Insightly CRM – user's Blog!

November 20, 2017

8 CRM Features You Might Not Be Using

We all love Insightly. That’s a given.

And, for sales-driven companies like yours, Insightly’s CRM features can be a real lifesaver. Contact management, opportunity tracking, and your Insightly mailbox help you close more deals with less effort.

Though you’re already getting value from Insightly, you might be missing out on some lesser-known features. In this post, I’ll share eight Insightly features worthy of further investigation.

#1: Relationship Tracking

What was the first thing you did after signing up for Insightly?

If you’re like many users, you probably imported all of your contacts, leads, and organizations. You may have even formatted your import file so that certain records (such as contacts and organizations) were linked together. This is a great start, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.

For example, let’s say you have twelve different points of contact at your largest customer. (I don’t envy your situation!) Your initial data import helps you know that all twelve people work there, but what good is that information? You already know who they are and what they do. It would be really nice if you could track who reports to whom (among other things).

Insightly’s relationship tracking is exactly what you need. For any contact, you can scroll down to the “links” section and key in a name. From there, you can indicate relationship status (such as “colleague of,” “boss of,” “friend of,” etc.

Have a unique relationship to capture (such as “doesn’t work well with…”)? You can create your own custom relationship in Insightly in your System Settings.

#2: Free Smartphone App

Sometimes it’s easy to become so focused on the day-to-day that you lose sight of potential efficiency boosters. Case in point? Finding time to download the Insightly smartphone app.

The Insightly app can pretty much do whatever you’d need it to while on the go. With the app, you’ll be able to:

Add new records
Search your contacts
Review pending tasks
Filter pending opportunities
Add updates, notes, files, and more
A bunch of other cool stuff

Wouldn’t it be nice to do these things while out in the field – rather than waiting until you’re back to your desk? The information would still be fresh on your mind, and you’d be much more likely to take action. After all, the moment you return to the office, more pressing things always seem to pop up.

#3: Contact Tagging

Perhaps you’ve heard about record tagging, but you’re just not sure how best to use it. It seems like a useful feature, but it’s so open-ended that the possibilities seem endless – a little too endless.

You’re in luck, as I published this tagging guide almost one year ago (time sure flies). Although you can tag leads, emails, organizations, opportunities, or projects, contact tagging seems like a logical place to start. As I pointed out in the guide, it’s wise to first plan out how tags can best fit your contact management needs.

For example, let’s assume that your company loosely classifies client contacts into three general groups:

Decision maker
Influencer
Support staff

Although most of your contacts fall only into one category, some could justifiably be considered both a decision maker and influencer. In this case, you might create a tag for each grouping, making it easier to filter contacts based on influence.

#4: Start Dates on Tasks

A wise person once said, “Work begun is work half done.”

Insightly certainly makes it easier to organize tasks and projects. But, at the end of the day, it’s up to the user to actually take action. Remember, a great plan offers little value unless it is carried out.

Unlike other project management systems that only provide a due date, Insightly allows users to also specify a task start date.

Start dates change the conversation and help teams to set more realistic expectations. Instead of waiting for an item to become past due, a start date protects the integrity of time-sensitive commitments. When an assignee accepts a task, he implicitly confirms that the proposed timeline (start to finish) seems realistic. If the allotted timetable is unrealistic, then both parties should work together and adjust one or more of the dates accordingly.

#5: Teams

Even if your company has very few employees or subcontractors, I’m sure that there’s a basic definable level of hierarchy.

Take, for example, your web team. Just last month you hired two additional CMS experts (Jorge and Rohit) to make ongoing changes on your site. They’ve joined forces with your lead developer (Alexey) who makes all of the “technical” adjustments, such as hosting or DNS adjustments. Since expanding your web team, more things are getting done. You also seem to be repeating yourself more often:

“Alexey, I don’t care who loads the blog post – can you just figure it out for me?”

“Jorge, would you be available to create this landing page for me?”

“Rohit, I thought Jorge was going to fix that responsiveness issue.”

“Can all three of you send me a monthly report, detailing what exactly you worked on?”

Setting up an Insightly team can help you cut through much of the frustration.

Once created, you’ll be able to assign tasks to the entire team with one single action. When delegating to your team, Insightly will ask you if you want to create:

A single task for the entire team – perfect for when you don’t care who takes action, such as loading the blog post.
A task for each team member – useful for when each person needs to take action, such as sending you the monthly summary report.

No more confusion or overlapping conversations. Just assign it to the team, and let Insightly handle the rest.

#6: Voice Notes

You’ve just wrapped up an important client meeting. Although you did your best to scribble down some notes, sadly your handwriting couldn’t pass a 7th grade penmanship test. Obviously, it’s important to get these notes into Insightly ASAP. Each passing moment reduces the likelihood you’ll be able to read your own notes.

Here’s the problem: Keying in several paragraphs of notes (via your smartphone) is a painful proposition. What would normally take five minutes on your laptop could take much more of your time on your smartphone’s QWERTY keyboard.

What should you do?

Insightly’s audio notes feature is here to help. For any contact, organization, lead, opportunity, or project, you’re able to record up to one hour of content (per audio file). Stop fumbling for the next tiny letter on your smartphone’s keyboard – just speak what’s on your mind and move on to the next task.

Bonus: Here are ten creative suggestions for using Insightly voice notes at your business.

#7: Task “Following”

You’re not a micromanager. On the other hand, there are situations that call for added insight into what’s being done.

Take, for example, the important letter that you need to send to your landlord. Your company has an aggressive expansion plan, which means you need a larger facility. You would be willing to stay put for another year, but you would need an amazing deal on rent. You decide to delegate the creation of this letter to your marketing manager, Tom (who is by far your team’s strongest writer). The task is assigned to Tom (don’t forget to include a “start date”!). Several days pass, and you receive no update from Tom. Has Tom started working on the letter? You won’t know unless you log in to Insightly. That is, unless you’ve started “following” the task.

By adding yourself as a follower (just click on the task’s star icon), you’ll receive a notification each time Tom:

Updates the details of the task
Links the task to something else
Tags or comments on the task
Adds a file

Save yourself time and frustration – start following tasks (and other important records) in Insightly.

#8: Project Categories

If you’re like most companies, you probably provide more than one product or service. In fact, you may offer several different lines of products and services. Because Insightly is more than just a CRM (it’s also a project management system), many businesses use the system to coordinate the many moving parts of order fulfillment.

Take my business as an example. My primary line of work is consulting, which generally involves one of three services: preparing marketing plans, producing content, and providing ongoing advice. In addition, I also write books and develop online training courses for the general public. It’s no wonder that I have the following five project categories in Insightly:

Marketing plan
Blog article
Consulting
Book
Training course

Categorizing my projects helps me visualize how I’m allocating resources. It’s also useful for evaluating potential upsells and cross-sells. (Note: You can enable project categories so that they appear in other records, such as opportunities, tasks, etc. This opens up additional economies of scale, particularly when combined with filtering and reporting.)

What works for one client (or vertical) is bound to benefit another.

Which CRM Features Did I Miss?

What’s your favorite Insightly feature? Reach out and share your thoughts!

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.

May 24, 2017

5 Smart CRM Shortcuts to Impress Your Clients

Consultants are in the business of looking smart in the eyes of our customers. (Whether we are actually smart might be somewhat debatable!)

With client priorities dictating every waking moment, consultants can sometimes fall into the trap of overlooking their own business workflows. Although it’s important to keep your customers top of mind, it’s also wise to constantly refine your own operations.

In this post, I’ll share five easy ways that you can use Insightly to streamline your consulting business – and make a lasting impression with customers.

#1: Onboard Clients in a Couple of Clicks

Today is a great day. Before you sipped your first cup of coffee, you received word that another new client (we’ll call them “Smith Company”) has decided to accept your proposal. This represents an excellent opportunity for your firm, and you’re obviously very excited.

As you’ve done many times before, you head over to your Insightly account, find the opportunity record, and mark it as “won.” For good measure, you even convert the opportunity to a project. After adding a few notes to the new project record, you move on to the next item on your to-do list. Perhaps this afternoon you’ll have time to officially get things moving for the new client.

Unfortunately, your day doesn’t go exactly as planned. An existing client has an unexpected emergency pop up, sending you into an all-day meeting. A different client keeps pinging you, consuming any excess brain power you can muster. Smith Company is just going to have to wait until tomorrow.

More than 24 hours pass before the team at Smith Company receives your canned “welcome” email. At this time, you also assign a few tasks to your project manager. You even add a task for yourself so that you remember to schedule a kickoff call. The folks at Smith Company respond quickly to your email, and the ball is in motion.

There’s nothing necessarily “wrong” with your current approach. But, wouldn’t a more expedited process reduce client wait time and make you happier? Sure it would! Here’s how Insightly can accommodate that.

By leveraging the power of workflow automation, Insightly can do all the administrative work on your behalf. For example, you could configure an Insightly workflow to do the following:

Instantly send a prebuilt onboarding email template to your contacts at Smith Company
Assign tasks to your project manager
Assign yourself a reminder to schedule the kickoff call

In a matter of clicks, you could instantly set the wheels in motion when the deal closes – rather than manually doing the exact same thing a day (or more) later. Smith Company would certainly be impressed by your attentiveness, and your project manager could get to work sooner.

#2: Respond to Leads Faster (with Better Info)

Streamlining the customer onboarding process is a great first step, but what about automated lead engagement? Despite being an important part of your future viability, courting new business can be rather distracting to your workday.

Once again, Insightly email templates can come in handy here, too.

Stop and think about the most common questions that leads ask you. In my line of work (marketing consulting), these are the most common ones I get:

How much do you charge for content marketing services?
Can you send me some examples of your work?
Do you have experience developing marketing plans?
Can you help me with my social media?
I need help with my website – can you point me in the right direction?

For the better part of a decade, I’ve answered questions like these countless different ways. And, I’m ashamed to admit, I usually just fire off a quick, one-off answer. A better approach would leverage the power of Insightly email templates. So, as new web leads come in via a web-to-lead form, answering questions becomes as easy as clicking the “Actions” dropdown, selecting the appropriate template, and sending the message.

By building response templates for every common question, you could save hours of time each year and avoid forgetting key details.

Had I followed my own advice from day one, I would have probably saved dozens of hours. Lesson learned!

#3: Host Better Meetings with Tags & Pipelines

Clients love to have meetings with you. After all, your advice matters to them. The most direct way to get such advice? You guessed it….meetings!

The simple act of meeting preparation can be very time consuming. You never know when clients will expect you to run the show, so the prudent consultant always has a few discussion topics up his or her sleeve.

By living and breathing Insightly, you can ensure there’s always something to talk about with clients. Pipeline views and tags are particularly useful for structuring meeting conversations. Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

As you know, most clients love to see the progress you’re making. You could talk until you’re blue in the face, but showing a visual representation of such progress can be much more impactful. For work utilizing pipelines, Insightly natively builds a visual representation in your project dashboard. Before the meeting, just filter your projects to show only those that apply to the given client. Voila, you have a dynamic explanation of the client’s initiatives, which can be provided as a screenshot or through browser sharing.

Likewise, tags can help you structure a meeting agenda in minutes. This is especially true as your list of client-specific projects grows beyond more than a few. For projects that require in-depth discussion, you might create a tag called “stuck” or “to discuss.” Filtering for that particular tag presents a list of pre-filtered discussion topics, making you look like a genius.

#4: Capture Client Ideas from Your Inbox

Your clients send you plenty of ideas. Here’s the problem: they always seem to forget about their ideas shortly after emailing you.

Luckily, they have you to help keep everything organized!

One way you can achieve this goal is by setting up a new project, specifically for collecting their ideas.

As new ideas arrive in your inbox, just forward the email to the project-specific email address. Insightly will automatically link your forwarded email to the “idea bucket” project. Then, the next time you chat with the client, you’ll have a real-time feed of all their latest ideas.

Stop digging through your inbox for an email you’ll never find. Instead, make a habit of getting each new idea into Insightly as quickly as possible. Your clients will thank you, and you’re bound to yield new revenue-producing opportunities – simply by clicking “forward.”

#5: Create Accountability with Recurrence Patterns

You can’t do your job without clients providing some level of input. All of the best strategies in the world will fail unless your customers are willing to do their part, too.

Many of these client responsibilities, especially for longer-term relationships, tend to happen on a repeating pattern. For example, in my life as a marketing consultant, I’m constantly asking for the following:

Topics to include in the monthly newsletter
New features worth mentioning on social media
Quarterly budget approvals
Ideas for upcoming blog posts
Updates from product development teams

Granted, some of these could be addressed in your ongoing meetings with clients. In reality, most meetings tend to focus on new ideas – rather than ongoing responsibilities.

One way to create accountability is by setting up repeating tasks and email reminders in Insightly. In a perfect world, your clients would have their own instances of Insightly, allowing you to assign work directly to them. If your clients use a different system (or none at all), the next best solution is to assign the tasks to yourself and forward (or auto-forward) the email reminder to the appropriate stakeholder.

Take a monthly newsletter for example. As an outside consultant, it’s literally impossible for me to come up with 100% of the content by myself. I need input from inside team members in order to do my job and produce an engaging work product. If a newsletter needs to go out during the last week of each month, setting a repeating monthly task for mid-month could be helpful. This way, there’s plenty of time to collect the information I need to hit the deadline. Internal stakeholders will also appreciate the grace period, rather than a last-minute fire drill.

Maximize the Usefulness of Your Insightly Toolbox

As you can see, a tool like Insightly offers endless possibilities for the efficiency-minded consultant. Invest time in getting to know the best practices for using Insightly more efficiently. You can even watch free videos and recorded webinars, packed full of tips for maximizing the usefulness of your Insightly account.

Now go out there and really impress your clients – with less effort!

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.

September 19, 2016

Why Investing in Gratitude Pays Dividends in Happiness

When you’re on that business hustle trying to get deals done, following up, getting disappointed and generally putting out fires, it’s exhausting. Business can get to the point where the humanity of it all is totally stripped out. A few months ago, all I was looking for was traction. I needed a lead, sale, or any sign that I was creating momentum for my business.

So I decided to do something really backwards…

Here are my preliminary results:

5 dinner/lunch/breakfast invites
50+ contacts responding to me (so far)
8 babies born
5 new sales
4 new marriages
500%+ happiness in my startup life

All because of a simple 20 word email.

I sent the email as part of an experiment to see if I could actually automate the process of manufacturing gratitude.

After so many years of hearing the platitude, after this experiment, I am starting to believe that gratitude is actually the key to happiness.

Here’s what I am going to do:

I am going to show you the email.
Break down how it’s connected to the secret of happiness.
Show you how to use it in your life to generate a continuous stream of gratitude.

Before I go into in specifics of the experiment, if you’re short on time, check out the detailed instructions (w/ screenshots) and video tutorial I’ve prepared for you.

The Gratitude Email

Here is a screenshot of the email:

Simple, right?

It wasn’t always that way.

I was going through a particularly down period. I was doubting myself and feeling my like I didn’t have much to offer the world. So I did something drastic.

I knew that my life was full of great people. So just to feel like I had something to offer, I told them why I thought they were great.

My first gratitude email experiment actually looked like the email below:

I would send the people I admired in my life unsolicited emails with the same subject line “Justified Effusive Praise”.

The responses were amazing.

The responses were a tremendous boost to my mood.

As long as I sent one email a day, I would get these tremendous responses back.

The issue I ran into was discipline.

The emails were emotionally draining and sometimes took 10, 20, or 30 minutes to write.

The email was simple to write but not simple.

It was still work.

Gratitude emails: Why do they work?

Daily detailed emails of appreciation are a lot of effort.

So why go through the exercise of writing them?

Well, in a word: happiness.

Who doesn’t want happiness in their life?

My friend Gretchen Rubin has a hugely popular blog and New York Times Best Seller book called the Happiness Project.

Happiness is such a big deal that there are apps dedicated only to happiness like Happier.

This Gallop poll study says 70% of people are unhappy at work.

Think about this for a second. If you are the unhappy boss, you might be dragging the moral down in your company.

Most importantly, happy people tend to live better, longer, and more productive lives.

If you’re working in or on a startup like me, you might say being truly happy could be a key in unlocking huge gains in productivity and growth for your company.

Yes, I know there those of you who could care less about happiness and just want money.

Long term, most of the research suggests money, prestige, and all the stuff you gain through achievement serve as temporary cheap highs that you keep chasing.

Okay, I want happiness. How do I get it?

When I was young I use think the whole gratitude leads to happiness thing was a bunch of BS. Turns out there is a lot of scientific evidence proving gratitude is the secret cheat code to creating long term happiness in our lives. Dr. Robert Emmons has done over 10 years of documented research on the effects of gratitude.

If you want to get down and dirty with his findings, you can get his books “Thanks! How Gratitude Can You Make You Happier” and the remix “Gratitude Works!”

Here is one of Dr. Emmons’ biggest points on gratitude:

It’s IMPOSSIBLE to have true gratitude and envy at the same time

Gratitude and envy are inversely related.
It’s like walking and stopping at the same time. Not possible.
So if you ain’t busy thinking about your competitor’s business then chances are you are grateful for yours.

So Why Do We Practice Gratitude so little, if it’s so good?

It takes time

We’re busy. We are running around with our task lists on To-doist or your productivity app of choice. It seems like more than ever there is always something to do. We have trouble with trying to escape our business by watching cat videos. Now you want to me sit down and write in my gratitude journal? Please.

2) We get distracted. Those cat vids really suck our time. Along with our jobs, families, community obligations, and snapchat. Think about the last time you sat down and did work for 8 solid hours with no distractions. I’ll wait. Hard to remember right? Yep. We get distracted.

3) We take it for granted. Remember how excited you were when you earned your first dollar? How long did it take for the thrill to wear off? Not long. Now you want more.

Ever heard of the Hedonic Treadmill? It breaks down this phenomenon really well. The hedonic treadmill concept says the rewards we seek quickly get replaced by new, more attractive awards in a continuous cycle.

In the other words, the next sexy shiny thing becomes way more attractive than original thing we salivated over. We’ve all been there in the hedonic cycle. We strive and work hard to get ‘that thing’ then it loses all it’s shine.

Quickly. The irony is we act like we had ‘that thing’ all along after we forget all the work put in to get it.

Right now my business thing is successfully launching Scream Club, a community to help startups master their stress and anxiety in the fall. My personal thing is creating enough income to go out on regular dates with my wife. I’m 1000% sure once I reach these goals, they won’t feel as special anymore.

Manufacturing Gratitude: The Simple Way

Let me break down my simple method of manufacturing gratitude.

Step 1. Pick a group of people

In my case, I found a little less than 200 friends/contacts that I had not checked-in with in more than 3 months. You can easily do this in Google contacts or your email address book of choice. Your number of people could be as small as 50.

Step 2. Add their names and emails to a Google Sheet

Step 3. Use the Google Sheets add-on ‘Mail Merge with Attachments’ to draft a message

Step 4. Draft a simple email message.

My goal was to use 10 words and I ended up using 20.

Your message should sound like it’s coming from you.

If you copy my exact email, your results may vary.

Step 5. Make sure to add the {{First Name}} merge field in the email.

This way the mail merge will insert each person’s first name in every individual email.

Step 6. Send the message!

Make sure to send a test email to yourself to make sure there are no issues.

Then click ‘Run Mail Merge’ to send all your messages.

The gift of manufacturing gratitude

For my skeptical fellow entrepreneurs, the gift of this practice of manufacturing gratitude is not just good feelings or even potential sales. I’ve learned that sending emails where the only ask is “how you doing?” is an act of gratitude itself. If you have leads or customers to email in the first place, you have something! If you have a kind word or simple consideration for another human being you are manufacturing social and emotional currency. You also create a kind of virtuous circle of gratitude.

It was amazing to hear from business contacts with whom I didn’t have strong relationships. They write back with joy about their kids, getting married, or even getting personal things off their chest.

My sense is sometimes your leads or customers are not just looking for the ‘answer’ your product/service provides. Sometimes they just want permission to express themselves.

To be clear, I did get direct and referral sales from these emails. However, the reason I sent the emails was not necessarily to get a response. The act of pressing send reminded me I always have something to offer my contacts, leads, and customers.

If you’ve hit rock bottom in business (I have several times) or gotten stagnant, understand that you too have something to contribute.

Imagining the Possibilities

You can take this method of manufacturing gratitude to a whole other level.

Set it and Forget It:

Schedule your gratitude months and years in advance with services like Bananatag and Boomerang.

Take notes:

Using a CRM like Insightly, you can track responses and keep notes on what you should remember for follow-up conversations.

Re-engage your email list:

Email list services like Mailchimp or Converkit, will allow you to send your gratitude message to much bigger groups of people.

Follow Up: Try your own gratitude experiment

Want to replicate the effect of this experiment?
Here’s a step by step written and video tutorial I’ve recorded to show exactly how to implement manufacturing gratitude in your business.

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.

derrick-duplessy-square-500

Derrick Duplessy is Founder of Scream Club, a community to help startups master stress and anxiety. His Purpose Rockstar podcast with 50,000 listeners in 120+ countries shares the career stories of successful professionals around the world. He’s been featured in Boston Globe, NPR, and CBS talk show “The Doctors”. Check out more stress relief experiments here.

September 19, 2016

Insightly Grows With You: Creative Services Industry

Creatives, like writers, graphic artists, and videographers, have to juggle a lot of details, especially if you are an independent contractor. Insightly’s CRM can make your life much easier.

We know what it’s like. When you first start, you have just a few clients and projects are easy to track. You create the thing, and you get paid for the thing. Simple. Then your business starts to grow. You make a name for yourself and recommendations start coming in.

Suddenly, you have half a dozen customers and each wants several pieces of content. Your business is growing, and before long, you’re in danger of losing control. Some customers pay your invoices right away, others pay weekly, twice a month, once a month, net 30, or even longer. Now you’re dealing with deadlines, invoicing, new business negotiations, edits…this is not what you signed up for.

Contact Management

Over time, your contacts grow. You have a client list, of course, but you also have other creatives you trade work with or hire. Writers need graphics, videographers need scripts, graphic artists need text for infographics. We all cooperate with others to some extent.

Networking is another critical component to your business strategy. To help gain attention to your work, you may want to build a network of influencers. When your work is published, an engaged network will help you promote it.

Integrate and Organize

Let’s be honest. Most creatives are anything but organized. While there are exceptions, for the most part, we are messy, chaotic, and distracted. That can make the administration part of business difficult. Who wants to chase payments when we can be creating art?

Insightly integrations are the answer. Having all your information and projects for each client in one place allows you to stay on top of all those details and still get your work done.

For example, you can:

Connect your accounting program to track invoices, payments, and tax obligations. Insightly integrates with QuickBooks and Xero.
Connect with your calendar to ensure you don’t miss client meetings.
Store your files in the cloud with Box, Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive.
Automate your proposals.
Call or text via Google Hangouts from your customer record – so everything you need to know is in front of you.

Task Management

Managing projects is easy with Insightly’s task management features. Set milestones, deadlines, and schedule follow-ups to keep you on track.

As you grow, you’ll likely have to hire help. Task management and Insightly integrations will help you manage virtual assistants, ghostwriters, editors, and other creatives you need to finish your projects. Your dashboard will allow you to see everything you need to know about your projects.

You’ll also be able to track metrics. How long does it take to finish certain types of projects? Which customers give you trouble and waste your time? When an old contact gets back in touch, you can check your history together and decide whether to work with them again. Your data will tell you where to concentrate your efforts to make the most money in the least amount of time. And which projects suck up tons of time without paying very well.

Growing With Your Business

You may eventually outgrow a free account. Your ambition may be to manage a team of creatives, or even coach others on how to build their careers. You may land a giant contract with a major brand. Or you may branch out to related work, like writing a novel or becoming a speechwriter. Insightly scales up as you need it. No matter how big you grow, we’ll be there to provide the organization and support you need.

Want to know how CRM helps creative industry professionals grow their businesses? Download our free eBook! From Chaos to Control: How Insightly Helps Advertising and Media Companies Succeed. We used a third party survey service (TechValidate) to interview over 300 creative professionals to reveal how CRM specifically helps creative pros. Download the eBook now!

June 22, 2016

CRM for All: Business Services

The business services segment is broad and encompasses companies across industries that offer a variety of services including marketing and advertising, consulting, legal services, security and many more. While the sector is large, they all share a common need to keep leads, contact information and projects organized. But using pen and paper, email, Excel spreadsheets and/or Google docs to keep information straight and up-to-date is a recipe for disaster. As a result, many business services companies have quickly realized that what they really need is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. And the benefits of implementing a CRM are endless. In fact, according to a recent survey of Insightly business services customers, 49 percent improved the efficiency of a business process with Insightly. So what was the “aha!” moment when these Insightly customers knew they had found a tool that would change the way they did business for the better? We compiled a list of our favorites:

Guidance Aviation: With Insightly, Guidance Aviation reps have successfully used the data stored within the platform to give students more attention and highlight the benefits most likely to suit their needs. This individualized attention has resulted in consistently increasing enrollment rates for both of its programs.

Hive Business: Insightly has become the 7th member of the Hive Business team. Now, sales and marketing can manage and communicate with clients and prospects simply, quickly, and with complete transparency. The efficiency of the company’s sales process has developed from an unknown to a constantly improving figure that allows the team to have confidence that no opportunity is being left behind.

Peter Greeno Photography: Peter’s business relies heavily on referrals, which means he needs to keep each client happy and satisfied throughout the entire process. With Insightly, he can easily keep track of more conversations with potential clients, and as a result, sales have increased substantially. He’s also saving a considerable amount of time on back-end processes, allowing him to invest those resources to grow his business by investing more time into marketing for the next season.

Sandler Training: After just five months of using Insightly, the Absolute Sales Development team, a Sandler Training center based in Miami, completely overhauled its client management process. Employees were eager to use Insightly because it is easy to add new clients, and the organization benefits from having all customer data in one organized database. The intuitive nature of Insightly’s user interface makes it easy and fast for the team to navigate through contacts and sort them to identify tasks.

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.

February 4, 2016

From Widgets to Digits: How CRM Can Streamline Your Supply Chain and Boost Sales

Manufacturing is a complex business. Coordinating your teams so all parts of your supply chain and the business continue to run like a well-oiled machine can be pretty tricky. A customer relationship management (CRM) solution can make a real difference on the operations side of things. By simplifying the information and communications process, you can focus more efforts on sales.

Integrate With Existing Systems

Your supply management includes three core flows: the product, the information, and the finances.

The product flows from the supplier to the consumer, and includes returns and customer service.
The information flow handles the ordering process, providing details on when the order ships, and then tracking the shipment all the way through delivery.
The finances flow handles the credit terms, payment schedule, and ownership arrangements.

The ideal online CRM will easily integrate with your existing systems to handle all the flows of your supply chain management. Integrated systems are not only simpler to implement as part of the operations process, but also a more cost effective approach. An integrated CRM builds seamlessly into the workflow.

Connect With Customers Throughout the Journey

Using a CRM makes it easier to engage prospects and customers about new opportunities. It gives you a central location to put all the customer requirements, and allows you to alert all team members involved, so everyone remains on the same page throughout the journey. 74% of Insightly’s industrial manufacturing customers who used the product at least two to three times per week reported improved internal collaboration and communication.

Customer service is a critical part of the customer journey: before, during, and after the sale. With CRM, when a customer talks to employee 1, 2, and 3, your employees can each leave notes in the system, to make any further communication more personalized. Since 73% of consumers prefer to do business with companies that use personal information to personalize their experience, this type of intuitive service is key. CRM keeps everything more organized, and your customer doesn’t have to waste time repeating the issues.

Data shows the customer service experience is paramount to building loyalty and increasing revenue. A 2012 study from American Express shows 66% of customers are willing to spend more with companies they believe provide excellent customer service, and 75% of customers say they have spent more with a company because of excellent customer service. By 2020, the customer experience is projected to overtake price as the key brand differentiator.

As time goes on, you’ll have a vast library of customer data you can use to fine-tune your product and service offerings to better suit the needs of your customers.

Make Supply Chain Management Easier

There are distributors and suppliers to coordinate with, and tons of data to keep track of along the way. As products move from the supplier to the manufacturer, the wholesaler, the retailer, and finally to the consumer, there’s plenty of room for error. Your CRM will make managing the information, materials, finances, and communication between departments much simpler with a central location for all data.

Your CRM makes it easy to keep track of the current availability of materials and pricing. You’ll be able to manage customer assets, inventory, subscriptions, and software licenses. You’ll even be able to keep track of customer maintenance needs.

Manufacturers are in a highly competitive industry, and need to make use of every available sales channel to offer clients highly personalized service to get the edge. CRM data helps ensure all clients get the level of personalized approach that fosters loyalty, trust, and reliability – which helps boost your sales.