more productive and efficient for you. If you haven’t downloaded the Android app, get it today!

 

We’re working on making Insightly even better and will be upgrading our database this Saturday, January 17, 2015.

Insightly will be offline for four hours from 10:00 to 14:00, PST. To view the schedule in your time zone, check the event time here. We apologize for any inconvenience this downtime causes you and thank you for your patience.

You can also subscribe to our status updates via email, SMS, or RSS feeds. Just click the Subscribe button on our status page at status.insightly.com.

When we originally released Insightly’s app for Outlook 2013 over a year ago, the installation was limited to customers with administrator accounts. With recent updates to Microsoft Outlook, this barrier was removed, and Insightly quickly updated our app to get you up and running. You can review all the great features of the app at Insightly University.

If you’re an Outlook 2013 user and would like to access your Insightly information directly from your inbox, visit our listing at the Microsoft Office Store and add the app today!

We’ve all followed a trail of links through the internet from one topic of interest to another. That’s one of the joys of roaming through the world wide web!  Unfortunately, sometimes we may get a little lost as we are traversing the web, so Insightly has made this process a bit easier and clearer with linking and our own back button.

You can add links to a record in its Links section, creating connections to represent relationships between people, sales opportunities, projects, communications, and other Insightly activities.

You can click through the links to move from one related record to another and review important details. And clicking the Insightly back button will return you to your previously viewed pages, one by one.

Because it’s so easy to quickly check a link and return to your previous workflow, the Back button is the most used button in Web browsers. By placing a button with the same function right below your record names, we’ve made it a little bit faster to move through Insightly!

You may say ‘tomato’ and I may say ‘tomahto,’ but with Insightly’s customization options it doesn’t matter.  We can each customize Insightly to match our own unique work processes, making data entry and navigation easier. Some of these settings are often overlooked, so here are a few—with a couple of newer additions—that you or your Insightly administrator can set to your liking.

 

Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts allow you to navigate and create records without moving your hands away from your keyboard. When you log in to Insightly and click the profile icon in the upper right, you can select the Keyboard Shortcuts option to view the shortcuts menu.

To enable or disable these keystrokes, simply check or uncheck the Enable Keyboard Shortcuts option and close the menu.

 

Automatic Social Profiles

Since many small businesses utilize social media to boost their brands and extend their marketing outreach, Insightly includes automatic social media searching for contacts based on email addresses. We display links to matching social profiles directly on the contact’s page for easy access.

If your business prefers not do display the Social Profiles section on contacts, your Insightly administrator can disable this function from the System Settings > Social Profiles page.

Your administrator can uncheck the Enable Automatic Social Profiles box and click the Save Settings button. Please note that this will disable social profiles for all users in that Insightly account.

 

Inline Editing

While you can click Edit (the pencil button) to add or modify fields in any record in Insightly, you can also edit existing fields when viewing a record by moving your mouse cursor over a field, clicking the pencil icon, and clicking a checkmark to save your changes. This setting is enabled by default, but if you would like your users to see all the available fields when they edit records, your administrator can disable inline editing.

To access this setting, go to the System Settings > Inline Editing page.

To disable the setting, uncheck the Inline Editing Enabled checkbox and click the Save Settings button. Please note that this will disable inline editing for all users in that Insightly account.

With these and all the other options available from Insightly, you can configure your CRM to make every workday more efficient!