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Lead or Contact–What’s the Difference?

 

Sales-Lead

As important as language and communication is, sometimes it gets in the way. Case in point: A Lead versus a Contact.

Lead them into the sales funnel

In contemporary sales vernacular, a lead is information about someone who “might” be interested in your products are services. Might is the important word here because as a lead, you or your sales team likely haven’t yet reached out to that person to determine whether or not they are a solid candidate. And by solid candidate, I mean someone who will likely purchase your goods or services. When it comes to lead management, what’s cool about using Insightly is that you can quickly designate someone as a lead just by adding them to the Leads tab.

Better still, once you take the next step and reach out and talk to that person and determine that they are not just a lead, but a solid sales prospect, you can take that person’s lead information and convert it to a sales opportunity.

Keep them close as a contact

A contact, on the other hand, can be one of two things. A contact can be someone who was originally a lead but never progressed into a closed sale. OR, they can simply be someone whose information (perhaps a vendor or a consultant you’ve worked with) you’d like to keep on hand in your records. If you want to add somebody as just a contact, you can select the Contacts icon from the navigation menu and then add in the essentials you want for your records.

New-Contact

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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Are You Managing Your Sales Team Efficiently?

 Earnings

Whether you’re in sales, marketing, or administration, when arrive at work in the morning chances are you’ve got a long list of “to do’s” for the day. Unfortunately that list sometimes resides solely inside your mind, leaving other people in the dark when it comes to accessing important information. In fact, 44% of sales executives think their organization is ineffective at managing the sales pipeline, yet companies with effective pipeline management grow 15% faster (Vantage Point Performance).

Lead by example with specifics

Manually assigning leads is a tedious administrative process which takes time away from other more important tasks which will actually grow a business. And, manual processes are always subject to errors. So, manually assigned leads will likely be mis-assigned, not assigned at all, or assigned when the lead has already gone cold.

With Insightly you can build out and maximize an efficient workflow by creating lead-flow processes that are both logical and repeatable. If your sales team is generating solid leads, for example, you can use Insightly to help qualify their potential. Likewise, if you’re collecting prospect information through a web form, you can flow that information right into Insightly using the Leads tab.

We’ve recently added a new feature to lead management with the release of Lead assignment rules. Lead assignment rules automate the process of assigning leads as they are added to Insightly. If you’re a sales manager, this makes it faster and easier to distribute leads evenly or according to specific criteria, including:

  • Geographic area, by selecting fields like Postal Code, State/Province, or City.
  • Number of employees, by selecting the Employee Count field.
  • Your own custom fields that you’ve set up in Insightly.
  • Round robin, by selecting a team or multiple individuals to receive leads on a rotating basis.

By automating the lead assignment process, your sales reps stay informed in real time which helps them to more accurately schedule their daily sales activities.

To create a more comprehensive picture, Insightly Lead Forms are now also supported by custom fields.  Custom fields give you the flexibility to create fields for non-standard information such as billing ID numbers, birth dates, contract renewal dates, project types, and referral information.

 Meet in the middle
When used correctly, one of the many benefits of a CRM solution like Insightly is that it takes the burden off of your brain by minding the details for you. You have to meet in the middle, however, by taking the time to input information consistently. If you remain consistent, at the end of a busy day, you can stop worrying about the “herding cats” aspect of managing your team’s activities, knowing that you’ve got the end-to-end support you need to take a hot lead and turn it into a sale.

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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How to Maximize Your SMB Ad Budget

Marketing-Budget

 

For most small- and medium-sized business owners, you can’t expect customers to find you without some level of advertising. But ads can be extremely expensive, often with little in the way of results to show for it.

Today, SMBs are overwhelmingly focused on online ads rather than pricy print, television, or billboard media, but even online ad expenses can quickly spiral out of control if they’re not kept in check. We spoke to several online ad pros about how to squeeze every last penny out of those ad budget dollars. Here’s what we learned.

Set Up Ad Tracking First

Before you start tinkering with your ad strategy, it’s important to know where your money is going, by carefully tracking campaigns, keywords, prospects, and more. “It’s impossible to scale or optimize what you can’t see, so campaign tracking is crucial to stretching your ad budget,” says Meagan French, president of marketing consultancy Lotus Growth. “The easiest way to set up tracking is by creating goals in Google Analytics to track conversions… and it’s free.”

Google Analytics and other tracking systems can be complex to master, so it’s best to start slowly with some inexpensive test ads (start with $10 a day, for example) so you get comfortable with tracking and ensure you have everything set up properly before investing additional funds.

Hone Your PPC Keyword Strategy

It can be tempting to throw money at the broad keywords that get the most search traffic, but that strategy often ends in an arms race of price escalation with other bidders. For example, Google AdWords’ “suggested bid” for the search term “baseball bats” runs $1.27 per click, while an ad for the more specific “8 year old baseball bats” would cost only $0.56. Traffic is much, much lower for the latter term, but it also represents a laser-focused customer who can be targeted with a very specific advertisement.

Wendi A. Henderhan, founder of bankruptcy-focused Henderhan Law Offices in Ohio, says this works across industries, saying, “Rather than bid on just ‘bankruptcy’ keywords from an online advertising perspective, we broke it down even further. I knew that Chapter 13 related bankruptcy keywords would generate more high quality leads for my firm. Even though the search volume isn’t as high as Chapter 7 keywords, I was willing to take quality over quantity. Additionally, rather than target the entire Columbus market, I geo-targeted specific zip codes so the advertisements would hit our ideal prospective customer.”

Another solid strategy to save money is to use highly specific keywords that won’t attract “casual” web browsers. Andrew Harrison of Zeus Legal Funding relates a story about using terms like “blue pencil severance lawyer” and “constructive discharge lawyer” in ads that were designed to target lawyers (rather than consumers). “These are terms that most lawyers understand, but most ordinary citizens who are searching for a lawyer wouldn’t know them,” he says.

Get Serious About Retargeting

Have you ever visited a website, then later that day seen an ad for that website somewhere else? If so, you’ve experienced retargeting, considered one of the most powerful online ad strategies available because it shows ads to people who have already visited your site. “While it’s great to be able to market to new people, marketing to people who already know about you but haven’t converted yet often returns a much higher ROI, and will help you maximize your small ad budget,” says John Turner, CEO of meditation website QuietKit.

Retargeting isn’t just effective, it’s also usually quite affordable. “Just by introducing retargeting as part of our strategy, I have been able to cut our customer acquisition cost by a third,” says Nenad Cuk, marketing manager of branding and design shop ThoughtLab. “We now have more people converting and a lower overall cost of advertising.”

Experiment Via A/B Testing

One of the keys to stretching your ad budget is to make sure your ads are working as effectively as possible. How do you do this? By testing different ads simultaneously to see which performs the best. “Test two different variations of copy, creative, or landing page and see which one has a higher click-through or conversion rate,” says French. “Then repeat, repeat, repeat. This will improve the quality of your ad campaigns, find messaging that resonates with your customers, and drive down advertising costs. We’ve improved our click-through rates on ads by 3x by testing different ad copy.”

In this extensive article, Optimizely offers much greater detail about how to put A/B testing to work for you.

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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About the Author: Christopher Null is an award-winning business and technology journalist. His work frequently appears on Wired, PC World, and TechBeacon. Follow him on Twitter @christophernull.

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Are You Using These Insightly Integrations?

App-Integrations

 

There’s no such thing as a “one size fits all” when it comes to CRM. This is especially true for small and growing businesses – your needs can change daily. In order to meet the needs of our growing customer base, both big and small, we combine Insightly’s capabilities with the best apps on the market. These are a few highlighted Insightly integrations you may be missing out on:

Accounting and payroll software: Xero & QuickBooks Online

Xero creates visibility throughout the entire process – from early prospect communication, through to sales, invoicing, and payments, Insightly’s integration with Xero allows you to draft invoices from within your CRM, which means you will never lose track of customer payment information and will help to get you paid faster.

Also, with our QuickBooks Online integration, users can view any customer payment status and history within Insightly. Dual data entry is eliminated, giving you a single operational and financial view of your customers and their account status, invoices, and payments.

Proposable

Proposable offers sales proposal automation and sales intelligence for sales teams. When a proposal is sent, Proposable automatically creates an Insightly opportunity and continually updates the opportunity in real time as your contact interacts with it.

MailChimp

Email marketing with MailChimp is even easier when integrated with Insightly. Now, you can import contacts to Insightly from your MailChimp account and export to any of your MailChimp Lists, cutting down on the repetitiveness of an unnecessary task.

Evernote

Insightly offers users the ability to link Evernote items to Insightly records.

All your recorded notes, photos, voice memos, and other important information about clients and projects that housed in Evernote can be immediately accessed from within your CRM.

Zapier

Zapier automates workflows between Insightly and more than 600 apps –say goodbye to manually importing and/or exporting contacts, tasks and opportunities. Connections, which are called Zaps, perform all the tedious, manual tasks you used to do, letting you focus on the things that matter.  

PandaDoc

PandaDoc helps you build and deliver quotes and proposals from a single interface. This means you can automate your workflow, stay up-to-date on documents, and quickly close deals with legally binding eSignatures. Insightly + PandaDoc allows you to build sales collateral from within the platform by pre-populating deal data with prospect contact information, product, and pricing details into sales documents.

Here at Insightly, we’re always working to make your CRM and contact management tool easier to use and with the most up-to-date integrations so you can be as productive and efficient as possible. With these highlighted integrations, you and your team can create deep customer relationships even after the sale, which will make your customers happier and more loyal for the long haul.

Do you have a suggestion for a new integration? We want to hear from you; post your idea in our community section.

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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Tip Yourself Generously

Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 4 weekly tips—a tip on running your business, a tip on how to ramp up your sales efforts, a tip on using Insightly CRM, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

tips on tuesday logo 198x194

 


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Add an Image to Your Email Signature
Using the HTML editor for your custom email signature, you can insert an HTML tag and URL to display a picture at the bottom of your emails. To do that, you’ll need to save your file on an image hosting service or your own server and make it publicly accessible. You cannot upload an image directly to Insightly.

To add an image to your signature: 
From the profile icon menu, go to the User Settings > Email Signature page.

Click the HTML icon above your signature 
Email-HTML-Sig
Enter the text for your new signature, using the options on the toolbar to format it. You can also include an image by using HTML tags pointing to a hosted image file. Position your cursor at the place in the HTML code where you would like your image to appear.

Email-Sig-3

Copy the URL for your image from your image hosting service or server.

Enter the HTML img tag and paste the URL to your image within the tag.

 

This week’s tip was provided by Tony Roma. Tony is an Insightly product expert who has been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.
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New Collar Worker
If the collar on a dress shirt or a blouse is looking a bit wrinkled–and you happen to have a flat iron–grab it and run it across the edges for a smooth, freshly ironed finish.

Collar-Iron

 
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Tip Yourself Generously
Tip-Yourself

  1. Before you commit ask yourself, “Is this the business that we are in?”
  2. Get clarity on how you spend your time. Write a job description.
  3. Being the boss isn’t worth it if you don’t exploit the freedom it affords you.
  4. Stick a post it on your computer with your business goals and look at it daily.
  5. Be more than a widget. Show your clients why your work matters to you.
  6. Create accountability by finding a business buddy. Meet weekly.
  7. Celebrate your success. Even the small ones count.
tip-for-life 61x58

Set Goals
Teach sales reps to spend five minutes every day prioritizing. “Without prioritization, it’s difficult to be efficient and productive, says Tom Hopkins, author of Selling for Dummies.

Business-Sales

 

He suggests taking 5 minutes at the end of every day to sit down, assess and choose the 5 or 6 priorities for tomorrow so you can begin with clarity. Successful people don’t squander effort and energy on unimportant issues.”

Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around.Free-trial-button

Would you like to share your tips with Insightly customers? Send them to us! If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card! Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email.

About the author: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.

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Body Language for Success: A Salesperson’s Silent Cues

 

Gestures-Executive

 

Did you know that 55 percent of communication takes place through body language, according to Psychology Today? That’s why it’s important for candidates and employers alike to understand how body language can reveal far more than words alone. This is especially true for small business owners who can’t afford to make poor hiring decisions.

Body Language for Success: What to Look for in a Sales Candidate

While body language should be considered when hiring any candidate, hiring managers should pay careful attention when filling a sales vacancy. Bringing on the right sales person that fits your company and culture is an important step — and it’s one you want to get right the first time. Here are five traits to look for:

  • Eye contact: Good salespeople make and hold eye contact slightly longer than others. They aren’t afraid to look you in the eye when they’re speaking to you. People tend to hold eye contact longer with people they like, Forbes notes, and a salesperson who makes and holds eye contact sends prospects subtle, nonverbal cues to show they are valued. It’s a strong characteristic in any salesperson.
  • Lean forward: Leaning forward is a signal of interest. Candidates who lean forward imply an interest in the job and in what you’re saying. More importantly, during sales meetings this can imply an interest in what their customers are saying to help make them feel valued.
  • Sincere smile: A sincere smile imparts confidence and joy. A fake smile can be a big turnoff in sales. Look for candidates who smile appropriately and sincerely.
  • Open arms: Holding the arms open or relaxed, rather than crossed over the chest, is another important body language for success move. Studies have shown that open arms lead listeners to remember 38 percent more of what’s said, according to Forbes.
  • Quiet hands: Hand gestures are acceptable in some cultures, but Americans using body language for success know that they need to keep their hands still and use gestures sparingly. A salesperson shouldn’t point, crack their knuckles or make fists for emphasis. Instead, keeping the hands soft and open on the lap are all signs of listening, caring and openness to ideas.

Tone of Voice

A candidate’s tone of voice also conveys body language for success. A deeper voice commands respect. Candidates who pitch their voice lower and speak in a calm, relaxed tone will help your customers feel more relaxed, too. That may help them relax and buy more!

Body language includes gestures, body posture and tone of voice. Pay attention to how candidates present themselves during interviews and look for people who convey genuine interest, authority and intelligence.

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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Aldor_Delp_WEB

Aldor H. Delp is Division Vice President and General Manager of ADP Resource & HR Solutions, ADP, LLC. Aldor joined ADP in 2006 and has held various leadership roles supporting National Accounts, ADP TotalSource, and the Small Business Services division of ADP.

 

 

 

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Insightly Insider Discussion, “Tweet It Up”

 

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insightlyinsider_jess (2)

 

Join us on Wednesday, July 13th at 9:00AM PDT  for our next Insightly Insider Discussion “Tweet It Up: Tips for Using Twitter to Grow Your Business”. In this online discussion, Jess, from our Customer Success team, will share practical tips not just for promoting your business on Twitter, but for meeting and networking with your peers, too.

This online discussion will take place in the Insightly Community. Leave a question for Jess to answer and share your own customer engagement best practices with the group in the comments area. All you have to do is sign in (top right of the discussion page), and you are set to participate.  And if you cannot make it during this time-frame, no worries. Jess’ tips and the comments will be archived in the Community.

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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Accelerate Your Sales with Lead Assignment Rules

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

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

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

 

Automate lead assignments to save time

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

lead assignment rule options

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

lead assignment import

 

Customized rules to meet your needs

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

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

lead assignment rule criteria

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

Distribute leads evenly and effectively

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

lead assignment rule assignees

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

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

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CRM for All: Consulting

Business-Mentor

 

Business owners are pulled in every direction on a daily basis. From managing operations, sales and marketing, to customer service and so much more. There’s no way that one – or even two – people could keep it all straight. Those who head up consulting firms are no different. When traditional rolodexes and spreadsheets fail, smart consultants turn to customer relationship management (CRM) to regain control of their operations. Our consulting customers broke down the top three reasons they turned to CRM:

  1. To improve workflow

Business Made Simple needed an easy-to-you, inexpensive and intuitive tool that would improve workflow and task management. Co-founders Erin Mathie and Melissa Bamfo use Insightly with the Evernote integration to capture notes from customer and lead calls. The information is automatically populated to the corresponding account records, so data can be tracked and easily accessed. The duo also loves Insightly’s pipeline tools, which manage client fulfillment projects from start to finish. All of this has contributed to greater sales conversions.

  1. To move leads through the sales funnel

Eric Greenspan, CEO of 74 Systems, uses Insightly to improve efficiency and keep tasks from falling off his radar – it’s become mission control. A majority of his leads come in from the website and webinars. Before, it was a challenge to keep prospects in order and moving through the pipeline. Now, using Insightly and Zapier, Greenspan has leads automatically pushed to the platform and turned into opportunities. He then reaches out to determine next steps. Since first implementing Insightly, the company has had more than 30 new customers sign up over the last three months.

  1. To boost customer experience

Winston Faircloth, CEO of Winsightz, has to keep track of individual clients and projects, so he can provide the right support at the right time. Using Insightly has proved to be invaluable in helping Faircloth heighten customer service. He assigns goals, holds training sessions and provides ongoing support, all of which are tracked and monitored on an ongoing basis. It’s been especially helpful in situations when Faircloth has had to quickly access client activity. When a client asked what was in the pipeline, he was able to immediately pull it up on the spot and show all the activity.  

Especially in consulting, with so many moving parts, project and contact management can quickly get out of hand. With CRM and project management, consultants can keep tabs on what needs to get done, so client projects stay on track. Even better, Insightly surveyed its consulting customers and 56 percent of respondents paid back their investment in Insightly in one to three months or less.

 

At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.

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