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.

Considering drastic changes in mobility and the way people work, the use of business technology is becoming a key differentiator between companies that succeed and those that fail in the digital economy. How does your company stack up?

One way to find out how well business technology supports your team and goals is to perform regular tech audits. Keep reading to learn how to perform a tech audit.

The tech stack

A tech stack is simply a group of technology-based tools that help a business operate more efficiently, market more accurately, and enable sales and services teams to provide a stellar customer experience.

As a business adapts and grows, the tech stack will change. This is also the case for post-pandemic operational needs, as people seek to lower costs and maximize efficiency. Some organizations used this time to clean shops and go lean. Others introduced new technology to improve digital operations and meet new customer trends.

You may find that certain systems have poor integration, run too slowly, or lack the security for an at-home setup. It may be time to evaluate your tech stack.

Why is it important to audit your business technology?

When it comes to modern business needs, there is no “one-size-fits-all” solution. Each brand has unique needs, goals, and challenges. Considering also that new apps and platforms are developed each day, it’s helpful to audit your tech stack to stay on the right track.

A consistent review will help you to:

• Gain better ROI on all software and tools
• Reduce labor costs and employee time
• Consolidate systems and improve integrations
• Maintain a universal source of truth for all data
• Provide better customer experience

The more systems you have, the more critical it is to perform an IT audit. Every app used should be tied back to business strategy—everything from accounting to website management, to customer relationship management (CRM) systems, to social media accounts.

What types of tools are part of a tech stack?

Consider all the tools you need on a daily basis. The best tech stack can include, but is certainly not limited to:

Marketing

• Marketing automation
• Content management system (CMS)
• Lead management, including lead scoring and tracking
• Email automation
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Data analytics
• Ad management tools
• Social media management
• Creative asset
• Chatbot automation

Sales

• Customer relationship management tools (CRM)
• Meeting scheduler
• VoIP/call tracking
• Data management
• Video recording/editing
• Sales enablement

Service

• Ticket management
• Live chat
• Knowledge base
• Help desk automation
• Time tracker
• Survey automation

Signs it’s time to audit your business technology

The major reason to audit your tech stack right now is the shift in the global economy and rise of the remote workplace. From productivity to collaboration to customer management, needs are changing and you may need new and different tools to meet them.

Other factors that will indicate it’s time for a technology audit include:

Data silos

A good sign it’s time to audit is when you start seeing data silos that hinder productivity. When the tech tools you are using don’t communicate with each other, it takes longer to get the job done, causing inefficiencies in both individual and team schedules.

Data silos also hinder collaboration between teams. If departments aren’t pulling the data from the same spot, it’s going to impact the success of operations. It will be hard to distinguish what is working from what is not.

If a system doesn’t easily integrate or is taking up too much time, consider getting rid of it or replacing it with a flexible alternative.

Bad data

If you are brewing mistrust for your data, it’s time for a tech audit. Inconsistencies, errors, duplicates, and problems with shared information can all lead to disaster.

If not right away, the loss of labor over time (to fix these issues) can certainly add up. Don’t let problems go unresolved. If a system isn’t working, fix it, upgrade it, or get rid of it.

Wasted time

As more people start working from home, businesses are brutally aware of wasted labor. If people are used to operating with mediocre software, all their time is spent working out the kinks, rather than shopping for a better solution.

Spending too much time on tools because you don’t know how they function is also a sign it’s time for a system audit.

Consider adopting easy-to-use, intuitive systems and training new staff around the tech stack as part of the onboarding process. This ensures high adoption rates and consistent usage of key systems.

Duplicate functions

Sometimes your tech software features overlap. If two separate systems do the same thing, you probably don’t need them both. You may decide to choose to keep only one or purchase a new system that can completely replace both systems.

Budget changes

If you need to get a new budget approved, it’s time for a tech audit.

Here are a few questions to consider:

• Are you seeing a return on investment (ROI) from the technology you use now?
• Are the number of paid users the same as the number of people using it? Or, what is the system adoption and usage rate?
• Do the tools fit in with your long-term goals?

How to conduct a business technology audit

When it comes to performing the actual audit, every business has its own method to the madness. Start with the following considerations:

• How, where, and when a tool is used in business processes
• The cost to move to a different system
• The number of needs a single tool or system meets for the business
• Systems with overlapping functions
• Can you scale your business with the existing tech stack?

Instead of directing all your attention to the apps themselves, a better approach is to think about the business processes they support.

You should also consider how each tech tool affects employee performance and productivity. This will have a direct influence on the customer experience.

The audit process: step-by-step

The best way to determine if you have the right business technology in place is to make a list of what you already have. Ask the following questions:

• What tools am I paying for?
• How many licenses/users does each program have?
• What does each tool do?
• How are all of the systems connected to each other?
• What critical business needs does each system serve?
• How much does each solution cost?

Once you have a broader view of exactly what’s running operations, follow through with these IT audit steps:

1. Conduct a security sweep of the network and every device attached to it
2. Audit the software in use
3. Consolidate the hardware
4. Inspect all security and backup systems
5. Audit the document management system
6. Ensure the company has a strategic technology plan

Deciding on what you need

When it comes to accommodating the gig economy, there are a few solutions that are critical for success. Here are a few things you’ll need for remote workers:

Secure and easy access tools

If you provide remote workers with tools that are too complicated or have a sharp learning curve, chances are they’ll go back to using their own. If your VPN is too slow for company apps, workers may end up using unsanctioned online tools.

Remote collaboration apps make it easier for people to work from home—and that’s the whole point.

Leveraging the cloud

Most modern brands have a heavy hand in the cloud and SaaS space. This means fewer issues with bandwidth and remote access. The more data that can be stored off-site, the easier it is to reach.

In the new normal, it’s a great idea to increase your cloud footprint. Ways to save money using the cloud include:

• Auto-terminating development during off-hours
• Reducing the need for “on-demand” resources
• Using storage-efficient apps

User feedback

A business technology audit requires input from everyone on the team. Ask for feedback on the daily tools your teams use. Make sure these discussions focus on gathering the facts and the underlying business processes. Ask people their thoughts on the effectiveness of the tool and any suggestions on what else might work.

Customer relationships

Customer churn and retention is a major concern for businesses across every industry and vertical. People have shorter attention spans and competition is fierce. This issue only becomes magnified during a post-pandemic situation.

Any business technology audit you perform must have serious considerations for customer relationships. In fact, your main focus when shopping for new solutions should be “how can this make the customer happier?” It’s the means to every end.

Robust CRM tools can help insulate companies from economic downturns and push revenue growth even in the toughest of times.

Instead of using separate point solutions for marketing, sales, and services, you could consider a unified platform with built-in integrations with other systems, including finance and accounting, HR, and/or e-commerce.

Setting up for success

Ignoring tech tools in your arsenal can cost you money and hold your business back from growth. Consider performing a business technology audit on a regular basis, just like you do with finances. Once a year is a good practice, but it can be more or less depending on your industry and changes in the economy or consumer behavior.

To stay on track, create an audit schedule. A set schedule will help you and your team to prepare and construct a methodology for changes, including additions. It also helps to keep teams communicating and integrations running smoothly.

When was the last time you reviewed your tech stack?

Sources

Before the coronavirus, telework was an optional benefit, mostly for the affluent few. Drew Desilver. Pew Research Center. March 2020.

National Compensation Survey: Employee Benefits in the United States. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. March 2020

The post How to audit your business technology appeared first on Insightly.

Digital marketing tools and advancements have made this conundrum a thing of the past. For modern marketing teams, value and return are key indicators of success. Now, marketers are responsible for understanding their business impact. Today, marketers are able to track online customer behavior and have an extraordinary opportunity to learn about their market position and reputation.This gives us unprecedented ability to understand how marketing contributes to company profit.

Why should you track marketing performance?

It’s no secret that marketing impacts your company’s bottom line, but how? An efficient marketing process drives customers, lowers costs, and shortens the sales cycle. Marketers are responsible for tracking performance to improve the health of the business. This means returning the investment made into marketing programs at a growing rate.

What is marketing ROI?

Marketing ROI, or return on investment, is revenue generated from marketing programs, less the cost of these programs.

Many companies make strong investments into marketing. These include direct costs, like ad spend. They also include indirect costs, like marketing team salaries. Marketing ROI shows that these marketing expenditures contributed to revenue the company generated. Marketing ROI is presented as a percentage.

The marketing ROI formula is (total revenue – marketing expenses) / marketing expenses.

If you spent $20,000 on marketing, and your company generated $100,000 in revenue, your marketing ROI would be 400%. Put another way, for every dollar invested in marketing, the company made 400 dollars.

But, what if you make a marketing investment and you see the value of it later on, or over time? For most companies, calculating marketing ROI is not a simple equation. Instead, it is a process of strategic decision making and analysis.

How to calculate marketing ROI

Measure your marketing spend.

The first step of understanding return on investment is understanding your investment. Your investment includes ad spend, marketing software, team salaries and agency fees. Additionally, consider if you’re spending on marketing outside of your traditional team. Is your customer success team using social media to connect with customers? Is your CEO flying across the country to speak at events? These costs are nebulous and need estimation, but are still marketing investment.

Attribute revenue to marketing efforts.

For companies that broker one or two enterprise deals per year, this is easy. You ask your customer how they heard about the company. Then, you can attribute revenue to the marketing channel they mention.

For many companies, the volume of leads is too great to ask each customer about their journey. Further, online consumer behavior is fraught. Many customers would not even remember how they first learned about your brand.

With technology like Insightly, Google Analytics, and Looker, customer journeys can be tracked through the marketing funnel. You can learn which ad a customer clicked on, which blog posts they read, and how they purchased your product. Then, you can give a marketing effort proper ‘credit’ for the revenue it generated. The team at Marketing Evolution terms this ‘person-level marketing,’ or marketing attribution.

If a customer has many marketing touchpoints, how do you assign credit? Your team should choose an attribution model. An attribution model designates a consistent method of measuring marketing revenue. A common model is first-touch attribution, crediting the initial interaction a customer had with the company. Many companies also use last-touch attribution, ascribing value to the final interaction before purchase.

Whichever attribution method you choose, you measure your marketing ROI by knowing which efforts resulted in revenue. Your team can measure investment by program, and calculate the return that each program generates. Depending on your volume and model, you may be able to calculate ROI with more granularity.

How not to measure marketing ROI

Measuring marketing ROI with an attribution model is somewhat novel. Most firms are just beginning proper implementation, attribution and optimization that allows for calculating marketing ROI.

Here are some of the biggest mistakes made about marketing return on investment.

Don’t undercut long-term impact by focusing on short-term value.

Consider this situation. Your team makes an unprecedented investment into creating a professional report. You research, write and design a 20-page book explaining trends in your industry. You publish this report on your website March 1st. By March 31st, it’s received a paltry 25 views and hasn’t brought in any leads. When you’re calculating your marketing ROI for March, you chalk it up to a major loss.

In April, your team adds a few keywords to the report and distributes the piece to some industry analysts. Your sales team starts to use the report for lead engagement. It starts to gain traction. You double your web traffic, and you start to notice a few leads attributed to the piece. Even though you published the piece in March, it’s providing value in April. In each subsequent month, the value of this report grows. Ultimately, the revenue it brings in dwarfs the investment.

Marketing compounds. Online, digital marketing efforts live forever and gain traction over time. What looks like a loss in the short term has the potential to be a long-term gain.

Don’t fall for vanity metrics.

When you begin analyzing your marketing, it can be easy to get excited by the biggest numbers. For example, say you published a short blog post about the best restaurants near your new office. The piece generated high web traffic from tourists in the area looking for lunch spots. This high number might tempt you to divert marketing efforts away from product posts. Instead, you can increase your traffic by focusing on lifestyle topics. If you’re casting a wide net, you can cross your fingers that some users actually want to become customers.

But, like every teen movie has taught us, popularity isn’t worth it. Metrics like impressions, web traffic, and “likes” worsen your marketing ROI. The exception is if these metrics correlate to revenue, like if your site is ad-supported.

Daniel Hochuli of Content Marketing Institute sums it up, “It’s the act of counting vanity metrics as evidence for success that is a problem.” Vanity metrics muddle marketing ROI. They are investments untethered to returns.

Don’t get tricked by ‘sunk costs.’

In the example of the industry report, a rookie marketer might chalk it up as a loss. They will move on, and never create another industry report again.

A savvy marketer would likely see an underperforming marketing effort as an opportunity.

You can always optimize, improve and iterate on your marketing efforts. You can bring value into marketing programs, even if they seemed hopeless. By growing the return over time, you minimize the impact of the investment.

Measuring short & long-term marketing ROI

Marketing isn’t a simple input-output, and neither is marketing ROI. Marketing teams need to measure both short and long-term investments and returns. Here are two schemas for understanding marketing ROI over time:

Short term: marketing spend per customer.

If your marketing programs are new, you may not have the luxury of proving marketing ROI over time. You are looking to show the value of your programs quickly. The fastest way to show marketing value is total marketing spend per customer. This is also called total customer acquisition cost.

This metric takes into account all marketing spend across all customers. Because of this, you can be sure that all your marketing efforts are being accounted for. Over time, your total marketing spend per customer should decrease. Understanding total customer acquisition cost is crucial for short and long-term marketing planning.

Long-term: cohort analysis.

Mature organizations have historical data, and opportunity to plan for the long term. These teams want to optimize marketing efforts for efficient value. The best way to do this is with cohort analysis.

A cohort of your users are those who come into your website through the same channel, ad, or piece of content. For example, users attributed to your industry report, mentioned above, are a cohort.

A cohort analysis report tracks the behavior of a group, and the revenue they generate. For the ‘industry report’ cohort, you credit their revenue to March’s marketing investment. This cohort analysis also allows you to value recurring revenue by marketing investment

Cohort analysis requires an investment of both time and resources. Yet, it is crucial in reporting on long-term marketing gains. By laying this groundwork, you validate your efforts and investment. In her explanation of cohort analysis, Maria Calvello of G2 explains, “since the process of cohort analysis involves taking a deep-dive into groups of people and observing their behavior, it’s an ideal way to improve your customer retention.”

Conclusion

Marketing ROI is both a simple formula and a long-term analytic process. It is assessed in both the short-term and the long-term. It can impact an organization immediately, or over a period of time. This enigmatic nature can make calculating return on investment a daunting task. Yet, it’s a crucial step in understanding how  marketing contributes to the bottom line.

Sources:

Cohort Analysis: An Insider Look at Your Customer’s Behavior. Maria Cavello. G2. February 28, 2020.

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” Gerald Chait. B2B Marketing. March 18, 2015.

The Right and Wrong Ways to Use Vanity Metrics. Daniel Hochuli. Content Marketing Institute. February 10, 2020.

The post How to measure marketing ROI appeared first on Insightly.

With the availability and affordability of tools like unified CRM solutions, the measurement of many metrics is automated. Plus, these tools provide dashboards that compile the metrics you need to see in one easy-to-access location.

Unfortunately, many businesses still don’t have a formal metrics and reporting structure established within their organizations. Moreover, those who do report on various metrics, do so in a siloed way and miss opportunities to extract valuable insights and act on them in a timely manner.

Marketing might be reporting on email open rates, but what does that mean for the rest of the business? How does that impact revenue, productivity, customer satisfaction, and company growth? If all marketing does is pat themselves on the back for increasing email open rates, they end up with what are referred to as “vanity metrics.”

Vanity metrics don’t provide much actionable insight. However, certain metrics provide significant insight into business health and drive the smartest growth decisions. We’ll call them “golden metrics.”

• Productivity metrics
• Sales metrics
• Marketing metrics
• Marketing SEO metrics
• Customer metrics

Golden productivity metrics

Internal teams’ productivity levels are key to business growth—that’s common sense. But it’s easy to mistake the activity for productivity. Let’s quickly touch on that before diving into productivity metrics as it’s an important distinction.

Activity vs. productivity: an important distinction

Excessive meetings provide a great case study through which to distinguish activity from productivity.

Let’s say an employee often schedules meetings to discuss X, Y, or Z. However, during those meetings, little is accomplished, no one is engaged, and the information shared could have easily been conveyed through an email.

On the surface, that person may be seen as a proactive and productive colleague who brings people together to drive initiatives forward. But, more often than not, all they are doing is activelywasting time.

With that important distinction out of the way, let’s look at some key productivity metrics you can start measuring today.

Employee experience: The overlooked key to business success

Employee experience (EX) is one of the important variables that dictate employee productivity and a business success. If your employees aren’t happy, inspired, engaged, and motivated (all parts of the overall EX), the quality of their work product will decline. Plus, employees in these states of mind deliver a poor customer experience, further damaging your bottom line.

The challenge of measuring employee experience

It’s challenging to measure EX because there are too many variables involved. Most companies use surveys. But surveys don’t paint an accurate picture of EX for a variety of reasons, key among them are:

1. Many employees are hesitant to answer survey questions honestly for fear of retribution and this skews results. (You may tell them it’s anonymous, but many employees won’t believe you.)
2. Most companies design their own surveys. However, they are rarely designed by psychometric specialists with the expertise to develop an unbiased survey that produces reliable results. For a survey to be effective, it’s best to outsource it to the experts.

Fortunately, you can maintain insight into the quality of the employee experience without using surveys. You do so by analyzing additional metrics that are directly or indirectly connected to EX. These additional metrics, in addition to being an aggregate representation of EX quality, are themselves great ways to measure productivity.

Employee turnover rate

Turnover is natural and happens in every company. But if your turnover rate is significantly higher than industry benchmarks, it’s a strong indication that productivity is down, and your employee experience needs improving. The average national employee turnover rate in the US (as of 2019) was 22%. (1)

What’s the main driver of employee turnover? The graphic below says it all—82% of respondents to a recent survey cited better job opportunities as the leading cause.(2)

Employee engagement

You can measure employee engagement by looking at their usage rates of the technology you provide to make their jobs easier. Participation in employee engagement programs such as employee volunteer initiatives is another way to measure engagement. And you can use surveys, of course. Just be aware of the points mentioned above about using a psychometric expert to design and administer the survey.

Why is employee engagement so important? Consider that disengaged employees in the United States cost businesses between $450–550 billion annually. (3)

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Golden sales metrics

Fortunately for businesses, it’s much easier to measure sales performance than productivity. Below we lay out the golden metrics for sales, many of which can be measured by the powerful reporting productivity tools of a unified CRM.

Sales revenue

Sales revenue is a simple metric to measure and can provide much insight into the health of your business. This metric can tell you how sticky your product or service is, how competitive you are in your market, whether your marketing initiatives are producing results, and a lot more.

Plus, it’s easy to calculate. There are two types of sales revenue: gross revenue and net revenue. While both are easy to calculate, they provide quite different types of insight.

Gross sales revenue

Gross revenue is simply the amount of money your company brings in through sales. If you sell 100 widgets at $10 each, your gross revenue would 100 times 10, which equates to $1,000. That would be your gross revenue.

Net sales revenue

Net revenue considers expenses as well as incoming cash flow. To calculate net revenue, simply take gross revenue and subtract all the expenses in producing and selling that product or service.

For example, let’s say to produce one widget, you pay $1 for parts, $2 for an employee to produce it, and $2 to rent the space and pay the utilities needed to keep your shop open. Your expenses per widget are $1 + $2+ $2, which equals $5. When you subtract that $5 from the $10 in gross revenue you made from selling it, your net revenue would be $5.

What does each tell you?

If gross revenue is increasing, you can ascertain that sales are up. However, if, at the same time, net revenue is dropping, it means the costs of producing and selling your widgets are increasing. And that means less profit for your business. These are important distinctions that inform different types of forward-looking business growth decisions.

Customer acquisition cost

This is another helpful sales metric that sheds helpful light on the effectiveness of your sales team and the overall health of your business.

This golden metric is calculated per month, quarter, and/or year. To calculate customer acquisition cost, start by calculating the amount of money spent on acquiring new customers: marketing spend, sales technology subscriptions, sales team travel costs, etc. in a given time frame.

Next, divide that amount by the number of new customers acquired during that same time and you have your total customer acquisition cost. This metric is best used in tandem with customer lifetime value.

Customer lifetime value

Customer lifetime value (CLV), when used with customer acquisition cost, is one of the most important metrics to measure. In short, it is the total monetary value your average customer brings to your business.

It’s a bit more complicated to calculate. You start by calculating the average value of a single sale for a given time frame—typically one year. For subscription-based businesses, this isn’t limited to average annual subscription cost per customer—you must consider upsell transactions as well.

Once you calculate the average cost per sale, you then multiply it by the average number of purchase transactions you process per year (again, don’t forget to include upsell purchases). Finally, take that number and multiply it by the average customer lifespan (the amount of time the average customer remains a customer before leaving). That’s your CLV. It’s a particularly important business intelligence metric that all businesses should measure. If this is new to you, read this comprehensive piece on customer lifetime value.

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Golden marketing metrics

Let’s turn our attention to marketing metrics and reporting. Metrics are especially important for marketers. Proving the impact of marketing via metrics and reporting is one of the only ways marketers can justify their worth within an organization.

Marketers measure all sorts of metrics—open rates, click-through rates, new leads generated, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), etc. However, many of them don’t shed any light on overall business health and some don’t even help marketers themselves.

Why measuring MQLs isn’t golden

New leads generated and leads qualified don’t mean much because there’s no telling what will happen to them after they are generated and qualified. Many marketers revel in their ability to generate marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

The problem with that metric? The marketers using it to measure their own performance are the same people who define what it means to become “qualified.” It’s a subjective metric that many marketers spend way too much time focusing on and celebrating.

Sales measures lead-to-customer conversion rates (how many leads they convert into customers). It’s a helpful metric for sales teams but it doesn’t tie back to marketing because sales teams find many leads on their own.

MQL-to-customer conversion rate: Where the gold lies

The golden marketing metric in this mix is MQL-to-customer conversion rate, which measures the percentage of MQLs that sales convert into customers. Why is this important? It tells marketers how precise their criteria for qualifying a lead is. You can send MQLs to sales all day, but if only two out of 50 of them convert into customers, you’re not qualifying them properly and should sit down with sales and discuss your lead qualification criteria and revisit your lead disposition process.

What matters is that marketing is sending sales the right leads—those that are sales-ready. Quality wins over quantity here. The MQL-to-customer conversion rate will tell you whether you’re sending the right leads at the right time, or if your process needs to be refined. If your ratio is low, you are qualifying leads too soon. If it’s high, congrats, you should be promoted.

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SEO metrics

Among the most important elements of a successful business in the digital era is a healthy website. It’s crucial that your site can easily be found and is engaging enough for visitors to stay for a bit and return later. To drive traffic to your website, you need to constantly tend to search engine optimization (SEO) tactics—both on-page and technical SEO tactics.

Marketing is typically charged with SEO and website design. In the 80s, the physical brochure was your brand’s public face, and it was incredibly important to make yours shine and stand out from the rest.

Websites are today’s brand brochures and it’s equally if not more important that it shines. Why? There are exponentially more websites today (more competition) than there were brochures in the 80s.

How do you ensure your site’s visibility and high engagement? A few golden metrics will give you a constant sense of how well your site is doing, as well as inform you when something needs to be fixed. Let’s break them down.

Total organic traffic

Organic traffic refers to site visitors that find you via search results. Organic traffic doesn’t include visitors that arrived on your site by clicking an ad result—that’s pay-per-click traffic and is a separate tactic and metric altogether.

It’s easy to measure organic traffic. If you have a website, you can connect it to Google Analytics for free and easily grab loads of real-time data about site health, visitor trends, and more. Logically, you want to see a steady uptrend in traffic per week and month over time. Ideally, you want your traffic chart to resemble Berkshire Hathaway’s stock share price chart.

How to interpret organic traffic

You’ll see traffic dips here and there, but you should expect to see more and more visitors to your site as you grow. If your traffic plateaus, it could be caused by any number of things, including backend technical SEO issues that Google and other search engines see as negative factors and penalize your site’s ranking for.

The other usual culprit that causes traffic to stop growing is a drop in the quality of your content. Google’s algorithm keeps getting smarter and can increasingly differentiate high-quality content from fluff and clickbaits. But content quality is better measured by the next metric on our list: average session duration.

Average session duration

This metric can also be pulled from Google Analytics. It tells you the average amount of time visitors spend on your site. If this metric is hovering around one minute, it’s an indication that your site is not engaging visitors and needs some work. If session duration is, on average, three minutes or above, you’re looking good. When you reach five minutes, it’s time to bring out the champagne.

Bounce rate

We’re still in Google Analytics with this one. A “bounce” refers to a visitor who lands on a page, takes no action such as scrolling, clicking anything, etc., then leaves. In other words, they did nothing on your site. They came, took a peek, didn’t like what they saw, and left.

Alternatively, it wasn’t that they didn’t like what they saw but rather they realized they were in the wrong place. That results from your site’s rankings not aligning with search intent, a topic that’s broad enough to deserve its own article.

Quality backlinks

Backlinks are links on other sites that reference information on your site, then link to and send their visitors to your site to learn more. Google sees this as a powerful sign that your site is authoritative and thus ranks it higher.

Backlinks are an important metric to track but beware of one tempering yet self-destructive temptation. Don’t purchase backlinks. You must generate them organically by publishing amazing content that people want to consume. If you buy backlinks, anyone who clicks on them is likely to bounce and/or skew your other website metrics in a negative direction. Also, make sure that your backlinks are from high-ranking, relevant, and quality sites, otherwise they’ll affect your SEO negatively.

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Golden customer-focused metrics

We round out our guide to golden business intelligence metrics with some important customer-focused key performance indicators (KPIs). We’re now in the age of the consumer and customer expectations are higher than ever before. Catering to customers’ needs has never been more important. The metrics below are vital to maintaining a healthy business and insight into your future growth trajectory.

Customer churn and retention

These are two separate metrics but tie into one another. They provide the same type of insight but from opposite ends of a spectrum.

Customer churn

Calculated as a percentage, customer churn rate is the proportion of customers that you lose in a given month or year. It’s a great metric for keeping an eye on how quickly your business is growing and reflects the performance of every team in your business. It’s particularly helpful for subscription-based businesses.

It tells you if you’re losing more customers than you acquire and vice versa. Churn rate is easy to calculate. Simply take the number of customers you lost during a given time frame and divide that by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that timeframe. Then represent that number as a percentage.

For example, if you started the year with 100 customers but lost 15 that year, you would divide 15 by 100, which equals 0.15. As a percentage, that’s 15%. So, your customer churn rate would be 15%.

Customer retention

Customer retention is also most helpful for subscription-based businesses. Customer churn shows you one side of the coin while retention shows you the other. Customer retention tells you the percentage of customers who stick with you and renew their subscription to your product or service.

To calculate retention, you need three numbers: the number of customers you started the year with (A), the number you acquired during the year (B), and the number of customers you had at the end of the year (C). The formula looks like this: ((C – B) / A)) x 100.

For example, let’s say you started the year with 100 customers, acquired 20 new ones, and ended the year with 110 (because you lost 10 during the year). You could subtract 20 from 110 and have 90. Then you’d divide 90 by 100 (the number of customers you started the year with) which gives you 0.9.

Viewed as a percentage, 0.9 is 90%, which would be your customer retention rate. Now, is 90% a good retention rate? That depends on your business model. However, in most cases, it’s a high retention rate that means your business is stable with reliable recurring revenue. If this metric is new to you, learn more about customer retention and strategies to keep your rate high.

Customer effort score

Customer effort score (CES) is a simple metric that measures customer satisfaction and customer experience at the same time. There are various customer satisfaction metrics out there. Many businesses rely on net promoter score (NPS) as the holy grail of satisfaction metrics. However, using NPS as an end goal is misleading both for employees and businesses. NPS should be used as a beginning point, a way to learn and track customer satisfaction for ongoing improvements and building better customer relations.

Now, back to CES. CES measures the amount of effort a customer had to put into a specific interaction with a company. Many businesses use CES to assess the effectiveness of their customer support function, but you can use it to measure any interaction your business has with a customer.

In many ways, higher levels of customer satisfaction depend on reducing the effort a customer must put forth when interacting with a business. If their issue can be solved in a few minutes without putting much of the burden on their shoulders, they will come away satisfied. That indicates a satisfied customer who just received a positive customer experience. Checkmate.

CES tends to be more reliable than other satisfaction metrics. CES is calculated by asking customers to rate the amount of effort they had to put into an interaction, on a 5-point scale, with 1 being “very low effort,” and 5 being “very high effort.”

Collect a number of scores and calculate the average. A score of 2 or lower means that a company is making life easy on its customers, and they are happy. A score of 4 or 5 means that the company should rethink how they support their customers with a mind towards taking some of the burden off their shoulders.

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Connecting the dots

We just covered some of the most valuable metrics businesses today—metrics that provide real, actionable insight. That insight is necessary to make data-driven decisions today.

It’s important that your leadership team gets behind business intelligence and reporting efforts. After all, we have the data at our fingertips. Why would we not use it to inform the decisions we make that will dictate the future survival or failure of our businesses?

Good luck, and may the data be with you.

If you’d like to learn how Insightly CRM can help you to align teams around key metrics, reduce data silos, and create a data-driven culture and decision-making, then request a free demo.

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Sources:

1-2. North American employee turnover: trends and effects, Mercer, 2020

3. DNA of Engagement: How Organizations Can Foster Employee Ownership of Engagement, The Engagement Institute, 2017

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As a business leader, you see both sides of the issue. You want data integrity, but you also want to empower users with the right mix of tools and information. What’s the best approach?

Here are four steps for striking a balance.

1. Develop a cross-functional CRM team

Some organizations wrongly assume that their CRM should be entirely owned and managed by sales (with occasional assistance from IT). Revenue-generating teams may be some of the heaviest users of CRM technology; but, they’re not the only stakeholders. A properly implemented CRM should serve as the source of truth for your customer data, which includes everything from basic contact information to web interactions and attitudinal insights. Storing all of your customer data in your CRM forms a solid foundation for understanding the customer journey—which benefits everyone, not just sales.

Data-driven customer journeys don’t just magically appear in your CRM. Rather, they require a company-wide commitment to efficient data collection, organization, and reporting. That’s why you need to establish a cross-functional team that is responsible for strategic CRM decision-making.

At a minimum, the team should include your CRM administrator along with representatives from sales, marketing, IT, operations, business development, and executive leadership. The team should meet regularly, discuss corporate strategy in the context of your CRM, and serve as a clearing house for any major changes or enhancements.

2. Make it easy for CRM users to share feedback

Your front-line staff probably comprise the largest group of CRM users. Sales reps use it daily to log calls, send emails, track deals, and monitor pipeline growth. Operations teams manage projects, invoices, proposals, and work orders. Marketers build segmented lists, design and send promotional emails, and monitor lead acceptance rates. Altogether, your users may have thousands of CRM interactions in a single day. Naturally, they’re full of CRM enhancement ideas.

Get ahead of the situation and develop a formalized mechanism for soliciting and collecting user feedback. If your organization uses a team collaboration platform—such as Slack or Microsoft Teams—consider setting up a dedicated channel for users to share ideas in real time. In addition, distribute a quarterly survey that encourages all users to share their joys and pains of working with your CRM.

Taking a structured approach will make users feel confident that their thoughts are being heard, which can lessen the perceived need for “urgent changes” to your CRM. More feedback leads to more data. More data empowers your cross-functional team to identify trends, weigh one idea against another, and make informed decisions—instead of dealing with every customization request as a free-standing emergency.

3. Know the full scope of what your CRM can do

Messy CRM customizations are often unnecessary—especially when you know what you’re doing. Just because your sales team is asking for a way to track “hot deals” does not mean that a custom field is the best approach for alleviating their pain point. In this example, an Insightly user might consider using tags—rather than custom fields—which can be easily applied to leads, contacts, organizations, opportunities, and other records without altering the record itself.

Or, perhaps a more robust solution is required, in which case prospect lead scoring with Insightly Marketing could be worth a look.

Either solution addresses the core request while using built-in CRM capabilities (instead of relying on record-level customizations).

Go beyond the original request and terminology nuances. Revisit your CRM vendor’s documentation often. Understand what you’re trying to solve for. Tap into your CRM knowledge (and your creativity) to deliver the most value with the simplest solution.

4. Take an agile approach to CRM feature rollouts

The world’s top software development teams are experts at collecting a wide spectrum of user feedback, sequencing ideas, and working on features that deliver immediate impact. And, that’s exactly how your CRM cross-functional team should operate, too. Here’s how.

Collect raw ideas in a centralized location

Once you turn on the spigot of ideas as outlined in section two, you need a place to collect and organize them. A shared spreadsheet could work, although centralizing ideas as projects or tasks in your CRM might be a more scalable solution.

Merge & filter ideas

Some ideas will be duplicates. Some will be related or subideas within a larger idea. Some won’t be aligned with your company’s CRM philosophy. Appoint one person from your cross-functional team to regularly combine and archive requests on your kanban board.

Sequence ideas for implementation

There are only so many hours in the day. Members of your cross-functional team have plenty of other responsibilities on their plates, so sequencing top ideas is dependent upon understanding true capacity.

Engage the team in a discussion to understand capacity so that cards can be prioritized for implementation. Sequence CRM customizations or enhancements that offer the most value to the largest amount of users, without compromising data integrity or accessibility.

Find the right balance for your CRM

At the end of the day, your CRM should help your teams become more efficient, productive, and confident. CRM customizations, when implemented strategically and methodically, support these ideals without abandoning time-tested best practices.

Learn more about how to customize CRM for your business while preserving data integrity.

Get a free Insightly demo to learn more about CRM setup best practices.

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Data is objective, unbiased information. Data-driven decision making is the process of studying large amounts of data, analyzing it to identify patterns, obtaining actionable insights, and using that insight to make business decisions.

Intuition is subjective, and business decisions should be made based on objective information. Intuition is effective when you don’t have data or the time to think logically before making a decision. And even though you can develop intuition based on knowledge and experience (a type of data), it’s still risky to use it in business decision making.

Experts suggest relying on data, not intuition

Experts almost unanimously agree that data-driven decision making is more reliable than intuition-based decision making. Cold, hard numbers are simply more dependable than intuition.

Nobel Prize laureate, Daniel Kahneman, says humans formed intuition as a tool to alert us to potential risks. It aids in our survival when we’re faced with fight or flight situations. However, Kahneman claims that using data to make decisions is critically important because it decreases our propensity to make poor ones.

Nevertheless, reliance on intuition is still widespread in business today. Let’s dig deeper to understand why.

Challenges in data-driven decision making

Businesses have the data at their fingertips, but how do they organize it in a logical way? Many still struggle to understand how data is used to make decisions.

Too much data for the human mind to analyze

There is so much data in the world today that it would take over 180 million years to download it. That poses a challenge for businesses because the human mind can’t analyze terabytes of data on its own. Gartner sums this challenge up perfectly, “Organizations have access to unprecedented volumes and variety of data, but deriving insights continues to be a struggle.” (1)

Struggling to effectively leverage data

A 2019 survey asked CEOs which factors impeded their ability to leverage data to make more informed decisions. Surprisingly, 54% cited a lack of data-driven skills and analytical talent. Additionally, 51% blamed data silos, and 50% pointed to unreliable data.(2)

Rampant skepticism around data accessibility & reliability

Humans can’t process and analyze so much data manually, but technology can. Many successful companies comfortably rely on customer relationship management (CRM) software to crunch the numbers.

Regrettably, many leaders either don’t trust their data or haven’t adopted the technology to analyze it. A recent Deloitte survey revealed that 67% of business decision makers aren’t comfortable basing decisions on data pulled from their current technology.(3)

What’s worse, another survey uncovered that 53% of senior executives feel they are too old to learn data analysis skills.(4) Yet, being an effective business leader increasingly requires data analysis skills. This is forcing a shift in thinking about data, all the way from the C-suite down to entry-level employees.

Considering the statistics above, how can businesses successfully transition to leveraging a data-driven approach to decision making?

How to become a data-driven company

Given the importance of data-based decision making, businesses must first understand the benefits involved. Then they must learn how data is used to make decisions and implement measures to begin a company-wide transformation.

Lead the way

When CEOs champion data-driven business cultures, performance results and revenue increase. The Deloitte survey illustrates that when CEOs lead the charge, businesses are 77% more likely to significantly exceed business goals. Plus, they are 59% more likely to gain new insights from the metrics they track and to use data analysis to drive business decisions. (5)

Create a company culture that supports data-driven analytics

Only 13% of businesses claim to have the proper culture, technology, and skills to support data-driven decision-making.(6) That doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

Identify “data champions” who can lead change across your entire organization. You can also hire a chief data officer to work closely with the C-suite on designing and implementing initiatives that foster a data-driven culture.

Gaining buy-in from your sales director is crucial. This will also create a trickle-down effect across the entire sales organization. The majority of data that decision makers want to see comes from sales. If the sales director enforces consistent data management, her team will be more likely to fall in line.

Use the right technology

Many (perhaps most) companies today use CRM software to capture and analyze decision data. CRM technology has evolved and businesses can now leverage unified CRMs that include tools to measure sales and marketing performance.

This delivers three key benefits. First, when all your data is stored in the same system, decision makers find it much easier to rely on the data and analysis these systems produce. Second, when you have all those functions in one system, you reduce software costs while giving everyone in your company access to decision-making data. Third, all your teams are better aligned with one centralized source of truth on customer data. Without the right technology, creating a data-driven business culture is exponentially more difficult.

Look to younger generations for support

Younger employees are more comfortable with data than “analog” generations. It makes complete sense—they grew up in the digital era. We should turn to younger decision makers for support in championing the transition to a data-driven business culture.

Plus, younger generations are more willing to embrace change. In fact, 76% of executives in their 30s or younger look for opportunities to leverage new technology to achieve business goals. Plus, 67% of them see risk as opportunity, not danger. (7)

In the coming years, we can expect to see more young people in decision-making roles. They will employ more technology—like CRMs—to capture and analyze data for decision making. Why? Because they more clearly recognize the vast array of benefits gained from CRMs and data analysis technology.

What does the future hold?

Increasingly more businesses are adopting a data-driven approach to decision making. But it may be a few years before this trend starts to dominate business. We still see laggards across industries despite the data that indicates businesses grow faster and outperform their peers when they leverage data to drive decision-making. As competition increases in the digital economy, using data insights won’t be a matter of preference, but rather of necessity.

Read more like this:

• 4 steps to building a unified business approach in 2020
• What are different types of customer data?
• How to improve customer experiences using data analytics
• What is data integrity? How to achieve it?

Sources:

1. “Tie Your Data and Analytics Initiatives to Stakeholders and Their Business Goals,” Gartner, 2020
2. “22nd Annual Global CEO Survey,” PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2019
3. “Analytics and AI-driven enterprises thrive in the Age of With,” Deloitte, 2019
4. “The State of Dark Data,” Splunk, 2019
5. “Analytics and AI-driven enterprises thrive in the Age of With,” Deloitte, 2019
6. “Data-Driven Mindset Report,” Mention, 2019
7. “How Younger Generations are Reshaping the Future Workforce,” Inavero, 2019

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In the new post-pandemic world, businesses have had to rethink operations, culture, and even customer relationships to ensure survival and continued growth. For many businesses this has meant a rapid digital transformation. Based on my experience as a tech CEO and business leader, here are a few insights to help you continue that digital transformation in three key areas of your business.

Business operations

Whether you had to introduce an online sales channel, transition your team to a fully remote work, or rethink your digital ad campaigns—you had to rely heavily on technology to implement changes.

Now you have to shift focus to better preparing your business for future disruptions and growth. Your new strategy should include careful consideration of how and where your valuable business data is stored, so you can better measure progress towards your goals, assess risks, and take a proactive data-driven approach to operations and growth.

To do that operationally, remove roadblocks and bottlenecks between teams to speed up execution and enable continuous innovation. If you have not already adopted an ERP or CRM system in your business—now is the time to invest in one that is both easy to use and flexible enough to fit your future requirements. This type of foundational technology will speed up digital adoption across the board, and as your business faces new challenges and growth you will be able to adjust and course-correct without wasting time and resources.

Organizational culture

For many companies the new normal means all-remote work and restricted in-person interactions and gatherings. And while we can easily connect with each other and stay productive thanks to a plethora of communication tools, there’s something to be said about people meeting up in a shared physical space where spontaneous conversations can lead to breakthroughs, creative ideas, and innovative thinking. Your company culture won’t just follow along into the digital realm or somehow reshape to fit the new normal. If you want to keep your people engaged and inspired, you need to be proactive about rebuilding your organizational culture and include it in your overall business strategy. One way is to reinforce your shared values through clear messaging and opportunities for people to take action—as a team or individually—to support internal diversity and inclusion and/or contribute to causes and projects that reflect your values in the society at large. It’s the right thing to do, and it’s also the only way a modern business can stay relevant and build meaningful relationships and trust both with the employees and customers.

Customer relationships

In a time of crisis and post-crisis recovery, you have a great opportunity to double down on your existing customer relationships, test new ideas, and find new opportunities. Find ways to identify with your customers and focus on serving them and they will become your biggest source of new revenue. Chances are the majority of your customers are now spending most of their time online. Develop a digital brand strategy that reflects your company values, provides customers with helpful information, and sets your business apart from its competitors. Use marketing automation tools to quickly build and execute campaigns, measure performance against your baseline expectations for engagement, and tweak as you go. If you are considering launching an online sales channel, make sure you select an e-commerce platform that aligns with your business model, is easy to manage, is SEO-friendly, and can scale as you grow.

Don’t wait for the economy to rebound, customers to start buying, or life to return to what it was a few months ago. Now is the perfect time to take a proactive approach and lean on strategic partners and your technology providers who can help you execute on your digital transformation and prepare for future growth.

Considering the importance of digital transformation, your technology providers should be on your partner shortlist. Don’t just auto-renew your software subscriptions. Reach out to your vendors to discuss your goals and explore options to solve your problems. They can also help you to decide on strategic digital investments—whether it’s to introduce AI, implement a new CRM system, or launch e-commerce. If your technology vendors and partners are not willing to help or have no solutions that can solve your problems and help with your digital transformation, it makes it that much harder to succeed, and it might be worth finding new vendors and partners.

The worst thing you can do now is stay inactive or stick to your old strategy and tools that do not reflect the new reality we’re all facing.

***

Ready to start digital transformation in your business? Request a free CRM needs assessment and Insightly product demo with one of our reps, to see how we can help your business adapt and grow in the new economy.

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While all of these definitions may be partially correct, business development, in its purest and simplest form, encompasses any activity or team that accelerates growth beyond its current pace. Highly effective business development teams align with senior management to identify, prioritize, and implement incremental growth opportunities.

In this post, we’ll explore how a CRM can supplement biz dev efforts by streamlining sales development, relationship management, and capacity building.

3 CRM use cases to support business development

For purposes of discussion, let’s assume that you’re the business development leader at a mid-market manufacturing company. Your leadership team has tasked you with the job of doubling revenue within eighteen months. What’s your first move?

Luckily for you, your organization uses a cloud-based CRM. Users are well-trained and actively use the system, which means you have a wealth of data and insights at your fingertips. After analyzing the data and considering all of your options, you sequence three cards on your kanban board.

1. Entry into an adjacent market

Although the vast majority of your existing revenue is from the automotive industry, you can’t help but notice the occasional outlier lead. In fact, your sales team has been tagging all non-automotive leads in your CRM in case someone ever decided to do something with them. (That’s you.) Further review uncovers a very interesting trend. That is, about half of your non-automotive inquiries originate from the boating and marine industry.

How a CRM helps: Tagged records accelerate your ability to identify data-driven, real world market opportunities without wasting time on gut feelings. Drag and drop reporting makes it easy for you to analyze audiences, understand each lead’s inquiry, and drill down for further insights. At-a-glance contact information within the lead record provides a convenient way to re-engage old leads when validating assumptions.

And, if the market is deemed viable, your CRM enables a rapid ramp up of sales activity. For identical sales processes, an existing pipeline could be applied with a few clicks (instead of starting from scratch). Built-in outreach features, such as email inbox integrations, expedite your sales team’s ability to engage a large number of leads and convert them into paying customers.

2. Increasing production capacity to serve more customers

Not every business development opportunity requires expansion into a new market. Sometimes, there’s simply more demand than you can supply. When customer demand exceeds supply, it’s your job as the business development manager to step in and evaluate ways to increase capacity. After all, customers are willing and able to purchase—but only if your company can deliver.

Unfortunately, increasing supply is not as easy as flipping a switch. Doing so may require an upfront investment of additional tooling, equipment, labor, and production facilities.

How a CRM helps: Your CRM should be an essential data source when building an expansion business case. Productivity metrics, such as project and milestone trends, offer a snapshot of existing workloads to inform complex staffing decisions. Transaction and invoice data stored in your CRM provides transparency for identifying large customers, who may be more likely to make advanced purchases. Intuitive business intelligence (BI) dashboards make it easy to visualize existing product sales trends and forecast the impact of additional capacity.

3. Leveraging existing relationships to evaluate product fit

Launching a new product is hard work and, in many cases, kind of a gamble. Will the downstream revenue more than offset the upfront cost and effort of commercialization? Pre-validating product fit with a critical mass of customers is an excellent way to reduce risk and improve your chances of success. If enough customers express a desire to purchase, non-customers will likely, too.

Existing customers also play a vital role in QA testing prior to full-scale launch. Beta testing with a group of loyal customers provides an unparalleled platform for collecting honest feedback and eliminating roadblocks to success.

How a CRM helps: Neatly organized customer records and data filtering in your CRM make it easier to identify and connect with customers who are willing to share feedback and participate in beta testing. Sorting records by creation date enables quick access to your longest-standing relationships, which could serve as a gold mine of support ticket data to substantiate product feasibility. Logging calls and notes directly in your CRM provides a convenient way to track customer conversations without relying on spreadsheets or other data silos.

Grow faster with a better CRM

Whether your goals involve expansion into new markets, maximizing output, or leveraging customer relationships to their fullest extent, a well-structured CRM is an essential part of any business development initiative, in any industry.

Is your CRM not up to the challenge? Check out Insightly’s switching CRMs eBook or continue reading about why companies switch CRMs.

Ready for a new CRM? Request a free demo from Insightly. No commitment required.

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Recently, Insightly CMO Tony Kavanagh spoke with Emma Roberts, the Director of Sales at NowPow, on the Insightly Gamechangers Podcast. They talked about how the idea of NowPow came about, how the platform works, and where the company is headed. They also discussed how the NowPow team uses Insightly CRM, including Microsoft Office 365 integration, to power their internal operations and manage customer relationships. Below is a summary of their conversation.

To listen to the full episode, check Insightly Gamechangers Podcast on iTunes or SoundCloud.

What is NowPow’s origin story?

The concept of NowPow emerged from the need to provide patients with support across different social determinants of health — or things tied to their overall wellness — food, child care, employment transportation, behavioral health, etc. For health providers, that meant being able to systematically identify and address their patients’ basic needs, either in-house or by building a network of partners.

Dr. Stacy Lindau, the founder of NowPow, set out to address this need. She came up with the idea of e-prescribing community resources right at the point of care after conducting research funded by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, at the University of Chicago.

What makes NowPow a gamechanger?

While the concept of connecting traditional health care with community resources, or weaving social determinants of health into standard care, has been around for decades, NowPow is among the first organizations to leverage technology and make that connection easily accessible and effective.

For many hospitals, sharing the information with patients and caregivers has been a major pain point — the process is cumbersome, time-consuming, and lacks a follow-through. With NowPow, health care providers can connect with patient advocates and care managers in a timely manner and coordinate their referrals securely on a multi-sided platform. They can also use NowPow to track the impact of these referrals on patients’ health and well-being over time.

How do care professionals use NowPow?

Broadly speaking, care professionals have to complete four steps to make referrals via NowPow. As the first step, they identify a patient’s need, which can be anything from a higher-paying job to better childcare. They also collect key information, such as a patient’s health conditions, address, schedule, etc., via screening or through electronic health record (EHR).

The second step is matching patients with specific programs and services that best fit their needs and are available to them at convenient times and locations. After the matches have been identified, care providers make recommendations and share that information with patients or caregivers. Note that with NowPow, care providers can track all that information in a patient’s EHR.

And, finally, care providers close the loop on referrals, i.e. confirm that the referral was a success.

Why did they choose Insightly?

With so many moving pieces and a growing customer base, it was crucial for NowPow to find an internal system for managing sales and customer relationships from the get-go. They also needed to future-proof their business and be ready to scale.

Five months after the launch, NowPow was a team of five people, including Emma, the Director of Sales, looking for a way to track interactions with their customers (hospitals) from the very first engagement to launching NowPow platform, and through months or years down the road. The team needed to be able to view and understand the entire scope of customer relationships. They were also looking for an affordable solution that they could customize and implement quickly.

In their search for a solution, the NowPow team considered a number of CRMs, including Salesforce, Base, PipelineDeals, and Insightly. After comparing these CRMs across different functionalities at price points that matched NowPow’s needs and budget, the team chose Insightly.

They were able to upload all the information, set up the process, and start using Insightly on the day they signed up.

How does NowPow use Insightly?

Initially, NowPow had identified a couple of key needs: the ability to manage sales opportunities and a way to keep track of all past conversations (so they could easily assign salespeople for follow-ups or brand new outreach). At that time, their contact base consisted of 500 people, in Chicago and New York. But as NowPow grew, the team expanded their use of Insightly to manage ongoing customer support. Here are more details on how NowPow uses Insightly.

Sales and lead management

NowPow has embedded Insightly into their sales team’s day-to-day workflow. As soon as the team gets a lead (from the website), they immediately record it in Insightly with all the key information, including source, contact, and title, and assign a sales associate for the follow-up. After the first conversation, they move the contact to the next stage in the pipeline and use calendar notifications to ensure regular check-ins.

More recently, NowPow has begun to use Insightly’s Leads functionality to conduct mass outreach within their target markets.

“Everyone on the sales team uses Insightly every day. It’s the same for [NowPow platform] implementation and customer success, in terms of every team member using it… But I would say that for the sales team – we definitely spend the most time in Insightly,” says Emma.

Productivity and collaboration

NowPow’s customer success team uses Insightly’s Tasks feature to schedule and manage customer onboarding, training, and ongoing support/check-ins. The entire team has full visibility to scheduled tasks and events.

“In sales, we are really focused on the organizations, context, opportunities, and leads, but our customer success team uses all of Insightly’s project management functionality,” says Emma.

Business intelligence

NowPow also uses Insightly to gain in-depth understanding of their opportunities and existing customer relationships: What’s in a pipeline? Where are the gaps? How long is an opportunity in the proposal stage? What’s an average year one contract value? The team uses these and other insights to decide how to manage contacts.

“It [Insightly] really is the anchor of our processes and essential to what we do,” says Emma.

How does Insightly’s integration with Office 365 work for NowPow?

NowPow uses Insightly and MS Office 365 integration for all of their email customer communication and outreach.

“It’s great that we’re able to do the mass outreach right through Insightly, but then it is automatically in our Sent box in Microsoft Outlook,” says Emma. “Outlook is where we spend the most of our time, and so when someone responds, it’s just all in Outlook, and that’s been really convenient for us.”

As a matter of fact, Insightly and MS Office 365 integration is the first item covered in NowPow’s training of new sales associates.

What’s ahead for NowPow?

Taking a bit of inspiration from Insightly, NowPow plans to revamp their own analytics environment to make it possible for users to pull their own reports on the platform. At the moment, they have a Community Resource Finder, but plan to build out their patient-facing functionality to allow self-referrals and self-scheduling for patients.

As NowPow evolves and grows its customer base, they intend to leverage Insightly’s custom capabilities and integrations with other key tools and systems, such as Office 365, to manage internal processes and double down on their outbound lead outreach and management.

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The post Connecting people to care with Insightly + Office 365 appeared first on Insightly.

Lately, in my research, I’ve experienced a growing number of experts who throw around the term “business intelligence” – or “BI” for short. Taken at face value, “business intelligence” sure sounds nebulous enough. In reality, BI is changing how companies make informed decisions.

In this post, we’ll dive into the topic of BI and explore how you can put it to good use.

What Exactly is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence has been defined a thousand times over (and by many people, who are smarter than me). That being said, allow me to break it down in a way that makes sense for busy entrepreneurs (such as myself). Business intelligence typically refers to a general category of software tools that are especially useful for visualizing important metrics. In other words, an effective BI application will take your historical and real-time data and present it in a way that’s both engaging and informative.

Business intelligence tools come in all shapes and sizes. Some are entirely dedicated to data modeling. Others, such as Insightly, incorporate aspects of BI into a much broader feature suite. Either way, as illustrated in the following screenshot, BI software gives the business owner fingertip access to a number of vital KPIs.

Sales KPI tracking is certainly a common use case for BI technology, but it is by no means the only use case. Companies use business intelligence software for almost everything imaginable, from tracking churn to customer satisfaction and on-the-job safety.

How Can Businesses Benefit from BI?

Like anything else, business intelligence is what you make of it. If your company makes an investment in a business intelligence system but then promptly forgets about it, you’ve obviously wasted your time. On the other hand, if you start with the intention of streamlining your goal tracking and decision making, BI can be an excellent resource for your organization.

Take, for example, your sales process. I’m guessing that you’re already tracking the following data points:

• Total booked sales revenue
• Sales revenue, broken down by each sales rep
• Current value of your deal pipeline
• Stages where deals are stuck
• Top reasons deals are lost

If you’re using a CRM, this data is readily available to you. The big question is not what to track – rather, it’s how to track it (and present it in a meaningful way).

By harnessing the power of BI, small business owners can bring new life to data that would otherwise be less insightful. Instead of waiting on a virtual assistant to manually refresh a spreadsheet, team leaders and department managers can gain instant access to the information they need. Furthermore, they can drill down with the click of a mouse, yielding more answers and less confusion.

So, Why Aren’t More Businesses Using BI?

If BI software is so powerful, why aren’t more small and mid-size business owners utilizing it? Good question.

As a consultant, I’ve had the opportunity to work with clients across a wide spectrum of industries and markets. From my perspective, the following issues seem to be the most common impediments:

Affinity for Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets are essentially free to create. They’re also easy to share with collaborators. With spreadsheets being so familiar, why venture into unknown territory and mess with a business intelligence package? It’s a question that business owners no doubt wrestle with.

Data Silos: Data silos present a very real issue for organizations of all sizes. With sales records in one database, newsletter stats in another, and customer support tickets tracked elsewhere, simply creating a 360-degree view of each customer’s journey can be enough of a struggle. Tying all of these disparate data silos into a separate BI platform is, therefore, unrealistic for most companies.

Lack of Technical Resources: Even if a company has a relatively clean data structure, few businesses have the technical know-how to deploy a business intelligence app. API documentation, security protocols, and data warehouses can be daunting to even the most experienced of IT managers.

Budgetary Constraints: BI tools usually come with some type of subscription or download fee (although some are free). There’s also the cost of hosting, maintaining, and supporting a BI application. When weighed against more pressing priorities, it’s easy to understand why business intelligence drops to the bottom of to-do lists.

More Pressing Matters: Speaking of more pressing priorities, just keeping the lights on and customers happy consumes 99% of most business owners’ brainpower. Deploying a BI tool, though desirable, seems more of a luxury than a necessity.

Solving the BI Puzzle for Businesses

For the reasons we’ve discussed, third-party BI tools are simply not feasible for a sizable percentage of the small and mid-size business world.

And, perhaps that’s why a solution like Insightly is particularly intriguing. Unlike a third-party tool, that may require extensive setup and technical expertise, Insightly’s solution is native to the user interface. Free and paid users alike enjoy out-of-the-box data dashboard, consisting of cards that can be dragged and dropped.

In addition to lead and opportunity data dashboard, Insightly users even enjoy project dashboards.

By leveraging a CRM that offers built-in business intelligence capabilities, including a data dashboard, smaller companies might be able to bypass the headaches commonly associated with BI.

Better Intelligence, Smarter Decisions

At the end of the day, your company is in the business of efficiently and effectively serving its constituents. A business intelligence system can help you achieve this goal, but only if the tool delivers more value than the resources it consumes. Smart business owners should seek out BI solutions that provide powerful insights without creating new internal problems.

The post Why businesses need business intelligence appeared first on Insightly.