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June 6, 2017

Time Management Secrets for Marketing Consultants

Time management secrets are essential for marketing consulting success.

Right-brained or left-brained? Creative or analytical? Strategic or tactical?

Marketing consultants have a fine line to walk between ideation and execution. On one hand, we must continuously develop innovative ideas that keep clients ahead of competitors. On the other hand, we also must be highly efficient in the implementation of campaigns and programs.

Luckily, technology is here to help.

1. Strategically Examine Your Work

Before spending too much time on the technology aspect of this article, let’s first step back and examine the bigger picture. If you’ve been in business for very long, you probably have a good feel for your business model. But, have you ever paused to specifically consider the commonality of your client engagements?

To do this, pull out a whiteboard or notebook and list your most important clients near the top. Below each client’s name, answer these questions:

What is the nature of my relationship? (hourly, fixed retainer, per deliverable, etc.)
What services do I provide within the framework of this relationship?
How much do I usually bill for each service?
Do any of these services follow similar production cycles, regardless of the client? (i.e. pitching, drafting, writing, editing, etc.)
Which steps in the production cycles are known to cause bottlenecks?
What do I (or others on my team) regularly forget to do?

What’s the point of doing this exercise? In the context of this discussion, you’ll be setting the groundwork for designing more effective workflows in your project management system. From a broader perspective, you may also identify new upselling opportunities. What works for one client typically works for several!

2. Divide Your Work into Two Camps

I’ve often heard experts compare marketing to an engine. Before you start your vehicle’s engine, you must first put in the right type of fuel. As your car takes you where you need to go, the fuel tank begins to run low. Unless you want to be stranded somewhere, you must continuously refill the tank before reaching empty. And, it’s always wise to have a qualified mechanic to run diagnostics and recommend ongoing preventative maintenance.

Like your car’s engine, your client’s marketing engine depends on you to fuel it. Quality content, wise SEO decisions, clean and mobile-friendly web design, and effective branding are just a few of the important ongoing responsibilities. Much like the mechanic, you also keep a close eye on performance by reviewing web traffic reports, lead data, email analytics, acquisition costs. You use this information to recommend exciting new initiatives, aimed at optimizing performance.

Although there are many moving parts, most tasks usually fall into one of two categories:

Repeating
One-off

Before going any further, make a list of your tasks that repeat. As you look at the many services you provide, it may be surprising to see how many occur on a recurring basis. Unless you’re already using project management software, simply remembering to do these tasks on time can be a chore. Looking at my own to-do list, I must admit there are many recurring responsibilities, such as:

Monthly

Prepare newsletters
Develop content plans
Review and interpret website traffic reports
Send invoices

Weekly

Review and approve social media plans
Publish blog articles
Prepare for 1×1 meetings
Check weekly SEO analysis reports

Daily

Provide feedback to web developers
Provide feedback to graphic team

Identifying your repeating tasks is relatively straightforward. But, what about things that are less predictable? For example, if you’re a digital marketer, you’ve probably helped a client promote a whitepaper or two. At first glance, this seems like a one-time engagement. In reality, although the specific whitepaper is new, the process typically follows a similar pattern. Spend time listing out the steps you typically follow to help bring a downloadable asset to fruition. Your list might include:

Gather content
Edit copy
Ask for client input on draft
Design the layout
Create landing page & thank-you page
Build email nurture sequence
Enable CRM integration for web leads
Seek client’s final approval
Set up goal tracking in analytics package

Go through this process for any other work that requires a specific production workflow but does not necessarily occur within a predictable time frame. Examples might include:

Launch a new website
Promote a webinar
Design a brochure
Write a guest blog post
Produce a training video
Deploy a new CRM system
Implement a marketing automation package

3. Create Standardization with Technology

Now that you’ve documented how your time is spent, the fun can really begin.

A system like Insightly can help create work standardization while simultaneously reducing your propensity toward forgetfulness. To illustrate, let’s see how client invoicing can be streamlined with Insightly.

Most of your clients prefer to be billed monthly. However, you have a few on bi-weekly billing. With everything else on your plate, keeping these dates organized is more challenging than it seems. Forgetting to invoice a client is not only bad for your cash flow, but it also sends the wrong message about your project management skills. If you can’t even send an invoice on time, how can you be trusted with other more important matters?

Automate your client invoicing by setting up repeating tasks in your project management system. For clients on a monthly schedule, you might just set up a single recurring task (to avoid unnecessary task clutter). In Insightly, that might look something like this:

Now, let’s take care of your handful of customers who prefer bi-weekly billing. Set the task to first occur on the next due date and select a repeat schedule of “every two weeks.”

Once set up, each completed task will automatically trigger Insightly to create the next instance on your behalf. Remembering to invoice clients on time just got a lot easier.

By automating your repeating tasks, you’re likely to find new time in your schedule. Reinvest some of this time into building more scalable operations for your business. If you’re using Insightly, you might pre-populate an activity set for each important process.

Recalling the whitepaper example from above, we discussed how the production of such an asset follows a specific, predictable process (gather content, edit copy, design the layout, etc.). Regardless of the whitepaper’s theme, these steps must be followed each and every time. It therefore makes sense to create an activity set to serve as a template for your milestones or project pipelines.

Once created, the activity set can be applied to all future whitepapers that your team produces. Instead of wasting time to figure out what happens next, all of your steps are clearly laid out with a single click.

4. Commit to a Disciplined Work Life

As a marketer, you’re an expert at juggling a lot of things at once. Client meetings, phone calls, emails, and webinars are just a few of the many priorities in your busy workday.

Without a disciplined approach, it can be easy to get very overwhelmed. After all, your clients count on your expertise to grow their businesses. To provide prudent and timely advice, marketers must possess expert-level prioritization skills.

How can you achieve this for your consulting business? Digitizing your to-do list (as outlined in the three previous steps) is a great place to start. Unlike handwritten notes or even a spreadsheet, a project management system helps you to visualize your daily workload. By assigning due dates for yourself, your tasks can be automatically sorted by due date or priority. Log in, get your plan, and stay focused on what’s most important.

It’s important to note that any to-do list (be it digital or paper-based) is only as good as what you make of it. Failure to check it regularly will cause you to only feel further behind.

To avoid this situation, set a goal of checking your to-do list at least daily (preferably in the morning). Identify that which must be done today; anything else can happen as a second priority (or be pushed back to a later date). As you complete tasks, be sure to mark them as “done” in your project management software. This step is particularly important for repeating tasks, as to ensure future tasks get created by the system.

5. Delegate First (When Possible)

An idle task represents a missed opportunity – particularly if it involves work that requires group collaboration. When facing a list of a dozen or more tasks, give preference to those that can be delegated.

For example, let’s say your task list is packed full of (among other things) client infographic ideas. Although you’re not the person who will design the graphics, each concept does require your attention. Before the designer can do his job, you must first scope out the idea, provide detailed instructions, and explain your overall vision. Making this type of delegation doesn’t require a significant investment of your time. But, with everything else on your schedule, it’s natural to push it off for later. Unfortunately, in doing so, your graphic designer will be twiddling his thumbs instead of adding value.

With a rock-solid project management system, you can expedite your delegation process, thereby increasing the likelihood you’ll actually do it. With Insightly, delegating is as easy as updating the assigned user, adding your comments, and saving the record. You can also indicate progress completion, priority, and/or status.

Of course, on unusually hectic days, it may not be possible to find time to delegate. Time management can be well intentioned but not always feasible. That’s OK. Just to be sure to set aside delegation time on your “normal” days (if there ever is such a thing) and always look for things that can be delegated downward. In doing so, you’ll keep others busy, improve your team’s output, and make your workload seem much more attainable.

6. Create Accountability

Even the best of plans are worthless without proper accountability.

As the days and weeks go by, you may be tempted to fall into your old routines. Don’t let this happen to you! Instead, seek technology that can serve as your accountability partner.

For example, Insightly can actually remind you when important tasks are almost due. By enabling task reminders, you can make sure that nothing slips through the cracks. For visibility into tasks assigned to other users, consider building a task report that tracks overdue tasks by owner. Advanced users can even opt to automatically receive emailed reports. Customize the delivery frequency to fit your business model and availability.

From a bigger picture perspective, it’s also wise to incorporate a retrospective process into your project management workflow. Not every project goes as planned, which means there are probably valuable lessons to learn.

As you peruse your list of completed projects (and/or associated tasks), consider these questions.

Did we finish behind, ahead of, or on schedule?
What caused the deviation from our original plan?
Were there certain tasks that held up the process?
Are certain team members consistently clogging things up?
Could some tasks be merged into fewer items, thereby creating less clutter?
Was the client satisfied with the outcome?
How much downtime was attributed to delegation delays?
At the end of the day, was this project profitable for our business?

Of course, an in-depth retrospective doesn’t make sense for every work product. Depending on your business model, it may be best to spot-check at random. Or, it may make more sense to review closed projects over a certain budget or hour amount. Either way, define a process for your business and stick to it. Use this information to further optimize future work and technology decisions.

Better Time Management = Happier Customers

Clients don’t pay you just for the sake of paying you. Rather, the goal for any consultant is to deliver more value than what the client pays. Making the most of every minute, hour, and day with better time management will ensure clients always see you as a net positive asset.

Thankfully, technology continues to provide innovative solutions to even the most difficult productivity challenges. Make time to regularly identify your bottlenecks, map more efficient workflows, and deploy software features that can bring your vision to life.

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.

May 17, 2017

5 Time-Wasting Business Habits & How to Avoid Them

Time goes by much too quickly.

As the leader of a growing business, you know this to be all too true. Days and weeks continue to zip by in a flash, and your strategic priorities seem no closer to implementation.

Although you can’t slow down time, you can identify time-wasting habits that may have formed in your business. Overcoming these habits can free up new time and resources, making goal achievement more feasible.

In this post, we’ll discuss five common time-wasters – and how to overcome them.

1. Constantly Jumping Between Email, Chat, & Social Media

In a perfect world, you’d never be bothered during work hours. Instead of constantly putting out fires, a targeted focus on your ever-growing to-do list could yield significant value.

Unfortunately, your work life is far from perfect (so is everyone else’s by the way). Customers are always emailing you directly. Your team is not shy about pinging you with questions. New sales inquiries and support problems frequently require your input. And, your social media followers always appreciate your pithy thought leadership. All of this is, of course, encouraging news for your business. Clients increasingly trust the brand you’ve built. But, servicing so many requests can quickly grow tiresome and even serve as a distraction for your company’s future growth. Spending every waking hour jumping between your inbox and discussion forums diverts your attention away from your goals.

How can you gain greater control over your schedule without missing opportunities? Here are a few ideas:

Set aside “distraction-free” time each day: Set your IM status to “do not disturb” and close your inbox. Put your smartphone in a different room. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and spend 30 minutes on something you deem to be important. Try this for a couple days and measure the impact. I think you’re going to like it – and, you might even be surprised by how little you’re actually missed!

Study the sensitivity of your response time: Does each request deserve an immediate answer (by you)? How many of your emails are truly “urgent” in nature? Study these types of questions, and you’ll be more likely to identify how much “distraction-free” time you can get away with.

Look for additional things to delegate: Just because you’ve historically done something, it doesn’t mean you should keep doing so. Does it make sense to hire additional staff or freelancers to ease the burden? Perhaps you already have staff who could fill this role? It’s worth considering.

2. Capturing & Organizing Minutes from Meetings

Speaking of things worth delegating, how much time do you spend on glorified administrative work? For example, what percentage of your week is consumed by the seemingly simple task of organizing your own meeting notes?

If you said “not much,” think again.

Let’s say that you typically have between eight and twelve meetings each week (we’ll call it ten on average). You usually create a meeting agenda, share it with your team in advance, and then use the document to capture meeting minutes. After the discussion is over, you spend about fifteen minutes trying to make sense of your notes. You look for any action items and manually enter each one into your project management system. By my math, you’re spending over two hours each week (or 150 minutes to be exact) on post-meeting administrative activities! This is not to mention the time you’re spending during the meeting by trying to multi-task as both scribe and participant.

Here’s a better approach:

Step 1: Before the meeting, identify a related project or customer record via the Insightly mobile app.
Step 2: On the “related” tab for the record, tap the “+” symbol and select “Note with recording.”
Step 3: Let Insightly record the discussion and link the recording to the related entity.
Step 4: Have your administrative assistant listen to the audio transcript and add new tasks on your behalf.
Step 5: Enjoy the additional time in your busy work week!

Optimizing your meetings is only the beginning. With a tool like Insightly, you’re bound to identify other administrative tasks that can either be eliminated, streamlined, or delegated.

3. Waiting for the Next Assignment

Although your to-do list is always overflowing, the same isn’t always true for other members of your team. Granted, some staff members take the initiative and find ways to add value without being asked. Others, however, prefer to take a “wait and see” approach, hoping that you’ll find something for them to do.

Idle staff can be doubly wasteful to your organization. With the proper instruction, they could be helping you work through your overwhelming backlog. This would not only ensure their time is well spent, but it could help you move your vision forward – faster. Instead, idleness is reducing output and inhibiting the realization of your strategic agenda.

To reduce the risk of downtime, it’s important to take a proactive approach to project management. For example, you might:

Tag your projects: People can’t help you if they don’t know what’s on your mind. Consider tagging certain projects that may benefit from team involvement. Doing so will make it easier for staff to view and sort that which is important to you. They can even volunteer for specific tasks, allowing you to expedite the implementation of certain strategic initiatives.

Encourage group discussion: Sometimes a project just needs a healthy discussion to get liftoff. Set up a recurring monthly (or biweekly) calendar invitation, during which your team can collectively review and discuss your tagged projects.

Automate recurring tasks: Just because a specific task is marked as “completed,” it doesn’t mean that it’s done forever. What types of activities does your organization do on a repeating basis? Examples might include: monthly bookkeeping, preparing social media plans, and pulling sales reports. Configure repeating tasks to keep your team on track and avoid downtime.

4. Moving Data From Your CRM to Other Systems

You need timely and accurate data to make informed decisions. And, although you spend much of your day in your CRM, there are other software apps you use to run your business. Exporting, importing, and de-duplicating data lists isn’t exactly the best use of time.

How can you streamline the data management aspect of your business?

For starters, it’s important that you fully understand the native potential of your CRM. For example, some Insightly users overlook the fact that the system offers accelerated sales management and project management under one roof. By simply utilizing the built-in project aspects of Insightly, users can bypass the headaches of porting data between systems. When an opportunity is marked “won,” a new project can be created in less than ten seconds. This is especially useful for business models that require a high-touch fulfillment model.

Naturally, it’s unreasonable to think that your CRM can fulfill every aspect of your technological needs. Even after maximizing the use of a tool like Insightly, your organization will probably still rely on:

Eternal inboxes
Document sharing apps
Accounting & bookkeeping software
Email marketing systems
Scheduling calendars
Customer ticketing software

Before you export another customer data CSV file, it’s worth a look at the native integrations to your CRM. Insightly, for example, offers dozens of easy-to-enable integrations. And, if that’s not enough, you could leverage the power of the Zapier platform and potentially connect your CRM to more than 750 third-party tools.

With each newly enabled integration, your staff is bound to save hours of frustrating, non-value-added administrative work. You’re also in a better position for avoiding data headaches and oversights.

5. Relying Too Heavily on Your Desktop (or Laptop)

Unless you’re a millennial who grew up with a smartphone in hand since childhood, you probably prefer to do certain tasks via your desktop or laptop computer. There’s a certain sense of comfort that comes from your oversized monitor and ergonomic keyboard.

Despite the appeal of a traditional office setting, you and your team might actually be wasting time.

To illustrate this point, let’s imagine you have a busy day scheduled for tomorrow. You’ll be attending an executive networking event at 7:30 am, which is immediately followed by a couple of important on-site client meetings. After that, you’re meeting a potential new hire for lunch. Your afternoon calendar is fairly open, which seems like the perfect opportunity to regroup from the busy morning. Unfortunately, when you arrive back at your desk, a new emergency has arisen. Updating your CRM records will have to wait until tomorrow morning (hopefully there won’t be a new emergency then!).

In this scenario, which depends upon being at your desk and doing work, you’ve let a full day slip by before any follow-up action can occur.

A better approach might have looked like this:

After each event, pull out your smartphone and pop open the Insightly mobile app.

Find the related record and add a voice note (see above) to summarize your notes.

If immediate action is required, assign a task to one of your team members (or yourself!).

Close the app and move on to your next meeting.

By following this process (which takes five minutes or less), you’ll save yourself time later in the day. In addition, your staff can help coordinate the many follow-up activities before you ever get back to your desk. It’s the best of both worlds.

What Other Time-Wasters Do You Struggle With?

Struggling to overcome other time-wasting habits in your business? The first step to improving your situation is to realize a problem exists. Only then can you begin matching technology and other best practices to solve your newfound inefficiencies.

June 20, 2016

6 Research and Data-Backed Email Tips That Will Save You 4+ Hours a Week

A not-so-fun (McKinsey) fact: the average worker spends 28% of his or her time each workweek managing their email. That’s more than 11 hours a week for those with a 9-5, and closer to 20 hours a week for my poor (rich) 70-hour-work-week investment banking friends.

And that’s just at work. Throw in time spent on your personal email, and you’ve probably burned a day of your week just managing your inbox. That’s a lot of time spent in front of a computer or phone screen, maybe even at the cost of being outside in this beautiful summer5 weather. But it doesn’t have to be that way: here are six email efficiency tips to take back more than four hours a week.

Always-connected means always-interruptible

Push back on push-notifications

On average, we receive over 100 emails a day, which corresponds to a lot of annoying push notification chimes or “silent” vibrations. But how often is the interruption worth it? Rarely. The average person deletes half of their incoming emails, and a vast majority of the rest require no immediate action. And those few emails that do? You’ll often get a phone call moments later leading off with “I just sent you an email…”

These 100+ notifications add up. Every time we get a new email, it interrupts our focus for 64 seconds. That’s nearly an hour and a half of lost focus, all to know the moment you got an email regarding a meaningless FitBit achievement.

The solution is simple: kick push notifications. Turn them off for your email, ESPN, Mint.com, Fitbit, and any other app you use. Or at least limit them during work hours by using Android’s Do Not Disturb/priority alerts feature or iOS’s VIP alerts so you only get notifications that are worth losing a minute of focus for (e.g., emails from your babysitter.) Go ahead and turn off email notifications on your PC too.

Read and reply to email in batches and spend 20% less time on email

Disabling push notifications isn’t effective if you still constantly check or reload your inbox. Like a high school senior awaiting their college acceptance letters, we can tend to check our mailboxes eagerly and often. But we should relax a little. As the New York Times reported, not only does placing limits on how frequently you check your inbox reduce stress, but it also allows you to get through the same amount of emails in 20% less time.

Set aside a few times a day (e.g., when you first get into work, after lunch, before you leave) to go through your inbox and send off batches of email. You’re much more productive when sending multiple emails in a row, rather than as you receive them. With all the newfound time you saved, you can actually do the work or plan for the meeting you were emailing about! (If you need help taking a break from your email, you can check out Inbox Pause.)

Time saved by tips 1 & 2: 36 minutes/day, assuming you spend 20% less time on email and currently spend three hours a day across your email accounts.

Get a reply the first time

Schedule your email to hit the recipient’s inbox at the perfect time

One of the best ways to get a response to your email is to have it hit the recipient’s inbox at the most opportune time, which Boomerang found to be at the start of the recipient’s workday (~6-7am local time). Emails sent at this time are three times more likely to be opened than those sent at 4 pm, so clicking “send later” instead of “send” on that email you draft at the end of the day will ultimately save you from having to write more emails. (Send later functionality is just one feature Boomerang offers for Gmail, Outlook, and Android.)

Make your email easy to reply to, via formatting and brevity.

Like ill-timed messages, emails resembling novels also yield poor response rates. Loquacious messages with long paragraphs aren’t only hard to read, they can also difficult to respond to. This leads to a number of potential issues:

You don’t get a reply (too long; didn’t read) and have to follow-up
You get a reply with answers to some questions but not others, still have to follow up
You get an eventual reply, but it’s too late to be useful.

It’s frustrating taking the time to write out a detailed email, only to see it to fail to garner the answers or actions that you sought. You can improve the chances that someone responds to your email (and that they respond quickly and fully) with these three steps:

Bullet questions when you have more than one
Bold and format keywords and phrases that highlight time-sensitivity (e.g., “Please note that I must have all responses by June 25th, 2016”)
Keep your emails as short and simple as possible. Boomerang found that emails between 50-125 words yielded the best response rates (just above 50%) as did emails written at a third-grade reading level.

Time saved by tips 3 & 4: 10 minutes/day via reducing follow-up emails by a few a day

Be a power-user: harness the power of third-party tools and search operators

Save keystrokes and time: configure text expansion and recurring emails

Email involves a lot of repetition (e.g., answering the same questions, sending the same monthly reminders.) There are two powerful (add-on) features that can remove this tedious side of email, automate your emails, and save time while improving accuracy and consistency:

Text expansion allows you to use shorthand abbreviations to quickly output common phrases, paragraphs, or difficult-to-type or hard-to-remember text such as text with accents/symbols or fax/phone numbers.

It’s a simple concept, yet one of the most powerful ways to save time not only in email, but any word-processing application. Templates are useful, but text expansion applications are even more so because they allow you to weave together different paragraphs more easily than copy-pasting chunks from different templates or past emails when you need to answer multiple questions at once.

TextExpander is a popular text expansion tool for OS X, ActiveWords is a good one for Windows, and there are plenty of others too.

Recurring emails are even better than text expansion if you send an identical email over and over again. Whether it’s a twice-a-month time sheet reminder, a weekly reminder to your office to clean out the fridge, or a quarterly reminder to submit financial report paperwork, there’s no need to type out (and remember to send) the same message each time. Here’s how to easily send recurring messages in Gmail for both a given period (e.g., for the next year, forever) and interval (e.g., weekly, daily).

Learn Gmail’s search operators (even if your label and filter game is on point)

There are people that take immense pride in their multiple inbox, multi-tiered label setups within Gmail. And while I can appreciate their masterful organization, these power-users (and everyone else) should still learn the power of Gmail’s advanced search operators, as searching for emails can be three times as effective as using a label or folder system! Here’s three quick examples on how to save time with Gmail’s search operators:

has:attachment – Hunting for that file someone sent you? You may be good at visually filtering out emails based on whether there’s a paperclip signifying an attachment, but you may be scrolling for pages and pages before you find what you need. Appending “has:attachment” to your search will show only threads with an attached file.

filename:jpg – If you have a lot of emails with attachments, using “has:attachment” still may yield pages of results and take a while to wade through. If you know the filetype (e.g., .jpg, .docx, etc.), you can search specifically for attachments with a certain extension. You can also use the boolean OR operator to search for multiple filetypes if you’re looking for an attached image, but aren’t sure of its filetype: “filename:png OR filename:gif OR filename:jpg OR filename:bmp”

before: yyyy/mm/dd – Say you’re looking for a specific email your best friend (that you email a lot) sent back in 2013. You’d probably have to scroll through hundreds of emails if you didn’t know about/use the “before:” operator. Adding “before:2014/01/01” to your search would return only those results before 2014, so you could start your scrolling/search from 2013. (You could also add “after:2012/12/31” if you wanted to exclude results from before 2013!)

I probably use these three operators the most, but there’s so many more to learn! And then you can try out even more powerful ways to combine operators together with wildcards and booleans to hone in on exactly what you’re looking for.

Tips 5 and 6 will save at least 7 minutes/day, and a lot more for those with jobs heavy on sending and responding to emails!

Have your own tips?

These are my favorite six tips, but there’s a lot of other good tricks out there to save time in email. Leave your own time-saving tactics in the comments!

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.

About the author: Brendan is a data scientist at Boomerang where he dives into data sets and tells stories from the patterns he finds. Boomerang is the leader in email productivity software and has helped millions of people focus on the email that matters, when it matters.

March 15, 2016

Community Building

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 running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

	If You Create it They Will Comment
	Developing an online community is a powerful way to communicate and build relationships with your customers. In fact, 71% of companies surveyed report that they useMuch like a living organism, communities do need to be curated and tended to regularly, so before you take the plunge, consider the following: Commit to the Cause Few people enjoy being weighed down by endless rules, but in a community setting with an open forum, order and civility must prevail. What you want to avoid is becoming overly sensitive or defensive. Customers can provide valuable feedback that can help you improve your product or service, so listen and don’t try to stamp out negative/constructive input. It will make your brand appear inauthentic. Appoint a Community Leader Part police-person, part diplomat, part mentor, it can be challenging to act as community leader. Despite its challenges, it’s a worthwhile effort as it gives you a great deal of insight and interaction with those you can truly advocate for your brand. Constantly assess how you feel you are doing in the role and ask for help and feedback from your peers. Understand Your Demographic It may seem obvious but sometimes we can get so caught up in the excitement of our own business ideas that we forget who we are trying to reach. Conduct surveys before and after you launch your new community. Companies like SurveyMonkey and Typeform offer free versions of their survey builder platform. Community members usually fall into a variety of camps: Avid users, casual observers, and those who need help solving a challenge. Your avid users can be a great source of knowledge and they want to share. Make an effort to authentically engage with your super users and show your appreciation.
	Workaround of the Week: Bulk Editing Contacts for Mass Emails
	If you want to send a mass emails to select contacts (and update the “date last contacted” information), you can start by filtering just those contacts you want to include on your mass emailing list. I created an organization titled “MailChimp” (the service I use). I then link this “organization” to the contacts I send mass emails to. This allows me to filter my contacts using the MailChimp link. Once I have my selected my contact list, I’m ready to bulk edit the contacts to reflect the last date contacted via the following steps: Click the “Select All” box to the left of the “Search Contacts” window and the click the pencil icon. Select the “Change Field Value” box (this activates the drop-down window) Scroll to the “Date Last Contacted” (or whatever you’ve chosen to name it when you added the custom field). Select your date, click “Save Bulk Edits” at the bottom of the page, and you just bulk updated your “Date Last Contacted” peeps! This week’s tip comes from Insightly user, Jeffrey House.
	You say tomato. I say, save time. If you find yourself racing around trying to accomplish multiple tasks, but feeling as if you’ve accomplished very little, the Pomodoro Technique might be right for you. The Pomodoro Technique is a proven and popular time management life hack developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s. The main purpose behind the technique is to work in short time bursts (25 minutes) and take regular breaks. Taking short, 5 minute breaks helps keep the mind fresh. The other key principle behind maintaining focus with the pomodoro technique is effectively managing distractions. Here’s how: Remove all distractions (email, phone, unnecessary browser tabs, manage colleague interruptions) Choose a focus task Set the timer to 25 minutes Work on the task until the timer rings Take a 5 minute break Every 4 sessions take a longer break, perhaps 15 or 20 minutes
	Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around. Send Us Your Tips. Would you like to share your tips with Insightly customers? Send them to us! If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card! Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email. 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.

February 9, 2016

Time Savers

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 running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

	Park It Here
	A global survey conducted by IBM in 2011 found that motorists in the U.S. waste 20 minutes of precious time in pursuit of a parking space. Not so great news for business travelers on the road. Fortunately there are some apps for that: BestParking: Available in 105 cities and 115 airports throughout North America, it will find you the best spot, no matter where you are. It even sorts spots by price, so you can instantly visualize where the most affordable (and most expensive) spots are. ParkMe: This app offers the largest and most accurate parking database in the world. With over 84,000 locations in over 64 countries, it can compare the most available spots and save every time you park. The app can even tell you where to find parking up to two weeks into the future. Parker: This app can help you find available parking spots, prices, and hours for 24,000 garages and lots. You can also filter parking spots by space, payment type, and more. Built-in GPS navigation can even guide you to the nearest open spot, so you will never have to drive around confused in a new city again. SpotHero : The app has its own dedicated unsold spots from parking facilities in the area. You can quickly reserve one of those spots from your phone and enjoy a discounted rate in the process. It is available in most large cities and is introducing new locations everyday.
	Save Time By Creating Activity Sets
	If you find that you are eating up time by entering the same tasks or events week after week to qualify leads or meet with new clients, you can build activity sets to generate those tasks or events in fewer steps. Activity sets can be applied directly to leads, contacts, organizations, opportunities and projects, and they can also be associated with stages in an opportunity or project pipeline. We’ll use the process of hiring a new staff member to illustrate how to set up and use an activity set: 1 – Task: Review resumes (due after 2 days) 2 – Task: Create short list of favored applicants (due after 3 days) 3 – Event: Phone interviews of short list (due after 4 days) 4 – Event: In-person interviews with potentials (due after 6 days) 5 – Task: Send out offer letter to successful applicant (due after 7 days) 6 – Task: Confirm acceptance and schedule orientation (due after 14 days) You must be an Insightly administrator to access the system settings. Click Profile icon > System Settings > Activity Sets. Type a name for the set in the Activity Set Name field and click the box or boxes for leads, contacts, organizations, opportunities, or projects. For our example, we’ve entered Staff hire, and ticked the For Projects box, since we use projects to manage staff member recruitment. To begin adding activities to the set, click the Edit Activities link. Click the Choose Activity Type list and select Task or Event. Complete the form for the new activity. Insightly allows you to specify a relative due date by entering the number of days after the activity set start date or the number of days before an activity set end date for each task to fall due. (The start and end dates are selected by the user when the activity set is applied.) Insightly also allows you to skip days like Saturday or Sunday so activities don’t fall on weekends.
	Bittersweet Goodness
	If consuming chocolate is a regular part of your lifestyle routine, there’s good news on the horizon… if you’re willing to make some adjustments and switch to dark chocolate. Research findings show that chocolate in its most pure form can help mitigate the effects of ailments such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and certain cognitive functions. Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around. Send Us Your Tips. Would you like to share your tips with Insightly customers? Send them to us! If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card! Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email. 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.

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Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11

Park It Here

Save Time By Creating Activity Sets

Bittersweet Goodness