This week Insightly hosted their Q1 Product update call. They shared exciting news about some great new features that will be coming up in the next few weeks.
If you have the Enterprise Edition, these features will be available for you:
Support for Products and Services catalog. Who needs this feature? Manufacturers will certainly benefit from using the product catalog feature. If you have different services, tit will also be great for you.
Pricebooks. This will help you to manage the complexities of bulk pricing or discounts for your partners as well as making it easier to update the prices of your products and services all at once.
Quotes. Yes, you will be able to send quotes from Insightly.
Custom validation rules. This one can help you and your team with data consistency.
Calculated field. I have been looking for this new feature for a while! I know a couple of clients who would benefit from this one. The question is, would they be interested in upgrading to the Enterprise version?
If you have the Professional Edition, you will enjoy:
Mapping visualization tool. I know our customers will love seeing their contacts in a map! You can also create a map to see all your open opportunities. One of my clients, who works with import and export, will love this feature!
Table cards. You can add a table card to view data in your dashboard.
They also shared their customer love improvements, which are available to all Insightly clients.
My favorite new feature: now you can add a new organization record when you are creating a new opportunity. How many times did you try to create a new opportunity and then realized you had to create another organization first? Now, with only a couple more clicks you can add your organization right as you are creating your new opportunity. I want to make sure you don’t miss this new feature! See the screenshot below, just so you know what you look for in your app (note: the quality of the screen shot is not the best, because I had to capture it from the video they posted, since this feature is not available yet).
Now you can create a document right from your Insightly record. How? You can generate a mailing label from the contact record, for instance. You can even use it with your opportunity record to generate a proposal!
Would you like to add an image to your records without it being an attachment? The new Image custom field will come in handy. You can add a picture of the business card to your contact record, or an image of a diagram to your project record.
What is up next for Insightly?
The new feature in their product roadmap that I am most excited about is a visual map of your contact relationships. I can’t wait to see this one!
In this call they also announced that Insightly is working on a new Email Marketing product that will be released later this year.
They want to help small business owners avoid the headache of having to sync data with the Marketing Automation tool.
Their goal is to have a tool that is built in to the same platform that allows small business owners to send rich emails including drip campaigns with branch logic. It might also include sms messages as well.
Are you excited? I am! I am looking forward to seeing their new product.
Jill and John own a small import-export business. They match buyers of dried fruits and nuts with suppliers and then coordinate product delivery through international shipping. (more…)
If you own a business you understand the value of your customers and prospects. That’s why it is so important to connect with your customers in a meaningful way. Converting sales leads into customers and making regular customers enthusiastic promoters of your business are both critical for business growth. And just as important, curtailing customer complaints before they cause damage is something else that is critical to your business. Without a clear plan for damage control or to manage the leads that come in, your business could suffer.
Before digital and advanced software technology was available, businesses had very few marketing options and customers called when they had a problem. Now thanks to technology, hundreds of people may be viewing your website or dissatisfied customers have a variety of ways to contact you with a complaint. Without a clear system to handle the leads, happy customers and dissatisfied customers it can be overwhelming. However there is an answer to the overwhelm. CRM software helps you keep in contact with your customers before a small issue becomes a problem and leads can start feeling a connection with your company immediately.
Organize customer leads
When leads come into your company, CRM software organizes them so you can follow up as soon as they show interest. Without proper follow-up, you could lose a lead or worse yet, it could go to a competitor! CRM not only creates an organizational system for you, but it automates much of the process as well.
Be more effective with email marketing
Sending out mass emails periodically to all your contacts isn’t the most effective way to handle your marketing campaign.
For example, what if your company was having a huge promotion on a product geared specifically for women? Or to further narrow it down, what if the product would likely appeal to women over 50. Maybe it’s a special vitamin supplement or herbal remedy, especially for mature women. A mass email means you are sending this promotion to all your younger female customers as well as to all your men. Not very helpful. This will look like a mass email and can give the impression that you don’t care about or really even know your customers very well. What if at the “push of a button” your email would go only to that customer segment. Your customers would see that you understand their needs. And it not just for B to C businesses. If you’re a manufacturing business of several products and want to reach a certain segment of your distributors with perhaps a certain product or product category, you want that email campaign to go only to the defined target; saving the rest of your distributors for products geared to them. CRM software develops segmented lists for you. This groups your customers into categories. You can even define the categories and change them whenever you want.
Understand your customers better
CRM software helps you understand what your customers like or dislike based on the data it stores about them. Of course, this is dependent on what information they provide you and their purchasing habits. However, even with minimal data, you can understand more about your customers with CRM than if you don’t have it. As you track your sales, you will begin to see trends that clue you in on some important data. For example, the data will indicate how quickly it takes to close a sale with certain customers. If you’re a distributor, you may notice that you close more quickly in some parts of the country than others. You may see a trend that reveals your sales model is effective with business owners who started their business less than 5 years ago. However, in order for these trends to show up and make sense, you need to collect the data.
Obtain metrics about your business
Metrics are an important tool that businesses can use to leverage their marketing efforts. CRM software keeps track of what your customers buy, when they buy things, how much they spend, their personal data (that you ask them for when they visit your website), and more. This gives your business a leveraging tool to understand what is making their business successful – or not. What products do customers like best? For example, you may discover from the data that you will experience seasonal buying highs or lows. This can guide you in your stock inventory amount. You also can use metrics from the type of emails to which your customers respond. Are they clicking on the link in the email? If so, what made that email effective? You want to know what makes your business successful.
If you want to better understand your business, customers, prospects and leads….then The Small Business CRM Coach is here to help! We figure out what type of CRM is best for your company and we even set it all up for you. Click here to schedule a discovery call.
As a consulting firm serving the small business community, we often run into small business owners who don’t have a business forecast. Without one business owners may be missing key opportunities because they can’t define a strategic direction that will enable their business to scale.
Non-profit organizations like yours work hard to improve our world in large and small ways. Their success depends on tracking donors, fundraising, and measuring their impact. But trying to track all that in Excel spreadsheets wastes hours of valuable time and gets confusing really fast. We invite you to consider CRM software to support your good work.
If you think your non-profit is too small for CRM, think again. Let’s look one such software, the Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack, as an example. As its name indicates, it’s specifically designed for non-profit organizations.
Salesforce’s CRM pack isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, thought. You wouldn’t want it if it were, actually. But what that means is you can’t just plop it into what you’re already doing and gain benefits.
When we consult with an organization, we begin with questions to learn about existing business processes. Are they well established and working? Or do we need to start our partnership by helping you map procedures? Without that, no CRM can be customized to do what you need it to do.
Once we, and you, understand clearly the role CRM can play in reaching your goals, we can guide you through all the options to the best one for you. We’ll configure it to your specifications, oversee or carry out the data transfer from your old system, and coach your team to successfully learn and adopt this new tool. They’ll soon experience its benefits, as it saves them valuable time and becomes a growing resource that helps them nurture relationships with donors and volunteers.
Is CRM right for your organization? To help you answer that question, consider these four key benefits of CRM for nonprofits:
Customizable software that meets your needs
Each nonprofit has its own procedures and goals. A very important customization for nonprofits is to track outcome of their initiatives, report it to their donors, and keep their community engaged. With help from someone with technical expertise in CRM, Salesforce can be completely customized to track the information that’s most valuable to yours.
A certain operational maturity is necessary for the most successful custom configuration of CRM. That’s why we invite an organization to examine their business processes early on as well as what data they want to capture. With that in mind, we can set up their system to eliminate wasted time and make it easier to make important decisions, raise more money, and cut expenses.
Make even more meaningful changes in your community by streamlining the efforts of your employees.
All your data in one place
We start by helping our clients move data from old legacy systems or spreadsheets into Salesforce. With all your data in one place, it’s easy to analyze information and watch your organization develop over time.
The Nonprofit Success Pack is a powerful tool that allows nonprofit organizations to compile all your data in one place, assuming all team members are utilizing the system as expected. This is one reason a good consultant will guide you in a strategy to improve buy-in of all stakeholders.
Salesforce for nonprofits integrates directly with your website to automatically save important contact information from donors and constituents directly to your database, making it easy to segment mailing lists to engage the people who impact your organization.
As your communication and tracking improve, you’ll see a real impact on the success of your organization.
Cost-effective solutions
Customizing a CRM for your organization will move you forward. We can guide you toward solutions that meet both your company’s software needs and your budget.
Adopting new software takes time and some specialized skill. Even if you are able to use it “as is,” you will need to be ready to invest either in a staff person getting training from SalesForce or in contracting with a knowledgeable consultant.
If you’re not sure about using a CRM, start with a free version and a few users to see how much it can benefit your workplace. Any nonprofit organization can get up to 10 users for free through the Salesforce Foundation.
Why do we recommend CRM for nonprofits? We recognize the importance of what you are doing and believe this tool can help you do more. Please, reach out to us. We enjoy working with nonprofits. Click here to schedule a discovery call.
Many small businesses think of CRM as interchangeable with email marketing programs like MailChimp or Constant Contact. After all, they house your contacts and keep you in touch with your leads and existing clients. Same thing, right?
Well, no, because that’s just a small sliver of what a CRM system can do for your business.
As great as an email marketing system is, it has definite limitations. A well-integrated CRM, however, is limitless in what it can accomplish.
The main reason many businesses confuse the two is a lack of awareness of what a CRM is really capable of and how it can help businesses with all their marketing efforts.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at three key considerations about CRM and email marketing systems to understand how they are different, and how using them together can contribute to the success of your business.
CRM is your database. Email Marketing just houses your contact information.
The very definition of CRM is contact management. CRM treats contacts as whole people, not just email addresses. Email marketing simply houses how to contact them so you can send them quick campaigns. It tracks how many and who opened your emails and clicked on the links from each campaign, but it doesn’t capture any other information about them or your relationship with them..
A CRM, on the other hand, is your ultimate sales pipeline. It will not only help you maintain a clean database of your contacts, emails and other key information but it will also give you room to customize so you have a complete picture of who you are doing business with.
CRM provides the full picture on business health. Email marketing doesn’t.
CRMs are built to track a multitude of data points, including:
Sales Revenue
Leads
Opportunity Pipeline
Contacts
Companies
Activity tracking
Separately, these data points are valuable because they provide you with the information you need to run marketing campaigns, including email. Combined, they can transform your business by providing valuable and accurate insights on its separate parts as well as the whole.
Using this information, you can improve operations, create targeted marketing campaigns and ensure that your customers and clients experience personalized service from your business. Your CRM will be a data powerhouse, and if you use it to its potential you’ll get maximum results and return on investment.
CRM and Email Marketing make a powerful combination!
Nowhere does it say that CRMs and email marketing cannot get along. Indeed, they can. In fact, they’re better together! But selecting the wisest CRM for you that also integrates with email marketing requires a fair bit of research.
Several available CRM options are able to streamline email marketing integration efforts with their own software. Infusionsoft and The Mission Suite are two of them.
