Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11
Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on using Insightly CRM, a tip on running your business, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!
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Create Teams to Manage Your Insightly Calendar |
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Creating “Teams” in Insightly can be very helpful in several ways. After you create a team, you can assign a task to more than one person.
Teams work really great with enhancing calendar use. Currently its a bit difficult (and I know Insightly is working on improving the calendar feature) to use the calendar interactively. If I schedule a meeting in the calendar, I cannot invite anyone to it. If you try to use the link function to let a contact know you want them to know about the meeting, it will not alert them.
To get around that, if I wanted to create an event such as a meeting, I would assign a task to a team containing all the people who needed to be at the meeting.
I would schedule the task based on the meeting time and create a reminder. Every member of the team will then be notified and it will go on everyone int the team’s calendar.
This week’s tip was provided by Insightly power user, Jen McHugh. Thanks Jen!
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Take Your Sales to the Top Floor |
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In a sales setting, the stakes are high, and chances are a prospect will decide whether or not to continue exploring a relationship with your company in less than a minute. That puts a lot of pressure on you to develop a perfectly-honed “elevator pitch” that can engage and excite a potential customer in virtually no time at all. Here are two quick tips to get your sales pitch heading right to the top floor. Get Super Specific Brilliant Growth website consultant Alexandra Velez has gotten the pitch down to a science. “Every 130 words equals a minute, so a 15 second pitch is about 30 words. Choose wisely!” she says. Every word is critical, and one of the best word choices, she adds, is to use numbers or quantities to add weight to your pitch. Consider “We reduce pain” vs. “We reduce joint pain by 50 percent in three weeks.” Quantifying your pitch gives it gravity and demands it be taken more seriously. “There’s a tendency to be company oriented rather than customer oriented in pitches,” she adds, so remember to speak primarily to your prospect’s likely paint points, not necessarily your service or product offerings. Eject the Jargon “One very simple key to mastering the pitch is to eliminate all industry jargon,” says financial advisor Pedro Silva. “Words like ‘leverage,’ ‘negotiate,’ ‘manage aspects of,’ and so on come across as pompous. Picture asking a pilot what he does for a living and hearing, ‘I negotiate thrust and acceleration to provide lift sufficient to transport goods to new and existing markets.’ Sounds fancy, but, at the end of the day, you’re a pilot.” Your time-crunched audience does not have time to do the mental gymnastics required to figure out what paradigm you’re shifting. Use simple language to keep your message crystal clear and accessible.
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Creative Ways to Terrify Your Team |
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Team building has gone Friday the 13th thanks to Hoodwinked Escape, a live-action game in which groups must solve puzzles, complete challenges, and decipher clues to get out of an “escape room.” Escape rooms have different themes—a popular one for team-building is the Asylum Room, a creepy, abandoned morgue in which participants are locked in with a slew of serial killers and must figure out who murdered their friend. Founder Michele Ware came up with the idea while looking for the perfect team-building activity for employees at her last job, and Hoodwinked Escapes has already hosted teams from organizations including Empire Blue Cross and Columbia University since December 2015. “Our escape rooms take you out of your normal work environment but still require you to function as a team and achieve a common goal,” Ware says. “Everyone has an hour to work together and get out!” |
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About the author: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
