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May 24, 2017

5 Smart CRM Shortcuts to Impress Your Clients

Consultants are in the business of looking smart in the eyes of our customers. (Whether we are actually smart might be somewhat debatable!)

With client priorities dictating every waking moment, consultants can sometimes fall into the trap of overlooking their own business workflows. Although it’s important to keep your customers top of mind, it’s also wise to constantly refine your own operations.

In this post, I’ll share five easy ways that you can use Insightly to streamline your consulting business – and make a lasting impression with customers.

#1: Onboard Clients in a Couple of Clicks

Today is a great day. Before you sipped your first cup of coffee, you received word that another new client (we’ll call them “Smith Company”) has decided to accept your proposal. This represents an excellent opportunity for your firm, and you’re obviously very excited.

As you’ve done many times before, you head over to your Insightly account, find the opportunity record, and mark it as “won.” For good measure, you even convert the opportunity to a project. After adding a few notes to the new project record, you move on to the next item on your to-do list. Perhaps this afternoon you’ll have time to officially get things moving for the new client.

Unfortunately, your day doesn’t go exactly as planned. An existing client has an unexpected emergency pop up, sending you into an all-day meeting. A different client keeps pinging you, consuming any excess brain power you can muster. Smith Company is just going to have to wait until tomorrow.

More than 24 hours pass before the team at Smith Company receives your canned “welcome” email. At this time, you also assign a few tasks to your project manager. You even add a task for yourself so that you remember to schedule a kickoff call. The folks at Smith Company respond quickly to your email, and the ball is in motion.

There’s nothing necessarily “wrong” with your current approach. But, wouldn’t a more expedited process reduce client wait time and make you happier? Sure it would! Here’s how Insightly can accommodate that.

By leveraging the power of workflow automation, Insightly can do all the administrative work on your behalf. For example, you could configure an Insightly workflow to do the following:

Instantly send a prebuilt onboarding email template to your contacts at Smith Company
Assign tasks to your project manager
Assign yourself a reminder to schedule the kickoff call

In a matter of clicks, you could instantly set the wheels in motion when the deal closes – rather than manually doing the exact same thing a day (or more) later. Smith Company would certainly be impressed by your attentiveness, and your project manager could get to work sooner.

#2: Respond to Leads Faster (with Better Info)

Streamlining the customer onboarding process is a great first step, but what about automated lead engagement? Despite being an important part of your future viability, courting new business can be rather distracting to your workday.

Once again, Insightly email templates can come in handy here, too.

Stop and think about the most common questions that leads ask you. In my line of work (marketing consulting), these are the most common ones I get:

How much do you charge for content marketing services?
Can you send me some examples of your work?
Do you have experience developing marketing plans?
Can you help me with my social media?
I need help with my website – can you point me in the right direction?

For the better part of a decade, I’ve answered questions like these countless different ways. And, I’m ashamed to admit, I usually just fire off a quick, one-off answer. A better approach would leverage the power of Insightly email templates. So, as new web leads come in via a web-to-lead form, answering questions becomes as easy as clicking the “Actions” dropdown, selecting the appropriate template, and sending the message.

By building response templates for every common question, you could save hours of time each year and avoid forgetting key details.

Had I followed my own advice from day one, I would have probably saved dozens of hours. Lesson learned!

#3: Host Better Meetings with Tags & Pipelines

Clients love to have meetings with you. After all, your advice matters to them. The most direct way to get such advice? You guessed it….meetings!

The simple act of meeting preparation can be very time consuming. You never know when clients will expect you to run the show, so the prudent consultant always has a few discussion topics up his or her sleeve.

By living and breathing Insightly, you can ensure there’s always something to talk about with clients. Pipeline views and tags are particularly useful for structuring meeting conversations. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

As you know, most clients love to see the progress you’re making. You could talk until you’re blue in the face, but showing a visual representation of such progress can be much more impactful. For work utilizing pipelines, Insightly natively builds a visual representation in your project dashboard. Before the meeting, just filter your projects to show only those that apply to the given client. Voila, you have a dynamic explanation of the client’s initiatives, which can be provided as a screenshot or through browser sharing.

Likewise, tags can help you structure a meeting agenda in minutes. This is especially true as your list of client-specific projects grows beyond more than a few. For projects that require in-depth discussion, you might create a tag called “stuck” or “to discuss.” Filtering for that particular tag presents a list of pre-filtered discussion topics, making you look like a genius.

#4: Capture Client Ideas from Your Inbox

Your clients send you plenty of ideas. Here’s the problem: they always seem to forget about their ideas shortly after emailing you.

Luckily, they have you to help keep everything organized!

One way you can achieve this goal is by setting up a new project, specifically for collecting their ideas.

As new ideas arrive in your inbox, just forward the email to the project-specific email address. Insightly will automatically link your forwarded email to the “idea bucket” project. Then, the next time you chat with the client, you’ll have a real-time feed of all their latest ideas.

Stop digging through your inbox for an email you’ll never find. Instead, make a habit of getting each new idea into Insightly as quickly as possible. Your clients will thank you, and you’re bound to yield new revenue-producing opportunities – simply by clicking “forward.”

#5: Create Accountability with Recurrence Patterns

You can’t do your job without clients providing some level of input. All of the best strategies in the world will fail unless your customers are willing to do their part, too.

Many of these client responsibilities, especially for longer-term relationships, tend to happen on a repeating pattern. For example, in my life as a marketing consultant, I’m constantly asking for the following:

Topics to include in the monthly newsletter
New features worth mentioning on social media
Quarterly budget approvals
Ideas for upcoming blog posts
Updates from product development teams

Granted, some of these could be addressed in your ongoing meetings with clients. In reality, most meetings tend to focus on new ideas – rather than ongoing responsibilities.

One way to create accountability is by setting up repeating tasks and email reminders in Insightly. In a perfect world, your clients would have their own instances of Insightly, allowing you to assign work directly to them. If your clients use a different system (or none at all), the next best solution is to assign the tasks to yourself and forward (or auto-forward) the email reminder to the appropriate stakeholder.

Take a monthly newsletter for example. As an outside consultant, it’s literally impossible for me to come up with 100% of the content by myself. I need input from inside team members in order to do my job and produce an engaging work product. If a newsletter needs to go out during the last week of each month, setting a repeating monthly task for mid-month could be helpful. This way, there’s plenty of time to collect the information I need to hit the deadline. Internal stakeholders will also appreciate the grace period, rather than a last-minute fire drill.

Maximize the Usefulness of Your Insightly Toolbox

As you can see, a tool like Insightly offers endless possibilities for the efficiency-minded consultant. Invest time in getting to know the best practices for using Insightly more efficiently. You can even watch free videos and recorded webinars, packed full of tips for maximizing the usefulness of your Insightly account.

Now go out there and really impress your clients – with less effort!

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.

May 17, 2017

5 Time-Wasting Business Habits & How to Avoid Them

Time goes by much too quickly.

As the leader of a growing business, you know this to be all too true. Days and weeks continue to zip by in a flash, and your strategic priorities seem no closer to implementation.

Although you can’t slow down time, you can identify time-wasting habits that may have formed in your business. Overcoming these habits can free up new time and resources, making goal achievement more feasible.

In this post, we’ll discuss five common time-wasters – and how to overcome them.

1. Constantly Jumping Between Email, Chat, & Social Media

In a perfect world, you’d never be bothered during work hours. Instead of constantly putting out fires, a targeted focus on your ever-growing to-do list could yield significant value.

Unfortunately, your work life is far from perfect (so is everyone else’s by the way). Customers are always emailing you directly. Your team is not shy about pinging you with questions. New sales inquiries and support problems frequently require your input. And, your social media followers always appreciate your pithy thought leadership. All of this is, of course, encouraging news for your business. Clients increasingly trust the brand you’ve built. But, servicing so many requests can quickly grow tiresome and even serve as a distraction for your company’s future growth. Spending every waking hour jumping between your inbox and discussion forums diverts your attention away from your goals.

How can you gain greater control over your schedule without missing opportunities? Here are a few ideas:

Set aside “distraction-free” time each day: Set your IM status to “do not disturb” and close your inbox. Put your smartphone in a different room. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and spend 30 minutes on something you deem to be important. Try this for a couple days and measure the impact. I think you’re going to like it – and, you might even be surprised by how little you’re actually missed!

Study the sensitivity of your response time: Does each request deserve an immediate answer (by you)? How many of your emails are truly “urgent” in nature? Study these types of questions, and you’ll be more likely to identify how much “distraction-free” time you can get away with.

Look for additional things to delegate: Just because you’ve historically done something, it doesn’t mean you should keep doing so. Does it make sense to hire additional staff or freelancers to ease the burden? Perhaps you already have staff who could fill this role? It’s worth considering.

2. Capturing & Organizing Minutes from Meetings

Speaking of things worth delegating, how much time do you spend on glorified administrative work? For example, what percentage of your week is consumed by the seemingly simple task of organizing your own meeting notes?

If you said “not much,” think again.

Let’s say that you typically have between eight and twelve meetings each week (we’ll call it ten on average). You usually create a meeting agenda, share it with your team in advance, and then use the document to capture meeting minutes. After the discussion is over, you spend about fifteen minutes trying to make sense of your notes. You look for any action items and manually enter each one into your project management system. By my math, you’re spending over two hours each week (or 150 minutes to be exact) on post-meeting administrative activities! This is not to mention the time you’re spending during the meeting by trying to multi-task as both scribe and participant.

Here’s a better approach:

Step 1: Before the meeting, identify a related project or customer record via the Insightly mobile app.
Step 2: On the “related” tab for the record, tap the “+” symbol and select “Note with recording.”
Step 3: Let Insightly record the discussion and link the recording to the related entity.
Step 4: Have your administrative assistant listen to the audio transcript and add new tasks on your behalf.
Step 5: Enjoy the additional time in your busy work week!

Optimizing your meetings is only the beginning. With a tool like Insightly, you’re bound to identify other administrative tasks that can either be eliminated, streamlined, or delegated.

3. Waiting for the Next Assignment

Although your to-do list is always overflowing, the same isn’t always true for other members of your team. Granted, some staff members take the initiative and find ways to add value without being asked. Others, however, prefer to take a “wait and see” approach, hoping that you’ll find something for them to do.

Idle staff can be doubly wasteful to your organization. With the proper instruction, they could be helping you work through your overwhelming backlog. This would not only ensure their time is well spent, but it could help you move your vision forward – faster. Instead, idleness is reducing output and inhibiting the realization of your strategic agenda.

To reduce the risk of downtime, it’s important to take a proactive approach to project management. For example, you might:

Tag your projects: People can’t help you if they don’t know what’s on your mind. Consider tagging certain projects that may benefit from team involvement. Doing so will make it easier for staff to view and sort that which is important to you. They can even volunteer for specific tasks, allowing you to expedite the implementation of certain strategic initiatives.

Encourage group discussion: Sometimes a project just needs a healthy discussion to get liftoff. Set up a recurring monthly (or biweekly) calendar invitation, during which your team can collectively review and discuss your tagged projects.

Automate recurring tasks: Just because a specific task is marked as “completed,” it doesn’t mean that it’s done forever. What types of activities does your organization do on a repeating basis? Examples might include: monthly bookkeeping, preparing social media plans, and pulling sales reports. Configure repeating tasks to keep your team on track and avoid downtime.

4. Moving Data From Your CRM to Other Systems

You need timely and accurate data to make informed decisions. And, although you spend much of your day in your CRM, there are other software apps you use to run your business. Exporting, importing, and de-duplicating data lists isn’t exactly the best use of time.

How can you streamline the data management aspect of your business?

For starters, it’s important that you fully understand the native potential of your CRM. For example, some Insightly users overlook the fact that the system offers accelerated sales management and project management under one roof. By simply utilizing the built-in project aspects of Insightly, users can bypass the headaches of porting data between systems. When an opportunity is marked “won,” a new project can be created in less than ten seconds. This is especially useful for business models that require a high-touch fulfillment model.

Naturally, it’s unreasonable to think that your CRM can fulfill every aspect of your technological needs. Even after maximizing the use of a tool like Insightly, your organization will probably still rely on:

Eternal inboxes
Document sharing apps
Accounting & bookkeeping software
Email marketing systems
Scheduling calendars
Customer ticketing software

Before you export another customer data CSV file, it’s worth a look at the native integrations to your CRM. Insightly, for example, offers dozens of easy-to-enable integrations. And, if that’s not enough, you could leverage the power of the Zapier platform and potentially connect your CRM to more than 750 third-party tools.

With each newly enabled integration, your staff is bound to save hours of frustrating, non-value-added administrative work. You’re also in a better position for avoiding data headaches and oversights.

5. Relying Too Heavily on Your Desktop (or Laptop)

Unless you’re a millennial who grew up with a smartphone in hand since childhood, you probably prefer to do certain tasks via your desktop or laptop computer. There’s a certain sense of comfort that comes from your oversized monitor and ergonomic keyboard.

Despite the appeal of a traditional office setting, you and your team might actually be wasting time.

To illustrate this point, let’s imagine you have a busy day scheduled for tomorrow. You’ll be attending an executive networking event at 7:30 am, which is immediately followed by a couple of important on-site client meetings. After that, you’re meeting a potential new hire for lunch. Your afternoon calendar is fairly open, which seems like the perfect opportunity to regroup from the busy morning. Unfortunately, when you arrive back at your desk, a new emergency has arisen. Updating your CRM records will have to wait until tomorrow morning (hopefully there won’t be a new emergency then!).

In this scenario, which depends upon being at your desk and doing work, you’ve let a full day slip by before any follow-up action can occur.

A better approach might have looked like this:

After each event, pull out your smartphone and pop open the Insightly mobile app.

Find the related record and add a voice note (see above) to summarize your notes.

If immediate action is required, assign a task to one of your team members (or yourself!).

Close the app and move on to your next meeting.

By following this process (which takes five minutes or less), you’ll save yourself time later in the day. In addition, your staff can help coordinate the many follow-up activities before you ever get back to your desk. It’s the best of both worlds.

What Other Time-Wasters Do You Struggle With?

Struggling to overcome other time-wasting habits in your business? The first step to improving your situation is to realize a problem exists. Only then can you begin matching technology and other best practices to solve your newfound inefficiencies.

May 9, 2017

Why Closed-Won is Just the Beginning of Business

Closing a big deal can be very satisfying. It’s dinner and drinks all around when the stage of the deal is changed to 100% (closed=won).

The hard work you’ve invested in prospecting, follow up, proposals, and negotiation have culminated in this highly anticipated moment. Time to sit back and relax, right?

Wrong!

In fact, for most business models, “closed-won” is not an endgame. It’s actually the first step in an ongoing customer relationship.

In this post, we’ll explore why closed-won is just the beginning. We’ll also look at technology that can help facilitate a more fruitful customer lifecycle.

Fulfillment & Delivery Must Exceed Expectations

Soon after a new customer signs on the dotted line, reality can quickly set in. By accepting the client’s business, your company stakes its stellar reputation on delivering an unbelievable (but also profitable) experience. It must walk a fine line between capacity building and providing existing clients the same personalized service that they’ve become accustomed to.

Without the right approach, the addition of new customers can actually be quite disruptive. Unfortunately, many companies are ill-prepared for the sales growth they achieve. By overemphasizing the sales funnel at the expense of downstream fulfillment and delivery, revenue growth actually detracts from the long-term value of the organization.

A more balanced approach (especially one that views sales in context of the broader customer lifecycle) can reduce the risk of overpromising while ensuring fluid on-boarding. How can your organization achieve a more “balanced” approach to sales and fulfillment? For starters, you might try fully harnessing the power of your CRM.

If you’re already an Insightly user, you may have heard that the software facilitates sales and project management. In fact, it’s even possible to convert sales opportunities to projects.

Rather than starting from scratch in a siloed project tracking system, Insightly gives your production and fulfillment teams a seamless view of each customer. The original opportunity record is automatically linked to the new project record. Emails, files, and notes can also be copied to the project. For added efficiency, Insightly activity sets can add new tasks upon project creation or conversion (for example: review customer specs, set up billing information, send a welcome packet, etc.)

By leveraging an integrated sales and fulfillment workflow, your operational team is in a much better position to effectively serve the new customer’s needs. (They’re also less likely to bug your sales reps with redundant questions!) The net result? Less busywork, expedited delivery, and another highly satisfied customer.

Measuring Satisfaction Helps You Improve Your Game

Speaking of customer satisfaction, do have a formalized process for collecting feedback?

Some companies live by the old adage, “no news is good news.” While there may be some truth to this statement, failing to ask for customer input could cause you to overlook new product or service ideas, process improvements, upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and other innovations.

Aside from waiting for customers to complain (or share their praise), what are some proactive ways to measure customer satisfaction? Here are a few simple ideas.

Design a quick survey: There are countless free and affordable survey tools online. In fact, your existing email marketing platform might natively offer polling and surveying (here’s a popular example). Regardless of the tool you select, be sure to invest adequate time and develop a simple, yet effective set of questions. Ask customers to measure various aspects of their interactions with your company. Numeric ranking questions can be particularly useful, especially when comparing the satisfaction of multiple customers. An open-ended question or two can also help you gain qualitative insights into the mind of the customer.

Create a survey distribution plan: Does it make sense to blast the entire survey to all existing customers? Or, would a batched approach make more sense? What about future customers – should you set up an autoresponder sequence that goes out a few months after an opportunity is won?

Make satisfaction data more accessible to your CRM: Insightly users have the luxury of many integrated apps. For example, the Insightly integration for the MailChimp email marketing system can display certain campaign data, making your survey results just a click or two away.

Convert Your Satisfied Customers Into Advocates

Even the largest advertising budget can pale in comparison to the value of a few vocal advocates. Customers who are willing to speak out on your behalf create untold goodwill and help other prospects understand your offering in their own terms.

As customer satisfaction starts to flow into your organization, you’ll find yourself presented with new opportunities. How can you best capitalize from glowing customer feedback? Some common approaches include:

Testimonials for Marketing Use – Would the customer allow you to publish his or her feedback on your website or on social media?
In-Depth Case Study – Would it be possible to interview the client as the subject for a whitepaper or case study?
Serve as a Reference – When future customers ask for references, would this customer be willing to speak on your behalf?
Technical Input – Would your technical or support staff gain value by picking the brains of highly satisfied customers?
Immediate Sales Opportunities – Some customers may simply be unaware of your entire suite of solutions. A follow-up email blast or direct mail piece could generate immediate revenue opportunities with existing clients.
Segmentation for Future Marketing – Even if there is no immediate opportunity, perhaps it would be prudent to tag satisfied customers for future reference.

As you might imagine, these ideas are only a starting point. Spend time reading and comparing customer feedback, and you’re sure to generate many other creative advocacy ideas.

Closed-Won is Important, But It’s Not Everything

Winning the initial contract is an important and necessary step in the future success of your business. However, as we’ve demonstrated in this article, achieving “closed-won” status isn’t everything – far from it, in fact.

By leveraging your CRM throughout the entire customer lifecycle (from initial inquiry through advocacy), you’re bound to yield much greater value from each customer and account.

And, most importantly, your customers will love you all the more!

May 4, 2017

Exceptional Service Management: 5 Skills for Strong Customer Connections

You’re invited to join us on Thursday, May 23rd from 8 – 9 AM PT, for “Managing for Exceptional Service: 5 Skills Your Team Needs Now to Create Strong Customer Connections”.

This Insightly Insider Discussion series will be hosted by Marilyn Suttle and Lori Jo Vest, Customer Service Experts and co-authors of “Who’s your Gladys” and “Taming Gladys”.

Based on their personal experiences and interviews with companies that set the bar for service excellence, Suttle and Vest will share what you can do right now to give your staff the skills they need to keep customers coming back and referring their colleagues and friends.

Participate in the upcoming customer service conversation inside the Insightly Community.

It’s free and open to all Insightly customers!

May 3, 2017

How to Convert Insightly into a Lead Gathering Machine

Your marketing efforts are really starting to pay off. You’re a lead gathering machine.

Each passing week brings in a record-setting lead volume, far exceeding your own expectations. Best of all, there’s not one particular lead source that is overly dominant. Everything you’re doing seems to be working, and that includes organic web search, paid advertising, trade shows, and word-of-mouth referrals.

As optimistic as you are about your marketing engine, you’re now dealing with a new problem: making sure that each lead is efficiently funneled into your CRM. With leads expressing interest via email, webforms, phone calls, and other ways, you need a quick and easy workflow to collect their information for follow up.

Luckily, if you’re using Insightly, you have access to a CRM that can accommodate even the most complex lead collection model. In this post, I’ll share a few tips for effectively gathering leads, thereby freeing up new resources for engagement (and bypassing all the administrative nonsense).

Start by Connecting Your Website to Your CRM

You’ve invested significant effort in your web marketing initiatives. A lightning-fast website, a new content team, and a revamped CPC bidding strategy are just a few of the priorities you’ve deployed this year.

These programs have your website buzzing with new inquiries. Prospects seem to be particularly fond of your whitepapers, eBooks, and other downloadable assets. And, with each new download, your website sends you (and select members of your staff) more emails to sort through. At first, these emails were helpful and even somewhat exciting to receive. Lately, however, they’ve become a serious distraction to your operations. They’ve also been known to get buried in your team’s inboxes, creating a significant lag in the follow-up sequence.

It’s time you created a more streamlined connection from your website to your sales funnel. Insightly can help you do exactly that by means of its intuitive web-to-lead connectivity. Here’s how to set it up.

First, have your CRM administrator or website manager go through the simple process of generating the HTML code.

During setup, you can even specify who (if anyone) will receive email notifications upon submissions. (Note: It might be wise to enable email notifications initially, to ensure everything still works to your specification. When your team is comfortable with the new workflow, you can then turn off the notifications.)

Once the code is embedded into a webpage, form submissions will start to appear as new leads. Best of all, they’ll be assigned to a specific Insightly user, ensuring the lead is contacted sooner rather than later.

Already invested in a third-party form builder? No worries, as Insightly connects directly to several of the leading online form builders (or indirectly via the Zapier platform). Check your tool’s integration options to see if an Insightly integration can be enabled.

Build a Workflow for Inbound Calls

Despite the many resources and webforms on your site, some leads just prefer to speak with a human being. That’s fine, as your inside sales team is happy to help.

Unfortunately, there’s no consistency in how your phone bank tracks caller information. Some reps prefer handwritten notes, while others create their own spreadsheets. Still others submit call summary reports via email. This inconsistency creates unnecessary confusion, and in some cases, has caused certain leads to be completely overlooked.

You need a more reliable method for capturing and tracking phone inquiries.

There are several possible ways to use Insightly for solving this problem. Of course, you could require each agent to be logged in to Insightly and add lead records for each incoming call. Adding new leads from the user interface is relatively straightforward.

Alternatively, if giving your phone agents CRM access seems like overkill, you could build a web-to-lead form specifically for their use. Generate and embed the code on a webpage that’s only accessible to your reps, bypassing their need for user licenses. Adding new leads becomes as simple as visiting a webpage (which, by the way, could be set as the default homepage on their browsers) and submitting a form.

For additional efficiency, consider enabling a workflow rule. As phone calls are converted to leads in the system, the workflow can ensure that specific users are automatically assigned or follow-up actions occur.

Supercharge Your Team’s Inboxes & Browsers

Although web traffic and phone calls account for a large percentage of your inbound lead collection activity, even the most automated systems have outliers. For example, your staff may occasionally be on the receiving end of:

Inquiries sent to your company’s general inbox
Unsolicited referral emails from existing clients
Responses from automated nurture sequences or newsletters

Again, Insightly can prove to be an invaluable tool for these types of unpredictable situations. For starters, each Insightly user has a unique mailbox address. When a message is forwarded to such an inbox, Insightly does some pretty nifty work behind the scenes. The system takes a look at existing contacts, searching for matching records. If there’s not a match, Insightly automatically creates a new contact and organization. It then links the email to the newly created records.

Although doing this technically creates a “contact” (and not a lead), it’s easy to add an opportunity to the contact for future follow up. (After all, qualified leads can be converted contacts and opportunities in a few clicks.)

If your staff checks email in a web browser (as opposed to a desktop client), the Insightly Sidebar can also be a viable option. Here’s a quick demo for setting that up.

By leveraging the Insightly Sidebar and/or mailbox tools, you’ll make it easier for staff to manage one-off leads (that might otherwise get lost).

Create Fingertip Access for Outside Reps

Before we wrap up this article, let’s not forget about your team out in the field.

Even if your reps spend most of their time calling on known accounts or existing customers, they’re always on the lookout for new prospects. By attending client meetings, networking opportunities, and industry events, your outside reps serve as a reliable source of new leads. Therefore, it’s important that you make it easy for your sales team to capture new lead information.

Since reps are usually away from their desks, be sure to invest time training your sales team on the Insightly mailbox. To further simplify the use of this feature, you might even have your IT staff set up contact entries for each rep’s unique mailbox address. (Tip: include an easy-to-remember keyword in the contact’s name, such as “Insightly” or “CRM.”) This way, when a rep is crunched for time, he or she can simply forward the email and start typing the name of that mailbox as the intended “contact.” The inbox should recognize the contact being referenced, pulling up the Insightly mailbox address.

For added firepower when on-the-go, the Insightly mobile app is also a great tool. From any web-enabled smartphone, your team quickly can add new lead records, notes, and other related information. Better yet, Insightly allows you to record and attach audio notes (up to 60 minutes per recording) to any lead record. Voice notes can serve as an excellent way to capture in-depth information, which would otherwise be difficult (if not impossible) to create with two thumbs and a smartphone.

And, once your reps have installed the Insightly mobile app, they’ll also be able to create new lead records simply by scanning in business cards. No more fumbling through a briefcase for the three dozen business cards gathered at a trade show. Scan them in with a few taps, and Insightly transcribes and saves the information in your CRM forever!

It’s Time You Turned Insightly Into a Lead Gathering Machine

Using your CRM primarily as a lead collection repository is a good place to start. However, the name of the game is to convert leads to lifelong customers – not to simply store their information in a database. By reducing the time and effort involved with lead collection, you’ll free up more time to actually engage with prospects.

As an Insightly user, you have access to a dynamic suite of lead gathering tools. Put this toolbox to good use and maximize the ROI from your CRM investment!