business intelligence – user's Blog!

April 17, 2018

Why Businesses Need Business Intelligence

If you’re like me, you probably spend a considerable amount of time reading blog articles, perusing whitepapers, and watching webinars. To remain competitive in today’s fast-paced business environment, we have no other option than to try and stay one step ahead. (Thankfully, there’s an infinite number of educational resources online to help us achieve that goal.)

Lately, in my research, I’ve experienced a growing number of experts who throw around the term “business intelligence” – or “BI” for short. Taken at face value, “business intelligence” sure sounds nebulous enough. In reality, BI is changing how companies make informed decisions.

In this post, we’ll dive into the topic of BI and explore how you can put it to good use.

What Exactly is BI?

BI has been defined a thousand times over (and by many people, who are smarter than me). That being said, allow me to break it down in a way that makes sense for busy entrepreneurs (such as myself). BI typically refers to a general category of software tools that are especially useful for visualizing important metrics. In other words, an effective BI application will take your historical and real-time data and present it in a way that’s both engaging and informative.

Business intelligence tools come in all shapes and sizes. Some are entirely dedicated to data modeling. Others, such as Insightly, incorporate aspects of BI into a much broader feature suite. Either way, as illustrated in the following screenshot, BI software gives the business owner fingertip access to a number of vital KPIs.

Sales KPI tracking is certainly a common use case for BI technology, but it is by no means the only use case. Companies use business intelligence software for almost everything imaginable, from tracking churn to customer satisfaction and on-the-job safety.

How Can Businesses Benefit from BI?

Like anything else, BI is what you make of it. If your company makes an investment in a business intelligence system but then promptly forgets about it, you’ve obviously wasted your time. On the other hand, if you start with the intention of streamlining your goal tracking and decision making, BI can be an excellent resource for your organization.

Take, for example, your sales process. I’m guessing that you’re already tracking the following data points:

Total booked sales revenue
Sales revenue, broken down by each sales rep
Current value of your deal pipeline
Stages where deals are stuck
Top reasons deals are lost

If you’re using a CRM, this data is readily available to you. The big question is not what to track – rather, it’s how to track it (and present it in a meaningful way).

By harnessing the power of BI, small business owners can bring new life to data that would otherwise be less insightful. Instead of waiting on a virtual assistant to manually refresh a spreadsheet, team leaders and department managers can gain instant access to the information they need. Furthermore, they can drill down with the click of a mouse, yielding more answers and less confusion.

So, Why Aren’t More Businesses Using BI?

If BI software is so powerful, why aren’t more small and mid-size business owners utilizing it? Good question.

As a consultant, I’ve had the opportunity to work with clients across a wide spectrum of industries and markets. From my perspective, the following issues seem to be the most common impediments:

Affinity for Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets are essentially free to create. They’re also easy to share with collaborators. With spreadsheets being so familiar, why venture into unknown territory and mess with a business intelligence package? It’s a question that business owners no doubt wrestle with.

Data Silos: Data silos present a very real issue for organizations of all sizes. With sales records in one database, newsletter stats in another, and customer support tickets tracked elsewhere, simply creating a 360-degree view of each customer’s journey can be enough of a struggle. Tying all of these disparate data silos into a separate BI platform is, therefore, unrealistic for most companies.

Lack of Technical Resources: Even if a company has a relatively clean data structure, few businesses have the technical know-how to deploy a business intelligence app. API documentation, security protocols, and data warehouses can be daunting to even the most experienced of IT managers.

Budgetary Constraints: BI tools usually come with some type of subscription or download fee (although some are free). There’s also the cost of hosting, maintaining, and supporting a BI application. When weighed against more pressing priorities, it’s easy to understand why business intelligence drops to the bottom of to-do lists.

More Pressing Matters: Speaking of more pressing priorities, just keeping the lights on and customers happy consumes 99% of most business owners’ brainpower. Deploying a BI tool, though desirable, seems more of a luxury than a necessity.

Solving the BI Puzzle for Businesses

For the reasons we’ve discussed, third-party BI tools are simply not feasible for a sizable percentage of the small and mid-size business world.

And, perhaps that’s why a solution like Insightly is particularly intriguing. Unlike a third-party tool, that may require extensive setup and technical expertise, Insightly’s solution is native to the user interface. Free and paid users alike enjoy out-of-the-box dashboards, consisting of cards that can be dragged and dropped.

In addition to lead and opportunity dashboards, Insightly users even enjoy project dashboards.

By leveraging a CRM that offers built-in business intelligence capabilities, smaller companies might be able to bypass the headaches commonly associated with BI.

Better Intelligence, Smarter Decisions

At the end of the day, your company is in the business of efficiently and effectively serving its constituents. A business intelligence system can help you achieve this goal, but only if the tool delivers more value than the resources it consumes. Smart business owners should seek out BI solutions that provide powerful insights without creating new internal problems.

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 17, 2017

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.

December 15, 2016

Are You Leveraging Your CRM Reports?

Your CRM does a lot for you – manages contacts, manages projects, integrates with a number of other cloud-based services to simplify your workflow. One often overlooked feature is built-in reports. Knowing how to use the options at your disposal to their greatest potential can give your business just the edge it needs.

Custom Reporting: Legacy Reports

If you don’t need a lot of customized reporting tools, the legacy reports are a good place to start. These include configurable reports based on activities and opportunities, and display information in basic graph form. Legacy reports include:

Opportunity Category Breakdown Report
Reasons for Losing Opportunities Report
Opportunity Pipeline Stage Distribution Report
Opportunity Funnel Analysis
Opportunities by Responsible User Report
Opportunities by Organization Report
Opportunities by Custom Field Report
Total Incoming Opportunities Report
Value of Opportunities Won Report
Completed Tasks and Events Report

With these reports, you can:

Easily locate the number of opportunities each salesperson is creating – making it easier to reward your most active salespeople.
Determine which salesperson closed the most deals in the last month
Examine reasons why your company is losing business
Determine your most valuable clients and see how much they are contributing to your overall revenue
Find the most and the least satisfied customers, to reach out to them directly with a highly targeted marketing campaign to breed customer loyalty.
See which user(s) completed the most tasks
And more…

Custom Reporting: Advanced Reports

You can create your own custom reports using our intuitive drag-and-drop user interface. Start with one of the report templates to save time and keep things organized, and then rely on advanced Boolean logic filters to create reports based on the criteria you designate. You can include summaries on rows of calculations, making it easy to leave notes for anyone else who may be viewing the report.

With a paid plan, you can enable report scheduling and smart alerts – send an alert to the appropriate person if a certain criteria is met, such as an opportunity over $X entering the pipeline.

You can export your reports to Microsoft Excel print hard copies for distribution. Though our advanced reports don’t include graphs yet, they will soon. In the meantime, it’s possible to export the data into other graphing tools, such as Excel or Microsoft BI.

Advanced report options allow you to go beyond what the legacy reports have to offer, so you can share information with management and even your clients, if necessary. When you have the report scheduling feature, you can automatically send reports at regularly scheduled intervals, for easy comparison over time.

Is your business making use of these reports? If so, what have you noticed? It’s easier to keep track of what’s going on in the business overall, and to share information with the employees who need it. If you’re not using these reports, you’re wasting time sorting through the information, or acting without it.

Take a few minutes to explore Insightly’s reporting features, and you may be surprised at what you find. Let us know how you’re making the advanced reports work for you.

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