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October 30, 2017

Supertool for Outlook — The New Insightly Sidebar

Email + CRM. Two indispensable tools for great customer relationships.

Make the two work together, and you’ve got a relationship supertool on your hands.

We’ve been hard at work on this ground-up redesign of the Insightly Add-In since the beginning of 2017. It does everything the old one did — but better. It adds a ton of new functionality, too.

What you can do with it:

View your whole CRM within Outlook
Save emails to Insightly with (or without!) links and attachments
Apply Insightly email templates, scheduling, and tracking to emails sent from Outlook (Yes, seriously.)

↑Watch/Read↓

View your whole CRM within Outlook

Now, you can see everything without leaving Outlook.

Open the sidebar while viewing an email and relevant contacts show up automatically. Click through to see details, past emails, and attached files. Related Organizations, Opportunities, and Projects. Everything.

And if you’d like to see something totally unrelated, just search for it. Any record in Insightly can now be viewed within the Sidebar.

Save emails to Insightly with (or without!) links and attachments

The Insightly icon now lives at the top of every email. Use it to save emails to Insightly with a click.

Or, you can Save and Create New Lead/Contact/Organization/Opportunity/Project with a couple clicks.

Or, Save and Add Link.¹ This lets you decide who or what the email should link to, and also whether or not to save attachments. (Great for conserving storage space on your Insightly account.)

¹ Tony’s favorite

Apply Insightly email templates, scheduling, and tracking to emails sent from Outlook

This is the big one. Now, instead of sending in Outlook, you can “Send via Insightly.”

Why “Send via Insightly?”

Automatically save a copy of the email to Insightly
Save a copy in your Outlook “Sent” folder, too
Add tracking technology to the email, so you can see if/when your customer opens it
Schedule your email to be sent sometime in the future (Optional, but awesome)

Scheduling Emails⁴

Send email in the fuuuturrrree! (Up to one week.) By scheduling emails, you can batch your email work to be more productive and deliver emails when they’re most likely to get through.

⁴ Part of Insightly Plus and Professional plans.

Using Insightly Email Templates

Hopefully you already know how much time can be saved using Insightly email templates.

Now, with the Sidebar, you can insert any of those templates right into your Outlook compose window. The same applies for templates your teammates have created and shared. (Reminder: Share your templates, people!)

Can I use it?

Requirements:

You have Outlook AND a subscription to an Office 365 business plan²
You use Outlook in a web browser OR the Windows desktop app (2013+) OR on the Mac desktop app (2016+)
Your email server is Microsoft Office 365³
You do not use OWA

² If you signed up for Office 365 through a third party like GoDaddy, Microsoft may not allow you to install the Sidebar.

³ Microsoft Exchange? Unfortunately you won’t be able to “Send via Insightly,” so email scheduling and tracking won’t work. But the rest of the Sidebar will be fully functional.

How much does it cost?

It’s free! Just remember that you have daily limits on how many emails you can “Send via Insightly.” Also, email scheduling is only available to Plus & Professional accounts.

How do I get it?

Install the Insightly Sidebar for Outlook.

If you used the old Add-In and you want to start using the new one ASAP, just turn it off and on again! Otherwise, you’ll get the new one automatically in the next day or two.

Your Thoughts?

We want to help you build better relationships with your prospects and customers. Let us know if/how the Outlook Sidebar helps you do that.

And, as always, please join our community for other product feedback and requests.

October 25, 2017

Dreamforce 2017 Eat & Drink Guide

Convention center concessions never win Michelin stars for their wallet extortion beer, shrink-wrapped limp lettuce sub sandwiches, blowfish-puffed chip bags, and hockey puck cookies. Dreamforce may boast best-in-class swag, but you can’t chew on stress balls, chapstick or organic cotton socks.

Don’t hold your caffeine fix hostage to metallic coffee carafes at break-out sessions. Rebel against the stale popcorn scented, air-conditioned keynote hush.

Below is your #DF17 hit-the-street-and-stride guide to the best kept secret foodie destinations of San Francisco, all ’15 minutes or less’ footsteps from the conference epicenter.

*All distances listed are from Moscone Center.

FEAST

Rise and Shine

Equator Coffee & Teas 222 2nd St

10 minutes on foot*

The half-block long, terraced stadium seating cafe atrium is more than enough square footage for mansplaining and sifting through your free trade show loot. Bonus: Their cold brew acts as an emergency filibrator for hungover hearts (and minds).

Blue Bottle 66 Mint St

14 minutes on foot

Get your buzz at one of the Bay Area’s iconic coffee brands; Blue Bottle’s founder was a freelance musician who began roasting beans in a former Oakland potting shed. Sip a cup of hot midnight heaven and sink your teeth into Instagram-worthy avocado toast or an oven-mitt sized Belgian waffle.

Lunch Comas

La Capra 360 3rd Street

9 minutes on foot

You won’t find any bleating she-goats at this tucked-away Italian cafe. Vegetarians salivate over the cranapple brie sandwich and marinated artichoke caprese salad. And carnivorous appetites are known to quote Don Vito Corleone after ordering the Godfather-inspired meatball hoagie.

Soma Eats 186 2nd Street

10 minutes on foot

This centrally located American lunch bistro unites an angry, divided America. Southerners go straight for the deviled egg Peppadew pepper sandwich while big city Yanks hunger for the BLT & Zataar spiced fried egg sandwich. Go ahead… ignore that opinionated a-hole screaming outside on the street and pass your lunch hour in culinary consensus bliss.

Uno Dos Tacos 595 Market St

15 minutes on foot

Ditch Chipotle and discover this taco, burrito and salad bowl outdoor patio paradise. Braised beef tongue. Chicken tinga. Moist pork carnitas. Avalanche on the homemade salsa and smoky black bean sides for a happy mouth explosion of meat and heat.

Dinner Decadence

Salt House 545 Mission St.

12 minutes on foot

Starve yourself by day and per diem binge by night. The $100+ wagyu beef daily special menu entree is the ideal expense account one-night stand. In the mood for something less impulsive? The strawberry jus duck breast or roasted cherry tomato short ribs offer equal lip-licking satisfaction.

Wayfare Tavern 558 Sacramento St.

20 minutes on foot

Plan on doing twice the amount of one-legged plank push ups on your hotel room floor the morning after a meal at this manly upholstered, upscale pub. From the pillowy soft, baby-head sized bread popovers to the burrata whipped potatoes to the Best Fried Chicken in America (Food & Wine Magazine 2016), you’ll experience your very first ‘comfort food’ orgasm.

Cockscomb 564 Fourth St.

15 minutes on foot

Bring a mafia-sized appetite to this expert offal cookery and butchery dining destination. Wood oven suckled whole pigs head. Pine cone, apple and endive smoked duck. For those not keen on eating their childhood storybook friends, choose from an abundance of root vegetable divine and creative cruciferous dishes.

DRINK

You can drink your weight in liquid. And there’s no better week than Dreamforce to win that bet.

Skip the caterpillar crawling, city block long lines to official #DF17 parties and pony up to the nearest bar.

Why Insightly is Like Having Your Own Business Intelligence Internet

The web fuels your company with the timely information and business intelligence you need to stay competitive.

When are our estimated quarterly taxes due this year? How will the new privacy regulations affect how we interact with customers? Which software is the best fit for our exact needs and budget? In which social media groups does our target market engage?

It seems there’s no question too complex for a simple web search.

As powerful as the Internet can be for your business, it’s also a vast and ever-growing ecosystem. With billions and billions of web pages to sift through, there’s clearly more information than you could ever consume.

Luckily, Insightly can help you make better sense of it all. In this post, I’ll share a few tips for converting Insightly into a personal Internet for your business.

Problem: Your Information is Everywhere

At a very basic level, the Internet is nothing more than a collection of linked-together files. Some files are made available as plain text articles with embedded images (such as the blog post that you’re reading!) while others offer more of a multi-media experience (such as videos). Regardless of a file’s format, most publishers aim to provide web content that is helpful, informative, and easily accessible.

Looking at your business, you likely come into contact with dozens of “helpful and informative” pieces of information each day. For example, that 12-page blog article about SEO that your marketing intern sent you can easily be bookmarked for later. Unfortunately, there’s not an easy way to “bookmark” things like:

A spreadsheet containing the names and contact details for your top 100 leads (ranked in order of importance)
A PDF report from your accountant, comparing different profitability scenarios
An email from your recruiter, explaining her top three candidates for your sales department
A private Google Docs file, containing your company’s strategy roadmap (prepared by your business development consultant)
Three recent invoices from a vendor who might be ripping you off
A project plan, containing detailed milestones and tasks for various staff members
Email marketing campaign data from your most recent newsletter

So, how do you deal with things like this? If you’re like most business owners, you probably try to use some combination of inbox labels and cloud or desktop folders. Trouble is, things frequently get lost – and, perhaps even worse, there’s no guarantee you’ll ever remember to follow up.

Aggregate the Information that Matters to You

A platform like Insightly solves this problem by getting your most important information into a usable, consistent format in a single location. Instead of spreading your files across multiple locations (which aren’t connected, by the way), Insightly becomes your one-stop location for business intel – accessible from any web-enabled device. In other words, Insightly becomes your own personal Internet.

With that being said, let’s see how Insightly can solve the challenges mentioned above. (In the interest of brevity, I’ll focus on just a few of the examples that we’ve discussed.)

Spreadsheet with Your Top 100 Leads:

At its core, Insightly is a CRM (customer relationship management) system. Therefore, if you’re using it correctly, your team won’t need to waste time creating lead tracking spreadsheets. Since your leads are already in Insightly, your team should instead just use the “lead rating” field to group important prospects in order. Or, you could always create a custom field to get a pure 1-to-100 sequenced list. Either way, all of this should be done within your Insightly account – not spreadsheets.

PDF from Your Accountant:

Your CPA’s time isn’t cheap. You’ll therefore want to make the most of his or her efforts. In the past, reports like this have sat in your inbox for weeks. Why not forward that email (attachments and all) to an accounting-related Insightly project? In doing so, you’ll get it out of your inbox and into a more action-friendly format. Insightly does the filing and admin work for you, saving a copy of the email and PDF exactly where you need it. For added firepower, consider enabling an automated workflow, ensuring that you’ll actually do something with it in the future.

Private Google Docs File:

Insightly connects to dozens of cloud-based apps that you’re already using, including several document management platforms. So, rather than sharing the doc via email, Insightly lets you “attach” cloud documents to any lead, contact, organization, opportunity, lead, or project record. Just connect Insightly to your document management tool, and you’re good to go.

No more hunting through dozens of online folders or email threads. The info you need is neatly linked to the correct records in Insightly.

Project Plan with Milestone Data:

One of the best-kept secrets among Insightly users is the tool’s native project management capabilities. Insightly is actually much more than a CRM; it’s built to support every step of the customer journey – from lead cultivation through delivery. So, if your team is using an external project tracking tool, your company might be missing out on a golden opportunity to boost efficiency. Insightly collects all of your project-related documentation, project plans, worksheets, and tasks into a centralized hub. Track milestones and project pipelines with much less effort (and confusion).

Build an In-House Search Engine

With everything stored securely in Insightly, now the fun can really begin. Insightly indexes your information, making it searchable by you and your staff. In other words, Insightly serves as an in-house search engine for your business.

Stop and think about the potential impact this could have on your business. Instead of searching one database for an email address and your computer’s folders for a related file, Insightly allows you to search across all record and file types simply by keying in a few words.

Searching in Insightly will return (in real time) any potential matches within your:

Contacts
Leads
Opportunities
Organizations
Projects
Files
Notes
Comments
Tasks
Events

With so many potential matches, however, you might be asking yourself, “How does Insightly decide which records to show first?” The software’s search algorithm takes into consideration a number of factors and logic, returning the records that you’re most likely looking for. For example, if you’re looking for a first and last name, Insightly will rank an exact contact name higher than matches found in notes or comments.

Sometimes, you know exactly what type of information you’re looking for. Doing too broad of a search might be more of a distraction than help. For example, I’m sure that you’ve used a Google images filter to identify a particular graphic or photo. The same can be done in Insightly, thanks to the tool’s intuitive search filter. Remember that project you created to forward reports from your CPA? To search for it, just key in the letters “CPA,” and click the “Projects” tab. Voila! All of your accountant’s valuable insights are now accessible at your fingertips.

As with any other search engine optimization strategy, manually creating “links” between your content is always a smart decision. Insightly makes is easy to link records together, saving your team time and effort. Better yet, Insightly even lets you track why a link exists – such as how one person knows the other.

And, as relationships and circumstances change, you can always edit or remove a link altogether…no IT help required!

Make the Most of Your In-House Knowledge

With a centralized, robust search engine of business intelligence at your disposal, your team will be primed for new levels of efficiency. To maximize the value of this asset, however, be sure to develop an ongoing strategy for keeping things fresh. After all, the world wide web wasn’t built in a single day. Nor did it stop expanding at a certain date in time. The Internet is always growing, always changing. Likewise, your Insightly knowledge base should always be evolving. Gaining buy-in from staff is an important step for building the best version of your in-house search engine.

One final note: It’s likely that some of your team members will be resistant to change. That’s OK, as you’re in this for the long haul. Create detailed work instructions and training videos, explaining how you expect the system to be utilized. Track which team members are the most active, and which team members aren’t holding up their end of the deal. In time, your staff will find that having a “micro Internet” actually helps them complete more tasks, access more reliable information, and achieve more goals.

After all, who doesn’t like to have everything accessible with a simple web search? I sure do.

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.

October 9, 2017

6 Signs It’s Time to Switch from Spreadsheets to a CRM

Your business is doing well. Sales are up and clients seem happy.

In the back of your mind, however, something has been bothering you lately. It’s your sales process. Since opening your doors, you’ve always relied on spreadsheets for managing the pipeline. Leads in one spreadsheet, customers in another. You even have spreadsheets to track tasks, projects, and revenue forecasts.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” you tell yourself. But, something in the back of your mind still wonders. Do you have a broken sales process and just not know it?

In this post, we’ll explore six signs that it’s time to get off of spreadsheets.

1. Your Team Does More Admin Work than Engagement

“Keeping busy” isn’t a guarantee for success. In fact, spending too much time on the wrong things can actually lead to failure.

You obviously know this, as evidenced by the growth of your company. But, as you objectively examine your sales process, is it possible that your team is working on the wrong things – at the expense of customer engagement? If you’re like most companies using spreadsheets, these administrative tasks might consume too much of your staff’s workday:

Scrolling through hundreds of rows to find the right record
Keying in every new lead by hand
Moving closed-won leads to customer tracking sheets
Deleting or archiving closed-lost leads
Building and testing custom filters for segmentation purposes
Reformatting row and column sizes
Deduplicating overlapping records
Fumbling with chart wizards to generate meaningful business intelligence
Troubleshooting the inevitable formatting issue
Training new hires on what to do (or not to do!)

Clearly, your team has good intentions. They’re trying their best to make your spreadsheet-based system work.

As I’m sure you’ve already realized, there is a distinct opportunity cost to such an approach: less time selling and more time on busywork. Do you really want your top reps spending so much time on data entry?

Probably not.

2. Records are Always Inaccurate

Your business depends on accurate and timely information. As each moment passes, your data becomes less reliable. Some of this is natural – circumstances change rapidly in today’s marketplace. However, some of the dependability issues are caused by your spreadsheet-driven workflow.

Do any of these sound familiar?

Typos: It’s difficult to close a deal when you have inaccurate contact information. A mistyped email address or phone number creates another unneeded disruption to your follow-up process. Unfortunately, spreadsheets are breeding grounds for typos. So many cells to update in so little time!

Accidental Overwrites & Deletions: Stop and ask yourself this question: What exactly is a spreadsheet? Obviously, it’s a digital file consisting of rows and columns. There’s also a good chance that it’s a shared repository, accessible by your entire team. Keyword here being “shared.” The moment you share a file (on your network drive or via the cloud), you expose yourself to accidental overwrites and deletions. Granted, some cloud-based services allow you to track (and roll back) changes. Even then, knowing which version to restore is itself a chore.

Double Record Entry: What happens when a lead talks to two or more of your team members on the same day? Double record entry, that’s what. Since it’s impossible to keep your contacts in alphabetical order (given the nature of sales), some reps are less diligent in checking for existing records. It’s often easier to just add a new row to your spreadsheet and move on.

Formula Issues: Not everyone is a spreadsheet wizard like you are. To make sure everything in your spreadsheet works right, you’ve built in all kinds of complex tabulations and display formulas. As your team adds and edits records, things have been known to break.

3. You Have No Idea What Some Reps Do All Day

Most of your reps are rock solid. There are a couple, however, that you’re not so sure about.

Take Billy, for example. Billy rarely gets into the office before 9 am. (He claims to be “networking” at his favorite breakfast hangout.) After spending an hour or two “catching up on emails,” it’s already time for lunch. After an hour-long feast, Billy finally picks up the phone and appears to be making calls. He always forgets to update the deal tracking spreadsheet, which frustrates you to no end. Although, even when Billy remembers to update the sheet, he rarely provides much substance.

Billy does seem to hit his quota each month – but barely. You’re sure that if he would just apply himself more, he could achieve so much more.

Sadly, there’s not much you can do for Billy. At the moment, he only seems accountable to one thing: that is, his monthly quota. Even if you did assign other milestones for Billy to achieve, there’d be no great way to track them.

Alas, poor Billy will continue to drift along as a mediocre sales rep, and you’ll keep wondering why he’s not more motivated.

4. It’s Painful to View Your Pipeline

“I’d like to see open opportunities for our top-performing product, broken down by city, state, and sales rep.”

In a perfect world, you’d ask for things like this. In reality, you know this type of request would be nearly impossible to fulfill. The data is probably available, but making sense of it all is a completely different story.

Why? Here are just a few reasons.

Data Overload: Consider your lead tracking spreadsheet for a moment. That sheet has so many rows and columns of data that just opening it stresses you out. Alternate mailing address? Check. Sister’s married name? Check. Favorite golf course? Check again. But, where are the fields you really need, such as projected close date, probability of close, and product interest? Just finding the right data points can seem like more effort than it’s worth.

Pivot Tables Galore: The fun doesn’t stop once you’ve identified the correct rows and columns. If you’re comparing more than a couple data points, you’ll probably have to brush up on your pivot table skills. Have fun with that!

New Sales vs. Upsells: Since your data is siloed in separate spreadsheets, you’ll likely need to merge multiple data sets to get the answers you seek. After all, selling to existing clients is just as important as winning new business. Your pipeline should deliver a 360-degree view of your sales activity – not only demand for a specific audience.

5. Your Forecast is Always Wrong (Big Time)

A sales forecast should be more than just an accountability guidepost for your sales team. As a business owner, you need a relatively realistic view into the future as to ensure:

Payroll is met
Supplier invoices and bills are paid
Proper staffing changes are implemented to accommodate forecasted demand shifts
The right mix of equipment and tools are in place
Your production team feels like they’re kept in the loop
Existing customers still feel highly satisfied

No sales forecast is ever perfect, but it sure would be nice to get close once in a while! As you know all too well, spreadsheet-based forecasts can be notoriously errant.

A major cause for this inaccuracy involves accessibility of the sheet itself. Perhaps you’ve saved the pipeline spreadsheet out on a network drive. Or, perhaps you maintain a shared Google Sheets file. Either way, it’s practically impossible for your team to provide updates while on the go. (Have you ever tried to update a spreadsheet on your mobile device?) Unlike a mobile CRM, your spreadsheet-based system requires users to be physically in an office and using a computer. During busy weeks, several days may pass before reps have time to make updates.

How can you build a reliable forecast when sales information is stale by at least a few days? You can’t – it’s that simple.

6. Everything Just “Feels” Disorganized

Even if you could miraculously make sales spreadsheets work in your business, there’s one thing they definitely can’t do: organize all of your sales collateral.

I’m talking about:

Proposals
Quotes
Invoices
Presentation decks
Customer business cards
Brochures and whitepapers
Technical drawings
Spec sheets
Email histories

Most likely, you’ve created additional shared drive folders and inbox tags to organize this type of information. One folder for quotes, another for invoices, etc. That’s certainly better than nothing, but I’m sure it’s still a chore to find the right file – especially when you need it quickly.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have everything indexed by customer, lead, or prospect? For example, with Insightly, you can easily build links between a contact and all related correspondence and files. Working on a deal that’s gone through multiple proposal iterations? With Insightly, you’re able to get a full picture of how the relationship has progressed. There’s no need to dig through countless folders and inboxes – it’s all right there at your fingertips.

Even better, Insightly integrates with the industry’s top inboxes and document apps, making it even easier to find and organize your important sales information.

Time to Switch? I Think So

Let’s be honest – your spreadsheet-based system isn’t holding up its end of the bargain. It’s time you at least considered switching to a cloud-based CRM system.

DOWNLOAD OUR FREE EXCEL SALES TRACKER TEMPLATE to easily import your contacts into Insightly.

With the availability of free CRM platforms like Insightly, what are you waiting for?

October 5, 2017

Putting the Relationship Back into CRM

Find out what enterprises can do to go beyond sales force automation to create profitable and sustainable relationships.

Since its inception in the late 90’s, the proponents of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and its community, have been promising a new nirvana of customer centricity. They have been working hard to build software platforms and social technologies to engage them, educate them, analyze their buying behaviors, entice them to purchase and then support them in solving their problems post-sale. But what has CRM really done to make the customer’s experience better than ever, and how has it helped businesses to grow by cultivating customer relationships over time?

Gartner, defines Customer Relationship Management as “the business strategy that optimizes revenue and profitability while promoting customer satisfaction and loyalty. CRM technologies enable strategy, and identify and manage customer relationships, in person or virtually. CRM software provides functionality to companies in four segments: sales, marketing, customer service and digital commerce.”

This definition of CRM clearly does not place the “relationship” at its core. While not inaccurate, it clearly considers the customers as something about which to strategize and optimize for profitability, rather than someone with whom to build a lifetime, personal relationship — arguably the key to long term business success. Tony Kavanagh, CMO of Insightly, explained, “Unfortunately, Gartner’s clinical definition of CRM is the spirit in which most businesses to date have built their customer relationship management systems and processes, using technology as a substitute for the care and attention that every customer expects. Moving forward this will not be good enough.”

Setting up for recurring sales

Sales force automation technology does a great job of converting leads into sales. However. the availability of an ever-increasing number of higher quality alternatives and the ease with which to access them, are placing greater demands on enterprises to cultivate lasting relationships driven by customer needs rather than commissions. The relationship part of CRM needs to address what happens after the money has been collected as much as before.

To address this gap, CRM data needs to facilitate project delivery and improved customization. Project delivery involves tracking the customer engagement with products services after the fact. In an enterprise sales context, this means looking at the timeline, customer satisfaction, trouble tickets in a way that is fed back into the sales cycle. This requires more than just a technology integration, but with empowering sales staff with the processes and mindset to follow up after a commission check has been cut.

When future industrialist Henry Kaiser first came to Washington state in 1906, he offered to be a salesperson for one of the area’s hardware stores. He was initially turned down when the manager said they had enough salespeople. Kaiser countered with an offer to focus on outside sales. He spent his days on construction sites and got to know the needs of the areas contractors, rather than selling products. Mostly he just helped short staff project managers find plumbers, electricians, and carpenters they needed to finish buildings. In short order, he was outselling the rest of the sales people combined as these happy contractors ordered the parts needed for these jobs from him.

Bringing customer insight across channels

It can be challenging creating this level of engagement across multiple touchpoints in a customer relationship. The goal is to make every customer feel like they are the only one, whether there are tens or tens of thousands of them. But customer interactions tend to be orchestrated across multiple channels such as sales calls, support requests, and project collaboration via web, email, chat, text. Customers can get easily frustrated if they feel like they starting from scratch.

Leading enterprises are starting to pursue a new style of engagement called moment marketing that engage customers across channels in a consistent and highly customized manner. The idea came from the mass consumer marketing space, but the concepts apply to enterprise engagements as well. The basic principle is to move from a predefined user journey or sales process to a style of engagement that matches a customer’s needs.

Forrester analyst Joe Stanhope explained, “It starts by bringing these channels and data together where you can mine it with a single customer profile. You start to understand more about your customers. You understand how they have interacted and where they have interacted to personalize engagements and create more relevance for your customers across these channels.”

Every relationship is unique

Quick sales are great for the bottom line in the short run, but are easy targets for upstart competitors. Longer lasting relationships require developing a far deeper appreciation of customers as individuals that goes beyond the traditional views of firmographics, demographics and purchase history.

This could include understanding:

the complex organization hierarchies in which they work every day;
the business partnership they have built;
their professional affiliations and associations;
personal preferences;
opinions; and
other signals expressed on public forums and social media.

Kavanagh said “All these insights, together, help businesses paint a clearer picture of who their customers truly are, allowing them to tailor how they more effectively communicate with their customers over their lifetime, ultimately forging stronger relationships.”

This requires bringing in a more complete view of a contact’s communications history, key relationships, events and tasks, social profiles, sales opportunities and project involvement. Enterprises can leverage this data to employ unique relationship graph engines and complex algorithms to automatically capture the links between contacts, organizations and the business relationships they share and use these insights to build detailed and multifaceted social profiles of their customers. In the long run this kind of approach not only build lasting business, it also strengthens the bonds of professional engagement and nurtures customers for life.

George Lawton is a journalist based near San Francisco, Calif. Over the last 15 years he has written over 2,000 stories for publications about computers, communications, knowledge management, business, health and other areas.

October 2, 2017

10 Creative Ways to Use Insightly CRM Voice Notes

Have you ever tried using the Insightly audio notes feature?

If not, you’re definitely missing out. Insightly allows you to record up to 60 minutes of audio per file. Voice notes can be linked to contacts, organizations, leads, opportunities, and projects. Best of all, free and paid users alike can access this feature.

So, what are some ways to use audio notes? Here are ten ideas to consider.

1. Recapping Sales Appointments

The best sales reps are usually very busy people. With client meetings from sunrise to sunset, there’s rarely a down moment. It’s therefore difficult (if not impossible) for your sales team to type summary reports for each completed appointment.

A more feasible approach could involve the use of audio notes. After finishing a sales call, the rep can easily locate the lead or opportunity record (via the Insightly mobile CRM app). Within seconds, he could be recording a brief explanation of how things went. Once saved, someone from your back office could then listen to the recording and update the record (such as changing the pipeline status).

A task that would otherwise take days to get completed (or never get done at all), could be done within minutes. Most importantly, your organization has the information it needs – and, your sales reps can get back to what they do best: selling.

2. Training Your Sales Reps

Good sales help is hard to find. And, more frustratingly, the really good ones are even harder to keep. (The competition is always happy to pay more!)

Before your top sales talent jumps ship, it might be wise to capture their best practices into audio format. In doing so, you’ll create a more scalable onboarding and training workflow for new sales hires.

What types of audio files could be beneficial? In a perfect world, new team members would probably appreciate a selection of recorded:

Cold calls
Follow-ups with stale opportunities
Upselling examples
Conversations with unhappy customers
Follow-ups with satisfied customers
Testimonial solicitations

Before you turn your star performers loose to create such recordings, be sure to review best practices for recording phone conversations. (You may need to ask clients for permission before recording such conversations, or you could use role play to achieve the same outcome.)

To what type of Insightly record should your sales team attach such audio notes? One option involves creating a never-ending project called “sales training.” As new team members are onboarded, add them to the project and assign new tasks, inviting them to review the recordings.

3. Outlining Blog Posts

Your content marketing always seems to take a back seat to more pressing matters. The moment you sit down to write a blog post, there’s always some new emergency that requires your attention. Despite your best intentions, there’s just rarely an hour in your week to focus on writing.

Audio notes can help you move one step closer toward your next published article. Simply pull out your smartphone, find your “content marketing” project in Insightly, and start dictating. Don’t get too worried about grammar or being concise. Just focus on collecting your ideas. (After all, you’re the subject matter expert.) You can have one of your staff members transcribe and edit the piece later on.

As you use Insightly to capture more of your blog ideas, you may find it helpful to follow a specific dictation pattern. For example, you might start by clearly stating the objective of the post. Once stated, you could then pause the recording until your first supporting point comes to mind. (Sometimes staring at a ticking timer is enough to give you writer’s block!) Repeat this process until you’ve fully developed your thoughts.

4. Interviewing Clients for Case Studies

Recent industry surveys have shown that customers trust online reviews as much (if not more) than word-of-mouth referrals. This is an astounding statistic, and it’s one that your business should be capitalizing on. The development of case studies for your website is one effective method for doing so.

Case studies don’t just fall from the sky. In fact, well-done case studies require substantial effort to produce. Interviewing clients, drafting content, and gaining final approval are just a few of the steps involved.

Luckily, Insightly voice notes can serve an invaluable role in this process. Rather than facilitating the client interview and manually keying in notes, Insightly can do the heavy lifting for you. Just jump into the client’s record and start recording. Your client will likely be impressed by how tech-savvy you are, and you can stay focused on asking the right questions.

Once you return to your desk, you’ll see the audio file in your activity feed. What a great feeling to know that you’ll never misquote another client!

5. Capturing New Product or Service Ideas

Great ideas can come during the strangest moments. For whatever reason, the grocery store checkout line seems to be a particularly fertile source of your ideas. Unfortunately, you rarely have a writing utensil on hand, and your phone’s notepad is a notorious black hole.

Instead, you might try creating a “new ideas” project in Insightly. When genius strikes, you’re then just a tap away from fleshing out an explanatory voice note. You can also customize the naming of your audio notes, making it easier to locate ideas in the future.

For added accountability, you could then assign yourself a date-sensitive task (with an email reminder). You’ll not only have an in-depth explanation of the new idea (in your own words), but you’ll more importantly have a deadline by which you must take action.

After reviewing your original idea and determining it has merit, you might choose to create a new project specifically for implementation. Choose between milestones or pipelines, based on the nature of the idea.

And to think….all of this started with a bag of avocados, a conveyer belt, and a store clerk named Jake.

6. Delegating to Your Team

You know what your team should be doing. If only they’d just do it!

The sad reality is that some instructions get murky when translated from your brain into text format. Just because you’ve assigned a task, it doesn’t mean that your staff will actually understand it.

For projects that are especially important, adding a voice note can help to reduce confusion and increase the quality of work. So, when should you take the added effort to include an audio delegation? Here are some possibilities:

You Need Proof of What You Said: Tired of playing the blame game with staff? Leave no room for error by adding a verbal narrative of what should be done. It’s hard for your team to point fingers when they have access to you in your own words.

Only You Know How to Do Something: There are some things that others in your organization can’t possibly know. (For example, your motivation for starting the business.) Sure, you could type up an email or document with this information. But, that takes time – time that you don’t have. A voice file is a much more efficient way to provide clarity.

You’re Tired of Repeating Yourself: Saying the same things over and over? Say it once in a recording, attach it to a project, and point future questions to this resource.

7. Increasing Engagement During Meetings

“Who is going to volunteer to take minutes at today’s staff meeting?” The room goes silent, until one brave soul hesitantly offers to do the work.

If you’ve ever been put into this situation, you know how difficult it is to take notes and participate in the discussion. You want to share your opinion, but you also want to avoid being the scapegoat for bad recordkeeping.

The next time you’re called on, consider harnessing the power of voice notes. Simply launch a related project or other record and start the recording process. As long as the meeting last less than an hour, you can rest easy knowing that Insightly has your back.

And, if your team is expecting a set of typed meeting minutes, you can just download the recording and transcribe it into document format. (If you’re too busy, simply assign the task to your administrative assistant.) Once transcribed, the typed minutes can be attached as a file to any contact, organization, opportunity, or project.

By providing both audio and typed meeting minutes, you’re sure to impress your colleagues!

8. Handing Things Off

In today’s virtual work ecosystem, aligning schedules and time zones can be challenging. Your team in the Philippines is usually gone for the day before your West Coast staff arrives. This situation forces your West Coast team to waste hours simply determining what has been accomplished.

Audio notes can create a seamless interaction between different teams. Instead of only relying on written updates, an audible summary of the day’s work can expedite the handoff from one worker to the next. (It might be wise to develop a standard naming structure for audio notes, including the day’s date or project number.)

And, unlike shared documents, which are easily overwritten and edited, an electronic archive of voice recordings (in the worker’s voice) creates an additional layer of accountability. If it’s later determined that a major oversight has been made, reviewing prior recordings can help your team identify where things went wrong.

9. Celebrating a Job Well Done

Your team works hard to close new deals. They work even harder to build positive, long-term client relationships. Although bonuses and merit increases are greatly appreciated, sometimes a kind word from management goes even further.

You’ve been known to go out of your way to show your appreciation. Many times, this comes in the form of a brief email. Other times, you’ve shown gratitude during company-wide meetings. Recording an Insightly audio note can be another effective way to show people you care.

Unlike an email (which usually lacks personality) or a shout-out in a meeting (which expires immediately after spoken), a voice recording can be a lasting source of motivation for your team. In addition to being front and center in Insightly, users can also download a copy to their computers. It’s the gift that keeps on giving!

10. Blowing Off Steam

You have a lot on your mind. Keeping customers happy, employees on track, and your business profitable can create significant stress in your life. You need an outlet to decompress. Insightly’s audio notes can serve as one way to blow off steam.

(Obviously, you’re probably not going to want others to access your innermost thoughts. It’s therefore wise to set up a private project, visible only to you, for collecting these types of voice notes.)

So, what are some situations that might necessitate the creation of an audio note? Here are a few possibilities:

Something is Troubling You: Customers can say nasty things. Employees can fail on the job. When problems occur, getting them off your chest quickly can help you move on to more important responsibilities (without completely forgetting about them).

Something Needs Research: A colleague from another company shares a sticky situation that you hope to avoid yourself. Get it into Insightly as a note and figure out what to do about it later.

Something is Broken: Things break. Some require immediate attention, but others don’t. (For example, you can’t figure out why your printer keeps printing everything in blue ink!) Make a note for yourself to solve the problem later – instead of wasting time on it now.

Use Your Voice to Get More Done

Most people can talk a lot faster than they can type. Thanks to Insightly audio notes, you can increase your productivity simply by speaking. No more searching through your computer’s folders or smartphone’s text files for the next million-dollar idea. Everything is intuitively organized within Insightly from the get-go – in your own words.

If you’ve never tried this powerful feature before, it’s time you did so. In time, you’re sure to think of many new and creative ways to put your voice to work!

September 21, 2017

6 Reasons to Stop Using Your Inbox as a To-Do List

Whether we’ll admit it or not, our inboxes can be addictive.

After all, checking email is as easy as tapping an app or refreshing a web browser. Is there a new and exciting business opportunity waiting for you? Will your web developer finally send an update on the shopping cart project? Is your realtor ever going to sell your house? Checking email gives us hope that our dreams will soon be realized.

Addictions aside, email inboxes actually make a terrible to-do list. Sadly, many businesses use email to structure their work days. Despite the prevalence of affordable project management apps, some people just can’t break free from the shackles of email.

In this post, we’ll discuss six reasons why you should stop using your inbox as a to-do list.

1. Your Inbox Doesn’t Care About Importance

There are only so many hours in a work day. As a business owner, you rarely run out of things to keep you busy. Pitching new clients, dealing with employee issues, and developing game-changing strategies are all in a typical day’s work. With so much on your plate, you can’t afford to waste time on non-value-added stuff. In fact, you take great pride in your ability to efficiently identify (and solve) most problems that pop up.

With that being said, why do you spend so much time jumping between emails? Granted, it’s impossible to know when an important email will pop up. Keeping close watch on your inbox makes sense from that standpoint. On the other hand, I would wager that 90%+ of the emails you receive are less than important. If your inbox is anything like mine, you probably get a ton of stuff like this:

Industry newsletters
Emails from sales reps, who are trying to sell you things
Promotional emails from your vendors
Alerts from social media
Low-priority requests from colleagues or clients

Worst of all, your inbox doesn’t put the most important things at the top. As additional emails arrive, important requests sink further down into obscurity.

Sure, you can try to keep pace by deleting and archiving unimportant messages. However, is this the best use of your time? Probably not.

2. You Can’t Mark an Email as “Done”

Let’s assume that you’ve somehow devised a process by which only “important” messages make it to your inbox. To do this, you unsubscribed from all non-essential messages, set filters to auto-forward any administrative emails to your assistant, and convinced customers and team members to reach out sparingly (good luck with that!).

Now your inbox is the perfect to-do list, right? Not so much.

To illustrate my point, let’s say that you have the following emails awaiting your attention:

Subject: Select the Company Picnic Venue

Subject: Please Sign Up for an Insightly Trial

Subject: Finish Slide Deck for Next Week’s Proposal

Being the productive person that you are, you’re able to complete these tasks in less than an hour. Unfortunately, all three “tasks” are still sitting in your inbox. What should you do with them now? Delete? Move to a folder? Do you need to respond to each person, indicating that you’re done? If so, how much time will that take?

Wouldn’t it be nice to just mark your tasks as “done,” and then move on with your life? Sadly, email doesn’t work that way.

3. Delegation is Messy

To add another layer of complexity, not every task fits neatly into a single email exchange.

Take, for example, the selection of a venue for the company picnic. What seemed like a relatively straightforward decision has quickly evolved into dozens of separate email threads. Shortly after sending your confirmation email, you received several additional emails from staff at the venue. Their accounts receivable department needs you to make a 25% deposit by the close of business. You also received a 12-page PDF, containing all sorts of parking information, menu options, and other important details. And, to top things off, the venue’s Executive Director wants to connect for coffee later this week.

All of these things can (and should) be delegated to someone else on your team. Here’s the problem: delegating from your inbox is messy.

Forwarding messages to your accounting department and virtual assistant won’t take much of your time. Problem is, there’s no guarantee that they’ll remember to follow up. Their inboxes are overflowing with tasks, too.

Alas, you bite the bullet, stop what you were doing, and spend another hour on administrative work.

4. Your Inbox Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story

You finally get to a good stopping point on the picnic stuff, and you check your inbox for the next thing to tackle. Great news awaits, as you learn that another hot prospect wants a proposal. Even better, the slide deck that you just finished for a different client can be easily adapted for this new prospect. Both essentially want the same service, but you’ll need to make a few adjustments (such as updating the client’s name, logo, and key assumptions).

At this point you think to yourself, “Aha! Finally something that I can delegate to my administrative assistant!” So, you find the related email threads and forward them along. You even walk over to your admin’s desk to stress the importance of this project.

A few days pass, and your administrative assistant stops with a troubled look on his face. He’s clearly confused by the assignment, as evidenced by his questions:

“So, which deck is the one that still needs to be updated?”

“Are we keeping the color schemes the same? Or, should I update the background colors to match the prospective client’s logo?”

“Speaking of logos, where do I find a copy of their logo?”

“What is the due date for this task?”

“Did you want to proofread a digital copy of this before I print it out?”

“Where should I save the finished copy once it’s done?”

Once again, your delegation plan has been foiled. Your team is normally very competent, so why is this project creating so much confusion?

As effective as your staff may be, they’re not mind readers. They’re looking for you to provide the necessary information to do their jobs. Just forwarding a bunch of disjointed email conversations only tells part of the story.

5. There’s Software Designed Specifically for Organizing To-Dos

By now, I hope you’ll agree that your inbox is letting you down. If so, you might be asking yourself what (if anything) you can do about it.

There is good news – as I alluded to at the onset of this post, there are many online software tools that can structure your company’s work. Insightly, which is perhaps best known for its sales management features, also provides a suite of integrated productivity tools. Let’s look at how Insightly could solve many of the headaches we’ve discussed.

Sequencing Important Work: Unlike your inbox, Insightly brings clarity to your most important tasks. Assign due dates, priority, completion, and status with a few clicks.

As due dates and priority levels are defined, it becomes much easier to see the “big picture.”

Tracking Completed Tasks: A task tracking system, like Insightly, will also fulfill your desire to check things off your list. Marking a task “done” is as easy as clicking a button.

Want to see a historical archive of the great work you’ve done? Jump over to your “completed tasks” view for a detailed review.

Delegating to Others: Getting the rest of your team into Insightly can also be beneficial. Rather than delegating from your inbox, Insightly provides a more structured workflow. Create tasks to occur on a one-time or repeating basis, thereby making the very act of delegation natively more efficient. To assign work to others, just select the correct team member from an intuitive dropdown. Connect the task to additional contributors or larger projects.

You can even add detailed notes to ensure your team is always in the know. No more excuses!

Connecting Sales & To-Dos: For added context on sales-related tasks, you can easily link items to opportunities in your pipeline. Within a click or two, your team has access to information that would otherwise only reside in your brain.

6. The Rest of Your Team is Following Your Lead

Leadership comes from the top – even when it involves juggling mundane tasks.

By continuing to rely on your broken inbox-dependent process, you’re telling the rest of your team to do likewise. Is this the best use of their time and your resources? I think not.

Take the bold step toward a more streamlined approach to productivity. Your team will thank you – and so will your bottom line.

September 6, 2017

Why Data Silos are Bad for Business

Growing up in rural Indiana, I’ve seen many silos in my lifetime.

In case you’ve never been to the heartland, farmers typically use silos to store silage (feed for dairy cattle and other animals). Silos are often sealed airtight to control moisture levels and prevent pests.

Where am I going with this discussion? How do Hoosier silos relate to data silos in your business?

Physical structures aside, “data silos” are increasingly challenging for today’s technology-driven companies. Like their agricultural brethren, data silos are very common for gathering things (in this case, information). Sales information in one silo. Projects in another. Email histories scattered across dozens of inbox silos. Even knowing which silo to look in is daunting.

And, unlike dairy cows, that eat whatever they are given, your team members are hungry for real-time access to everything in your silos. Unfortunately, it’s all sealed airtight and buried among a million other data points.

In this post, we’ll discuss tips for identifying silos in your business.

Survey Your Data Landscape

Some business owners don’t realize the data challenges they’re facing – until it’s too late.

A rogue employee, a server meltdown, or even a time-sensitive client proposal can be the reality check that drives many into action. Luckily, you’re reading this article and have the luxury of developing a proactive strategy.

Before you can build a cohesive data strategy, it’s important to first identify where silos exist in your business. Although doing so may seem easy enough, data silos can be less apparent than you might expect. Silos of information can, of course, exist in obvious places, such as databases or shared network folders. However, they can also exist in less obvious places, such as the brains of your employees, on smartphone devices, or even in physical file cabinets.

A smart business owner routinely takes a step back to examine his company’s entire information footprint. Only then can he develop a realistic plan for creating a more scalable and collaborative environment.

To get started, try asking yourself some simple questions. Here are a few off the top of my head:

Question: If your top-grossing sales rep unexpectedly quit, what systems would you need to comb through in order to ensure a seamless transition to his replacement?

It’s quite possible that you’d at least need to check:

Your CRM (customer relationship management) system
Email folders & sent boxes
Various deal tracking spreadsheets
Saved voicemails
Proposals saved to your network drive
Invoices saved to his old work station

Question: What marketing systems does your company use to achieve its goals? If you needed to build a “complete picture” of your marketing processes, where would you have to look?

Marketers (like me!) love to use the latest software and tools that deliver results. However, unless you’re strategic in the use of such tools, you can have data strung out everywhere:

Email campaign analytics (opens, clicks, opt-outs)
Social media stats (top-performing posts, shares, likes, favorites, followers)
Web traffic data (unique visitors, goal conversions)
Direct mailing lists
Form submission histories
CPC budget and performance results

Question: In what ways do team members collaborate with one another? Is this collaboration being documented in a centralized location, or is it remaining in isolated buckets?

On one hand, you want to encourage a flexible and creativity-inducing culture. On the other hand, allowing too much leniency will inevitably spread information across countless medium. Do any of these sound familiar?

Instant message conversations
Shared documents in your Google Drive account
Email attachments
Handwritten meeting notes
Text message exchanges

Question: How do team members structure their work days? What tools do they use to delegate and create accountability?

There are countless productivity apps on the market. Some offer a to-do list-style interface, while others take a kanban board approach. In fact, your team is probably using several of them to organize:

Recurring and one-off tasks
Projects that contain major milestones
Sequential workflows
The delivery of your goods or services

Fewer Silos, Greater Business Value

By now, you might feel overwhelmed just thinking about the many places where data is hanging out – and, what to do about it. Fear not, as you don’t have to solve this problem overnight. As with anything else in your business, you’re a master of going from good to great. You’ll handle it like the pro that you are.

I’ll save the “how to knock down silos” discussion for a future blog post. However, as I recently pointed out in this post, repositioning your CRM as an “integrated information hub” can be an effective starting point for bridging some of the disconnected silos that plague your business. For example, a tool like Insightly, which can connect to your email inbox, document management system, marketing systems, and countless other apps, pulls your most important information under one roof. And, since Insightly offers a number of built-in project management and workflow features, you might even be able to run the proverbial backhoe through a few outdated silos.

As you begin the process of consolidating or tearing down data silos, never lose sight of the bigger picture. Remember your primary motivation for undertaking such a momentous project should always be focused on one or more of these goals:

Fewer Excuses, Less Confusion – Empower your team to do their jobs. Fewer logins and learning curves should result in less confusion and greater productivity.

Better Customer Alignment – Merging project and sales data into a single hub should make it easier to serve your most important stakeholders: those customers who are paying the bills.

More Reliable Data – With fewer silos to sift through, your team will have fewer legacy databases to keep current. This should help boost the accuracy of your business intelligence, allowing you to make more informed decisions.

Cost Savings – Who knows…you might even be paying for a silo that hasn’t been accessed in several months or years. Consolidation could represent a cost savings opportunity, both in the short term and long term.

Watch Out for Silos in Your Business

Let’s face it…you’re not a farmer. Why are you keeping your most important business information in isolated concrete pillars? Give your team the data they need most. It’s time to recognize where silos exist in your business, develop a consolidation plan, and put your business information to better use.

August 23, 2017

6 Tips for Building a More Collaborative Virtual Team

Big businesses aren’t the only ones benefitting from virtual teams.

Thanks in large part to freelance marketplaces, such as Upwork.com, traditional brick-and-mortars, mom and pops, and startups are now able to rapidly staff up with team members from across the globe.

Although virtual teams offer a number of tangible benefits to your business, they do have their share of distinct challenges. In particular, many companies struggle to create a truly “collaborative” virtual culture.

In this post, we’ll explore a few best practices for using Insightly to boost engagement among your virtual workers.

1. Get Everyone In the Same Place

Emails…group chats…random to-do lists…shared project documents…customer tracking spreadsheets.

Unless instructed otherwise, remote workers have a tendency to spread information across multiple systems and inboxes. Although productivity may seem high, it’s impossible to know for sure. After all, you don’t have time to dig through the many different apps they’re using. Likewise, it would be wasteful to ask each team member to manually cobble together a report. Unfortunately, you’ll just have to assume things are operating smoothly.

Solving this problem requires you to first take control of the situation. Even though your team has your best intentions in mind, reliance on overlapping systems or siloed datasets is no longer going to cut it. You need everyone working from the same system and database.

A system like Insightly can get everyone on the same page. Your sales team can hit the ground running by centralizing all of their customers, leads, and deals. Customer emails, notes, invoices, and quotations are also accessible from any web-enabled device.

Everyone else will love the built-in project and task management functionality. Since each team member has his or her own unique Insightly log in, you can create a greater sense of accountability. Assign due dates, define recurrence patterns, and indicate priority for each task. No more handwritten sticky notes or “forgotten” assignments.

Note: Insightly also allows you to configure teams, letting you assign and manage view permissions in fewer steps.

2. Differentiate Between Projects & Tasks

Some initiatives require more collaboration than others.

For example, rebranding a website involves much greater thought and coordination than scanning a stack of paper documents. Launching a new product line is more complicated than invoicing a client. Some initiatives require multiple iterations, meetings, and collaborators to achieve the greater goal. In other words, not every delegation is as simple as making a one-time request. You therefore need a process for managing the many moving parts.

At the heart of this discussion is the differentiation between “tasks” (individual pieces of work) and “projects” (larger initiatives or desired outcomes). If you’re planning on using Insightly, this terminology is natively built into the application. In fact, you can “link” individual tasks to a larger project, making it easier to see the specific steps required to arrive at your end goal.

Projects can be structured one of two ways in Insightly. For initiatives following a sequential pattern (such as onboarding a new customer), using a project pipeline might work best.

For less predictable projects (such as an expansion into adjacent markets), you might consider using one or more milestones. Milestones allow you to set goals, assign dates, and group together related tasks – without the rigidity of a sequential pattern.

With milestones, pipelines, and tasks, your team will feel more organized and less scattered. As the business owner, you’ll appreciate the enhanced visibility into your company’s work-in-process, bottlenecks, and completed work.

3. Integrate, Integrate, Integrate

Migrating your project and sales processes into a single web-based application is a great starting point. However, even the most robust of platforms can’t do everything. Your team will still rely heavily on their email inboxes, document processors, marketing tools, and other third-party apps.

A highly integrated platform, such as Insightly, can offer the best of both worlds. Insightly actually acts as the “hub” for everything else your team uses.

Take, for example, your marketing consultant who uses the MailChimp email marketing software to build and send the company newsletter. He’s doing a nice job, but he occasionally forgets to prepare the summary reports that you need. This situation reduces the productivity of your strategy sessions and creates unnecessary friction for the entire team.

How can you make this problem go away?

One possibility is to connect your Insightly and MailChimp accounts. Insightly’s innovative integration pulls in highly valuable marketing analytics into each lead or contact record. Once enabled, you’ll be able to see real-time MailChimp data without ever leaving your Insightly account, such as:

Campaign history
Click rate
Open rate
Engagement history
Opt-in / subscription date
List membership

Problem solved! Now, your marketing consultant can stay focused on the next newsletter, and you have the information you need.

Better yet, Insightly integrates with dozens of other best-in-class apps. The possibilities seem endless.

4. Build “Links” Between Internal (& External) Relationships

Organizational charts become murky as you grow your team of freelancers, part-time staff, consultants, and employees. Who reports to whom? Solid line or dashed? The questions never seem to end.

It’s time to scrap the diagram software and leverage the info that’s already in Insightly. If you’ve already added your team as Insightly users, you can easily use relationship links to track your organizational structure.

Each user can be linked to other internal (or external) team members, offering a 360-degree view of who knows whom. Insightly’s relationship dropdown lets you identify:

Boss / direct report relationships
Client / consultant relationships
Colleague relationships
Other unique relationships

This type of linking also comes in handy for tracking your customer relationships. By tracking the organizational hierarchy of your customers, your sales reps and support staff will be more equipped to deliver an unbelievable experience.

5. Free Up More Time for Collaboration (with Automation)

Just because something needs to be done, it doesn’t mean that a human has to do it. As workflow technology and artificial intelligence become increasingly prevalent, business owners are seeking ways to maximize their investment in human capital – virtual team members included.

A tool like Insightly can help you maximize ROI from virtual staff via automation.

To illustrate my point, let’s look at your current web lead management process. If you’re like many business owners, your web developer probably configured your site to send email alerts for new leads. New lead data is keyed in by your virtual assistant, the lead is assigned for follow up, and then your reps finally reach out. All of this occurs over several hours (or days), during which leads can go completely cold.

By leveraging Insightly automation, you could build a better lead management model. How does the following workflow sound?

The lead fills out a form on your website.
Insightly automatically parses the lead information and creates a new record.
Insightly immediately sends an email that “looks like” it came from your sales rep.
Insightly assigns the lead (and a follow-up task) to the correct rep.

Instead of wasting time on data entry, your virtual assistant can finally get around to organizing your backlog of game-changing ideas. In addition, your reps can engage leads with much less effort.

6. Monitor Productivity

There’s an additional benefit of using a self-contained management system like Insightly: better business analytics. Each task, project, contact, lead, opportunity, and event is a trackable piece of data that’s easily modeled within Insightly’s intuitive reporting dashboard.

Perhaps you find yourself asking these questions:

Which team members are completing the most tasks?
Who is delegating the most work to other users?
What are our bottlenecks?
How long did certain milestones take to complete?
Who has the most overdue tasks?
Which projects are requiring the most effort?
How many leads can each sales rep manage per month?

If your virtual team is using Insightly correctly, you should be able to answer these questions within seconds. Better yet, you’ll be able to sort, filter, and customize the reports to your exact specification. Just drag and drop, and Insightly gives you the data that you need.

Columnar reports can also be converted into highly engaging charts and graphs. This saves you (or your assistant) the effort of exporting and charting the data. Once again, Insightly does the busywork for you.

Get a More Collaborative Virtual Team

Your virtual team adds value to your business. No question about it. However, there’s always room for improvement. By leveraging a cloud-based business management system, such as Insightly, you can boost engagement and take their value to an entirely new level.

To learn more about Insightly, click here to compare the features that best fit your virtual team.

August 21, 2017

Bedrock Data Announces Sales and Marketing Automation System Integration with Insightly

On the heels of Insightly’s announcement of a major release of its CRM featuring a redesigned technical architecture and user interface that helps sales team improve productivity, Bedrock Data is now featured as an Insightly integration service. They offer successful marketing automation system integration of Insightly with some of the top software used by companies worldwide.

Bedrock Data allows Insightly customers to setup a multi-directional integration between Insightly and one or more systems, to ensure consistent customer and prospect data across the frontline systems in an organization.

Top integrations include Insightly and HubSpot; Insightly and Marketo; and Insightly and Pardot – all of which leverage Bedrock Data’s pre-built integrations to allow companies to setup and manage expert-level integrations with no code.

This helps extend the Insightly vision of building lifelong customer relationships, by serving prospects and customers with a well aligned experience across a company’s sales and marketing touchpoints.

Bedrock Data’s marketing automation system integrations help Insightly users in a variety of ways.

Marketing communicates to customers & prospects in the right way

The 1:1 relationship that companies are looking to build with customers, needs to extend to all marketing communications. To ensure companies communicate to their customers as customer (and not a brand new prospect “off the street”), and that those communications are tailored (based on their preferences, business factors such as industry or size, etc.), marketing needs that CRM data to be accurate, complete and up-to-date in marketing automation systems.

Salespeople are informed for conversations based on the customer’s interactions with marketing

A customer or prospect interacts with a company through many digital means – visiting the website, registering for a webinar, downloading content, reading emails. Providing salespeople with the right snapshot summary of marketing interactions helps them best prepare for an informed conversation with customers or prospects. Bedrock Data uses custom fields in Insightly to map in key marketing data, so that salespeople get the right summary information at their fingertips in the CRM system they are using every day. No extra clicks, no new interfaces to learn.

No delays in sales or SDR follow up with new prospects

There are many different ways a prospect can signal to a company that they want to engage. Some – like filling out a Contact Us form on a website – signal they want immediate engagement. A marketing automation-Insightly integration ensures that when prospects are ready to engage, that information is fed directly to sales reps or SDRs so they can take immediate action. When engaging with today’s modern, digital buyer, you definitely don’t want to be stuck uploading spreadsheets between systems to communicate – as that will only cause errors and delays.

Marketing has insight around effectiveness for making investment decisions

Marketing is a key conduit between a business and the lifelong relationships of their customers; making the right marketing investments based on what your customers appreciate, goes a long way towards furthering these relationships.

A marketing automation integration is at its best when feeding sales opportunity, pipeline and closed won data back from the CRM to marketing automation, to help marketing teams make decisions on their resources around what’s effective: answer questions such as: What types of initiatives are prospects responding to? What is leading to sustained growth and profitable return?

Bedrock Data feeds that data from Insightly based on the marketing automations – each which have their own way of using that data. For HubSpot, it’s a Lead Source reporting showing top sources of customers. For Marketo, it’s powering their Revenue Cycle Analytics reports around program effectiveness. And for Pardot, it’s the Customer Lifecycle Report.

Thanks to Bedrock Data, these are all now compatible with Insightly – with no code required to setup and manage the integration.

Interested customers can explore Bedrock Data’s Insightly connectors.