customer relationship management

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.

May 9, 2017

Why Closed-Won is Just the Beginning of Business

Closing a big deal can be very satisfying. It’s dinner and drinks all around when the stage of the deal is changed to 100% (closed=won).

The hard work you’ve invested in prospecting, follow up, proposals, and negotiation have culminated in this highly anticipated moment. Time to sit back and relax, right?

Wrong!

In fact, for most business models, “closed-won” is not an endgame. It’s actually the first step in an ongoing customer relationship.

In this post, we’ll explore why closed-won is just the beginning. We’ll also look at technology that can help facilitate a more fruitful customer lifecycle.

Fulfillment & Delivery Must Exceed Expectations

Soon after a new customer signs on the dotted line, reality can quickly set in. By accepting the client’s business, your company stakes its stellar reputation on delivering an unbelievable (but also profitable) experience. It must walk a fine line between capacity building and providing existing clients the same personalized service that they’ve become accustomed to.

Without the right approach, the addition of new customers can actually be quite disruptive. Unfortunately, many companies are ill-prepared for the sales growth they achieve. By overemphasizing the sales funnel at the expense of downstream fulfillment and delivery, revenue growth actually detracts from the long-term value of the organization.

A more balanced approach (especially one that views sales in context of the broader customer lifecycle) can reduce the risk of overpromising while ensuring fluid on-boarding. How can your organization achieve a more “balanced” approach to sales and fulfillment? For starters, you might try fully harnessing the power of your CRM.

If you’re already an Insightly user, you may have heard that the software facilitates sales and project management. In fact, it’s even possible to convert sales opportunities to projects.

Rather than starting from scratch in a siloed project tracking system, Insightly gives your production and fulfillment teams a seamless view of each customer. The original opportunity record is automatically linked to the new project record. Emails, files, and notes can also be copied to the project. For added efficiency, Insightly activity sets can add new tasks upon project creation or conversion (for example: review customer specs, set up billing information, send a welcome packet, etc.)

By leveraging an integrated sales and fulfillment workflow, your operational team is in a much better position to effectively serve the new customer’s needs. (They’re also less likely to bug your sales reps with redundant questions!) The net result? Less busywork, expedited delivery, and another highly satisfied customer.

Measuring Satisfaction Helps You Improve Your Game

Speaking of customer satisfaction, do have a formalized process for collecting feedback?

Some companies live by the old adage, “no news is good news.” While there may be some truth to this statement, failing to ask for customer input could cause you to overlook new product or service ideas, process improvements, upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and other innovations.

Aside from waiting for customers to complain (or share their praise), what are some proactive ways to measure customer satisfaction? Here are a few simple ideas.

Design a quick survey: There are countless free and affordable survey tools online. In fact, your existing email marketing platform might natively offer polling and surveying (here’s a popular example). Regardless of the tool you select, be sure to invest adequate time and develop a simple, yet effective set of questions. Ask customers to measure various aspects of their interactions with your company. Numeric ranking questions can be particularly useful, especially when comparing the satisfaction of multiple customers. An open-ended question or two can also help you gain qualitative insights into the mind of the customer.

Create a survey distribution plan: Does it make sense to blast the entire survey to all existing customers? Or, would a batched approach make more sense? What about future customers – should you set up an autoresponder sequence that goes out a few months after an opportunity is won?

Make satisfaction data more accessible to your CRM: Insightly users have the luxury of many integrated apps. For example, the Insightly integration for the MailChimp email marketing system can display certain campaign data, making your survey results just a click or two away.

Convert Your Satisfied Customers Into Advocates

Even the largest advertising budget can pale in comparison to the value of a few vocal advocates. Customers who are willing to speak out on your behalf create untold goodwill and help other prospects understand your offering in their own terms.

As customer satisfaction starts to flow into your organization, you’ll find yourself presented with new opportunities. How can you best capitalize from glowing customer feedback? Some common approaches include:

Testimonials for Marketing Use – Would the customer allow you to publish his or her feedback on your website or on social media?
In-Depth Case Study – Would it be possible to interview the client as the subject for a whitepaper or case study?
Serve as a Reference – When future customers ask for references, would this customer be willing to speak on your behalf?
Technical Input – Would your technical or support staff gain value by picking the brains of highly satisfied customers?
Immediate Sales Opportunities – Some customers may simply be unaware of your entire suite of solutions. A follow-up email blast or direct mail piece could generate immediate revenue opportunities with existing clients.
Segmentation for Future Marketing – Even if there is no immediate opportunity, perhaps it would be prudent to tag satisfied customers for future reference.

As you might imagine, these ideas are only a starting point. Spend time reading and comparing customer feedback, and you’re sure to generate many other creative advocacy ideas.

Closed-Won is Important, But It’s Not Everything

Winning the initial contract is an important and necessary step in the future success of your business. However, as we’ve demonstrated in this article, achieving “closed-won” status isn’t everything – far from it, in fact.

By leveraging your CRM throughout the entire customer lifecycle (from initial inquiry through advocacy), you’re bound to yield much greater value from each customer and account.

And, most importantly, your customers will love you all the more!

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, check out his book, or connect with him on Linkedin.

April 25, 2017

Why HBO’s Pied Piper Needed a CRM for Startups

silicon valley HBO cast crm for startups

HBO’s hit show Silicon Valley is a biting mockery, a satirical exaggeration of the very worst of everything about America’s entrepreneurial hotbed. But, it’s also a tale of everything that can, and often does, go wrong with a great idea when launching a start-up without a CRM.

In the last season, we watched as Richard and team took on venture capital for their revolutionary data compression solution and were quickly, well, beaten into submission. From newly installed CEO Jack Barker, who cared more about selling any product than the product itself, to the entire sales team he puts in place, everything goes terribly wrong for Pied Piper. By the end of the season, their only choice is to pivot to Dinesh’s chat platform.

The most painful part was watching along and knowing that if only the Pied Piper team had a CRM for startups at their disposal, they could have saved the company and turned things around. Just think—what if the Pied Piper team had Insightly and hadn’t bungled their way through their capital? How different would things have turned out?

Here’s how we think Insightly could have helped some key players in Pied Piper Silicon Valley’s unfortunate downfall:

Richard Hendricks

As founder and the original CEO of Pied Piper, Richard is constantly struggling with the demands of the business world, preferring instead to disappear into the coding of his application than those more outward facing tasks traditionally handled by CEO. He’s your typical, socially inept geek. While he realizes he must do more for his team to keep them on schedule and meeting development project milestones, time and again he retreats to his code.

The product feature that could have saved Richard: Automated workflow webhooks

If only Richard had Insightly, he might have kept his team on track. Webhooks, which you’ll find in the best CRMs for startups, are like smart robot assistants that live in your account. You tell them what to do, and when to do it, and they take action when you specify workflow. You can share data with other applications and automate the internal management tasks that you might otherwise forget while buried neck deep in code.

Laurie Bream

Laurie is the new CEO of Raviga Capital, the investment firm behind Pied Piper, and the replacement for Peter (Thiel) Gregory. Like her predecessor, Laurie is highly intelligent and socially inept, but she appears to rely more on tangible metrics than Peter did. It’s this business-centric approach that leads her to terminate Raviga’s investment into Pied Piper, all while avoiding eye contact at all costs.

Which product feature could Laurie have used? Custom business reports and metrics

Pied Piper HBO’s downfall in season two came from every imaginable direction it would seem, but perhaps Laurie could have helped save the team from themselves with custom business reports and metrics. After all, it’s harder to buy fake customers when you have someone tracking them.

Jack Barker

Let’s face it, Jack Barker is former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer: a “Salesman without a Product Vision“. As the newly appointed CEO of Pied Piper, he relies on sales over anything else and hires a huge sales team, much to the team’s dismay. And then, instead of pushing to sell the revolutionary data compression tool Richard and his team have built, they look to sell whatever would be easiest to sell, which turns out to be a box that does absolutely nothing at all.

The ideal product feature for Jack: Sales opportunities and lead generation

With lead management, you can keep your product in mind while finding the perfect people and businesses to pitch it to. Instead of taking your B2C vision and scrapping it because it’s easier to sell something that does nothing to a business than something that does something to a consumer, you can find the right consumers to buy your product.

Erlich Bachman

Oh, Erlich. He’s often just so high that he is clueless to remember how he met important people. More often than not for Erlich, it’s open mouth, insert foot. He’s a loveable idiot with gaping holes in his pockets when it comes to money, yet he stunningly manages to help Richard raise a seed round by smooth talking a bunch of investors.

Product feature for Erlich: Customer relationship linking

With customer relationship linking, Erlich can keep tabs on his relationships. Customer relationship linking lets you add links to a record, creating connections to represent relationships between people, sales opportunities, projects, communications, and other Insightly activities. Watch more ways he could have managed his business contacts.

Monica Hall

Monica is a busy bee. She’s always either in a meeting or scheduling one. Handling the day-to-day duties of Raviga’s tech investment business, she is often fielding pitches and working directly with tech folks—all under the watchful demands of Laurie Bream.

The product feature designed for Monica: Team task management

When Monica drops the ball, it affects everything around her. With team task management, she can not only keep herself on track, but help the team around her. Insightly’s team task management feature is like a shared Google calendar, but with all the insight of Insightly!

Pied Piper’s Lesson: The Best CRM for Startups

If any of this hits too close to home, as great satire sometimes does, bear in mind that suffering to the extent of Pied Piper isn’t necessary, or even desirable. Real-world startups benefit by lessening—rather than exaggerating—costly errors. Even if you choose to kick holes in doors and wear rad pajamas to work, the more nefarious outcomes of Season Four can be avoided with Insightly, and your sanity saved to boot.

September 29, 2016

Insightly Recognized By Gartner

Insightly places on the new FrontRunners quadrant for CRM software!

FrontRunners is a new research methodology on Software Advice, powered by Gartner Methodology. Similar in design to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, the FrontRunners quadrant provides a data-driven assessment of top performing products that offer the best capability and value for small businesses. It’s driven by real user reviews and ratings, and verified product data.

The FrontRunners methodology assesses products on two primary dimensions: Capability on the x-axis and Value on the y-axis. The Capability score is based on three criteria: user ratings on capability, a functionality breadth analysis, and a business confidence assessment. Learn more about how Gartner selects top contenders.

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

August 3, 2016

How Pipelines Help SMBs Leap Hurdles Like an Olympian

Every sport has an element of chance that’s impossible to predict. Outdoor games take place regardless of weather conditions, injuries are always a possibility, and many other factors could enter the playing field and swing the odds toward a given team. That’s why professional athletes train to deliver their best performances in any situation. There’s simply too much at stake to leave variables to chance – and for every pro sales team member, the same level of training, dedication and focus pays off.

When you nurture sales prospects through your company’s pipeline, planning in advance will help maintain a lead on your competition. Below are three ways to take a cue from the Olympics, up your sales training schedule and go the extra mile for your customers.

1. Know the course by heart.

When members of the U.S. Olympic track and field team take their starting positions in Rio’s first races, they’ll have memorized the course – twists, hurdles and all. Think of a sales pipeline as a racetrack. By outlining stages and milestones in a new customer’s journey and planning how you’ll benchmark progress, your team will be prepared to track new leads, assign activities, manage workflows and break records.

2. Connect with your audience.

According to McKinsey, 70 percent of buying experiences are affected by how customers feel they’re treated. Just like an athlete winning over new fans, make your customers feel special by connecting at every stage of the pipeline. Whether you’re capturing leads from your website, assigning them to sales team colleagues, converting them into customers or following up with reporting, invoicing and payment, establish a one-on-one relationship that wins over the customer’s loyalty.

3. Simplify the pipeline for your customers.

There’s a reason you’ll see nonstop Olympics coverage on nearly every media and social channel this summer. If following the 2016 Games required too much end-user investment, the Olympics would likely lose viewers and fans. The sales process is no different: when companies centralize prospect information, pipeline status and marketing efforts in one place, it makes being a customer feel like a breeze.

A customer relationship management (CRM) tool can be the unifying force your sales team needs to achieve its goals. Using a CRM to track and organize data as it moves through the sales funnel – and prospect information as leads turn into customers – ensures that every member of your sales team has access to assigned tasks, scheduled events and critical milestones. That level of organization can be a game-changer for a company of any size, but for a small business, CRM can be the difference between placing in the Olympic qualifying trials and bringing home the gold. That’s why Luke Freiler, CEO of Centercode calls his CRM solution a “strategic asset” and its results for the company’s sales pipeline “invaluable,” and why AR&L Managing Director Alex Rhodes notes that her company’s client base increased by 200 percent when it began using a CRM.

Start creating sales opportunities with your pipeline today.

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.

July 28, 2016

Keep Your Business Moving During the Summer Slump

Summer is in full swing, which means warm weather, barbeques, and more time with family. But as you start to trade in your office chairs for beach chairs, remember that your business shouldn’t have to take a vacation. Here are four tips to help keep your business moving forward through the remainder of the summer months.

Plan ahead.

Many companies experience a dip in activity over the summer. It’s important to prepare well in advance so there’s a stream of business to take you through Labor Day. Ahead of the summer months, look at new contacts and prospects that could fuel business during the slower months. Additionally, take a look at your team’s summer vacations to make sure all your customers have a point person checking in regardless of schedules.

Stay visible.

This is your chance to get some quality face time with your customers and strengthen your relationships as their schedules slow down for the summer. A weekly newsletter informing customers and prospects about company updates and new blog posts is a great way to maintain engagement during the summer. Doing so will show customers that you haven’t forgotten them over the holiday months and reminds them why they selected you as a business partner.

Take on a project.
Use the slower-paced period as a time to work on other projects. Redesign your website, brainstorm new ideas or revisit old ones that your team had discussed earlier in the year but couldn’t pursue because of bandwidth. These activities will help you and your team to innovate and continue to move the business forward.

Recharge.

Go on vacation and enjoy the weather while it lasts. Everyone, (yes, that includes you.) needs time to relax and recharge. Take a few days off, and encourage your staff to do the same, so everyone can come back ready to get to work. But make sure you appoint someone to answer any incoming customer queries or questions while you are out!

Use these tips to build up a pipeline that will continue business momentum throughout the slow season. Summer is a great time to refocus and recharge, so take advantage of the slower season to get your business on track for a successful second half of the year.

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

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

July 13, 2016

Are You Using These Insightly Integrations?

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

Accounting and payroll software: Xero & QuickBooks Online

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

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

Proposable

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

MailChimp

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

Evernote

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

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

Zapier

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

PandaDoc

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

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

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

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

July 7, 2016

CRM for All: Consulting

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

To improve workflow

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

To move leads through the sales funnel

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

To boost customer experience

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

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

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