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Some businesses believe that the phrase “sales funnel” is just another business buzzword.  This may be because many of the businesses that use it, aren’t managing it effectively.  When this occurs, critical problems arise such as lost data, lead spamming and poor customer satisfaction.  By using an online CRM to effectively manage your sales funnel, you can turn these problems around.

Why You Need a Sales Funnel

The sales funnel was created as a way for sales and marketing to track leads and contacts through every stage from prospect to buyer.  By using the sales funnel, marketers can sift through prospects and classify them as qualified, or unqualified before passing them on to sales.  This eliminates the “cold-calling” reputation that sales agents were previously known for.  Since the agent knows the contact is already interested, they can use the information gathered on the contact record by marketing to assist them in the sale.  If the buyer isn’t interested at the time that sales calls them, the lead is passed back through the funnel or kicked out of it.  However, in order for the funnel to remain effective, it has to be managed.

Why Your Funnel Has Leaks

Sales funnels that aren’t managed effectively are counterproductive.  They can actually make a bad situation much worse, resulting in lost sales, frustrated leads and a poor brand reputation. If you’re currently experiencing these problems you may have leaks in your sales funnel.

The following items are common precursors to funnel leaks:

• Not contacting qualified leads from marketing. (According to CRM Search, 80% of marketing generated leads generated are ignored by sales.)
• Pursuing unqualified leads.
• Not knowing a lead’s status.
• Not following up with leads.

How Customer Relationship Management Can Help

What’s clear from the above section, is that most leaks affect leads/contacts.  Whether it’s calling leads that are unqualified or forgetting to follow up, leaks in the sales funnel will drive down sales and could even damage your reputation.  To keep your funnel free of leaks, you need a CRM system. A CRM system, tracks and organizes data through the sales funnel. It gives every team member the same view of the sales funnel, so any updates or notes are immediately visible.

As soon as a contact becomes qualified, the information is passed through the funnel directly to sales to contact the prospective customer. This eliminates the need to look through various systems for information, which is one of the largest precursors to sales funnel leaks.  A successful CRM also providescalendaring systems that allow agents to schedule events, tasks, and important milestones.  The Insightly CRM provides alerts and notifications of new emails and follow-ups, this way you never miss any changes with your leads.

Since web CRMs work in the cloud, you can access your sales funnel from any device with WiFi connection. If you need to update the status of a sale, you can do so from this device without having to update it again at work. All of your team members have access to your changes, allowing you to effectively, track data through the funnel.

Thinking about a CRM to manage your sales funnel?  Try Insightly’s free account or sign up for a 14 day trial to test drive our premium features.

From time to time you may run into that one lead that just refuses to budge.  No matter what you say, it seems to drive them backwards instead of forward.  This is a sales agent’s worst nightmare, but it doesn’t have to be. Here are a few tips to coach you through those difficult sales and to prevent pushing them further away.

Approach Each Buyer as a Unique Person

This is the hardest step for sales agents to remember.  At times, you get so caught up in “processing” that you start to look at every buyer as just another buyer.  However, when you run across that one buyer that refuses to budge from the “lead” zone, panic sets in.  If you really want to shift them through the funnel, you have to treat them as individuals.  Get to know your lead.  Do some background research on them using social data — two great sources of this information is LinkedIn (or other social channels) and their company website.

Sell them on the Value of Your Products

Do you really know what you’re products are worth?  Not in terms of price, but in terms of usage.  If you’re not sure, think of it like this:  If you were looking for a product like the one you’re selling, why would you need it?  What problems would it solve for your business?  What problems could it possibly prevent?  Once you derive at the answer, analyze your demographic and decide if they have similar problems.  Another way to gain insight into your demographic is to ask them question.  Ask them why they’re interested in the product and what they plan to use it for.  Once you find out the answer, you have the leverage to sell them a vision of how it can solve this problem.

Ooze Energy

If you aren’t enthusiastic about your products, why would your prospects be?  In order to effectively close a sale, you need to bring some energy to the call.  However, it’s important to strike a fine balance between energy and hyperactivity.  If you come across as “too energetic” or hyper as it were, your leads will think you’re trying too hard and they won’t trust your motives.  Entrepreneur magazine says you should do thefollowing to remain high energetic and trustworthy:

• Focus on the positive and celebrate how far you’ve come.
• Increase your physical activity outside of the office. (If your building has a gym, use it!) Physical activity releases endorphins that make you feel relaxed and less stressed.
• Fish for compliments

By following the above steps you’ll not only improve your energy through difficult sales, but also in future sales.  Who knows, you may also leverage a referral or two!

Are you working from a CRM system? If not, this could very well be the problem. An online CRM system streamlines all of your customer data into one centralized app, making it easier for you to access. It also makes it easier for you to keep track of your leads and to boost productivity time. All of this of course, improves customer satisfaction, which drives sales, boosts lead generation and solidifies brand loyalty.

If you’re using Insightly, one of that ways you’re probably using it is to track and close deals. (That’s one of the best things about Insightly’s freeplan – it does everything!)

Keeping track of your contacts is a handy feature in any CRM system, but it’s a means-to-an-end. CRM is how businesses get business deals done.

But, there’s one factor that stands between most sales professionals and a “Closed Won” opportunity – your proposal. And there are four questions that most sales professionals completely neglect to ask, resulting in the non-closing of their proposals.

1. “Why this quarter?” – One of the most basic implication questions that a sales professional can ask is the “Why Now?” question. If every stakeholder on your prospective customer’s team (usually 4 to 14 different people) can’t give a good reason that the project needs to happen this quarter, then you can press “pause.”

No need to be harsh and try to kill the deal. You can simply say, “It looks like we’re good on scoping for now. Since it does not look like the project is urgent, shall we schedule a final scoping meeting 12 weeks from now?”

Do not write this proposal.

2. “Which delivery date is best for your team – X,Y, or Z?” – The real goal of this question is not to find out the proposal delivery date. It’s to acquire information on any hidden decision-makers. This method comes from Alan Weiss’s Million Dollar Consulting Proposals.

By using a set proposal window (usually 48 or 72 hours), and offering the prospect a choice of dates to deliver it on, the prospect will often say something like, “Oh, gee, next Wednesday won’t work because my boss’s boss Randy is out on vacation.”

If you’ve never met with Randy before, then he’s the real economic decision-maker, and you’ve got some serious homework to do, before writing that proposal.

3. “Our decision-making team is me, my manager Bob and his manager Jennifer. Who’s on your decision-making team?” If the prospective customer does not want to tell you who is on their decision-making team, that’s a red flag. Don’t write that proposal.

Generally the prospective customer will give you an answer that includes one or two people that you have not heard of yet. Thank them profusely – they may have just saved a deal that you nearly lost. Then, track down those people that you have not met, and interview them about the project to gather feedback BEFORE writing that proposal.

4. “Our proposals come in a special format so your team can suggest changes and rev it with us if changes need to be made. Who on the team should be authorized to see the proposal and add comments to it?” – If you don’t know who will be reading and editing the proposal, then you’re missing information on the economic-decision-makers on your deal. Always learn this information before sending a proposal.

Once you’re ready to send the deal to your prospect for signature.  What’s the best way to do it?  Well Insightly is now integrated with the PandaDoc!  If you’re an Insightly user, you can now have all of your Insightly contacts auto-synced (every 30 minutes) with PandaDoc.  For example, if you want to know:

– when each customer or prospective customer looks at your proposal
– how long they look at it for AND
– who has not looked at it

then give the Insightly/PandaDoc integration a try. It’s free to use, and you can even get moredocuments by telling a friend.  Speaking of winning proposals from PandaDoc … Why not get 3 free documents to start with (you can even get 3 more with a tweet). No credit card is required, and you’ll be up and running in minutes.

About the Author: Adam Metz is the author of Amazon #1 internet-marketing best-seller The Social Customer, and the VP of Business Development at PandaDoc. He’s a veteran sales executive who’s carried a million-plus sales quota for a Fortune 500 company (CDW) and run a sales channel for a Google Apps eco-system startup, UberConference.

Marketing automation is a big industry these days – and for good reason. With each task you automate, the more human capital you can allocate to value-added activities. The problem is that these systems often come with big price tags. For many small businesses, the value proposition of implementing a marketing automation system simply doesn’t add up. The good news is that Insightly users can reap many of the benefits that a marketing automation system provides by combining a few (budget-friendly) third party tools. In this article, I’ll offer my tips for doing so and show you how to automate more aspects of your sales and marketing activities.

What is Marketing Automation?

At a high level marketing automation streamlines customer outreach and customer response by replacing high-touch, repetitive manual processes with automated solutions.  Here’s an example:  when someone self-identifies by filling out a form on your website, you most likely receive an email notification with his or her contact details. What happens next? If you’re like most business owners, you probably flag it in your inbox or forward it to your sales manager for follow up. Hours or perhaps even days go by before the prospect gets a phone call or follow up email from your organization, simply because your team is too busy. By then, the prospect has already contacted two or three of your competitors and long forgotten about your company.

Define Your Goals

I’ve been involved with several marketing automation launches. Unfortunately, many clients get excited and try to do too much at once instead of laying out a realistic timeline of priorities. When bootstrapping your marketing automation, you need to be particularly aware of your goals before moving forward. You’ll be piecing together several different third-party software applications, so it’s crucial you start with the end in mind. Always remember that you won’t be completely automated overnight. It may take weeks, months, or even years of tweaking and building new campaigns (and even then you’ll still come up with more ideas). Here are a few short-term goals that may make sense as a starting point for your automation:

•    Send nurture emails to new leads who meet certain criteria
•    Automatically tag certain leads based on pre-defined criteria
•    Automatically send new web leads to Insightly

Develop an Implementation Plan

So reviewing the example above, when someone completes a form on your website, make sure you have a place other than your inbox to capture the information.  You can use Insightly’s web to contactcapability to have that lead automatically captured in your online CRM.  Then you can you start your marketing automation process by fully exploring Insightly’s out-of-the-box integration with MailChimp(for paid Insightly users). As pointed out in this MailChimp video, with the click of a button you can instantly add Insightly contacts to any MailChimp list. This opens up many different doors for your organization, particularly with regard to lead nurturing. As you may know, MailChimp’s auto responder feature is quite useful for configuring effective drip email campaigns. Sending opt-in contacts to an autoresponder list can be a great way to get started with marketing automation. Once you’ve implemented your first MailChimp campaign, you may also want to explore additional third party integrations.

I am particularly fond of Zapier, which is an amazing service that simplifies the connectivity of various web applications. In fact, at last count you can connect over 250 web apps to achieve your goals. Want to automatically set appointments on your sales rep’s Google Calendar for new Insightly leads? Or how about automatically sending sales call notes from Google Drive to contact records in Insightly? No problem. With a free Zapier account, you can literally automate virtually every aspect of your sales and marketing – to and from Insightly.

One important note here – although Zapier is relatively intuitive to use, it may be wise to hire a consultant to help you successfully implement these integrations. Here are some additional free resources to help you with that process.

Bringing It All Together

Marketing automation is all about helping your organization win more business with less effort. Insightly offers your business a great opportunity to do exactly that. Start simple, stay focused, and in no time you’ll be on your way to becoming a highly automated company.

About the Author:

Matt Keener is a marketing professional, specializing in marketing strategy and efficient, cost effective outsourcing best practices.

If you’re a small business owner and haven’t yet considered using an online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to help you build a loyal customer base now is the time. According to a recent report from Software Advice, with so many free options available there’s no reason to not use a small business CRM to manage your business. A shocking 73% of small businesses have no process for re-engaging leads after an initial sale and this can definitely impact your business. With the explosive growth in social media, capturing and organizing customer interaction data is essential to thriving in today’s online marketplace. The statistics below tell the tale of the tape, and if companies wait too long to adapt to the social nature of customer interactions, they aren’t going to last long in the ring.

How can Insightly help?  Check out our easy social integration which requires no integration setup or special connection.  When you enter an email address, Twitter ID, or LinkedIn address for a contact, Insightly will use it to find and display public social media profiles for that contact on virtually any social channel where the contact has participated —  Facebook, Google+, FourSquare, Picasa, Klout and more.

Sign up for a free Insightly account or try a 14 day trial of our premium plan.

 

Congratulations! You’ve finally decided to take the plunge, quit your soul-sucking 9 to 5 and start your own small business.

Whether your new business has been operating for one day or one year, you’ve probably noticed that along with the freedom, passion and excitement of self-employment comes a lot of challenges, many of which can be downright confusing.

Many small business owners start off by wearing a variety of different hats – not only are you the CEO, you’re also the marketing manager, CRM director, accountant, sales rep… the list goes on and on.

So how are you supposed to juggle things like tracking expenses and filing paperwork when you’re swamped with the day to day tasks of running a new business?

That’s where Shoeboxed comes in. Most small business owners aren’t born accountants – if they were, they’d be doing that instead of running a pet grooming company, or growing their life coaching business.

That’s why you should use Shoeboxed as your own virtual bookkeeper. Shoeboxed is a receipt scanning service that helps your small business go paperless, get organized, and enjoy flawless bookkeeping – even if (especially if!) math was your worst subject in school.

With Shoeboxed, you can instantly declutter your workspace using their nifty Magic Envelope. Simply toss all of your receipts, bank statements, business cards and expense reports into the prepaid envelope, toss the envelope in the mail, and watch as your account is magically populated with digitized data in a matter of days.

You can also scan documents right from your office, or while you’re on-the-go by using the Shoeboxed Receipt & Mileage Tracker for iPhone and Android. Or maybe you have a bunch of eReceipts in your email inbox. If that’s the case, forward them to your Shoeboxed email address at the same time you send them to your Insightly email address. Then you’ll have the receipt saved in your Shoeboxed account, as well as associated with your customer record in Insightly! This is a great option for busy small business owners who are constantly traveling or working outside the office.

Once the bulk of your clutter is cleared, maintain your newfound organization by snapping a photo of each receipt the second you get it. The totals – including expense category, amount, date and payment – will be automatically stored inside your Shoeboxed account.

Shoeboxed is especially handy come tax time, when you can get an instant snapshot of your spending by logging in to your account. Generate reports based on common tax write-offs, or create your own categories.

If you need to find a specific receipt, it’s easy to filter by date, keyword or amount. In just a couple clicks, you can then generate a report and share it with your tax professional.

New small business owners have enough to worry about without the headache of tracking every dollar spent and payment received. The time saved by using Shoeboxed not only allows you to focus on growing your customer base, it also gives you an overall financial snapshot of your business and shows you exactly where you could be saving more money.

Shoeboxed also scans and organizes your business cards into your secure online account, and from there you can send your contacts to dozens of programs (including Insightly!).

Use Shoeboxed to go paperless, get organized, increase your productivity and keep your finances updated in real time – all of which will let you get back to running your business. Which is why you started this thing in the first place, right?

Special Offer: Insightly users can sign up for any Shoeboxed Premium Plan and receive 30 days free, with an extra 10% off your first 6 months! Sign up here.

Questions? You can reach the Shoeboxed team at help@team.shoeboxed.com or on Twitter @Shoeboxed.

Are you (or is someone you know) a labeler? Label maker lovers like to categorize all their small things in bins neatly labeled “Markers” or “Legos” or “Stamps” so they can easily find everything later. Think of Insightly CRM Tags as the modern version of stick-on labels. When used creatively, they are efficient and wonderful organizational tools that can help you sort your data and find it when you need it.

Tags can be used to filter and sort data in many ways. Unlike “categories,” multiple tags can be associated with opportunities, contacts, projects, organizations and/or emails. You can create filters to sort your contacts’ demographic information and give you access to groups and associations in new and outside-the-box ways.

Get the basics on Insightly tags, and get ready to think creatively on how you can use tags to gain insight into your data.

1.Tag by Demographic Information

Try thinking of new angles to sort your customers and contact information. You can tag them with any information you have—age, gender, neighborhood, city, state, or zip code. Assess what you need to know when it comes to your customers and start tagging!

2.Tag by Association

Perhaps your contacts belong to different professional groups. Opportunities can be found within specific groups, be it Toastmasters or your local Chamber of Commerce. Knowing what groups your customers belong to can help you schedule events that don’t conflict with your local Junior League’s monthly meeting, or target a special offer to customers who are members of AARP. Whatever the association, tagging can be a powerful tool to quickly narrow down targeted mailings and give your real estate agency, non-profit, or small business the tools you need to contact the right customers at the right time.

3. Tag by Industry

Sorting data by industry relevance can be very helpful as well. Identifying customers in similar industries helps you find commonalities and can help you build a campaign that will appeal to their specific trade.

Sorting your project by the industry or tool needed for success can also be helpful. Perhaps you have several upcoming projects that will need a mailing house, or at least two of your projects will require some public relations or IT expertise. Find the data in one quick filter by attaching a tag to the necessary industry or job.

4. Tag by Common Interests

By tagging all your contacts who participated in a community golf-outing you co-sponsored, you can quickly find them again for your next golf event.

Common interests can be important when you are marketing to a specific religious group (remember to send out Rosh Hashanah cards, or schedule events that don’t conflict with important dates).

Looking for other commonalities—pet owners, gardening buffs, car-fanatics or foodies, can be a great boon to your targeted marketing efforts. In today’s world, customers want to be remembered and feel special. When you know what your customers are most interested in, you can order promotional items they’ll want to keep. Tagging their records with information on their interests can help create a marketing plan that will really get their attention.

5. Tag by Priority

Adding a priority tags can be one more way to make sure you can quickly sort and find your “hot” leads. Get creative—if you think it would be helpful. Tags can always be edited and undone. There’s no wrong way. If you find that a tag is not as useful as projected, delete it and try something different. Flexibility is one of the best things about Insightly!

6. Tag Projects in New Ways

It can be helpful to sort projects in numerous ways. We’ve discussed sorting them by the job or industry; what about sorting your projects by the division, location or area they will take place?

You may also want to look at “long term” or “ongoing” projects as opposed to one-time tasks. This can offer valuable planning assistance when you are assigning projects, projecting and scheduling for the upcoming year.

7. Tag the Red Flags

While it can be risky to tag customers with red flag warnings that are slanderous or mean (not to mention unprofessional), making notes can help avoid disastrous PR reoccurrences. For example—customers who hate to be called during dinner can be tagged as such. This helps avoid upsetting a customer.

There may also be reasons to indicate that someone should speak with you before they make contact with a specific client or customer. Perhaps you can offer them some (insight) on a sensitive topic or give some history on the customer disposition. Tag them with a code, initials or a word to indicate that employees should consult with you before talking to the customer.

8. Filter Your Tags

Using filters can help narrow down your tags and find customers that fit multiple criteria. Find customers that live in the same neighborhood, moved in the last year, and are over the age of 60 by smart use of filters. When you tag customers with the right data, the possibilities are endless.

9. Add Tags to a Filter Set

To quickly add tags to a filtered group, you can simply select all of the contacts, projects or data under that “tag” by clicking at the top to select all. From there you can add an additional tag to this group, deselect some members to tag, or “play” with your data in ways that make it more efficient. This is a great way to quickly add tags to like groups, rather than individually opening and tagging each one.

Once you’ve mastered the art of tagging, don’t be afraid to test new ways to manage your data. You may come up with new marketing techniques and plans that you never thought of! Watch our tags video for more in-depth assistance with tags and get the most out of your customer data.

 

Customer relationships are at the core of marketing. When you nurture relationships with your customers, you endear them to your brand or business. By leveraging customer relationship management (CRM) solution, you can stay connected with your customers for the long haul.

Keep Customer Data Organized and Accessible

The key to effectively connecting with your customers is to know important details about each one and keep all that knowledge in one place. For small businesses on a budget, it can be hard to tell whether a CRM will be worth the initial investment so try a free plan  or a 14 day trial of our premium plan as a way to get started without financial risk.

CRMs exist to make sense of your contact data. For example, Insightly CRM features custom fields, filters, and tags, so you can include all the information you want to and make it easy to search. You can even upload customer files and link between contacts and any other items. This gives you much more information to work with than a spreadsheet or an address book. Analyzing data to find customer likes, dislikes, spending habits and patterns helps you decide your next steps.

Try Customer Segmenting with Behavior or Category Tags

By creating “smart” tags or grouping customers by their behavior or some other common similarity, you can create email campaigns that not only target each customer based on their interests, but on the likelihood they will act on your pitch.

Rather than blast customers with email advertisements that will make them unsubscribe from your list, use behavioral segmentation to send them offers they want to act on. This isn’t just for mailers though. Use behavioral tags to inform all contact with customers. For example, you can contact customers who actively engage via your Instagram to advertise a flash sale just for Instagram followers.

Listen to Customers

We all know that customers don’t want to be sold to. They don’t want you to talk at them. If you want to communicate with your clients, you have to listen to them. Of course, great customer service is the first line in listening and responding to your clients’ needs. You can even listen even before they reach out to you.

By looking at the contact profile you’ve created, including purchase history, interactions with your company via social media, and how frequently they engage with your brand, you can gauge how often each customer wants to hear from you. If you’re initiating contact too often, customers may unsubscribe or unfollow. You can adjust your behavior to cater to their pattern of preference. For example, if you find customers tend to unsubscribe six weeks after a purchase, don’t send an email during the sixth week.

Have a Public Conversation

If your social media outlets are on autopilot, you’re missing out big time. It’s easy for SMBs to send out one post to several different social media accounts and think that’s enough. If you cannot manage live interaction with your customers over numerous networks, consider cutting down to one or two social media accounts or hiring someone to represent your brand for you. Effective social media meansconstant, meaningful interaction.

Having a dialogue with your customers over public channels shows individual customers they are valued, and your other followers see that you value each customer as well. In addition, you get more data about customers the more you interact, which, when paired with an intuitive small business CRM, provides you with information for future marketing efforts.

When you collect and maintain holistic contact profiles, tagged or grouped in a useful, searchable manner, you can put your customer data to good use and directly engage with your customers in meaningful ways.