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March 1, 2018

The Nominees Are In

“This year’s award for best regional sales manager goes to…”

It’s safe to say that these words have never been spoken at any red-carpet event in the history of Hollywood. And, perhaps rightfully so. The general population could care less about your company’s sales revenue or top-performing contributors. (Their loss, right?)

Despite the public’s lack of concern, you and your team spend every waking moment thinking about the business. What is contributing to success? How can last year be beat? Which competitors are posing new threats? Thanks to your star-studded team, no question is too difficult to solve.

So, as “awards season” draws to a close in the entertainment industry, perhaps it’s time you instituted an award season of your own. Last year was a great year, so why not show your team how much they really mean to you? There’s no better time than now.

Here are a few possible awards to hand out:

Leading Sales Performer

I’m sure you have a suspicion of who your top-producing sales rep is. Thanks to your CRM, you don’t have to operate based purely on gut feelings. Because your company has been using Insightly for years, everything you need to identify your leading actor (I mean, sales performer) is just a few clicks away.

In fact, there are several different ways to access the same data. If I were in your shoes, I’d probably just jump into the “Reports” tab and begin customizing the standard “Opportunity Report.” As you can see in the following screenshot, I’ve decided to look at all closed opportunities for last year, grouped by the “Won” field.

By adding “Owner Name” into the report, you’ll arrive at a filterable view for last year’s deals. Apply additional groupings or export to tabulate last year’s top revenue producer.

Best Supporting Admin

The sales process doesn’t magically happen on its own (although you’re trying to automate as many things as possible with workflows!). Several years ago, you made the strategic decision to supplement the sales process by hiring virtual assistants for each rep. (A “supporting actor” of sorts.) This arrangement has worked out nicely. Sales reps are able to hand off many “back office” tasks, allowing them to stay focused on prospecting, proposals, and deal closures.

Your sales administrators perform a wide variety of tasks each day. From transcribing audio meeting minutes, to linking records, to proofreading proposals, your VAs are very busy people. It might seem overwhelming to determine which one is most deserving of special recognition.

Luckily, your virtual assistants are tracking all of their work as Insightly tasks. Much like the sales report we just built, last year’s productivity is fully queryable. With a few drags and drops, you’re able to see all of last year’s completed tasks, including which team members did the most work.

In some cases, simply looking at the number of tasks completed might not tell the entire story. For example, perhaps some of your VAs work more hours than others. Or, perhaps some crank out a ton of work but at a lower quality. These are all factors that should be considered before finalizing the award criteria.

Rising Star

Shifting attention back to the sales team, last year was a year marked by several new hires. In fact, somewhat to your surprise, you added a dozen additional sales reps. It might be smart to recognize the newbie who best exemplified your corporate mantra.

Clearly, you could go a lot of different directions with this award. Some reps were onboarded earlier in the year, so basing it purely on revenue wouldn’t seem fair. A better approach might include a variety of criteria, such as:

Lead-to-Opportunity Conversion Rate: What percentage of a rep’s leads end up converting into viable opportunities? Is this metric relatively consistent across all reps, or does one rep stand out from the pack?

Close Rate: How effective are your reps at closing deals? In theory, close rate should increase as your reps become more confident with the subject matter and customer segment. A rep who demonstrates a strong close rate early on might wind up becoming a leading performer in the future.

Average Value per Deal: Are some reps more effective at mixing in upsell and cross-sell messaging to clients?

When determining your “rising star” award, it might be wise to use a weighted average of these (or other) data points. It all depends on your business model.

Best Writer (or “Marketer”)

Without a compelling story, a film is nothing more than a moving picture with noise. The same could be same about business. To supplement the efforts of its sales cast, today’s growth-minded organization needs a skilled team of writers and marketers.

Like most companies these days, your business relies on a blended team of in-house marketing staff and freelancers. Between ongoing SEO efforts, email campaigns, and CPC promotions, your marketing team has its hand in many things.

The following data points could be useful for refining your marketing nominee list:

Top Blog Post(s): Log into your web analytics software and sort all of your blog posts by web traffic and/or lead conversions. Of the top-performing posts, which were written by whom? Do you notice a common thread?

Most-Opened Sales Emails: Your newsletters and promotional campaigns are likely sent via a bulk email system. Be sure to review open and click-through data in there, but don’t forget to also review the same information in your CRM.

Impactful Ad Campaigns: Who seems to generate the best ad campaign concepts? If you’re using projects to sequence and track campaigns, you can quickly build a report to uncover this information.

It’s Time to Spotlight Your Superstars

At face value, your business might not have the same glamour as that of tinseltown. But, in reality, your team members love their jobs as much (if not more) than the actors and actresses in Hollywood. Providing ample recognition, in whatever fashion, can be an effective way to show your appreciation, boost employee morale, and even improve future results.

It’s time to roll a red carpet of your own…

Or, beige would probably work, too.

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, get his book, or connect on LinkedIn.

February 28, 2018

Insightly Redefines Data Visualization with Dynamically-Rendered Dashboards

At Insightly, we’re building the future of CRM. We’re completely rethinking the way we use typical CRMs to envision a future where we utilize customer data to provide views into previously inaccessible business information. We’ve added more visualizations to CRM data, giving small and midsize businesses the tools that were once reserved for larger enterprises with technical muscle.

All your CRM data front and center

Built from the ground-up on Insightly’s Customer Relationship Platform, the newly released reporting and dashboard rich analytics feature allows businesses to view critical information directly within the CRM. By building data visualization tools right into its CRM, Insightly provides a powerful out-of-the-box solution for uncovering valuable business data. Customers now have the option to place a dashboard on their home screen so key information is always front and center.

Track performance and find hidden opportunities for growth

With a single view of your CRM data, you can track team performance and quickly make decisions to make a positive impact. Insightly’s dashboard engine includes a calculation tool to crunch numbers and show metrics like “Win Rates” and “Average Sale Price” to measure performance. Plus, with better structured data in Insightly’s dashboards you’ll uncover more opportunities for growth.

Build your own dashboards without IT help

With a simple, intuitive drag and drop interface you can create dashboards in minutes. Easily build individual cards with specific categories and values to add to any dashboard and display them in a variety of visualizations like bar charts, scatter plots, pie charts and more. Personalize the dashboard layout to your preference – resize cards and drag and drop them anywhere on screen – all without needing to be a technical whiz.

Key features include:

Expanded Chart Types: Insightly provides +40 chart types for sales reps, business leaders and other collaborators to visualize everything from leaderboards and pipeline summaries to project updates and productivity goals

Custom Field Support: In addition to a wide variety of standard business data, Insightly also supports critical custom fields in dashboard to view segmented data such as lead source, top industries, premier accounts and other criteria.

Project Insights: Teams can now visualize not only sales information and individual projects organized by status, owner or client. By flagging at-risk projects early, companies can allocate resources to ensure successful on-time completion

Dashboards for any role: Executives, Sales, Marketing

Whether you’re a CEO, sales leader, marketing manager or another role, Insightly’s dashboards provide insight into the overall health and trends you need to make smarter, more informed decisions. Using data drawn from Insightly’s underlying Customer Relationship Intelligence Platform, CRM users can surface rich, customizable dashboards to display dozens of different reports filtered by role, industry, customer profile and other attributes.

Easily share key information

Your business has questions. Insightly CRM has answers. Dashboards are an effective way of organizing report information in one place for insights into key metrics at a glance. Insightly’s sleek dashboards allow companies build KPIs to view insights about their business, track important projects and share information seamlessly within their company.

Availability

The new customer data visualization features are available March 1st across all Insightly CRM plans.

February 27, 2018

Top CRM Trends

2017 was a big year for the CRM world, we saw the rise of chatbots, and customer data enriched with social media feeds but what are this year’s top CRM trends? 2018 is already shaping up to be an exciting year for CRM users, with talks of AI helpers, unified omnichannel customer service supports, and tightly integrating CRMs with other best of breed cloud business apps. Read on to find out more about these exciting developments.

Your CRM will be more social

Social media isn’t going anywhere soon, and businesses are looking for effective ways to monitor and analyze their social channels. In 2018 CRMs will go beyond social media monitoring for mentions of your business, they will help you with your customer support efforts. Here are two crucial customer touchpoints where social media will shine in 2018:

Community Building: CRMs will delve deeper into community building and allow customers to share their experiences with the company, rate products and services and log customer care enquiries. It also encourages interaction with other customers, so they can share their experiences with your products.

Social analytics for customer service: Social media is the go-to customer support channel for millenials,with a report from Microsoft finding that 47% of 18-34-year-old consumers have used social media to complain about a brand’s service.

AI infused CRMs

By 2021, AI tech in CRM will generate $1.1 trillion in revenue. It’s safe to say this is a technology that isn’t going to go away anytime soon. In 2018, we’ll see an uptick of AI in our CRM software, especially when it comes to low-level tasks such as making appointments.

Michael Fauscette, principal analyst at G2 Crowd said “You’ll start seeing more intelligent assistants to take things off your plate, like scheduling meetings or finding the right PowerPoint — those types of things will keep getting better.”

Some AI systems will be able to automatically adjust workflows, and optimize sales cycles. The more data your CRM collates, the better your AI can learn from this data, “Over time, this system will teach itself to do an even better job of targeting potential customers and decision makers by identifying which personal or professional attributes hold the most weight,” says Chris Matty, analyst at Destination CRM.

While your AI helpers aren’t going to be taking over your job, they will be helping you to do a better job.

Tight integration with other business cloud apps

The hottest CRM trend in 2018 is integrating your business cloud apps, so that your teams have access to the most up to date customer data.

Best of breed CRMs, such as Insightly, do a great job holding prospect and customer data, you can take Insightly further by connecting it to your marketing automation, customer care, or accounting apps.

While a lot of CRMs natively integrate with some apps, your choice is severely limited. A lot of CRMs, including Insightly are now turning to third party integration services, like PieSync, to help fill customer demand that they integrate with more best of breed apps. They know that integration isn’t an easy task, so a third party app that specializes in integration is the way to do to ensure data accuracy and consistency.

What’s the problem? You’ve probably seen this one, you’re working in Insightly,but marketing, customer care, and accounting each have their own apps, filled with customer data. The problem is customer data gets stuck in these apps, and it leads to problems like miscommunication, leads being handed over when they are ice-cold, and customers not getting their invoices on time.

It comes down to data accuracy, which underpins all customer service efforts. In fact, a report found that 75 percent of organizations believe inaccurate data to be undermining their ability to provide an excellent customer experience. 2018 will see CRMs opening up to third party integration platforms so that their customers can benefit from the power of creating a unified SaaS Stack.

Vanessa Rombaut is the Content Manager at PieSync and a featured writer in various tech publications and websites.

The PieSync Blog In the Pipeline has been named The Best Marketing Blog 2017.

February 22, 2018

7 Strategic Business Questions to Ask Yourself in Q1

Don’t blink…February is already here.

February can sometimes serve as a hard dose of reality. This year was finally going to be the year you realized all those ambitious resolutions. Unfortunately, with January being a month filled full of budgeting, accounting, and other year-end obligations, you probably haven’t had a spare moment to think strategically.

Don’t feel too bad – you still have the better part of the year to make progress.

With January now a distant memory, it’s time you finally sat down and refined (or built) the strategic plan for your business. In this post, I’ll share seven questions to get your strategic juices flowing.

1. What worked?

You probably have a gut feeling about what worked last year. Take, for example, that email campaign your marketing team deployed in mid-July. It was so successful, in fact, that you’re already planning several more like it this year.

Looking beyond the “big wins” of last year, what else worked? What was your seventh-best or eighth-best initiative? How did these programs impact to the company’s bottom line? Without the right data, it’s difficult to know for sure.

Smart business decisions are based on reliable information, which is precisely why you need to connect with your leadership team as soon as possible. Challenge them to identify their five to ten most impactful initiatives, complete with budgeted and actual results. If you receive pushback about data accessibility, you may have identified an issue to solve in the new year (see question #3).

2. What didn’t work?

While you’re at it, go ahead and ask the team to also identify the biggest disappointments of last year. Again, don’t just settle for anecdotal evidence. Ask for specific evidence that something was a failure.

Here’s a classic example. As a marketer, I’m routinely asked to measure the performance of various advertising campaigns. Before I do any analysis, the client will often have a preconceived notion about what didn’t work. However, this opinion may be based entirely on a single KPI, such as number of leads or revenue impact. While these metrics are important, they may not tell the whole story. For the sake of discussion, let’s imagine that I brought the following numbers to you.

Campaign	Cost	Visitors	Leads	Cost / Lead	Conversion %
#1	$1,000	300	10	$100	3.33%
#2	$10,000	1,000	20	$500	2%
#3	$5,000	600	15	$333	2.5%

Based on the table above, which campaign was the biggest loser?

If we base success (or lack there of) purely on lead volume, then campaign #1’s meager budget was destined to fail from the get-go. Looking at the data holistically, we learn that this campaign actually had the best conversion rate and most affordable cost per lead. In other words, face value failures can sometimes represent your greatest opportunities for growth!

3. Is anything broken?

The skeptic in you might be tempted to ask what isn’t broke.

As imperfect as your business might seem, the simple truth is that you don’t have time to fix everything. When looking at broken things to fix, you need to cut to the chase and solve the problems that have the greatest impact.

When answering this question, it’s wise to do so through the lens of:

The customer experience: Are customers cancelling or abandoning because they don’t feel loved? Does your product or service need a refresh? Would a better CRM help your company engage more customers and leads?

Revenue-producing activities: Do your sales reps forget to follow up on opportunities? What percentage of the sales team’s day consists of administrative work – rather than making calls? Is it time for an overhaul of your lead management process?

Inefficient back office tasks: Is information getting lost between your CRM and your external project management system? Could you reduce confusion simply by aligning project and sales management into a single system?

4. Where do we waste the most time?

If you can’t pinpoint any “broken” systems to fix, you might try looking for a common symptom: wasted time.

Whether we’ll admit it or not, we all do things that are less than optimal. In fact, one of my strategic initiatives for this year is to identify ways that I waste time. Each time I do something that seems like a time waster, I jot it down for future optimization.

Here are a few goodies I’ve discovered so far:

Deleting marketing emails that I never bother to read (without unsubscribing first)
Clicking through endless folders on my computer to find documents
Constantly pushing out due dates on overdue tasks
Dealing with overlapping reminders on my smartphone
Spending time on things that I could have paid someone else to do

As the saying goes, you can’t solve a problem unless you first know that it exists. Although I don’t yet have solutions for these time wasters, I’m at least becoming aware of them.

Lead by example and begin studying your own work habits. You’ll likely inspire others at your organization to do the same!

5. What will soon require attention?

The business landscape is always changing. That’s never been more true than in today’s digital ecosystem.

You may not have a crystal ball, but you know your industry as well as anyone. By this time next year, what external forces (if any) will have changed enough to require your attention? What are experts in your field projecting? Are customer tastes and preferences evolving? How will all of this impact your company’s position in the market?

Taking things one step further, it may even be prudent to prepare a situational SWOT analysis, focusing specifically on the forward-facing aspects of the analysis: opportunities and threats.

To illustrate my point, let’s say that your company supplies injection molded parts to the automotive industry. For years, there have been rumors that your largest customer intends to bring this process in-house, thereby negatively impacting your order volume. Lately, you’re seeing evidence that this may becoming true. The threat is obvious – a significant impact to short-term revenue. On the other hand, the opportunities could be worth thinking about:

Opportunities:

New capacity
Expansion outside of automotive
Greater margin potential
Diversification of risk

Waiting around for things to happen is rarely wise. Smart business owners (like you!) are always a few steps ahead, especially when it comes to anticipating market forces.

6. What can (and should) be automated?

In today’s world of APIs and workflow automation, it’s amazingly easy to automate certain business processes. Alas, knowing what to automate first is where many business owners get stuck.

If you’re unsure of what to prioritize for automation, here are a few ideas:

Recurring tasks: The delegation process itself is a great place to start. Which tasks do your team members commonly forget to do? Do they (or should they) occur on a predictable pattern? If so, adding a recurrence pattern to your tasks might be a smarter way to delegate.

Pipeline administration: When an opportunity advances from one pipeline stage to the next, there’s typically some action required by your staff. If your pipeline has a “Quoting” phase, common sense tells us that a proposal should be prepared at that time. If only it were that apparent to everyone at your company! Stop hoping for results, and automate the assignment of activity sets.

Order delivery: The moment a deal closes, a race begins to deliver goods or services within the customer’s expected time frame. There’s not a moment to lose, which is why manually transferring information from your CRM to another system is particularly inefficient. A better approach involves keeping everything in one system and simply converting the sales record into a project.

7. Which systems align with our goals?

After digging into the prior six questions, you may begin to notice a common thread stemming back to your company’s technology footprint. Do some of your systems overlap in functionality and create more confusion than value? Or, conversely, are some systems being underutilized, thereby causing your team to do unnecessary work? Would an integration between certain applications create new economies of scale for your business and boost user adoption? These are all questions worth asking.

Remember, a software application offers minimal value on its own. To maximize the value of your company’s technology, it’s important to continuously ensure alignment with your strategic vision. As this vision evolves, so too should the systems deployed by your organization.

Get the Conversation Going

Asking the right questions can be an excellent way to launch an effective strategic conversation. As you work on this year’s strategic plan, consider asking more questions and pushing your team to collect the right answers.

Looking at the truth can sometimes feel uncomfortable, but it’s exactly what you need to do when building a more viable strategic plan.

February 12, 2018

2 Models of freelance consulting (and how to plan for each)

Are you part of the 36 percent of the U.S. workforce currently engaged in freelance consulting?

I am, and I’ve been doing so for the greater part of a decade. Consulting offers a number of benefits: flexible work schedules, the freedom to chart your own course, and the opportunity to meet a ton of interesting people.

On the other hand, consulting does come with its fair share of tradeoffs. After all, with freedom comes responsibility. Case in point? The ability to make your mortgage payment, health insurance premiums, and retirement contributions are completely reliant on your ability to pay yourself. It’s hard to pay yourself when your business isn’t profitable.

So, how can you ensure a more sustainable business model, thereby offering the personal lifestyle you desire? To answer this question, let’s examine the two most common freelancing business models – and, how to plan for each.

Model 1: “Package” Providers

What’s due each year on (or around) April 15th? That’s right! Your federal income tax returns. Unless you prepare your own taxes (which I wouldn’t recommend), there’s a good chance you pay a CPA to do the work for you. In exchange for a flat (or relatively flat) rate, your accountant analyzes your books, organizes your 1099s, prepares the necessary paperwork, e-files everything on your behalf, and (hopefully) minimizes your tax obligation.

Your CPA is leveraging the classic “service package” model. Unless you receive a letter from the IRS or state, you may only engage with your accountant once a year. Likewise, your CPA might only think about your needs once a year. It’s a relationship that works, but surely it could be so much more. Sadly, you’re both too busy to ever change.

What other consultants commonly leverage the service package approach? Here are a few examples I’ve seen over the years:

Web developers: “I’ll get your site up and running for $999.”

CRM experts: “We offer a few packages to help you transition off your legacy CRM.”

Bloggers: “Our rate card is based purely on word count.”

Video editors: “I charge $50 per minute of video you want me to edit.”

The package model has several distinct benefits. Perhaps most notably, this model can be scaled with relative ease through the hiring of skilled labor. Granted, that assumes the market supports both sides of the equation.

Here’s the obvious challenge with the package model: you typically need a lot of customers to make it work.

Planning Tips for Package Providers

Let’s assume you’re a web development consultant who is selling packages for $999. Some simple math would say that you need at least 100 new customers annually – just to make the business worth your time. Ideally, you’d love to far exceed that baseline. Of course, this can be done, but you need a game plan.

Remember, not every lead is going to convert into a paying customer. It’s a simple reality of business. In fact, after studying your past records, you learn that only 50% of your opportunities pan out. Given your minimum benchmark of 100 new customers in 2018, you better get busy with sales and marketing. Your sales pipeline is going to require 200 quality opportunities!

That’s where a CRM comes in handy. In addition to helping you feel more organized, a CRM makes it easier to identify gaps in your pipeline. The sooner you become aware of such gaps, the sooner you can begin ramping up promotional efforts.

Before getting too far ahead of yourself, it’s probably wise to first scope out the basic phases of your sales pipeline. You don’t need to make this overly complicated. Just list out the basic steps you go through to close a deal. It might be as simple as:

Prepare a quote or proposal
Receive written approval from the prospect
Mark the deal as won and get busy

A reliable CRM will make it easy to build custom sales pipeline stages. For example, I quickly created this example pipeline in Insightly, based on the bullets above.

Once you’ve customized your pipeline, you can then begin adding your in-progress deals. You might be surprised by how much prospecting is needed!

As time goes on, you may begin offering enhanced packages or new services that complement your basic $999 package. Or, you might think of new ways to drive revenue from past customers. Would former clients pay $100 for an hour of your time each month? Do they need ongoing maintenance or development support? A CRM makes this type of brainstorming more fruitful. Since all customer and project-related information has been tracked in one system, you’ll be able to generate reports with the information you need most.

Need to see a list of past customers in a specific industry or geographic region? Want to identify lost opportunities likely to need a website refresh later this year? Your CRM saves the day once again.

Model 2: Hourly Consultants

“My current hourly rate is…”

If you’re not offering some type of canned service package, you’re probably accustomed to saying these words. And, why not? From your perspective, hourly work is a low-risk way to build your consulting business. You do work, you get paid. From the client’s perspective, it’s a nice way to ease into the relationship without much commitment.

Hourly engagements are especially common among:

Marketing consultants (like me!)
Business coaches
Graphic designers
Lawyers
IT consultants
Project managers
HR consultants

As compared to the first model discussed in this article, the hourly consultant’s sales approach may be vastly different. In some cases, the hourly consultant might only be interested in winning a dozen or so clients – total. Rather than continuously searching for, starting, and stopping engagements, the focus is shifted toward serving the same known clients.

Although a pure hourly model may come with less sales administration, there are a few noteworthy downsides. In my experience, hourly consultants routinely find themselves falling into these temptations:

Putting your eggs into too few of baskets: Some clients want as much of your time as you’ll give them. That’s great, but does it expose your company to too much risk? If 50% of your income comes from a single customer, what happens if they cut back or go out of business?

Forgetting about your continuing education plan: If clients are willing to pay for “as much time as they can get,” why would you “waste” non-billable hours on learning things? The temptation is to pack every waking hour with billable time; yet, this approach makes you less valuable in the long run.

Cannibalizing margin potential for “easy money”: As you refine your skills, what formerly took several hours may only take you an hour (or less). Some services you offer would be a perfect fit for the “package” model; unfortunately, your “hourly-only” mindset is hard to overcome.

Forgoing long-term viability for short-term income: If you didn’t show up for work, your business wouldn’t earn much money. This presents a major challenge for the hourly consultant, and there’s rarely an obvious path for overcoming it.

Planning Tips for Hourly Consultants

At a foundational level, hourly freelance consultants must be very strategic with their time. For starters, you at least need a weekly and daily hour plan to ensure you’re always meeting your goals. (Check out this spreadsheet I personally developed and use every single week.) Unless you set very clear goals, you’ll struggle to ever realize your earning potential.

Beyond the use of an effective hour tracking tool, the hourly freelancer must regularly seek ways to challenge the status quo. For example, I try to make myself answer these questions on a regular basis:

Why do clients find value in my hourly services?
Does my current hour allocation expose my business to too much of a cash flow risk (or should I mix things up a bit)?
How efficient are my non-billable hours? Could I automate certain things?
Which of my services should be bundled into a fixed-price package?
How can I increase my hourly rate while providing even greater value?
Should I delegate certain tasks, thereby freeing up more capacity?
How can I learn more things with less of an investment of my time?
What is my plan for vetting and managing the occasional new lead?

As you begin to challenge the status quo, you’ll likely identify several opportunities for improvement. Again, this is where a CRM becomes so useful. For the sake of discussion, let’s assume you’re a graphic designer who primarily works on an hourly basis. You’ve designed logos for several clients, and you think there’s a potential market for a logo package. After doing some research, you learn the market typically supports $250 for such a service. This type of package would not replace your hourly work; rather, it would complement and further diversify your income stream.

Before spending a ton of time launching a completely new endeavor (and potentially diverting attention away from your hourly work), you decide to test this idea among a few select clients. Luckily, you know that one of your best customers is getting ready to rebrand its corporate website. It’s the perfect chance to give it a shot.

So, you jump into your CRM and add a new opportunity pipeline called “Logo Package.” You then add a new opportunity in the pipeline, link it to your customer’s record, and set a reminder to mention this to the client.

All of that only took five minutes, but it is time well spent. After discussing the idea with the customer, you start to realize how big this could be. Not only does he want to move forward, he’s ready to refer this service to five other business owners. He’s excited about this service, and so are you!

Which Model is Right for You?

There’s no question that the freelance consulting industry is picking up steam. For many consultants, the real question is this: fixed price, hourly, or both? Oftentimes, a blended model offers a more scalable balance. Just be sure to plan your work and always be intentional with your time!

February 6, 2018

Insightly CRM Meets Artificial Intelligence

Let’s start with the numbers and the major problem we face as sales people… or practically anyone who schedules lots of meetings. Sales people spent 20% of their time doing CRM, administrative, and report related tasks in 2015, according to the report State of Sales Productivity.

Of that 20%, we can imagine much of that time comes from scheduling customer meetings. Having had experience as a “sales hunter” closing long-term, six figure software sales, I confess that scheduling meetings with customers was a time intensive part of my sales process. Whether you’re an accountant, personal coach or CEO of a Fortune 500 company, you probably feel the same way I do. Scheduling meetings is time consuming but needs to get done. Period.

I’m going to help you shave down this 20% number with artificial intelligence Insightly CRM integrations for scheduling meetings in-person or via email.

Scheduling Meetings In-Person

First, let’s learn about NLP (natural language processing)?

Here’s a gif to explain…

via GIPHY

NLP allows programs to understand human language as it’s spoken or typed like shown with the Insightly Slack Bot. You may have already used tools such as Siri and Google Assistant, which also rely on NLP too. With our integration we’re going to integrate NLP technology with Insightly’s business card scanner to quickly schedule meetings in-person.

Let’s pretend we’re meeting a new customer at the Hard Rock Cafe Networking Mixer…

SUSAN

Hello, John pleasure to meet you.

JOHN

Nice to meet you too. Hey! My friend told me you do

fundraising for nonprofits. Can you help me with a project?

SUSAN

Of course I can help you. What’s the project about?

JOHN

We’re looking to build an animal shelter uptown

and we need help with funding. Here’s my business card.

Maybe we should schedule a meeting, so I can give you all the details.

SUSAN

Great! Let’s schedule the meeting right now.

It will take less than a minute. Do you have your calendar on you?

JOHN

Why yes I do… give me a second to check my phone.

John opens his calendar app to look for an available time slot.

While John is checking his calendar, Susan opens her Insightly mobile app and starts scanning John’s business card.

JOHN

I am available next week on Tuesday from 10am till noon.

Let’s meet here. Does that work for you?

Susan confirms time slot on her calendar.

SUSAN

Yes, that works for me.

Susan switches back to Insightly and clicks the voice to text button.

SUSAN

Meet with John from 10am to noon next tuesday at the Hard Rock Cafe in Phoenix, Arizona.

Susan clicks Save to Insightly.

SUSAN

Perfect! You’ll get an calendar invite soon with all my contact details too.

JOHN

Wow! You weren’t kidding when you said it would take less than a minute to

schedule a meeting. You’re really on top of things Susan.

As you can see there is no long list of fields to complete using various apps, the conversation barely skipped a beat, and best of all… you made a positive impression with your new customer.

Interested in integrating NLP technology with Insightly’s business card scanner?

Watch my Business Card Scan + Scheduling All-in-One Setup Tutorial

I imagine the next big tech advancement for this use case is wearing smart glasses to monitor your conversation and schedule meetings automatically. This would require zero human intervention on your part and only the customer would need to tell you when they’re available. The customer wouldn’t even need to give you their business card because facial recognition and data mining technology would scan the customer’s face to find matching contact information online. While we’re a few more years away from having this technology, scheduling in-person meetings will meet your needs for the interim.

Scheduling Meetings via Email AI

Moving onto scheduling with AI (Artificial Intelligence)… First, what is AI?

According to Wikipedia, AI is applied when a machine mimics “cognitive” functions that humans associate with other human minds, such as “learning” and “problem solving”.

Since we’re using AI technology to schedule meetings (or interact with humans), this technology will also rely on NLP and there’s a new AI tool for scheduling meetings that does exactly this. The AI scheduling service is called “Amy” by X.ai.

Here’s a video demonstrating how Amy (and her twin brother Andrew) learns your preferences, solves problems by working out scheduling conflicts, and takes NLP to a whole new level!

As stated on their pricing page, Amy will save you on average 10 hours per month scheduling meetings. That’s a lot of time, but as a CRM Consultant I’m still not satisfied…

If we look at Amy’s and Insightly’s processes, we still have three more activities we can delegate to robots:

Reduce time spent delegating tasks to Amy by using Insightly’s email templates. The email template insert fields will give Amy everything she needs to know about your contact(s), in order to schedule meetings as fast as possible.
Automatically sync your event activities to your CRM using Insightly’s Google or Microsoft Exchange calendar sync.
Amy’s not ready to send event reminders or integrate with conferencing platforms yet, so we’ll add automation tools like Zapier to give Amy a helping hand.

Interested in adding AI to Insightly CRM?
Watch my AI Scheduling Assistant for CRM Setup Tutorial

About the Author:

Micah Feldkamp is an Insightly Hero & CRM Consultant specializing in Insightly software implementations.

January 29, 2018

5 SaaS Lead Generation Secrets You Should Try in 2018

The ultimate goal of the SaaS product marketing is lead generation. The overall success of your marketing campaign whether you are making changes to a website, creating a next piece of content or running Facebook ads will be judged by a number of emails these activities deliver. In the long run, the question you should always keep in mind is how your marketing efforts will affect the number of people hitting the ‘Sign up’ button.

At Chanty, we had to learn a lot about lead generation as well as try new things before we found what actually works for us. Today we are sharing the best of our lead generation advice. Some of the hacks work well for us to get the precious sign ups for Chanty, others have proven to work great for well-known SaaS companies.

1. Lead generating content

Content marketing is nothing new. Unfortunately, there are still companies that invest into creating content, but don’t get the outcome they’ve hoped for. The good news is content marketing, if done right, could bring amazing results. Let us share our hack #1 that brings us a steady stream of customers.

Here’s a simple path you should follow:

Determine your top competitors in the niche
Make a keyword research for ‘Competitor Name’ alternatives, as well as ‘Competitor X’ vs ‘Competitor Y’
Choose the keyword phrase with the best balance of monthly search queries and keyword difficulty (could be checked in Ahrefs or SEMrush)
Write an in-depth article targeting the keyword. Among other alternatives mention your product. Highlight why it’s better than your competitors.
Acquire some backlinks pointing to an article
Enjoy the deluge of sign ups

This article on Slack alternatives in our blog is a a living proof of this strategy in work. It’s the easiest way to go if you have a prominent competitor in the niche. If you don’t – well, there’s still the traditional inbound marketing for you to try. Determine your buyer persona, learn their pains, solve them with your content, educate, engage and provide value. Create a downloadable asset such as an ebook or a comprehensive guide and offer it in exchange for visitors’ emails. Visit Hubspot Academy to learn how to do it in details.

2. Resonating ads

I can’t help, but mention this tactic, used by Ryver, our competitor. With the obvious leader in the face of Slack, team communication and collaboration niche is pretty hard to enter. You have to explain how you are different from Slack to their millions of fans and fight for your place in the sun. Ryver made a power move and set up the aggressive ad campaign in Twitter confronting their main rival.

Ryver says they’ve seen incredible engagement with these promoted tweets compared to other tweets where they’d speak of their advantages as a team communication app. Eventually, this approach helped them generate buzz around the product, got them noticed by thousands of potential customers and resulted in the long awaited sign ups.

I don’t encourage to go against your competitor with your ad campaigns. The ethical side of this approach is controversial and completely up to you. The bottom line is it works and gets you the precious emails.

3. Referral traffic from Quora

So many marketing channels, so little time. Referral traffic could become a great acquisition channel as well. After spending one week answering questions on Quora, I was surprised to discover its traffic converts at impressive 6%.

Here’s a priceless hack we’ve learnt – wiki answers. Rather than asking friends to upvote your content and fighting desperately to rank higher among other answers, here’s what you should do.

Whenever you find a question related to your niche e.g. it’s something like “What are the best Slack alternatives?” for us, hit the three dots menu and choose ‘Create Answer Wiki’. Once you post it, it’ll be reviewed by Quora staff and, if doesn’t violate their policy, it’ll be approved. Not everyone is aware of this hack so hurry up to make use of it asap.

4. Pricing model matters

Marketing isn’t only about promotion. There are still the three other P’s, remember? It’s hard to overestimate product pricing when it comes to generating leads.

When marketing thinks of leads, business thinks of sales. Not all leads are made equal. There are leads that turn into paying customers. There are also leads that churn after a free trial or remain freemium forever. Freemium, free trial, premium or other models you employ to price your product will result in different levels of lead generation. I’ve written more about various pricing models here. Let me highlight a few points.

I’d recommend to stay away from freemium unless you are a big company backed up by investors. Freemium sounds better than it in fact is. It means customers can use the lite version of your product for free for as long as you want. With all the virality you might get by going with freemium, you should consider the cons carefully.

Think of the number of free users you’ll have to maintain in order to get a handful of paying customers. Although it may look attractive, you can quickly find yourseful in a freemium trap – answering support tickets of free users and developing the features that freemium customers request.

The bottom line is price the product wisely and learn about pros and cons of each pricing model. Generating leads is good. Generating leads that eventually become paying clients is even better.

5. Conversion rate optimization

No tactics or hacks will work If your website isn’t optimized for conversion. I’m not going to repeat what’s already written on the other blogs. Let me just share our experience on this.

It is a good idea to encourage those who already signed up to share the love with friends. Offer something in exchange, e.g. we’re offering the early bird access to our app if the potential customers share the word about Chanty in social networks. This helps us increase brand awareness and attract new clients to our team messenger.

I know pop ups are annoying. That’s why I didn’t choose to put up distracting windows that appear when you are in the middle of reading an article. Instead, we’ve opted for an exit pop up. Once the user is about to leave your website, it comes out. The results have exceeded our expectations – it now generates about 10% of our sign ups.

The last, but not the least – signing up at your website should be incredibly easy. It goes without saying, you should remove CAPTCHA and other challenges on the way of your potential customers. Unless you are a well known app like HubSpot, avoid multiple fill in forms at the sign up form. Email is, in fact, all you need. OK, ‘Name’ is another appropriate field to add. Just make sure it’s doesn’t become this:

Source

If you have user-unfriendly forms that still convert, my best guess is you are holding a complete monopoly over the niche.

Conclusion

Marketing a SaaS product is complicated and involves a series of various activities. The bottom line, however, is the number of sign ups this activities generate. This is the metrics that every founder and CEO will keep in mind when evaluating efforts of a marketing team.

Therefore, try to strike a balance of promotion, price, product and placement to meet the business goals. Staying on the ethical side is equally important. Try the lead generation and conversion optimization hacks we’ve shared in this article to boost the number of sign ups on your website. Feel free to share other tips that worked well for you in the comments below.

—

Olga Mykhoparkina is a Chief Marketing Officer at Chanty- a simple AI powered business messenger and a single notification center. Having a 9-year experience in digital marketing field, Olga is responsible for Chanty’s online presence strategy, managing an amazing team of marketing experts and getting things done to change the way teams communicate and collaborate. Follow Olga on Twitter @olmykh or feel free to connect on LinkedIn.

January 26, 2018

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January 22, 2018

Measuring the True Cost of New Consulting Clients

“Yes, let’s move forward with your proposal.”

For consultants (like me!), few sentences are sweeter to the ear than this one. In addition to boosting next year’s revenue forecast, new clients help you hedge against uncertainty. After all, you never know when an existing client will decide to unexpectedly change course.

As great as new clients can be, there are also a few tradeoffs to consider. In this post, we’ll discuss the costs and risks associated with adding new clients.

Preliminary Sunk Costs

Before you ever bill your first hour, you’ve already dug yourself into a hole. Allow me to explain.

Let’s say that you own and operate a growing IT consulting business. Your company specializes in network and web security, and most clients are within driving distance of your office. About one month ago, a new prospect filled out a form on your website and requested a free consultation.

It turns out that this lead (a well-respected software company) represents a very large opportunity for your firm. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they’ve been putting you through the wringer – with no end in sight. You’ve already visited their headquarters on multiple occasions, pulling your top IT minds off important projects to attend the meetings. After several rounds of proposals, you feel no closer to a closed deal than on day one. To make matters worse, you have a bad feeling that even if you do win the contract, it’s going to be a very one-sided arrangement (in their favor).

The last thing you want to do is pass on the opportunity (especially this far into it), but you can’t help acknowledging your sunk costs:

Lost billable hours: Time is money. Had this lead never requested info, you could have freed up additional billable hours. Instead, your team invested substantial effort in preparing proposals, brainstorming solutions, and engaging with the prospect (for free).

Switching costs: Jumping from one thing to the next increases mistakes and decreases productivity. With so much attention being paid to a single lead, your team must work even harder to keep everything balanced.

Administrative costs: Each meeting brings the inevitable set of follow-up activities. You’ve smartly organized all of your contact records, meeting minutes, tasks, and project milestones in Insightly. That helps out, but there’s still a quantifiable amount of administrative work to go around. Things don’t get done on their own.

Legal review fees: A wise man once said, “The only thing worse than no deal is a bad deal.” Being the prudent business owner that you are, there’s no way you’ll sign something without having legal counsel look it over. That’s smart, but it’s also going to cost you something.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Yes, Matt. These are indeed sunk costs, but that’s just part of doing business. You win some, and you lose some.” I wholeheartedly agree with you. I’m not saying you shouldn’t pursue new business. I’m simply pointing out that there is a real cost that’s associated with any pre-sale process – especially when you’re doing complex deals. Surprisingly, some business owners never consider how much their sales pipeline is actually costing!

Ongoing Obligations

Finally, you receive the email that you’ve been waiting for: the software company is ready to move forward. Considering it’s Friday afternoon, you decide to take the crew out for ice cream and celebrate the victory. Everyone is very excited about the outcome.

Then, Monday morning rolls around…

As you stroll into the office at 8:02, you can immediately tell that it’s going to be a stressful day. You glance down at your phone, and you’re surprised to see several texts from various contacts at the software company. Your inbox isn’t much better. The first email is from the client’s accounts payable department, asking you to fill out a ton of paperwork. Another email, from their legal department, is asking you to complete something called a “new vendor due diligence packet” – before the close of business, of course. And, to complicate matters, your IT manager won’t be coming in to the office today – or the rest of the week, for that matter. His wife just went into labor a few weeks early.

The next thing you know, your office clock strikes 7:00 pm. What a day! As you walk toward your car, another reality hits you: this new client is already changing your company’s work patterns.

Incremental staffing costs: Your IT manager’s absence is a stark reminder of your team’s fragility. Should you hire additional staff to support new and existing clients? Doing so could be a wise move, but it also comes with a big price tag.

Non-billable requests: Some aspects of your client relationship simply aren’t billable. Submitting the vendor due diligence packet is the perfect example. On the other hand, failing to submit the packet would probably result in an unhappy ending for your firm. There’s an opportunity cost to fulfill these types of requests.

Other administrative “stuff”: If you want to get paid on time, invoices must get generated. Overdue invoices must be pursued by your accounts receivable team. Paid invoices must be reconciled in your general ledger. And, at year end, you hope that your 1099 will match up with your books. If not, there’s more work to be done. All of this has a cost.

Ongoing Risks

We’ve discussed the hard costs associated with servicing new clients. But, what about the unknown risks? Here are just a few to watch out for:

Nonpayment: Most customers pay on time. Some customers are forgetful and occasionally require a gentle reminder. Others aggressively push the envelope on payment terms in order to optimize cash flow. Remember, you’re not a bank. An occasional past-due invoice will happen, but a pattern of delinquency is detrimental to your own cash flow and stability.

One-and-done: The client’s work agreement has you locked in for a twelve-month period. That’s great for your current P&L, but what about future years? There’s no guarantee of renewal, which is all the more reason why you need a best-in-class CRM system. You essentially have a twelve-month window to lock in renewals and identify upsell opportunities. A tool like Insightly can help you manage such opportunities, reducing the likelihood of “one-and-done” clients.

Refunds (or worse): While most clients are very easy to work with, some can be quick to point the finger when things go wrong. You’re not planning on anything going wrong, but nothing is 100% certain in business – especially when it comes to the IT world. Until you establish a better relationship with the customer, refund requests are a possible outcome that you want to avoid.

Bad relationships: Consulting engagements are more than just the exchange of services and cash. Lasting engagements are built upon an interpersonal relationship between vendor and client. Like any relationship, however, some are better than others. Both parties must proactively work on the relationship. Otherwise, it’s destined for failure.

Balancing Cost vs. Reward

Clearly, there are many costs and risks associated with taking on new clients. In fact, at this point in the article, you’re probably tired of thinking about them all. I sure am.

So, should you dwell on all the downsides? Absolutely not! On the contrary, the smart consultant simply acknowledges them and creates systems to drive profitability. A platform such as Insightly can be invaluable for doing exactly that. Here’s how.

Efficient Pipeline Tracking: The moment a new lead enters your pipeline, Insightly can bring clarity to every aspect of the sales process. How many team members (and hours of work) have been dedicated to closing the deal? Where is the most recent proposal deck? Insightly integrates with the industry’s most widely used document systems, allowing you to quickly attach and link cost estimates, tracking files, quotes, and proposals. The built-in opportunity tracker brings key dates and milestones into the forefront, such as the forecasted close date, time spent in each stage, probability and deal size, and much more.

Effective Service Delivery: Unlike some CRMs that only track the sales process, Insightly provides a seamless transition from sales to delivery. Converting an opportunity to a project ensures your pre-sales information remains intact throughout the customer’s journey. No more jumping between your CRM, project system, and document system. Insightly brings it all together, ensuring a more cohesive client experience.

Upsell Management: Turn your “doers” into your best sales reps. As clients share their frustrations, challenges, and goals, your team can easily add new opportunities on the fly. They’re already using Insightly to coordinate tasks, projects, milestones – why not turn them loose to also identify upsell opportunities?

360-Degree View of Profitability: At the end of the day, you’re not a charity. You need to know if each client is contributing (or detracting) from your overall profitability. Insightly can help you get the answers you need. The library of prebuilt and customizable reports brings life to your CRM data. Pull together client project information, revenue forecasts, and booked business to make more informed business decisions.

Are New Clients Worth It?

If you find yourself routinely asking this question, it might be time to implement a more robust client management system. To find out if Insightly is the right tool for your consulting business, click here to learn more.

January 11, 2018

4 CRM Resolutions for the New Year

The New Year brings with it a renewed sense of hope and optimism.

Will this be the year you land that record-setting contract? Does expansion into adjacent markets represent a growth opportunity for your company? Will that “pet project” you’ve been toying with for years finally become a reality?

Business owners across the globe are wrestling with questions exactly like these. Some even go as far as setting resolutions, committing themselves to specific deadlines and outcomes.

If you’re still mulling a few resolutions of your own, your CRM might not be the first thing you think of. In reality, setting a few CRM-related resolutions might be exactly what you need.

Here are four CRM resolutions worth considering.

Resolution 1: Consolidate

In today’s web-based world, it’s easy to spread your business activity too thin. For example, your inbox houses your most important customer interactions. Project-related information is all over the place, ranging from team members’ hard drives to shared document repositories. And, of course, your pending deals are tracked in your CRM.

Without a single go-to reference point, it’s difficult to properly align resources and develop realistic plans. To make even the most basic business decision, you may find yourself checking several overlapping systems. Granted, you’ll never find a single software application that serves every business need. (If you do, please let me know!) Therefore, the next best option is to consolidate as many data points into the tool that you use most: your CRM.

Here are a few thoughts for consolidating around your CRM:

Revisit Unused Features:

If your CRM offers tiered pricing plans, is it possible that you’re paying for features that aren’t being utilized? If so, could these features eliminate the need for other third-party apps? As an example, some Insightly users are surprised to learn that all plans include project management features (at no extra charge). Aligning project management and sales initiatives could yield additional economies of scale, improve delivery, and make an impact on customer satisfaction.

Consider Upgrading:

There’s no law that says you must remain on the same CRM plan forever. Unfortunately, many business owners are quick to deploy additional apps (with overlapping functionality) – rather than simply clicking the “upgrade” button. Upgrading usually comes with an upfront cost, but it could save you countless dollars in frustration later on.

Identify Out-of-the-Box Integrations:

Your CRM is never going to replace the need for your invoicing software or document collaboration platform. For those third-party tools your company just can’t live without, it may be possible to get the best of both worlds. Many CRMs, including Insightly, offer out-of-the box integrations with a variety of popular software applications. Although your team will still need to log into and maintain multiple systems, they’ll at least enjoy the benefits of a more information-rich CRM.

Build Your Own Integrations:

Thanks to webhooks and innovative API services, such as the Zapier platform, your team can build custom CRM integrations with minimal coding knowledge.

Resolution 2: Simplify

Consolidation is a logical first step, but it’s matched in importance by your next resolution: simplification.

Remember, a CRM offers minimal value to your business if it creates confusion and chaos. Although there are countless records being managed by your CRM, it’s wise to continuously and proactively seek a more simplified data structure.

How can your data structure be “simplified”? Here are a few tips for starters:

Set a Master Vision:

Do you have a vision for your CRM? What defines a lead? When should they be converted to opportunities? What information should be fed (or not fed) in from your other apps? Take an hour or two to storyboard this with your management team. Doing so will prove valuable as you consider other simplification strategies.

Merge Duplicates:

Does your CRM make it easy to identify and merge duplicate records? If not, how will your team stay on top of this important issue? Maintaining multiple records for the same person or entity is highly distracting, thereby detracting from your team’s overall productivity.

Clean House:

I would wager that at least 10% of the records in your CRM could be deleted without harming your business. Don’t believe me? Try this exercise. If you’re using your CRM to track your to-do list, sort your tasks by due date. Now, look for items that are more than a few days past due (or have no due date at all). I’m sure you’ll find at least one task out of ten that’s already been completed. Or, you may find an idea or two from long ago that is now irrelevant. Keeping outdated records only clouds your ability to hone in on what truly matters.

Revisit Your Admin Settings:

Is your tagging structure out of control? Would adding a few custom fields enhance how your team organizes its records? Study your use cases and revisit your CRM admin settings often. A simple adjustment or two could dramatically simplify your data structure – and make your end users happier.

Set Ground Rules:

In what circumstances should your team utilize a project record instead of a simple task? How frequently should your sales staff update the probability on their deals? These are all good questions that, if answered and documented, will help your organization become more successful.

Resolution 3: Sequence Smarter

Now that your CRM contains the right information (no more, no less), it’s time for the fun part: sequencing.

All things being equal, there’s only so much work that can be done. It’s therefore incumbent that you leverage your CRM to determine what should be worked on first, second, third, etc. In other words, which projects and prospects represent the greatest impact to your bottom line.

Let’s look at a few sequencing tips:

Automate Your Sales Priorities:

Not all leads and opportunities are created equal. Likewise, not all sales reps are as gifted as your top-grossing agent. Does your CRM offer automated workflow rules that could reduce friction in the lead delegation process? Could some basic lead assignment rules pay big dividends with minimal effort?

Categorize Your Projects:

As a business owner, you never run out of ideas. That’s a blessing, but it can also be a curse – especially when deciding what your team should tackle first. Staring at a huge backlog of product and service ideas can make everyone feel overwhelmed. A logical first step might involve the categorization of your projects into subgroups. Categorizing by customer segment, department, or product type could provide the clarity necessary to make more informed sequencing decisions.

Make it Visual:

Whiteboards are particularly useful for mapping out innovative processes. The same is true for sequencing your company’s strategic initiatives. A Kanban-style board, such as the one below from Insightly, can be tremendously helpful for deciding what to do next. It also offers a bird’s-eye view of what has already been done (or what is currently in progress).

Resolution 4: Build in Accountability

Most New Year’s resolutions fail for one key reason: lack of accountability.

As January and February start to fly by, the temptation is to lose sight of your goals. After all, you have existing customers to keep happy. New priorities can wait – right?

Without the right accountability structure, you may find your goals no further along in October than they are now. You need an accountability plan, and you need to build it into your CRM.

Here are ideas for doing that:

Be Specific:

“By June 1, 2018, we will have the new product available for beta testing. We will also have ten of our top customers ready to test it for us.” This type of explanation would likely serve as an effective starting point for a project description. Based on this, your team can then get to work and coordinate the related tasks, events, and milestones. (Bonus tip: Be sure to link all subsequent records back to your master project!)

Set Reminders:

Just because a task has been assigned (with a due date), it doesn’t mean it will actually get done. Remember, not every team member lives and breathes your CRM. Create another layer of accountability by ensuring tasks are set to automatically remind users via email. The “I didn’t see that task” excuse just became a nonfactor.

Let Your CRM Track the KPIs:

Does your current CRM allow you to build customizable reports? If so, can you bookmark them or save them for later? If you’re not sure, spend time to fully understand which KPIs can (or cannot) be easily tracked. In the product launch example mentioned above, a listing of all items linked to the master project might be especially beneficial. Once created, should you set the report to arrive in your inbox weekly? monthly? The answer might depend on your meeting cadence and aggressiveness of timelines.

Here’s to a Productive 2018

Your CRM is destined to play a crucial role in achieving this year’s business resolutions. By setting aside time to be more strategic with your CRM in 2018, you may be surprised at the many great things you can achieve.