But what, exactly, do you need to know about each type of customer?

Look beyond buyer personas

Buyer personas are commonly used to describe the types of people who are likely to buy from you. The problem is, personas are primarily a selling tool—so they aren’t designed to be useful after the initial sale. They don’t offer the right insights to help improve the customer experience, build loyalty, or provide the right support at the right time.

For that, you need to understand customers on a different level—their relationship to your company or product, their buying behaviors and motivations, and what makes them happy. While every customer is different, they often share certain characteristics that can help us group them into broad categories that we call types of customers.

Here are six of the most common types of customers, along with recommendations for meeting their unique needs.

6 common types of customers

1. New customers

New customers are those who have just joined your customer base for the first time. When a new customer makes their first purchase, they tend to be more engaged and more receptive to your message than at any other time in the customer relationship. So be sure to make the most of every touch point.

First-time buyers have some unique needs, but they also present unique opportunities. This “honeymoon period” is your best chance to reinforce the purchase decision, build loyalty, and set the stage for repeat business. 

How to embrace new customers:

• Welcome them properly. A well-crafted welcome email (or email series) can help new customers feel appreciated, provide important product information, and ensure they know where to go for help.
• Set them up for success. New customers often need help learning how to use your product or service. Self-serve onboarding resources like walk-throughs, blog posts, demos, and tutorials can help new customers understand your product better and increase stickiness.
• Make help available. There will inevitably be questions your onboarding doesn’t address, so customer service is a must. Make sure your contact information is prominently displayed in all new customer support materials.
• Deepen the relationship. While this probably isn’t the right time for an upsell, new customers can be great candidates for future testimonials, product reviews, and case studies. Build feedback requests into your new customer communications to help identify happy customers who might be willing to sing your praises soon.

2. Potential customers

Potential customers—also known as “lookers” or “prospects” —aren’t actually customers yet. They’re gathering information and exploring their options before making a buying decision. Since they haven’t made a purchase, they’re still somewhere toward the middle of your sales funnel.

Lookers may not be ready to buy yet, but they’re typically looking for a specific product that meets a specific need. That interest level is what separates potential customers from casual website visitors.

The following are some things you can do to move potential customers deeper into the sales funnel and assist with their decision-making.

How to convert potential customers:

• Make a great first impression. You need to create the right experience for your website visitors if you want to turn browsers into buyers. Start with beautiful design and a good user experience (UX), then remove any elements that could be confusing or distracting—like pop-up ads and complex navigation.
• Demonstrate value. Potential customers already have some degree of interest in your product or service, so make it irresistible! Assets like white papers, testimonials, and case studies can show the benefits of your offering without making an overt sales pitch.
• Nurture warm leads. If your potential customer downloads a resource or fills out a contact form, be sure to follow up on that touch point. Adding them to a nurture campaign gives you more opportunities to share information and demonstrate value.
• Offer to help. Make it clear that you’re available to answer any questions a potential customer may have.

3. Impulse customers

Impulse customers make buying decisions in a snap. They are highly emotional buyers who typically don’t spend much time researching their purchase—so they don’t need to be “sold” with a compelling value proposition.

When the mood strikes, the best thing you can do for an impulse customer is get out of their way. Here are some suggestions for appealing to this valuable customer segment.

 How to influence impulse customers:

• Keep things simple. Impulse buyers value an easy and enjoyable shopping experience. The fewer steps required to complete a purchase, the less likely they will lose interest. Remove distractions (like pop-ups) on your landing page and expedite the checkout process with streamlined forms and autofill functionality.
• Offer timely upsells and cross-sells. Once you know what an impulse shopper likes, upselling and cross-selling offers can help you capitalize on their urge to buy. Consider adding “related product” recommendations to various touch points, including the checkout screen, order confirmation, shipping notice, and follow-up emails.
• Enable self-service. Impulse buyers don’t always read the fine print, so they’re more likely to need help with returns and exchanges. Anticipate these interactions and provide easy, self-service processes to keep impulse customers happy (and reduce customer support tickets).

4. Discount customers

Discount customers are the polar opposite of impulse buyers. They know what they want and they recognize the value of your product, but they’re willing to expend a lot of time and effort to find the best deal. Bottom line, they refuse to pay full price.

It’s hard to cultivate loyalty among bargain hunters, as they’re likely to drop your product or service once the discounted pricing expires. Discount customers can be tricky to manage, but here are a few tips.

How to satisfy discount customers:

• Explain the deal. Most discount seekers enjoy research, so give them clear and complete information about the terms of your deal. Make sure they understand exactly what they’re getting, in terms of discount pricing and/or increased value.
• Deliver exceptional service. This is not a customer who’s just going to “let it go” if a coupon or promo code doesn’t work properly. Keep your customer support team up to date on the details of every promotion so they can ensure a smooth transaction every time.
• Provide added value. Before your discounted pricing runs out, reach out with a new or extended offer—especially if it’s something they can’t get anywhere else. Going the extra mile might be enough to keep the discount customer satisfied.

5. Angry customers

Whatever your business, angry customers are inevitable. And while they may be difficult to handle, unhappy customers are a valuable source of feedback. When managed properly, their complaints can uncover critical flaws in your product, service, or processes.

It’s important to remember that angry customers are frustrated for a reason—and delivering good customer service can turn angry customers into your biggest fans. Here are some tips.

How to handle angry customers:

• Have a plan. A confident, positive approach can go a long way toward defusing a difficult situation. Make sure your customer support staff is well-trained, so they aren’t caught off guard by angry customers.
• Practice empathy. One of the most effective ways to handle an angry customer is to simply hear them out. Try to see things from their point of view. Wait to offer a solution until you fully understand the issue, or the customer may end up feeling dismissed.
• Take appropriate action. The resolution to a problem should always fit the circumstances—whether that’s a refund, a replacement, or even a letter of apology. For example, a discount on future purchases will only frustrate a customer who never received their order.

6. Loyal customers

Loyal customers are the gold standard for any business. They love your company and your product. They make repeat purchases year after year. And if you’re lucky, they’re also devoted brand advocates who share their positive experience at every opportunity. 

That said, customer loyalty should never be taken for granted. Long-term customer retention requires deliberate effort, to ensure your fans don’t lose interest over time.

 How to retain loyal customers:

• Highlight their success. Featuring your best customers in a spotlight article or case study can help to increase their exposure, while providing you with a valuable sales asset. You may also consider offering an incentive for referrals and testimonials.
• Invest in loyalty programs. Offering a loyalty discount or bonus program can help to strengthen a long-term relationship. Depending on how they’re structured, loyalty programs can also be a valuable source of behavioral and purchase data.
• Learn from your best customers. Ask for feedback from long-term customers. Find out about their experience; ask how they use your products. Then apply your learnings to improve the customer experience for others or shape future product enhancements.

Delight every type of customer with a customer-centric solution

Today’s customers want relationships, not transactions. At the end of the day, knowing each customer at an individual level—and giving them what they need—means having the right data. From basic contact information and purchase data to deeper insights like customer behaviors, attitudes, and preferences, the right CRM puts customer data at your fingertips so you can deliver an exceptional experience, every time.

Insightly CRM was designed to help teams build lasting customer relationships through a simple, scalable platform. Insightly’s unified solution aligns cross-functional teams like sales, marketing, and customer service on a single, shared data platform with a single customer view. The result? Unprecedented transparency, better decision-making, and a seamless end-to-end customer experience – for all types of customers.

Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today, or request a personalized demo to see how it can help your company achieve its business goals. 

The post 6 Types of Customers and How to Delight Them appeared first on Insightly.

What is Pride Month? Why June?

According to the US Library of Congress, “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Pride Month is currently celebrated each year in the month of June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan. The Stonewall Uprising was a tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States. In the United States the last Sunday in June was initially celebrated as “Gay Pride Day,” but the actual day was flexible. In major cities across the nation the “day” soon grew to encompass a month-long series of events.”

At Insightly, it is our goal to celebrate Pride, not only in June, but in day to day life. For Pride Month 2022, there is a specific line-up of activities and engagements to honor and celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community, with the intention of carrying that sentiment with us throughout the rest of the year. 

Voices of Pride at Insightly

This is what Pride looks like at Insightly:

“Pride month is a great opportunity to celebrate and reflect on the progress that’s been made by the LGBTQ+ community and our allies. I’ve been out for over 20 years. Sharing your unique worldview at work is a powerful way to live with authenticity and integrity. Insightly is incredibly supportive of everyone bringing their whole self to work and celebrates the importance of diverse perspectives.” – Melinda, Director of Product Marketing

“Insightly is the most welcoming and accepting company I’ve ever worked for. Insightly doesn’t just tell me it’s okay to be different, they empower me to be my truest self.” – Christian, Account Executive

“I’m new to Insightly, but I’ve had a blast so far. As an out queer man in 2022, it’s more important than ever to feel both accepted and celebrated at home and at work. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting so many people here that have shown me all that and more. So far so good!” – Harryson, Customer Marketing Manager

How Insightly is celebrating

Here are the initiatives we have planned for Pride Month and beyond. During Pride Month, we will: 

• Disseminate information to our team that will include brief history & facts, LGBTQIA+ TV shows, movies, books, playlists, etc.
• Share ways for our global workforce to show support within their local communities, charities to donate to, and some other educational tips/resources
• Host a free virtual community event called Ask Me Anything: Allyship in the Workplace, led by expert advocate Tiq Milan
• Dedicate the June issue of our company newsletter to Pride month information and resources
• Provide resources and promote use of gender-neutral language
• Provide a variety of Zoom background options celebrating Pride month
• Share the voices of our LGBTQIA+ team members and allies in social media posts
• Host a Pride trivia event

Most importantly, during this month we will listen to the LGBTQIA+ community to learn how to provide support year round. 

What is your company doing for Pride month? Tell us how we can get better! 

The post Insightly Celebrates Pride Month appeared first on Insightly.

These steps are ideal to help you to focus on the problems you are looking to solve and the goals you have. Combining these activities with some objective data will give you an edge to finding the right CRM for your organization. 

Research commissioned on CRM selection

Insightly recently partnered with Ascend2, a B2B research firm, to get insights into how people make this important decision and ways to help them make it a successful one. The report, Choosing the Right CRM to Align Teams: An inside look at how sales, marketing & customer service teams are leveraging their CRM for a better customer experience, is now available for download and review.

The new data reveals how more than 500 sales, marketing and customer service professionals choose a CRM and how they are leveraging their CRM to ensure a best-in-class experience for their customers. 

The report indicates that a customer relationship management (CRM) system can provide businesses of all sizes and industries a host of benefits, and that these systems can be a catalyst for achieving the goals of individual departments and the organization as a whole. 

Finding: CRM is key for delivering exceptional customer experiences

Among the benefits of effectively using a CRM is delivering exceptional customer experiences.

That bodes well for those seeking a CRM since improving the customer experience is a top strategic priority in the year ahead for 55 percent of respondents, second only to growing revenue. 

Further research found that less than one in five respondents rated their organization’s customer experience as exceptional, which is important to note because companies that report the best customer experiences are 2.5 times more likely to report significant revenue growth than all others.

Changing your CRM is common

The study also found that over one-third of organizations will be shopping for a new CRM in the coming year and 45 percent of respondents listed improving customer experience as a top priority in driving the consideration of a new CRM. And for those who currently use a CRM platform and are looking for a change? For those in a manager or director role, the biggest complaints about current platforms being used are missing or inadequate features, cost and difficulty of customization. VPs and executives were more concerned about scalability and costs.

Alignment drives growth

Only one-in-five organizations surveyed report having aligned technology and customer data used by marketing, sales, and customer support/success teams. On the flipside, over one-third of companies with completely aligned technology and customer data across their marketing, sales, and customer success teams saw a significant increase in revenue last year. It’s clear that alignment among teams drives growth.

Benefits of an effective CRM

The top benefits of effectively utilizing a CRM according to those who are extremely satisfied with their solution, include better customer data (44 percent), more organized/streamlined processes (43 percent) and higher sales/faster growth (40 percent).

Across all teams, dashboard visualization of reporting and analytics is essential. Creating a unified view of the customer is imperative to providing an exceptional customer experience.

Over two-thirds (68%) of those surveyed report having customer data stored in multiple locations. Storing customer data across several different platforms limits access across teams and ultimately results in an uninformed and disjointed journey.

A 360-degree unified customer view often includes the following data: 

• CRM and customer data
• Behavioral data
• Marketing channel interactions
• Sales representatives’ interactions
• Support tickets
•  Project status

By enabling this unified customer view, organizations are given a better understanding of the customer. This allows for improved personalization and a better overall customer experience, not to mention more efficient workflows and processes.

The problem with enterprise CRMs 

The data shows that ‘over-buying’ is a real issue in regards to enterprise solutions. It seems that flashy marketing campaigns and big name sponsorships may convince organizations to over-invest in an enterprise solution (e.g. Salesforce) that is really meant for the Fortune 500. Two-thirds of enterprise CRM users are from departments with 50 employees or less. This signals that these organizations have likely over-invested in a solution they likely underutilize. 

The resulting data shows that enterprise CRM users are significantly more likely to complain about initial and ongoing cost of their CRM (41% of Enterprise CRM users list this as a top complaint vs 24% of all others). Clearly, the chosen solution is not a fit.

Integrating with existing systems 

For 40% of those surveyed, integrating a new CRM into existing systems is a major challenge during the implementation process. A CRM that can speak to the rest of your technology stack ensures data accessibility throughout your organization and enable a unified view of the customer.

The most useful integrations according to those surveyed are QuickBooks, ADP, and WordPress, but this varies by who you ask. Sales puts Zoominfo among the top of this list while Customer Success and Ops professionals place a higher value on Workday.

For 40 percent of those surveyed, integrating a new CRM into existing systems is a major challenge during the implementation process. A CRM that can speak to the rest of your technology stack ensures data accessibility throughout your organization and enables a unified view of the customer. 

Project management and CRM is a logical progression

It seems like a natural progression that a prospect becomes a lead, a lead becomes an opportunity, and an opportunity becomes a customer. After that, most CRMs end and projects are moved to a PM tool for execution. A full 93% of those surveyed would adopt a project management tool that was native to their CRM tool to have this continuity rather than exporting data to yet another system. Note: Modern CRMs, like Insightly, have project management functionality built right in.

Failed implementations are costly – in many ways

With any new tool in your organization, the risk of failure is there. Successful adoption is the goal of course, but it doesn’t just happen. Having a plan and a team to guide the process is vital. Failed implementation of a CRM can cost organizations greatly. According to the survey, not overcoming these challenges results in employee frustration, wasted staff time, and missed opportunities for revenue according to 51%, 44%, and 43% of those surveyed respectively. 

In short, every implementation is important, but this is one you have to get right. Steal this proven process from the Insightly implementation experts. 

Methodology, get the full report & more

A custom online questionnaire for the “Choosing the Right CRM to Align Teams” survey was fielded throughout the month of April, 2022 to a panel of 511 professionals representing sales, marketing, customer success, and related operations teams and who self-identified as management through higher-level job functions such as directors, VPs, and executive roles. These individuals represent business-to-business (B2B) organizations in the US with 50 – 500 employees across several industries.

Get your copy of the full report and/or watch a webinar presentation of the results from the head researcher. 

Ready to align your teams? Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today, or request a personalized demo.

The post New research to help companies choose a CRM appeared first on Insightly.

Customer relationship management (CRM) systems simplify the process of managing your customer data and relationships so that you can focus on what you do best. In this post, we will look at how a CRM is vital to your small business and why Insightly is the best platform for supporting your growth.

Why your small business needs a CRM

Creating exceptional experiences for your customers is crucial for all businesses. However, it is even more vital for small businesses. Unlike mid-size and enterprise companies, a single customer can make the difference between staying afloat or losing it all. This means you must go above and beyond to ensure that every customer has such a good experience, that they never consider looking anywhere else.

So how do you go about delivering these winning experiences? It starts with how you manage and utilize the information surrounding your customers. You need to truly understand someone to best serve their needs. In the early stages of your company, it may be tempting to manage your customer information using spreadsheets, physical documents, or even worse – in someone’s head. However, this leads to unwanted inefficiencies as your team must spend more time searching for information. If your team is weighed down by inefficient systems and processes it will lead to wasted time that could be better spent helping your organization grow.

A CRM gives you a centralized place for storing your customer information. By using a single tool, it is easier to ensure that your information is always up to date and easily accessible to everyone on your team. This leads to greater productivity and higher quality service given to your customers.

How you can streamline your sales and marketing with a small business CRM

As a small business with a small team and a small number of customers, you may be wondering if your company really needs a dedicated platform for storing customer information and managing relationships. However, you don’t need to be a large-scale business to benefit from a CRM. Here are some of the ways you can use a CRM platform to help your small business.

Get a 360-degree view of customers

A CRM serves as a central source of truth for everything you need to know about your customers. When you have holistic views of each customer, it is easier to craft high-quality experiences. You can personalize every interaction based on the information you have at your fingertips while ensuring that the timing of your messaging is always aligned. It also leads to consistent engagements across sales, marketing, and customer support.

Get more done faster

Managing all your data from a centralized location allows your team to get more done in less time. Instead of wondering where to find the information they need, everyone can access the CRM to quickly pull any insights as required. When you boost your team’s productivity, you lower your business costs while improving processes. This ultimately leads to more sales and better experiences for your customers. 

Qualify your leads more effectively

New leads are a potential source of revenue for your small business. However, not every lead will be a good fit for your company, and some will be more worthy of your attention than others. Without a good lead management system, your sales team will struggle to achieve their optimal results. A CRM helps you filter and manage your leads so that your sales team only focuses in on those most relevant to your business and more likely to close.

Key functionality of a CRM for a small business

Every small business is different, with a unique set of needs. That said, there are some functional requirements needed in a CRM no matter your specific use cases. Below we will examine some of the essential features to look for in a CRM for small businesses.

Pipeline management and visibility

A CRM should be the backbone for all your sales processes. You want the ability to visualize your entire sales funnel to know exactly where every prospect is in their journey and how they got there. When you have a clear understanding of your sales pipeline, you are better able to track each opportunity and can tailor your communication to only include the most relevant messaging to each prospect.

Contact management

CRM software lets you track every customer detail and interaction. This includes basic information like contact details along with more specific information like the last time you messaged them. A strong platform also comes with the ability to create custom fields for specific details that are important to your business, and the ability to add notes to each contact profile to reflect each interaction. With this information, everyone on your team can pick up a conversation without having to ask repetitive questions.

Workflow automation

Large, small, or a new startup, every business has repetitive tasks. These are often low-value actions but are required for the company to function. When your business is small, these tasks take up a larger portion of your available resources. With a CRM, you can program many of these tasks so that they no longer require manual input.

Integrations

A CRM solution is just one tool your business will rely on. Over the course of operations, you’ll also need tools for accounting, project management, and internal communication. The more effort you need to put into switching between different platforms to perform important tasks, the less time you’ll have for caring for customers and growing your business. This is why you need a CRM that has integration capability.  The best CRM software for small businesses will integrate seamlessly with the other tools used to run your business, making your important customer information available to any other process and system in the company.

Why Insightly is the best small business CRM software

Insightly is a highly customizable solution that offers a wide range of sales, marketing, and management features to help your small business operate more efficiently while creating world-class customer experiences at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Let’s take a look at a few of the distinguishing qualities that make Insightly the best CRM for small businesses:

Quick implementation

A CRM won’t do your business much good if it is difficult to use or if it takes a long time to set up. In fact, nearly 70% of CRM implementations stall due to lack of adoption. Insightly is built with user-friendliness top of mind, ensuring your employees won’t have to waste valuable time simply learning their way around. Plus, the platform is quick to set up, so you can enjoy immediate benefits from adopting a CRM. This ease of use doesn’t limit functionality as you still get all the key features needed to manage your business. 

Workflow and automation

Insightly comes packed with built-in automation features to streamline every aspect of your small business. You can use these capabilities to automate repetitive manual tasks like updating records, sending followups, and routing leads to the best sales rep. By automating away your mundane tasks, your team can spend more time serving customers and engaging in other high-value activities. 

Robust integrations

If a CRM is to serve a single source of truth for your business, you need the ability to bring together all your other tools into the platform. With Insightly, you get powerful pre-made connections for hundreds of the most common business platforms. This includes communication tools such as Slack as well as social media platforms and email marketing tools like Gmail. By integrating Insightly with all your external platforms, you can set up workflow automation to eliminate redundant tasks and the need to switch back and forth between solutions. Via AppConnect, Insightly has more than 500 pre-built integrations available to you.

Customized reporting

Your business may be small, but you can still benefit from the enterprise-grade data visualization capabilities included in Insightly CRM. The platform allows you to create custom dashboards to visualize data and insights for any process happening in your CRM. For example, you can see how many opportunities you have in your pipeline and their projected value, given their current stage. Or, you can view roundups of important projects to know where you stand. By leveraging these insights, you can understand every part of your business to make decisions that drive the best outcomes.

Streamline your business with a user-friendly CRM system

Now you now know some of the immense benefits of implementing a CRM system for your small business. Don’t think you can put off adopting the software until your business is larger and more established. It will only get harder to implement the software when your team and customer base are larger.

Flexible, with affordable pricing, Insightly CRM was made with small businesses in mind, making it well suited to help your company at each stage of its growth. Plus, you can get started for free for up to two users.

Try out a free trial of Insightly CRM or get a personalized demo to see firsthand how the platform can support your small business.

The post Best Small Business CRM: Empower Your Small Business with Insightly appeared first on Insightly.

In this post, we’ll cover some of the key reasons you need a CRM system for your eCommerce business and why Insightly is the best CRM for eCommerce.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

• Why your eCommerce business needs a CRM
• How can you benefit from a CRM for eCommerce?
• What to look for in a CRM for eCommerce
• Why Insightly is the best eCommerce CRM software
• How to win more eCommerce customers with Insightly

Why your eCommerce business needs a CRM

ECommerce is growing, but it is also more competitive than ever before. Customers have countless online stores and marketplaces they can choose from when making a purchase, and it is easier for competitors to enter the market.

If you want to stand out in this hyper-competitive market, you need to deliver best-in-class customer experiences. This means creating holistic views of each of your customers to understand the needs of new buyers to show them the products they are looking for, and analyzing the behavior of past buyers to know how to best keep their interest.

This can be challenging as eCommerce stores inherently lack the ability to interact with customers in person as you would with a traditional brick-and-mortar store. Even more so when data is scattered across multiple tools. eCommerce platforms like Shopify and Magento have customer profiles, but the information is limited, normally only consisting of name and contact information. 

A CRM brings together fragmented data on customer actions from all touch points to give you a centralized repository for storing data and connecting sales and marketing teams. This data allows you to gain insights into your customers’ shopping behavior and purchasing habits. You can see everything from when a customer lasted visited your site to what products are their favorite. 

When this information is consolidated into a single platform, it is far easier for you to target customers with messaging that is relevant to them. By engaging in personalized marketing, you can drive more sales while creating a better overall experience for your buyers.

How can you benefit from a CRM for eCommerce?

Adopting a CRM for your eCommerce store can have a big impact on your bottom line. Data accessibility shortens the sales cycle and fosters loyal, long-term customers and strong features improve your business operations. Here are a few of the ways you can use an eCommerce CRM to benefit your business.

Gain detailed insights for marketing

As an eCommerce business, you need powerful analytics and data to market your products effectively. With a CRM, data is gathered from all your marketing channels to provide detailed insights and reports into your eCommerce business.

You can see what pages are the most visited, how many people add products to their catalog, how many abandon their carts, and more. All of this data helps you understand the shopping patterns and preferences of your customers.  With this information, you can quickly identify your strengths and points of weakness in your shopping experience. For example, you might notice new customers prefer a specific type of product then choose to feature this product more prominently in your marketing.

Segment customers by interest

Segmentation is critical to ensuring that each customer receives an experience relevant to them. With an eCommerce CRM, you have the ability to create highly targeted segments for all of your contacts. You can then create personalized marketing message tailored to each of your customers.

These segments can be created using a variety of criteria. For example, you can create unique groups based on total spent, past products purchased, pages visited, and more.

Boost business efficiency with automation 

Without a system for streamlining all the tasks needed to run your business, even the most organized and efficient organizations can only operate at a fraction of their capacity. When your team gets less done, it ultimately leads to a poor experience for your customers and less revenue for the company.

A good eCommerce CRM lets you automate processes and redundant tasks. This gives your team more time to focus on engaging customers and creating the quality experiences needed to stand out in a competitive marketplace.

What to look for in a CRM for eCommerce

With a better understanding of how to use a CRM to improve your eCommerce business, let’s examine the key functionalities to look for in a CRM solution:

Data security and compliance

Securing your data is vital to the longevity of your company. One data breach can tarnish your brand’s reputation past the point of recovery. Because a CRM serves as a centralized repository for all your customer data, it needs to be completely protected from all security threats.

A good CRM meets all the industry-standard security compliances. There are security features like two factor authentications and all data is encrypted in transit and at rest.

Customization

No two eCommerce businesses are the same. This means that there is no standard CRM layout or set of features that will work for every company. Because of this, a good CRM for eCommerce needs to be highly customizable.

You want to be able to customize the interface and functionalities as needed. This means customizing sales funnels, building custom reports, and creating custom fields and templates to use for your records.

Integrations

When evaluating CRM software for your eCommerce store, it is also important to find a platform that can integrate with the other tools your business uses. To start, the CRM will obviously need to work with your eCommerce platform in order to gather data such as orders and sales histories. Other useful integrations include accounting software and any lead generation tools.

Like automation, strong integrations help you save considerable time. It frees you from having to hop back and forth between different platforms to review data or complete tasks.

Why Insightly is the best eCommerce CRM software

Insightly CRM is designed to help small and medium eCommerce businesses provide the great experiences needed to make a difference in a competitive market. It lets you bring all aspects of managing your customer relationships into an easy-to-use, all-in-one platform. Here are some of the distinguishing features that make Insightly the best CRM for eCommerce:

Holistic and unified data

Today’s buyers interact with your business through a variety of touch points. Someone may first discover your business through social media, view your store on their mobile device and complete their purchase through their laptop. You need the ability to track this entire journey to really understand your customers.

Insightly connects data from all these interactions to give you a unified view of all your leads and customers. With the data, everyone on your team is on the same page and has access to the information needed to create successful campaigns. They can then have more meaningful interactions to boost conversions while working better without the need to switch between tools. Customer support can know someone’s purchase history in real-time to quickly find a solution to their problem.

Audience segmentation

Age, location, browsing behavior, and other characteristics reveal a lot about how to best target a customer. Insightly gives you the ability to segment your audience according to their interests and stage in the customer journey. It ensures that you always send the right message at the right moment for each individual.

Advanced automation

Small and mid-sized eCommerce stores need tools to get more done with fewer resources. Insightly makes it easy to create workflows to break down your manual process into smaller, repeatable steps that the CRM can perform automatically. You can automatically update records to reflect each customer interaction and save time by automating many of your administrative processes.

With Insightly, you are also able to automate your email marketing efforts so that your team can focus on devising winning campaigns. For example, you can set up an automated email message for previous customers that have not engaged with your business for a few months. Or you can create an abandoned cart series targeting anyone that leaves your site with items in their cart.

Quick implementation and ease of use

CRM software should make running your business easier. With Insightly, you get a platform that is easy to implement and quick to learn. You don’t have to spend unnecessary time onboarding your team. 

Insightly CRM has an intuitive user interface and the features are easy to use so that all team members can utilize full functionalities of the CRM. With Insightly AppConnect, you can quickly set up an integration with eCommerce platforms like Shopify and Magneto. Plus, there are hundreds of other pre-built connections to help you integrate the other apps and tools that your business needs.

Win more eCommerce customers with Insightly

The right CRM software helps your eCommerce business provide great buyer experiences that retain loyal customers. With Insightly, you have an all-in-one tool to know every detail of your customers while improving processes to run your business more efficiently.

Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today, or request a personalized demo to see how it can help your eCommerce store standout.

The post Best Ecommerce CRM: Improve Your Customer Experience with Insightly appeared first on Insightly.

Today’s sales organizations are facing challenges unlike any they’ve seen before—but the most successful teams have always been flexible, agile, and adaptable. The key lies in recognizing potential pitfalls and finding smart ways to overcome them.

As we move to the midpoint of 2022, we’ve compiled this list of top sales challenges for 2022, along with tips and recommendations for navigating them successfully.

Challenge #1: The Great Resignation

According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 48 million people voluntarily left their jobs in 2021. This unprecedented exodus from the workforce—dubbed “the Great Resignation”—has hit sales teams especially hard, with average turnover rates estimated around 35 percent.

Even in the best of times, attrition makes it difficult for sales teams to operate effectively. Sales leaders are forced to focus on hiring and onboarding instead of strategy and execution. Performance suffers as depleted teams struggle to meet revenue goals. And morale declines as those who remain are left to pick up the slack. The best way to protect your team—and the bottom line—is by retaining the employees you already have.

How to manage it

Here are some tips to increase retention and minimize the impact of the Great Resignation:

• Show your appreciation. This should be obvious, but employees are less likely to leave when they feel valued. Take the time to recognize accomplishments and celebrate milestones. Invest in sales training and provide opportunities for career growth. Most importantly, treat each person as an individual—not just a cog in the sales machine. 
• Clarify your employer value proposition. Of course your comp plan should be competitive, but retaining your sales talent is about more than money. Give them something to believe in! Develop clear messaging about your company’s culture, your mission, and your products—and show how you’re making a difference in the world. (This is especially important for Millennials.)
• Uncover the real problems. Despite your best efforts, some people will inevitably choose to leave. As painful as they may be, exit interviews are your best opportunity to discover the issues that are driving talent away, so don’t treat them as a formality.

Challenge #2: Coming out of “pandemic mode”

As we emerge from more than two years of pandemic-induced uncertainty, sales teams everywhere are struggling with the questions of a new reality. Live events are starting to return, but will they ever be the same? How do sales meetings work when my prospects work remotely? Are the virtual processes we put in place on-the-fly appropriate for the long term? 

The fact is, the Covid-19 pandemic forced businesses to innovate, and some of those innovations are more efficient and effective than the old way of doing things. Rather than waiting for a return to “normal,” smart sales teams are seeking a way forward—which requires a creative, hybrid approach that blends digital channels with traditional in-person interactions.

How to make it work for you

As you prepare your team for post-pandemic selling, here are a few recommendations:

• Learn how to work virtual events. In-person conferences are making a comeback, but virtual events are likely here to stay. Without a traditional booth to make connections and book meetings, you’ll need to get creative with your event strategy. Every virtual event is different, so investigate the event platform and agenda to identify the best networking opportunities. Then get involved with the event itself. Attend as many sessions as possible and participate in sidebar chats to make organic connections. 
• Adjust tactics for digital leads. A greater percentage of leads are likely to come from digital sources (rather than trade shows), so you may need to fine-tune your nurture tactics to move them through the funnel. Email remains a go-to channel for sales communications, but consider adding a personalized video to build rapport without face-to-face contact. 
• Invest in training. Now more than ever, sales is an evolving field. A proactive approach to training will keep your team up-to-speed on emerging skills that can help them sell in a virtual-first world. Regular training also keeps everyone aligned and ensures you’re all working toward the same business goals.

Challenge #3: Gen X buyers take the reins

We’ve touched on the Great Resignation, but there’s another employment phenomenon that’s impacting sales teams: the Great Retirement. The Baby Boomers (currently 58-76 years old) are retiring in droves, and the Covid-19 pandemic only accelerated their employment exodus. As of late 2020, nearly 30 million Baby Boomers had retired—and a year later, more than half of adults age 55+ had joined them.

As Baby Boomers vacate long-held leadership roles, a new and different cohort is taking control of B2B buying decisions. Generation X is a much smaller population than either Baby Boomers or Millennials—so they’re frequently overlooked—but understanding the nuances of “Gen X” is now critical to selling success. 

How to embrace it

As you navigate this new generation of B2B buyers, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Gen X values authenticity. Unlike Baby Boomers who don’t mind being “sold,” Gen X buyers value marketing that is personal and authentic. Earn their business by becoming a trusted advisor. Your sales messaging should demonstrate how you can help them achieve a specific business result, like saving money or avoiding risk.
• Gen X questions everything. As the original “latchkey kids,” Gen Xers were often left to fend for themselves, and major economic events like the dot-com bust shaped their formative years. As a result, Gen X buyers tend to be independent thinkers who value data and unbiased research. They want the straight, unvarnished truth—and they want to see the proof, not just the pitch.
• Gen X is tech savvy. Born between 1965 and 1980, Gen Xers have spent their lives adapting to new technology. While they aren’t digital natives, they’re comfortable with a wide variety of digital channels and tech platforms. But they’re also a nostalgic group, so the occasional direct mail campaign may land well—if it’s authentic and well executed. 
• Gen X has unique communication preferences. While Gen Xers are often stereotyped as loners, the isolation of the pandemic affected Gen X buyers just as much as everyone else—so they’re likely ready for some face-to-face contact. Their feelings on phone calls are somewhat ambivalent—they’re more likely to answer than Millennials, but far less likely than Boomers.

Challenge #4: Remote work limits expansion opportunities

“Land and expand” is a popular sales strategy—and with good reason. Starting small and building on that foundational relationship lets you earn more business and land bigger deals throughout an organization. Studies show that 84% of B2B buyers start the purchasing process with a referral, and peer recommendations influence more than 90% of B2B buying decisions.

Of course, expansion becomes more difficult in a remote workplace because your customers aren’t having those everyday water cooler conversations. That means you’ll have to get creative—and proactive—if you want to connect with internal decision-makers.

How to overcome it

Following are some ideas to help jumpstart your expansion efforts:

• Do your homework. Develop a clear value proposition to explain how your solution can help different parts of the prospect organization. The selling points that resonated with your initial contact may not have the same impact in another department.
• Use all the tools at your disposal. Tools like LinkedIn and ZoomInfo make it easy to identify additional prospects within an organization. Your CRM data can also provide extensive insights on the people who make purchase decisions at your target company.
• Be proactive with outreach. If you have a solid relationship with a contact, ask for referrals. Requesting introductions to specific people is usually more effective than a blanket referral request—which makes your prospecting research even more important.

Challenge #5: Lack of alignment between sales, marketing, and success teams

Internal alignment isn’t a new challenge, but it’s even more common among remote teams. In many organizations, the tools to enable remote work were selected hastily and implemented haphazardly, leading to poor integrations and siloed communications. And remote teams tend to communicate less overall, which creates more opportunities for misunderstandings and conflicting priorities. 

Misalignment has significant consequences, including tension between teams, poor customer experience, and missed revenue targets. So it’s in everyone’s best interest to give sales, marketing, and success teams the tools and support they need to work together effectively.

How to fix it

Here are some tips to help you build (or rebuild) alignment between internal teams:

• Leverage technology to improve communication. Real-time chat tools like Slack, Google Chat, and MS Teams can go a long way toward replicating face-to-face conversations. Because they’re so easy, they encourage more frequent and informal communications.

• Schedule recurring meetings. Regular sales team meetings are a must, but you should also schedule monthly or quarterly meetings with marketing and support teams. Meet in person when you can or use video conferencing to increase engagement on remote calls. 

• Get on the same platform. Giving everyone access to the same data is a huge step toward improving alignment. A unified CRM platform (like Insightly) serves as a single source of truth, to give cross-functional teams a 360-degree view of each customer. 
• Optimize integrations. When evaluating your tech stack, consider the tools your team already uses. Any new additions should integrate easily with the tools your team relies on, to increase adoption and utilization.

Meet your toughest sales challenges head-on with Insightly

At the end of the day, the solution to most sales challenges boils down to three things: consistent processes, internal alignment, and deep customer insights. The right CRM puts these goals—and more—within reach.

Insightly CRM was designed to help growing teams develop and manage customer relationships through a simple, scalable platform. Insightly is the only solution that aligns sales, marketing, and services on a single, shared data platform for unprecedented transparency and a seamless end-to-end customer experience. And with its intuitive user interface, Insightly CRM puts customer insights at your fingertips for more strategic decisions and better business outcomes.

Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today, or request a personalized demo to see how it can help your company achieve its business goals. 

The post 2022 Midpoint: Solving the Top 5 B2B Sales Challenges appeared first on Insightly.

Why your healthcare business needs a CRM

Healthcare, like many industries, is built on daily interactions with customers (in this case, patients). Providers must build strong relationships with patients if they seek to stay in business. As the number of available providers continues to increase, it is easier than ever for customers to shop around and find a new healthcare provider. The key to creating meaningful relationships that retain patients for the long term is to truly understand their needs.

Healthcare organizations looking to manage their customer relationships using a disparate set of tools or multiple spreadsheets cannot gather the insights needed to create great experiences. Instead, it takes a comprehensive solution for storing and accessing all your customer data. With a healthcare CRM, you can keep track of all your patient details from one platform. You get a complete view of each individual, and there is no need for your team to hop between platforms to manage patient information.

Additionally, in the healthcare industry, it is vital that you protect all patient data and meet the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) regulations. When engaging with patients through digital channels, you also need to collect and store data in a way that is compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) standards. The right CRM software is both HIPAA and GDPR compliant, allowing it to serve as a central repository for storing and managing your sensitive data.

How you can use a healthcare CRM to improve customer relationships

Let’s examine some specific ways a CRM system can help your healthcare practice.

Better understand your patients’ needs

Providing great customer service requires you to deeply understand your patients’ needs. Healthcare CRM software collects data from every interaction across a variety of touch points and ensures this information is always available and up to date. Housing all this data in a single platform gives you a clear picture of each patient’s journey. You can use this information to know your patients’ greatest needs to provide better service.

More accurate record-keeping

Keeping complete and accurate records is challenging when your practice serves many patients. A study from Surescripts found that over 50% of medical patients have had experiences where their medical history is incomplete or missing when visiting a healthcare provider. This includes not having insurance information on file, not knowing existing medical conditions, and missing personal information among others.

Understandably, poor record-keeping can have a detrimental impact on your customer experiences. It also bogs down your business as you then need to spend your time fixing any issues. CRM systems fix this issue by giving you a centralized repository where you can store customer information. When you use a single tool, everyone knows where to add the information, so it is never misplaced or updated in the wrong system.

Reduce the time it takes to serve patients

Because a healthcare CRM system puts your patients’ details into a single system, it takes far less time for everyone to access vital information like patient medical histories and digital intake forms. With less time spent digging for information, your team can focus on getting to know your patients and establishing strong relationships with them.

Key healthcare CRM functionality

As you can see, there are many ways to utilize a CRM to enhance your healthcare business. Because healthcare is such a unique industry, a CRM system must be made with certain qualities if it is to prove effective. Here are some of the key features to look for in a CRM for healthcare companies:

Data management compliance

Protecting your patients’ private data is of utmost importance. Any CRM platform you consider using for your healthcare company must adhere to the latest security standards. Many companies choose to keep sensitive customer information inside their electronic medical records (EMR) system while using the CRM for non-medical data like contact information. However, if you want your CRM to serve as an all-in-one solution, it must be HIPAA compliant.

Workflow automation

Automation features help to save you both time and resources. For your patients, it provides a more consistent and reliable service as the removal of manual processes leads to a reduction in errors. Look for a CRM that lets you use automation to set up tracking and personalized interactions for each customer. For example, you can tag and segment your patients based on medical conditions and then set up an automated communication sequence that matches their particular needs.

Reports and analytics

A CRM should give you detailed insights into every aspect of your healthcare business. You want the ability to create customized dashboards and reports full of rich data and statistics. With this information, you can make real-time, data-driven decisions to create better outcomes for your business. For example, you can know which department drives the most revenue to make it a focal point of your resources. Or you may notice that patients are less responsive to a certain type of communication and decide to adjust your outreach strategy.

Why Insightly is the best healthcare CRM software

There is no shortage of healthcare CRM software options on the market. Insightly stands out among various platforms as a feature-rich, easy-to-use tool designed to serve as an all-in-one solution for managing the relationships in your healthcare business. Let’s look at some of the key qualities that make Insightly the best healthcare CRM.

Unified patient profiles

Insightly unifies every record from your patients’ medical history into comprehensive profiles housed in one central hub. Scheduled appointments, patient notes, and interaction histories are all there for your teams to quickly access so that they can serve patients quicker. These faster, more attentive interactions result in improved patient management and care and, ultimately, a better reputation and more sales for your practice. 

Data compliance

Insightly offers GDPR and HIPAA compliant transfer and storage of patient records. Your CRM account is protected through a variety of security features, including data encryption and multi-factor authentication. With this industry-standard security, you can use the platform as a central database that can be integrated across all your touch points.

Patient management and segmentation

The best way to connect with patients is to offer personalized care and attention. Insightly comes with powerful segmentation features for you to differentiate your patient engagement based on their unique medical histories and other personal factors. You can use this to deliver personalized messaging before, during, and after visits to boost patient satisfaction and retain more customers.

Integrations

A CRM is a powerful tool, but it is not the only solution you’ll use to manage your business. If you want it to serve as an all-in-one platform, it is important for a CRM to work effectively with your others tools. Insightly excels in this regard as it is built to seamlessly integrate with hundreds of the most popular solutions. With AppConnect, you can easily build automated workflows to reduce the need to hop between tools and ensure everything is in sync between platforms.

Grow your healthcare practice with Insightly

A CRM system can prove an invaluable tool for healthcare professionals looking to create better patient experiences. With a platform like Insightly, you can improve your internal business processes while differentiating yourself from the competition by building stronger relationships.

Get started with a free trial of Insightly CRM today or request a personalized demo to see how it can help your healthcare business.

The post Best Healthcare CRM: Enhance Patient Experiences with Insightly appeared first on Insightly.

Watch the webinar to hear the full set of product updates, or get a summary of Insightly’s new features below.

Watch the webinar

What’s new with Insightly AppConnect?

AppConnect is an integration automation platform that allows you to connect Insightly and its data to all the other software applications you use to get work done every day. Out of the box, it includes over 500 pre-built connectors to applications across HR, Finance, IT, Sales, Marketing, Productivity, and Data storage.

Updates to Insightly AppConnect:

• Added new Marketing, Data Storage, Database Programming Language Connectors
• No usage or record limits or restrictions on data transfers with AppConnect
• New bulk action to run an AppConnect integrations across multiple records
• It’s now much easier to set lookup field values in a recipe in AppConnect

What’s new with Insightly Service?

In September of 2021, Insightly Service was added to the platform. It’s a powerful, yet easy-to-use service and support application that’s built natively within Insightly, connecting seamlessly with all the applications you use today to run your business. Since then, we added a new mobile application for both Apple and Android users, while also updating three key areas of the Service product:

• Knowledge Base 
• Ticketing Management
• Customer Portal 

Knowledge Management Improvements

Insightly’s Knowledge Base is a convenient reference designed to save time and resources for customers. It’s also a great source of all documentation that teams need when learning about the product.

Updates to the Service Knowledge Base within Insightly Service:

• Reorganize articles in bulk
• New Insightly API endpoints for knowledge article management
• Generate a table of contents in an article automatically from a new editor button
• Archive knowledge articles in bulk from within list views
• Last published date field to article lists and details
• New reports available for knowledge base articles

Ticketing Management improvements

Ticketing is at the core of a team’s ability to track, respond to, and manage customer service requests and we have a significant number of feature updates to report here as well.

Updates to ticketing management within Insightly Service:

• New mobile and tablet applications
• New API endpoint for Insightly Service
• @ mention other agents within a ticket comment
• Ability to see when other agents are viewing or responding to a ticket
• Automated customer satisfaction surveys
• Additional capabilities around ticketing merging
• Improvements to processing incoming emails 
• Auto-hiding of quoted reply text in the ticket view 
• Improved visibility of customer service tickets

Customer Portal improvements

Another Insightly Service update is to our community management experience. You can use the customer portal to organize, manage, and order community content like topics and posts, moderate user comments, flag posts and comments as spam, or edit and clean up user-posted content.

Updates to the Customer Portal within Insightly Service:

• New capabilities for moderating, editing, and approving community posts and comments
• Insightly now monitors and auto-flags offensive and spam user-generated content using AI to save time
• Ticket forms in portals can now be completely  customized including custom fields
• New ability to customize 404 pages

What’s new with Insightly Marketing?

Check out these updates to the behavioral analysis and segmentation functionality of Insightly Marketing.

Segmentation improvements

Segmenting your customer base and targeting a subset of people with exactly the right communications or journey is now easier than ever in Insightly Marketing with powerful new capabilities. Users can now segment and filter prospect’s static and dynamic lists by activities including:

• Emails sent
• Journeys completed
• Forms filled
• Web pages viewed
• Links clicked
• Video’s viewed
• Emails opened

Email system improvements

Email systems often include security software that opens and scans every incoming email for malicious content and scams. Those automated bot email opens and clicks can cause issues for marketers in journeys and email analytics. 

Insightly Marketing now includes newly added AI-based capabilities to detect and filter out these automated bot clicks and phantom opens so marketing journeys that branch off email opens or clicks work reliably, lead scoring is accurate, and email engagement analytics are correct.

What’s new with Insightly CRM?

The Insightly team has also been working on ways to not just improve each product’s functionality, but also the integration between products. In the past 6 months, we’ve invested heavily in the integration between Insightly Marketing and Insightly CRM to make it more seamless.

New Cross-Object List Filtering Capabilities

Easily combine Marketing data and CRM data together in the Insightly platform with new capabilities in list filtering:

• Filter CRM contact and organization lists using filter criteria from Insightly Marketing Prospects 
• Filter Leads in Insightly CRM by using filter criteria from Insightly Marketing Prospects
• Filter opportunities by the linked organization fields

New Quotation Productivity Improvements

Easily manage, search, and generate quotes with these updates to the quoting experience within Insightly CRM:

• You can now use the same list filtering and search functionality in the standard list views to quote products, including the ability to filter by multiple fields and search within a list
• Added support for custom fields on quote products and quote line items, and in our API
• Now configure fields displayed in modals for managing quote products & quote templates
• New capability to quickly clone a quote
• Now one click to email linked contacts in opportunities, projects and organizations

What’s new with the Insightly platform?

Rather than just affecting one application, there are several improvements that will affect the entire Insightly platform:

• Configure Insightly to display a fixed number of  columns of data in any details view
• New improvements to email notifications after  bulk updating records
• Search dashboard lists to find the right dashboard & a new setting to lock all dashboard cards in position
• Automatically log back into the last app used
• New detailed login history of every user login for security purposes
• Audit logging now includes a history of changes to made to related links

If you’d like more information about these new features and how you can leverage them within your current Insightly plan, reach out to your Customer Success Manager. 

Looking to upgrade your plan to include Insightly Marketing, AppConnect, or Service? Request a demo.

Request a demo

The post Q2–2022: Product updates to Insightly AppConnect, Service, Marketing, and CRM appeared first on Insightly.

Navigating this complexity in the digital age requires a strong set of tools. A manufacturing customer relationship management (CRM) system is an essential tool for managing your business and understanding your customers’ needs to be able to provide them with a positive experience. In this post, we’ll break down how a manufacturing CRM benefits your business and why Insightly is the best CRM for manufacturing.

Why your manufacturing business needs a CRM

In the manufacturing industry, the success of your business depends on your ability to consistently produce high-quality products and to do so efficiently. Low-quality or defective goods will lead to unhappy customers and will negatively impact your company’s image. The end result is less revenue and more difficulty winning new business.

But, in today’s market, simply producing good products isn’t enough. The most successful manufacturing companies also create great client relationships that match the quality of their products. To provide great client experiences, you need to know the ins and outs of your customers’ needs so that you can provide a service that matches their expectations.

Now, there are plenty of tools and data sources to gather this information. However, challenges arise when your data is spread across multiple platforms. Teams often use different tools, leading to data silos and slow communication to get necessary information. With these limitations, you lack the clarity required to create connected customer experiences.

A manufacturing CRM gives you a single tool for storing and managing your customer data. Everyone on your team can work from the same system, so there are no data silos or need for inefficient methods of collaboration. By bringing all your information into a centralized platform, your business is better equipped for managing leads, converting them into deals, and providing great experiences as customers.

Essential features of a manufacturing CRM

Before you adopt a CRM for your manufacturing, it‘s essential to know what makes a good CRM system. The right tool can have a profound impact on your business success, while a poor selection will lead to suboptimal results. Here are some key functions to look for in a manufacturing CRM.

Pipeline visibility

As a manufacturer, you face the challenge of accurately forecasting your upcoming sales, whether it’s for the upcoming month, quarter, or fiscal year. With long and complex sales cycles, built with many distributors, dealers, and retailers, your marketing and sales teams must create accurate, in-depth projections if the business is to plan effectively.

A manufacturing CRM should give you a single tool to visualize and manage your entire pipeline. You want to see every detail of your current deals as well the value of every open opportunity in your pipeline. With this data, your team can accurately forecast future demand to know exactly where the business stands.

Customizations

No two businesses are the same. Everything from your sales cycles to the nature of your customers will vary based on your unique needs. Because of this, it is important to adopt a CRM platform that is customizable. You want the ability to create custom fields and objects and adjust the steps in your sales process to match your business operations.

Real-time reporting

A good CRM for manufacturing will enhance your data analytics. You want direct, real-time insights into each of your contacts to see how they are evolving through the customer journey. By understanding each customer’s complete picture, you can understand past performance, including which products sell the best and which distributors drive the most revenue. Having this information at your fingertips will help you know where to focus your efforts.

Insightly is the best manufacturing CRM

A CRM for manufacturers should streamline important tasks while giving your team powerful features to help them perform at their best. Insightly comes packed with all the features your manufacturing company needs to create stand-out experiences for your customers.

Here are some of the reasons why Insightly is the best CRM system for your manufacturing business:

Personalized communication 

Insightly comes packed with powerful segmentation features to help you organize your contact lists based on interests, demographics, industry, and more. By creating highly refined audience segments you get clear insight into what past buyers value the most and where new opportunities are in the buying process.

With this information, you can personalize each interaction based on individual interests and needs. By doing so, you create a more relevant and meaningful experience, increasing your ability to build a long-standing relationship with the customer.

Project management built in

Insightly CRM includes project management functionality to help you deliver on projects. You can convert won opportunities to projects and work them inside Insightly, rather than moving them into a separate PM tool. This is not only convenient, it also avoids data loss. From there, you can track project milestones, manage processes, and integrate with external systems to ensure on-time delivery and happy customers.

Reporting and dashboards

With Insightly, you can create customizable dashboards to quickly show the information that is vital to your business. For example, you could set up views to see the value of the current opportunities in your pipeline to create more accurate demand forecasts. Or you can create a visualization for your project pipeline to see how many projects you have going and their current statuses. 

Powerful Integrations

To make the most of a CRM system it needs to be compatible with the other tools your business uses. After all, the end goal of the platform is to boost your overall efficiency and your ability to provide great experiences to customers. 

With AppConnect by Insightly, you get ready-made integrations for hundreds of the most popular business software. This includes accounting software like Quickbooks, HR platforms like BambooHR, and communication apps like Slack. By setting up integrations for your favorite tools, you can automate processes to remove the need to switch between solutions, helping to save valuable time that can be spent on your customers.

Expand your manufacturing business with Insightly

CRM software gives manufacturers the tools to handle the complexity of their business. With Insightly, you can see every detail of your sales pipeline to know exactly where your business stands and the amount of demand to expect in the future. Robust automation streamlines essential processes, freeing you to focus all your attention on what matters most, satisfying your customers.

Start with Insightly CRM, then expand to Insightly Marketing for lead generation and management. Add on Insightly Service to manage customer support ticketing and more. Then, use Insightly AppConnect to integrate the tools you use across your business. Insightly grows with you every step of the way.

Start a free trial of Insightly CRM or request a personalized demo to begin empowering your manufacturing business.

The post Best Manufacturing CRM: Unify Your Business with Insightly appeared first on Insightly.

It’s building a strategy around the tools your company invests in that takes time and effort. Beyond “what are we buying?” you must challenge yourself with “why are we buying this?” and then build a plan to achieve the why. This is called your strategy.

What is a CRM strategy?

A customer relationship management (CRM) strategy is the specific, documented way in which your employees work together within your chosen CRM platform to serve customers and potential customers and elevate the overall customer experience.

Why do you need a CRM strategy?

Sure, you can jump into a platform and pushing data through it, but without a strategy, you’ll be missing out on the true value of your purchase. Here are a few benefits of putting together your CRM strategy:

ROI from your CRM – A CRM is a big investment, so you’ll want to make sure you’re getting a return. Having a strategy in place up front helps you look for the right data points to show the investment is paying off. 

Better sales pipeline – Your pipeline will be under the scrutiny of leadership, so you have to get it right. Part of having your CRM strategy will be defining key terms. Having common definitions that are supported by your CRM will make it easier to forecast your revenue. For instance, does everyone know what constitutes an opportunity? If one rep opens up an opp after a first call and another waits until there is a timeline and a quote, your forecasting will forever be flawed. 

Data you can trust – Some companies subscribe to the “if it’s not in the CRM, it didn’t happen” philosophy. If you make this part of your strategy, you’ll be sure that the data you are reporting is accurate and up to date. Nothing is more troubling than running all sorts of reports only to find that one rep is behind on data entry. Your CRM strategy includes policies that ensure everyone is in the CRM regularly and that data entry is everyone’s process all the time. 

How to build a CRM strategy

Your CRM strategy will be unique to your business and your goals. You can review guides and research options, but ultimately it will be up to your team to build. Here are some ways you can move along that journey:

Define your CRM goals

If this is your first CRM, perhaps your goal is simply to have all of your data in one place and create a single source of truth. If you’ve had more experience with CRMs, you can look to increasing sales rep productivity, or relieve them of manual processes to make them more efficient by using automated workflows. With even more experience,  you can look beyond internal metrics and seek to increase customer satisfaction (NPS, CSAT or the like) or decrease churn rates. 

Map your customers journey

As part of your CRM strategy, you’ll want to step into the shoes of your customer and see what the process is and what improvements can be made. That’s called customer journey mapping. It’s the process of creating a visual step-by-step view of your customers’ interactions with your brand. It seems simple, but it can awaken team members at all levels of flaws and pain points in the system and areas for improvement. With these insights, businesses can optimize their resources to deliver an improved customer experience via the CRM.

Analyze your sales process

It’s always a good time to take a look at your sales process, but when building your CRM strategy, it’s crucial. How are leads routed? What’s the time to first touch? Do you have a self-serve model, or are salespeople required for all deals? How many calls does it take to close? Are reps discounting? What’s the length of the sales cycle and is it getting longer or shorter? Where are deals getting ‘stuck?’ Keep in mind that your sales process should mirror the buyer’s journey. 

Knowing all of this will help you better position your CRM for success. You’ll set up better pipelines, employ custom fields, and create the right reports to get visibility into the business. 

Identify customer touch-points

As part of your journey map, you can identify each customer touch-point. A touch-point is each interaction your business has with your customers. You’ll want to map the touch-points and individually consider each one. Is there a way we can improve this touch-point? Perhaps it’s a form with seven fields. Can we cut that to five? It’s also important to check each touch-point on different devices. It may be a perfectly good touch-point on a desktop, but mobile users may struggle with it.

It’s tempting to complete this exercise and then forget about it, but the best experiences are reviewed regularly for updates and improvements. You should set a schedule for reviewing your touch-points – preferably quarterly.

Assess the data you need to collect

In order to determine  the success of your CRM strategy,  you’ll need data points. This is a good time to determine which data points to collect and measure. 

Caution: there are infinite ways to view, slice and dice data. What means the most to your company? What will the leadership team need to know to make decisions? These are the types of data points on which you should focus when deifining your KPIs in step 7.

To get your ideas flowing, review this list and see what makes sense to track for your organization:

Pre-sale metrics 

• Lead count by source
• Opportunity count by pipeline
• Lead-to-opportunity conversion rate
• Average projected deal revenue 

Post-sale metrics 

• Win percentage
• Revenue per sale
• New revenue per day, week, month, etc. 
• Order volume per sales representative
• Estimated profitability per won deal 

Delivery metrics

• Opportunity-to-project conversion ratio
• Project aging (average number of days or weeks)
• Percentage of past-due projects to total
• Actual cost vs. budget Productivity metrics
• Task completion count
• Tasks completed per team member
• Task duration
• Top-producing team members 

You can roll these metrics up into dashboards for your leadership team and/or for in-house monitors around your company offices.

List the tools your teams are using

Each department in your organization has the applications that are essential to how they operate within your business. Plus, there are some communications tools that are used throughout (looking at you, Slack and Gmail.) You’ll want a comprehensive list of those as you create your CRM strategy. Your CRM is the heart of your business, so it must interact with all of the applications in use. CRM integration creates an accurate, comprehensive picture of your customers and prospects. It improves how you communicate with customers, delivering more value from every interaction. Some CRMs require coding to get integrations to work. This can be costly and time consuming to both set up and maintain, likely by an expert resource or an outside firm. Modern CRMs have no-code, drag and drop functionality for integrations that make building and maintaining them much easier. 

Define your KPIs

Your team should set lofty, yet attainable key performance indicators (KPIs). As noted in section 5, there are many types of data your CRM can report. You’ll choose to roll up those data points into KPIs to share a few vital data points among stakeholders. What specific data points will you look at to determine CRM performance and thus the performance of the business? How will you report on the KPIs and how frequently? These are the questions to answer as part of your CRM strategy.

6 CRM goals examples

Coming up with your goals can be difficult, so below are some examples to help get you started. Your business is unique, however, so you should consider this a starting point and turn these ideas into your own. Consider the metrics that matter most to your business, and determine how the effective use of a CRM can impact them. 

For each goal, be sure to have a metric that you can measure. Below is a list of improvements with a sample goal under each one.

This is not an exhaustive list. You can look at any of the benefits of using a CRM and assign a quantifiable value to it. For example, how can you quantify the benefits of a 360-degree customer view? More accurate customer data? Reduced sales cycle? These can all be part of your goals and strategy.

1. Improve user experience – Achieving 83% customer satisfaction by 12/31.
2. Create personalized campaigns – Improving email click through rates by 8% in Q3.
3. Increase customer loyalty – Increase open rates on customer emails by 4%.
4. Improve your sales process – Use automated workflows to decrease time spent on repeatable tasks by 20%.
5. Track and report sales performance – Improve first response time to leads by 5 minutes.
6. Save your sales reps a lot of time – Automate 5 workflows this quarter.
7.  Bonus goal: Align your teams – Reduce expenses by eliminating apps from your tech stack by 30%.

How can a CRM do that last one? Well, Insightly CRM is part of a powerful platform that puts your CRM tool in the same suite of products as your marketing automation app and your customer service app. This aligns sales, marketing and customer service teams on a single, powerful platform. You have one platform for three teams, saving time on logins and data sharing, while empowering your teams to get the full picture of each customer. 

Choose Insightly CRM to achieve your strategy

Your CRM strategy will ensure that you get the most out of this critical tool and elevate the customer experience. The steps above will ensure that you are on the path to ROI from your CRM investment.

If you are selecting your CRM, put Insightly on your list and set up a free demo and discover how you can grow your business today.

The post How to Build your CRM Strategy (+6 Example CRM Goals) appeared first on Insightly.