With the CRM being the heart of most businesses, integrations between it and the key tools used throughout the organization is vital. Making CRM integrations simpler and still effective is the new expected user experience.

What does integration look like?

Users don’t want to copy and paste data between apps, upload CSVs, or write complex code. They expect data to move between apps so they can do their jobs with ease. Tasks like sending emails, booking meetings, creating invoices, and transferring orders are expected to be automated.

When selecting a CRM, this is one of the biggest points your team will need to cover. How will your CRM integrate, how will you maintain those integrations, and who will be responsible for them? 

The latter is a kicker, since SaaS applications push out new releases constantly, and your integrations can occasionally break during upgrades. You want easy integrations and the ability to keep them up and running without a developer or IT assistance.

Legacy CRMs and integrations

Legacy CRMs, like Salesforce, have a complex relationship with integrations. If you decide to build a custom Salesforce integration, you’ll need to consider factors like data mapping, what to do with duplicate records, how to handle the Salesforce ID, and batch vs. real time data exchange. These integrations will require a developer or an integration engineer who specializes in Salesforce integrations. 

Using an integration on the Salesforce AppExchange can ameliorate this process. But even that isn’t smooth sailing and will still require an integration specialist. Apps available on the Salesforce AppExchange can be either managed or unmanaged packages. You can make changes to the unmanaged packages, but not to managed packages, so your ability to get the integration to work in your unique environment may be limited.

CRMs like Salesforce are built for the Fortune 500, not for mid-sized businesses with realistic budgets. While an enterprise can absorb six-figure consultant fees and extra hires to facilitate integrations, the average mid-sized business doesn’t have that luxury. 

Making CRM integrations easy

Hiring integrators for CRM integrations contributes to a higher total cost of ownership, which again is fine for Fortune 500 companies, but can be a deterrent for mid-sized business. So when Insightly CRM started looking at ways to facilitate integrations, the goal was ‘no-code’ meaning that virtually anyone in your organization could create one. Using step-by-step guides, or recipes, it would be easy to connect Insightly to apps used in HR, IT, accounting and more.

Insightly partnered with Workato, a leader in enterprise automation with an eye on governance and security. Workato helps automate business workflows across cloud apps, so Insightly built its AppConnect product with Workato ‘under the hood’ to leverage the strength and reliability of an existing platform but deliver it in a convenient way to Insightly users.

Connect to the apps  that you already use

With AppConnect, you can easily build automations from Insightly to every other app you use to run your business. At launch, Insightly AppConnect included integrations to 500+ applications. 

That’s a nice number, but the most important integrations are the ones that you use in your business. Some of the most popular integrations are:

Finance/Accounting:

• Quickbooks
• Xero
• Sage

HR:

• Workday
• ADP
• BambooHR

Sales:

• Zoominfo
• Gong
• Docusign

Marketing:

• WordPress
• Asana
• PowerBI

Support:

• Calendly
• Jira
• Drift

IT/DevOps

• Slack
• Okta
• ServiceNow

eCommerce

• Shopify
• WooCommerce
• Magento

Success with AppConnect comes quickly

Based in London, the UK Screen Alliance is the trade association that represents companies working in production. They are users of Insightly CRM and AppConnect. 

CEO Neil Hatton says his team can quantify the benefit of having the apps across their business integrated with Insightly CRM using AppConnect. 

For instance, he says monthly invoicing went from a full day of work to 10 minutes of spot checking.

“We’re treating AppConnect as if we’ve gained an extra member of our team,” he said. “We’re a small team. It’s like AppConnect is a silent system. It just gets on with things in the background. That’s given us all more time to focus on working on behalf of our members and delivering the valuable activities they expect from us.” 

See AppConnect in action

To see how easy it is to integrate Insightly CRM using AppConnect, request a free demo today.

The post No-code CRM integrations? Explore Insightly AppConnect appeared first on Insightly.

You need to understand why you need a CRM and how it corresponds to your business’s primary goals. In this post, you’ll learn why a CRM strategy is important, and we’ll give you five CRM objectives you can set to achieve when using the software for your business.

Why do you need a CRM strategy?

Creating a CRM strategy ensures that you get the most out of your software. It clarifies why you’re using the software and how its impact aligns with your overall business strategy and goals. Plus, a defined strategy gets your entire organization on the same page and focused on achieving the same goals.

CRM tools do a lot. They give companies a centralized platform for organizing data and communicating with customers. And they allow you to manage relationships throughout the entire customer lifecycle, spanning interactions across several multichannel touchpoints.

With this robust functionality, countless benefits are available to those who implement a CRM. Creating a CRM strategy helps you find the gap in your current systems and processes so that you use the software in the manner that will have the greatest impact on the overall health of the business.

5 CRM objectives you can set for your business

Now that you know the importance of developing a strategy for your CRM, let’s examine some of the most impactful objectives you can set when adopting a CRM for your business:

1. Improve the buyer’s journey

The fundamental purpose of a CRM system is to improve the customer experience. Executing on this objective is the most sure-fire way to see positive results across your business. When you make improved customer satisfaction the main goal for your CRM, all other objectives work to support this goal.

One of the best ways to boost customer satisfaction is to offer a personalized experience. A CRM gives you unified customer profiles to understand all of your customers’ needs. You can use these insights to tailor every interaction and how you approach your products and services. 

With a CRM, all your customer data is easily accessible by the entire team so everyone can pick up on customers’ histories and preferences faster. This helps you increase the speed at which you respond to customer inquiries to provide a more positive experience.

2. Improve operational efficiency

CRM software makes your sales process much more efficient as you can save a considerable amount of time by automating repetitive administrative tasks. Audience segmentation, email follow-ups, post-sale workflows, and invoicing are just some of the tasks and processes that a CRM lets you automate.

Modern CRMs can further consolidate customer information gathered across the organization, including sales, marketing, and customer service, into a single dashboard, everyone in your business can enjoy streamlined communication and smoother collaboration. 

3. Increase customer retention

Your best customers are always your current customers. No matter your industry, it is always easier to encourage repeat purchases and/or expand contracts than it is to win over new prospects. By adopting a CRM, you can boost retention to maximize the average lifetime value of your customers.

The software makes it easy to track each customer’s interests and every interaction to gain a clear understanding of how to serve them best. As a result, campaigns can be aligned to each customer to encourage further loyalty.

For example, you can cross-sell and offer discounts based on previous purchases. Or, you could keep track of how long someone has been a customer and send them rewards when they reach key milestones to improve stickiness.

4. Lower your customer acquisition cost

Gaining new customers comes at a cost. With a CRM, you can get more return from every dollar spent on marketing to new customers to lower your average customer acquisition cost (CAC). There are several ways a CRM helps you achieve this.

To start, it can lower the cost needed to executive effective campaigns by automating repetitive tasks to free up time for your sales and marketing teams. The centralization of data afforded by a CRM also allows you to target potential customers with greater efficiency.

With a CRM, you will know exactly what stage of the purchasing process each prospect is in. You can use this to send marketing messages targeting their specific needs at that moment instead of sending generalized messages less likely to capture their attention.

5. Generate more sales

At the end of the day, your business needs sales to survive. A great way to increase sales is to ensure you direct your efforts toward selling to the right people. Not every lead will be a good fit for your business, and some will have a higher value than others. With a CRM, your sales team can ensure their pipeline is full of highly qualified leads and prospects. 

The data in a CRM system can be used to learn what your best customers have in common so that you can then prioritize the leads that share the same traits. This keeps the sales team focused on the best leads for the largest contract sizes. By doing so, you can close more deals with higher-value customers.

How to measure your CRM objectives

Goals that you can’t track and measure aren’t real goals. Therefore, every CRM objective should be tied to a specific performance metric that can be used to determine whether the objective is achieved.

If your CRM objectives align with your business goals, the appropriate metrics for evaluating your efforts should be easy to define. For example, if you want to improve customer retention, you should focus on your churn rate and look for it to decrease. Or, if you hope to increase sales, you can track new and total revenue generated.

If you find that you’re not reaching your CRM objectives, you can then adjust your tactics to yield better results. Perhaps, you’re not converting enough leads, so you decide to change your automated email campaigns. Or maybe, you’re not retaining enough customers, so you choose to make a greater effort to understand where and when customer satisfaction is dropping.

Achieve your goals with Insightly

Your CRM strategy should be an ever-evolving process, with your objectives adapting over time as your business grows. No matter your size or the results you achieve, your success will always depend on giving your customers the best possible experience.

Insightly CRM was designed to give businesses large and small the ability to create world-class experiences without unnecessary complexity.

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

The post CRM Objectives: 5 Goals You Can Achieve with a CRM appeared first on Insightly.

A Customer Relationship Management system (CRM) is a tool to manage all of your organization’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. CRMs provide a firsthand understanding of your customer’s experience to help you match your products and services to their needs. 

Like any tool, you’ll get the most out of your CRM when you put the most into it. The first step in that effort is to be sure to choose the best CRM based on your needs.

If you’re unfamiliar with the CRM software market, you may feel overwhelmed. In short, it’s huge.You may not know that there are subsets of CRMs, so it’s important to align your business type and objectives with the right offering. Let’s begin with what is generally agreed to be the four classic types of CRM systems.

Type 1: Operational CRMs

Operational CRMs provide customer service or marketing support through automation and streamlining business processes. They capture customer interactions and track lead qualification and action marketing automation.

Operational CRMs collect data from different marketing sources like social media, emails, or website visitors. This data can help your marketing team quickly and easily qualify leads. Operational CRMs also add value by providing more upfront information for analysis. An example of an operational CRM is Spotio.

Type 2: Analytical CRMs

Analytical CRMs use algorithms and machine learning to analyze the data they gather to create optimal customer targeting. Analytical CRMs provide insight into data and then understand and anticipate the customer’s needs that humans would otherwise miss. 

This category of CRM provides higher levels of insight and analysis regarding customer data. In addition, you can customize and scale them to allow your business to add or remove modules to suit your needs. An example of an analytical CRM is OLAP.

Type 3: Collaborative CRMs

Collaborative CRMs are mainly for customer relationship management tracking. These CRM solutions allow you to manage and track interactions with customers who contact your company via resources like social media, emails, and websites. A tracking system can help your team share sales process and task status information, reducing the confusion on what they need to do next. An example of a collaborative CRM is Dynamics 365 Sales.

Type 4: Strategic CRMs

Business models that focus on repeat and loyal customer bases use strategic CRMs to learn more about their customers. They then use this knowledge to build and maintain long-term relationships.  

Like the other types, strategic CRMs collect, analyze, segregate, and apply customer information and market trends to develop better value propositions. The difference is, this type of CRM uses algorithmic and analytical features to focus on building loyalty. It also finds strategic opportunities for engagement consistently and for more extended periods. Most generic CRMs would be identified in this category. 

Legacy CRM: Salesforce

Salesforce is the grandfather of sales CRMs. It is practically a household word these days, but it is also famous for being highly complex and expensive to deploy. 

Salesforce setup is time-consuming. The system’s complexity will require specialized resources that are almost always unavailable internally. Also, it may leave you with limited options. Although Salesforce claims to be integrated, additional apps are more bolt-ons than enhancements. 

Salesforce uses its market dominance to lock you into a single CRM type. A single type of CRM means you will be stuck with a solution that will evolve slowly. That leaves you with a problematic tool to use and constricts you to its technology. 

One of its main drawbacks is its high initial price point and recurring costs. The pricing structure is as confusing as it is costly. Development and user interfaces can be tricky to use. There are steep learning curves and user adoption issues that both admins and end-users need to surpass to get the most out of it. This makes the total cost of ownership very high.

The major advantage to Salesforce is also its major drawback: it’s a popular solution so theoretically you can hire people who already have experience in using it. However, it’s so highly customized by each organization that going from one Salesforce instance to another is akin to starting over. 

Niche player CRM: HubSpot

HubSpot’s primary focus is on marketing and marketing automation; its CRM came later. 

HubSpot is often perceived as a closed system that does best when it is not subject to integrations. As an example, companies with multiple and intricate sales technologies may not find it easy to integrate their complex environment with non-HubSpot technologies. 

A common concern about HubSpot is that it lacks flexibility and robustness when it comes to customizations and sales reporting. When identifying duplicate accounts and contacts, data synchronization is another example of its inflexibility.

Also, keep in mind that if your business or organization is in growth mode, it’s likely that you will outgrow HubSpot at some point. Thus the process of selecting and implementing a new CRM will be on the horizon for you again. 

How to choose the right type of CRM

While classic one-type CRMs noted above perform well within their strength areas, they can get you and your team stuck in a data silo. Whether it’s technological, price, or people-based, sooner or later, you’ll end up with a solution that doesn’t meet your needs. 

Legacy and niche solutions come with their own set of problems, including the risk of difficult user adoption, counter-intuitive UX, costly time, and investment losses due to additional customizations. 

You know you need to choose a CRM that will grow with your business, integrate easily, and not break the bank. It’s time to explore a modern, unified CRM as the answer to this need. 

Why modern unified CRMs are the answer

Modern CRMs save you time and money because they are easy to set up, so you don’t have to engage with expensive integrators to implement your CRM. Implementation is quick, so you won’t need to wait months to experience the benefits of your new system.

The six main reasons to choose a modern unified CRM are as follows: 

1. Improved collaboration and automation – Modern CRMs like Insightly ensure that your sales, marketing, and customer support teams find and work on the information they need. Winning a customer’s business and loyalty takes a united effort, not a siloed one. With modern CRMs, you can give your teams the ability to work in a united and carefully tracked manner due to the enhanced collaboration and automation. 

2. Maximized marketing automation – Most marketing teams juggle multiple tasks and projects at the same time. Marketing automation can allow you to maximize your marketing team’s time and effort. For example, by using Insightly Marketing, your team can create and recreate campaign structures quickly instead of having to reinvent the wheel. In addition, they can rapidly deploy workflow-based processes like web-to-lead forms that automatically generate new records and update data fields to ensure proper categorization. Easy-to-create workflows can trigger drip campaign emails that keep prospects highly engaged. Marketing reporting is easy as well, and is visible to all other teams. 

3. Streamlined sales automation – Unnecessary data entry means sales teams waste time and energy instead of concentrating on deals and the pipeline. Modern CRM sales automation can streamline sales aspects such as lead nurturing and routing. Insightly Sales makes lead-building email outreach campaigns easy for your team to manage. New leads receive emails automatically within moments of requesting information. All additional emails will seamlessly go out throughout the buyer’s journey without creating new manual task bottlenecks that are inefficient and prone to error.

4. Concise customer service automation – Closing new business is the goal, and it’s just the beginning. There’s so much more work to do to communicate the needed handoffs to deliver on promises and serve the customer. It’s vital to get these tasks right so you can retain your newly-won customers. Insightly Service, which is built on the same platform as Insightly CRM and Marketing, includes key features like an easy-to-access blade showing knowledge sidebar, macros, and full history, making it easy to share information and communicate quickly. It also includes quick visibility to SLAs, so reps can stay on track. Convenient dashboards and reports help managers analyze workflows and deploy resources more efficiently.

5. Deeply integrated – Modern CRMs like Insightly are more agile than legacy CRMs because they allow you to quickly build sophisticated integrations with the applications you already use in your organization, like Google, SAP, DocuSign, and much more. Imagine building workflows and integrations without writing a line of code. Insightly’s AppConnect is a no-code solution, so you don’t have to hire developers. AppConnect uses drag and drop functionality, automated error handling, built-in versioning, plus instant deployment and provisioning so your team can build and run sophisticated integrations efficiently.

6. Easy to implement and onboard new people – Legacy CRMs are complex and challenging to implement. They require a deep knowledge of the technology and often require third-party consultants to help, and that’s just with the install. The extreme amounts of documentation and training options demonstrate the complexity in deploying and rolling out to end-users. Modern CRMs like Insightly are built with the user experience in mind. They are designed to be intuitive and to perform like common consumer apps that are already familiar to users. They eliminate the need for long and complex implementations and get your team up and running as quickly as possible so you can experience CRM success in no time.

Where to start?

Not sure where to start? Get your personalized demo of a modern, unified CRM today to see it in action.

The post The 4 types of CRMs and their differences appeared first on Insightly.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) integration is essential to unlocking the true power of a CRM. Integrations add functionality to CRMs and build a reliable source of truth you can count on to make decisions across your entire organization by connecting every single application you use to run your business.

When done right, CRM integrations reduce organizational silos, save time, and bring an in-depth customer understanding to your entire organization. 

This clarity is where the CRM magic happens.

What is CRM integration?

A CRM is mission-critical sales technology that guides and manages interactions with current and potential customers. It helps companies build relationships with their target audience to improve the customer experience, increase sales and improve profit margins. 

Given this definition, it’s easy to see why your CRM must be integrated with the rest of your tech stack. CRM integration allows customer information to flow freely between all the applications you use to run your business. It’s a 360-degree view of customer data since your data synchronizes across all systems. 

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.

Why integrate your CRM with other tools?

Sure, you can run your CRM without integrating it with your other systems, but you’ll be missing out on a host of benefits. When you integrate your CRM, you can expect to experience the following: 

• Increased customer interaction: Delivering solid customer support should be at the top of your list to guarantee customer satisfaction. Sharing data quickly among platforms gives an up-to-the minute view of data across your business, empowering your team to serve.
• Reduced manual processes: Manually transferring data from apps to spreadsheets is labor-intensive and error-prone, and keeps  businesses from maximizing their human resources. Plus, manual processes are more prone to errors, leading to a potential decrease in accuracy and, in turn, customer satisfaction. 
• Improved reporting: When data across systems is shared, you get an end-to-end view of your organization which empowers your team and your leaders to make better, more informed decisions. 

Additional benefits include: 

• A complete view of your customers for all users
• Improved, long lasting customer relationships
• An overall increase in sales velocity

The no-code/low-code approach

So, you’re convinced that integrating your CRM is the right move. You may now be wondering how expensive and time consuming that is going to be. The answer depends upon the type of CRM you have implemented. It’s true that some CRMs will require you to work with an outside firm, require developers to write code, and it will a long time to enable your requests.

However, if you’ve selected a modern, unified CRM like Insightly, the process looks much different. Insightly’s AppConnect is a dynamic and easy-to-use, no-code integration engine. It lets you build sophisticated integrations and workflows between Insightly and hundreds of applications you use across your entire organization.

Using AppConnect, Insightly facilitates CRM integration without long development cycles. The best part is that you don’t have to be a software engineer to build integrations in your CRM system due to the intuitive, user-friendly interface. So if you’re already using Slack, GSuite, NetSuite, Oracle, or any of hundreds of other platforms, AppConnect is ready to help.

4 Essential CRM integrations for functional teams

Now you know that CRM integrations allow your team to maximize and optimize tasks and perform their jobs more effectively. The more you can integrate CRM technology with your teams and their workflows, the better you’ll be able to focus on what counts — your customers’ experience and their goals. 

You likely want all of the integrations right now, but how do you decide which to prioritize? Talk with your teams to discover and understand their frequent and high visibility needs to gain momentum when kicking off enhancement projects. This approach will simplify processes and provide a clear roadmap to help you determine and prioritize what integrations will deliver the best ROI and limit scope creep during the building sessions. The good news is that Insightly AppConnect is so easy to use, that you can tackle many integrations right away.

Finance and accounting

Empowering your team by integrating their SAP, Quickbooks, and DocuSign processes into a CRM can free them from unproductive platform toggling. They can automate the entire end-to-end process and securely sync and store vital vendor and organizational data, too.

Frequently used requests or processes (payment, invoicing, ordering, quoting, etc.) can be triggered and routed automatically to and from platforms like SAP and Quickbooks that record each step’s signing-off (DocuSign) status and history. CRM integrations also allow you to make sure all needed and required compliance documents are automatically uploaded and organized proactively, so you don’t have to put in the effort to meet regulatory filing and audit checkpoints.

Using integrated dashboards, you will never be far away from reporting status. All your spend and revenue data is ready and at your fingertips to provide critical insights and empower agile business decisions in real-time.

Human resources

Hiring great talent can be a challenge. With integrations to Talent Management platforms like Greenhouse, you can automate referrals and recruitment processes like scheduling interviews, and manage interview feedback communications effortlessly.

Enhanced integrations can also help save HR staff time by keeping job descriptions up-to-date, improving resume scoring, and surfacing better candidate choices, all while syncing it with your HR solutions and platforms.

It can take a considerable amount of time to hire someone, and you want to get them onboarded and productive as fast as possible. Integrating apps like BambooHR, Workday, and OKTA can automate onboarding and offboarding sequences for account generation or deletion, and grant permissions, benefits selection, and HR-based equipment provisioning.

IT and operations

Any downtime means a loss to the bottom line. IT integrations can help detect problems and proactively initiate incident resolution processes. Integrating your CRM with platforms like ServiceNow can automate and prioritize incident ticket generation, which will help decrease resolution times. Users can stay up to date with real-time communications via chatbots and collaboration tools like Slack. This can serve to communicate status in areas like ticket escalation, ticket assignments, and incident alerts. Help Desk staff can access best-practice knowledge libraries from multiple systems, so they have one source of truth when researching solutions.

Sales and marketing

When marketing and sales are in sync, the odds of success dramatically increase. Teams can elevate and strengthen marketing and sales impact by integrating a number of applications to help support and enhance collaboration. Some examples include:

• Keep lines of communication open with the Slack connector. Celebrate victories with closed-won deals auto-populating to a “wins” channel. Receive alerts to approve deals or when prospects are hot and ready for a call. 
• Rather than going back and forth between systems, trigger quotes and invoices via an integration with Quickbooks online, access your online store using a Shopify integration, or trigger DocuSign to get the deal sign-off now.
• Generate roll-up reports on campaign effectiveness without switching apps when you integrate with your ERP (e.g. NetSuite).
• Leverage communications tools by integrating with Gong and SalesLoft to get insights into lead qualification.

These are just a few examples of the benefits of enhancing your sales and marketing collaboration; in fact, there are hundreds of sales and marketing applications you could use to create velocity through the sales and marketing process. 

Insightly: An integrated CRM that goes beyond integration

Your business is about more than just transactions. It’s about building customer relationships that make your clients feel valued and confident about their purchases. 

You already know the importance of centralizing customer knowledge in one place, so your entire team has instant access to essential, reliable data. 

Insightly AppConnect is a powerful automation tool that makes it easy to build sophisticated integrations and workflows between Insightly and hundreds of applications you use across your entire organization. 

Test out the Insightly CRM with a free trial to see all the great features and discover how you can grow your business today.

The post CRM integration: What it is, why is it essential, and 4 key integrations appeared first on Insightly.

A CRM solution is an essential part of your company’s digital transformation. You can eliminate redundant interactions, departmental silos, and customer frustrations. You can maintain all your customer data on one central platform. And you can create new assets like dashboards, visualizations, and apps with incredible speed.

For example, your sales team leads can view individual interaction maps and know exactly where prospects are in your funnel. You can track each prospect’s unique paths through your marketing and sales pipeline.

Most importantly, you can use a CRM to develop and maintain long-lasting customer relationships.

Define your CRM needs

Before committing to a CRM solution, identify the business needs it should address. Determine the aspects of your current sales and marketing system you want to maintain. Next, ask yourself which goals you’d like to accomplish. And finally, answer these critical questions: 

• How do you currently track marketing prospects and sales leads? 
• How do you manage ongoing customer/client relationships?
• Do you use the same CRM software for all front-end operations? 
• What redundancies exist between your current systems? 
• What will it take to switch CRM platforms?
• Which new technologies do you want to leverage? Consider customized dashboards and visualizations, app development and deployment, and AI data analysis, forecasting, and machine learning.

Once you’ve answered these questions, here’s what you need to do next to get started. 

1. Assemble a cross-functional team

Because your CRM software will affect a wide array of stakeholders, you need a cross-functional needs assessment team. This group should represent senior leadership, middle managers, and the front-end staff who will use your new CRM every day. Invite specialists like IT people and CRM admins – as well as generalists and creative thinkers.

Choose a leader for this group who has an excellent understanding of all your customer-facing operations. This person will take responsibility for the project, ensure team member accountability, and deliver a data-backed decision. Consider operations or data managers, sales leaders, or IT leads for this position. Most of all, this person should balance details with general perspectives and have excellent communication skills.

2. Collect feedback from future users

Your new CRM software will integrate all your front-facing operations into one system, so touch base with everyone who will use it. Have leaders ask their teams what functionalities they value in your current system, what customer experiences they wish you could offer, and what workflows and interactions they wish you could track?

Create a comprehensive needs list like this:

• Secure customer data management
• Lead management
• Project management
• Workflow automations, integrations, and customizations
• Sales automations like product and price catalogs, quote books, territory management, etc.
• Marketing automations like campaign management, email marketing, lead scoring, etc.
• Data analytics and reporting
• Mobile CRM access
• Data management during the transition to this new CRM
• User training and ongoing support
• Implementation requirements and total cost of ownership

3. Analyze and synthesize feedback

Meet with a small group of stakeholders and parse your feedback data.  Look for similarities between  ideas, issues, and feature requests that may signal important trends. Group these into categories such as important features, cost and licensing, scalability, integrations, and support.

4. Prioritize your CRM needs and wants

Choose a CRM solution that meets the needs of your customer-facing teams. As you review your analysis, differentiate between each department’s “must-haves” and “wants.” Look beyond the needs of any single group to be sure your new CRM is easy to scale up as your business requirements grow and change.

Assess CRM vendors

To properly assess all the CRM solution vendors available, consider some key questions, including: 

• Which one offers the right mix of features for your organization of all the CRM companies out there?
• Which CRM tool allows access to real-time customer relationship data?
• Which contact management suite tears down the invisible barriers between your marketing, sales, and support teams? 
• Does your CRM software map interactions in real-time so your team members can speak with confidence and relevance? For instance, your sales manager may want to follow up with current customers to track relationships.
• And most importantly, how will your new system protect your customer’s personal information?

5. Identify solutions that fit your needs

Every department will need different features from your CRM. For example, your: 

• Marketing teams may want CRM features like custom dashboards and detailed lead management visualizations. 
• Sales managers may want to know how far prospects have progressed through your sales pipeline. 
• Content creators may require clearer perspectives on the email and workflow builder, and its content creation interface.

By determining all the features your company needs, you can compare CRMs and make the best decision for your company. 

6. Keep an eye out for CRM costs

Big names don’t mean big savings and every feature you require. Some legacy CRMs may include features that don’t meet your business needs. Alternatively, these older CRM solutions may not have the new technologies necessary to increase your market share.

CRM providers typically offer tiered pricing per user that facilitates scaling. However, look out for hidden fees and ensure the features you want are in the tier you choose.

7. Hop on trials and demos

After comparing the benefits of the CRMs on your list, pick two or three to examine in depth. The most efficient way is to schedule live demos and sign up for free trials.

Have your tech team test out integrations, customizations, and add-ons. Ask your marketing team which CRMs provide the conversion statistics they need to get the most from your ad budget. Have sales teams test out custom ticket automations and role-based permissions.

8. Remember these essential CRM characteristics

As you’re testing potential CRM solutions, consider the following essential factors that may matter most for everyday use:

• Implementation—Choose someone who understands team workflows and tech logistics to create a new CRM implementation plan. Although you probably want a CRM software suite with comprehensive functionality across many departments, you also need a CRM system that integrates with your existing software and data.
• Adoption rate—While a CRM software suite with comprehensive functionality across many departments is a wise choice, you also need a CRM system people will actually use. According to this 2019 report, experts differ on the causes of low adoption rates, such as bad experiences, poor onboarding, and negative preconceptions. However, the data shows that users engage more with systems that are easy to use, and include mobile apps.
• Customization and workflows—Even though a particular CRM software package may look like the right one on the surface, be sure to dig deeper, so have your teams test the limits of dashboard customizations, email design tools, and analytics.Make sure your new CRM can handle everything your teams throw at it during their daily workflows. Do a few test runs with salespeople playing the part of customers. That way, you’ll know you’re making the right choice.
• Support—A CRM system is only useful to your organization if users can quickly and easily get the help they need. From salespeople to tech people, everyone eventually needs help. Be sure the CRM you choose provides comprehensive customer service and support.
• Integration: A unified platform—You can save big bucks with a single, unified CRM solution that eliminates redundancies and helps you create efficiencies. However, integrating all your client-facing operations into one system can be difficult. So have your tech teams work closely with team leads to ensure your CRM can deliver on its all-in-one promises long before deployment day.
• Scaling and growth—Your CRM is the central hub of your customer-facing operations. Adopting new CRM software can put a massive strain on your teams. Be sure the platform you choose will easily scale to your growth. That way, you’ll avoid massive headaches by not having to change CRMs every time you expand.
• Smooth transitioning—Your new CRM software should seamlessly integrate with a wide array of third-party applications. Make sure your CRM works well with the tools you use now and the tools you’ll rely on as you scale up.Of course, your CRM will also need to integrate with your existing system. It’s crucial to preserve your current customer relationship data as you transition to a single, unified CRM.
• Compliance—Your organization needs to show it meets all current digital privacy requirements for the countries in which you’ll be operating. Be sure the CRM software you choose has powerful and up-to-date customer information protections. Nothing matters more than building and maintaining customer trust, so your CRM should be able to support those goals.
• Ease of use —Although your team needs to feel comfortable using your new CRM platform, consider how it looks to your customers. Find out if their experience is pleasant? Does your CRM software feel intuitive? Have team members play the role of the customer. They’ll learn a lot about each CRM’s UX by opening emails, clicking through funnels, and filling out forms.

9. Choose the best CRM system

Ultimately, you need to discover what feels right for your workflow and your teams. Take your time, test potential new CRMs, and check in with your colleagues. Together, you’ll find a set of tools that supports all your organization’s front-facing teams.

Marketing, sales, and support teams love a unified CRM

Insightly provides the versatility you need to quickly and easily scale your operations.

With Insightly, integration and dashboard customization are a snap. Our users appreciate our massive suite of relevant and powerful tools. Insightly’s adoption rates are incredibly fast because people enjoy using our tools.

Rely on Insightly for everything from broad-scope analytics to single-customer views. Our CRM software gives you unparalleled perspectives on your most precious asset: customer relationships.

Make us the nerve center of your entire customer service infrastructure. Click here for a free trial of Insightly.

The post 9 steps to choose the best CRM appeared first on Insightly.

A unified CRM is what’s required to thrive in a competitive landscape. The tools and data integration that it provides enable all of the company’s teams to seamlessly achieve synergy. They enable you to gain more insights and deliver a better experience.

Let’s dive deeper into the ways Insightly’s unified CRM software can have a transformative impact on your business.

What is the CRM process?

The CRM process can be best described as a business strategy that enables companies to better identify and interact with current and potential customers. 

The idea here is to improve personalization for every customer interaction for enhanced customer experience and loyalty through data analysis and segmentation tools.

The same approach is also leveraged for prospects to convert them into paying customers. The five core steps of the CRM process signify a collaborative effort between the key departments in a company.

The 5 steps of the CRM cycle

1. Increase brand awareness

Typically the marketing team’s domain, the first step in the customer relationship management process involves introducing prospects to the business. It requires in-depth research on the audience’s demographics and interests.

Audience personas are created based on this market research to launch marketing campaigns that will theoretically have a greater chance of resonating with the audience.

2. Acquire more leads

The lead acquisition step is generally handled by the sales or marketing teams, or in some companies, both. This is essentially an effort to get prospects to engage with the business. 

For example, the marketing team might offer downloadable content as a lead magnet to website visitors if they provide an email address. The sales team could then pull that data from the CRM to proactively target prospects to convert them into customers.

3. Convert leads into paying customers

Reps nurture leads to get them to convert to paying customers in this part of the sales process. They usually rely on lead-scoring data in the CRM to identify prospects that may have the highest probability of a sale and follow-up diligently with the lead.

Converting prospects into new customers is more of an art than a science. Sales reps must be skilled at building trust to inspire confidence in the leads to convert them into paying customers.

4. Retain customers with customer support and customer success

The job doesn’t end when the lead converts into a customer. Providing them with exceptional customer service is key to ensuring that they remain loyal customers.

The most widely used metric in customer service is CSAT or customer satisfaction. This data is used to track trends and identify and fix any issues impacting customer service.

5. Extract more value per customer with upsells/cross-sells

Upselling and cross-selling are great opportunities to proactively meet the needs of your customers by utilizing the data in the CRM. Companies should be mindful of the fact that customers’ needs may change over time. 

This can be achieved by leveraging purchase data to provide personalized recommendations on the products and services that would provide further benefit to the customers.

Why the CRM process is flawed

Not all companies are created equal. The customer journey will always be different for every company. What works for one may not necessarily work for the other. This crucial fact tends to be overlooked by the CRM process. 

What ends up happening is that the data gets compartmentalized in different tools. It turns into a mess as data discrepancies inevitably occur when all teams are not entering data into the same system.

This causes friction between various teams, including sales and marketing, since they effectively work in silos with complex ad hoc data sync processes.

Employees thus end up not trusting the data as it doesn’t provide them with a holistic view to make empowered decisions. They come to question the integrity of the data because it doesn’t appear to be cohesive and comprehensive.

They also find it difficult to achieve synergy with colleagues on other teams. Alignment across teams is crucial to close more customers and to improve retention.

A real-life CRM process example

A legacy CRM is effectively used as a suite of apps by a company. All of the sales, marketing, and service data is collected and managed in separate silos. 

Thus, in reality, these so-called “integrated” CRMs are actually “assembled” CRM software where features and functionality were added over time in response to customers’ needs. 

These solutions don’t fit the customer journey, particularly for companies that offer multiple products and services. The many teams that work on them use different tools that all do the same thing but don’t allow for seamless data integration. It’s impossible to have confidence in the data when it’s scattered everywhere. 

There’s no continuity between the various tools in the CRM system, which prevents them from having an up-to-date and comprehensive view of the customer journey.

This will prevent, for example, the hardware and software sales teams in a company from leveraging the upsell/cross-sell opportunities that may exist with their customers simply because their data is all over the place. 

Trying to fully integrate the scattered data is an expensive and time-consuming proposition, often making efforts to achieve that futile.

A better, adaptive approach to the CRM process

1. Start with the customer journey

The customer journey is a vital part of any CRM integration. Most solutions go about it the wrong way by forcing the customer journey to adapt to the CRM process. 

Think about it, what works for a customer who wants to buy hardware might not work for someone who’s buying software. The same CRM strategy can’t be used for both.

It should be the other way around. The CRM process needs to be flexible enough to adapt to the customer journey. This increases the potential of converting leads and enhancing retention regardless of what stage of the sales pipeline they’re in.

2. Integrate with your existing tools

A single customer view that centralizes all customer data is a powerful tool to achieve synergy. Its integration with all of the existing tools that a business uses is also of vital importance. 

Insightly AppConnect is a tool that allows for integration automation. Companies can use it to link and integrate Insightly’s unified CRM system with the other apps they use in their organization. 

This allows for powerful new workflow automation between applications. AppConnect also features over 500 pre-built connections to popular business apps.

Even non-technical users can build seamless integrations by using its simple drag and drop interface without writing a single line of code.

3. Take a unified approach

Companies can both extract the most from their CRM implementation and improve customer service by adopting a unified approach that no longer relies on redundant tools and the compartmentalization of data in silos. 

They can achieve synergy and data integration by unifying the marketing, sales, support, and project management on a single platform. All of the teams work together with a holistic view of the customers’ needs and expectations.

​​One of the biggest benefits of a unified solution for teams is that they can complete many tasks in one single system. They no longer have to switch between multiple applications to use various tools just to access data, a task that unnecessarily slows them down. 

Insightly puts this unified approach at the heart of its CRM solution. Teams’ productivity increases through automation. With business intelligence built in, Insightly can also be used to create data visualizations and real-time data dashboards for unmatched visibility.

Insightly unifies your CRM process

Insightly empowers organizations and even small businesses to align sales, marketing, and support teams so that they have complete visibility over customer relationships. They can use that insight and knowledge to improve customer service. 

Automatic lead routing ensures that leads are routed to the right person in real-time. With workflow automation, companies can create complex, multi-step business processes to better serve their customers. It can even execute custom business logic to sync with external systems from the likes of SAP and Oracle.

AppConnect ensures that the ecosystem of tools that a company uses every day isn’t disrupted; rather it’s integrated seamlessly with the CRM. AppConnect comes with more than 500 pre-built connections to the most popular business software apps. This makes establishing seamless integrations between the CRM and apps very straightforward.

Interested in learning more about how a real single customer view can enable you to improve customer retention and to better connect with them? Try Insightly for free to feel the unified CRM difference for yourself.

The post The CRM process is flawed. Here is why. appeared first on Insightly.

This misalignment has led to tension between sales and marketing teams. It also leads to companies missing revenue targets. Because of this, many companies have made strides to align marketing and sales teams. You may hear these referred to as revenue teams. By putting sales and marketing in lockstep, these companies keep the bottom line top of mind.

If you’re a marketer, navigating a move toward marketing and sales alignment can be a challenge. You may need to make changes in your day-to-day work. Here are a few ways marketers can work with sales teams to achieve better alignment and exceed revenue goals.

Why marketing and sales alignment matters

Marketers and salespeople working together smoothly and aligning their operations can create advantages for both teams.

Improved lead management 

Your junior sales team likely spends the bulk of their time qualifying leads. They use an integrated CRM, online research, email, and phone conversations to determine if leads have the potential to turn into customers. Instead of following up on low-quality leads, sales can use this time to start to warm up leads who fit their ideal customer profile.

This gap begins to close when sales and marketing work together to create lead scoring and grading models to qualify leads. Once sales and marketing agree on lead qualification criteria, they’ll reduce friction between the teams and start improving lead conversion rates. It may take some time and testing to figure out the best lead qualification model, but as long as sales and marketing are working in tandem with each other, they’ll be able to find what works best faster. 

Sales can leverage marketing programs

Once these leads are qualified, sales teams are responsible for converting them to customers. Here’s where marketing can help. Marketers have content, programs, designs, and events that can be repurposed into sales collateral. Sometimes there is a dedicated product marketer who focuses on using marketing to enable sales. This is especially useful during a sales blitz, an outbound sales campaign common with account-based marketing (ABM).

A marketing blog post can become a case study. A webinar can become a product tutorial. A trade show can be a way for a potential customer to meet your team. By repurposing assets, marketing provides sales reps with more tools to help them guide customers through the buying journey and close deals.

Integrated programs have the best chance of success

Companies are moving to hyper-targeted, integrated campaigns. If your company is using account-based marketing, the buy-in of sales and marketing is crucial. ABM campaigns require sales results, account management expertise, agile digital marketing, and creative thinking. Your marketing and sales leadership must be in lockstep as to how the campaign will operate, who is responsible for each aspect, and how to measure its success. If your marketing and sales teams aren’t on the same page, your ABM campaign will struggle—or fail outright.  

How marketing can better understand sales

Even when teams are integrated, there are still fundamental differences between marketing and sales. There are a few things that marketers can do to better understand salespeople and improve the value they deliver to sales. 

Sit in on sales calls

The best marketers do this regularly. By sitting in on one with sales each week, marketers can get insight into the results of their programs. Learn more about the characteristics of a good (or bad) lead, what the biggest concerns are, how they describe a problem they are trying to solve, and if your marketing materials resonate with prospects.

Understand the sales funnel

Marketers know how the sales funnel works: leads get qualified, turn into prospects, then opportunities, then customers. Yet, sales teams know the ins and outs of their funnel specifically. Perhaps there’s a smoking gun that can tell a salesperson that someone is a great potential customer. Conversely, there may be a red flag that tells a sales rep that someone should be disqualified immediately. Are there specifics that impact your company’s sales process? As the marketing team learns these, they can focus on generating leads that are a better fit for the funnel.

Integrate and align your customer relationship process

We all know there’s a slew of sales and marketing tools out there. Yet, what about tools that align the goals of marketing with the goals of sales? A unified customer relationship management (CRM) system, like Insightly, is the first step in orienting marketing and sales results. Sales management uses a CRM to organize and manage sales processes and customer interactions. Marketing can use CRM data to extract customer insights and learnings to inform programs and initiatives. 

Review sales results 

We all know the sales process doesn’t end when we generate a lead. Your sales team is likely using their CRM to collect and crunch plenty of sales-related information. This shows how leads move through the funnel and how they convert to customers. 

Three ways marketers can become indispensable to salespeople

Once marketers understand how the sales process works, there are a few easy ways we can help sales close more and bigger deals.

Provide them with content to help warm leads and close deals

Create a comprehensive content plan that includes blog posts, tutorials, videos, and other agreed-upon resources that sales management and account executives can share with prospective customers. Also, figure out the best ways to repurpose materials in different formats so that you can maximize the value of every piece of content you produce.

Offer social media training and reviews

Many sales managers rely on social networks like LinkedIn to help them qualify or prospect. Marketers can offer reviews and recommendations to sales’ social media accounts, as well as provide a plan that includes post content and suggested language.

Create loyalty programs to improve customer engagement

Marketing doesn’t end once the deal is closed. Implementing best practices in customer engagement can improve customer experience. This gives salespeople more leverage in offering benefits to customers. 

How salespeople can help marketers

Sales teams can also help marketers improve programs, which in turn generate better leads. Here are a few specific ways that salespeople can provide insight to marketing.

Help marketers build an ideal customer profile

An ideal customer profile is a comprehensive account of your company’s perfect customer. Ideal customer profiles are crucial for account-based marketing and targeting enterprise-level customers. An ICP relies on sales information to understand the process by which the ideal customer goes through the sales funnel. Marketers can integrate both quantitative and qualitative sales results into the profile. 

Identify customer advocates

Customer testimonials strengthen marketing. There’s no better way to convince a new customer than the recommendation of a current customer. Along with customer success, salespeople can help marketing identify strong customer advocates who can be quoted on the website and speak at marketing events.

Measure marketing return-on-investment

You don’t know if your marketing program is successful until you get regular feedback from sales and see the final bottom line. Request regular reporting from the sales team on the results of marketing programs, including revenue generated from specific campaigns. Incorporating this assessment will ensure that marketing programs align with sales success. A unified platform for sales and marketing, like Insightly, can help to keep both teams in sync from lead generation through conversion and ongoing customer engagement campaigns. 

Conclusion

We are all striving toward perfect sales and marketing alignment. Consider the value that each team can provide to one another when interacting and planning your joint revenue efforts. What tools, processes, and elements of culture can help your sales and marketing teams to better collaborate and tackle challenges? 

The post How marketers can work more effectively with sales appeared first on Insightly.

But how can your company be strategic when data are created and stored in so many different locations and formats? Email inboxes, social media sites, document repositories, and other third-party software tools are just a few of the places where your data live.

Integrating your CRM is certainly an option, but where should you start? Is integration worth the effort?

In this post we’ll explore CRM integrations and discuss five important integrations to consider in 2021.

Why use CRM integrations?

Before we dive into specific integrations to consider in 2021, let us first examine why CRM integrations are necessary. After all, you’ve already made a considerable investment in your CRM. Shouldn’t it do everything you need without relying on other systems?

Not exactly. Here’s why.

Even the best CRM can’t do everything

Last time I checked, no CRM will run a profit and loss report or statement of cash flow. Nor should it. And, although CRM technology continues to advance and encompass more aspects of daily life for businesses, the reality is that CRMs are not built to support every process and workflow. System consolidation can be wise, but total elimination of non-CRM technology is simply infeasible (at least in 2020). Therefore, integrating mission-critical apps to your CRM makes good sense.

Some tools become more useful when enriched by data stored in your CRM

You’ve put great effort into making your CRM the central source of truth for your organization. Maximize the usefulness of that data by making it accessible in other mission-critical apps, such as email inboxes and team collaboration platforms.

Not every team member requires direct access to your CRM

Sales, marketing, and project teams tend to be the heaviest users of CRM technology. That being said, there are many other teams who do not (or should not) require access to your CRM. Does your freelance graphic designer really need a CRM license? Perhaps not. On the other hand, she does interact with customer-related projects. What’s the right answer? Integrating her workspace to your CRM could be the perfect solution.

Managing relationships is messier than ever

No matter how much thought you put into engineering the perfect customer journey, some relationships do not fit into a nice and tidy box. Creating additional web-to-lead forms and autoresponder emails will never stop some customers from circumventing your ideal workflow. In today’s digital world, customers have more ways to engage your company than ever before.

Building integrations to third-party platforms (in particular to social media and email) makes your company better prepared to handle these situations, avoid data loss, and elevate customer relationships.

Integrate these five things in 2020

So, what should be on your integration to-do list in 2020? Here are the five system integrations that will deliver the most value to your organization.

1. Inbox

Stop and think. How much time do you spend in your inbox on a typical day? Now, multiply that across your entire staff. If you’re like many companies, email is still your most frequently used tool. Email offers a convenient platform for outreach and engagement, but it’s not ideal for organizing relationship data.

A better approach integrates your CRM and email, allowing users to quickly access and edit relationship data without leaving their inboxes.

Tip for Insightly users: Insightly Sidebar for Gmail makes it easy to view and add contacts without leaving your inbox. You can also save email messages into Insightly with a click of a button. The Insightly Sidebar for Outlook is also available for customers who use Outlook.

2. Financial data

Cash flow is the lifeblood of any business. When customers fail to pay their invoices on time, your company suffers. Unfortunately, for many organizations, customer relationship management and billing fall into two separate departments that rarely speak to each other.

Integrating proposal, invoice, and payment data into your CRM creates transparency for front-line staff who are most likely to engage with customers, thereby reducing past-due situations and increasing cash flow.

Tip for Insightly users: Insightly integration for QuickBooks Online pulls in invoice and payment data into a dedicated tab on the customer’s record in Insightly.

3. Documents and files

Your CRM is an excellent place to collect customer contact information, notes, memos, and small chunks of relationship data. However, some data sources are best retained in their original format (i.e. complex pricing spreadsheets, photos from trade shows, and product spec sheets).

Attaching downloaded copies of files to CRM records is one option, but a better solution integrates your CRM to a cloud document management system. Linking to live versions of an online document maximizes collaboration and minimizes the possibility of confusion caused by revisioning.

Tip for Insightly users: Insightly offers a number of document integrations, including Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive, Evernote, and others.

4. Team chatter

With the advent of remote work and collaboration apps, such as Slack, team members spend more time “chatting” than ever before. This online chatter represents real business value, but value is decreased when data remains isolated from your primary source of truth. In a similar way, online conversations become much less meaningful when collaborators do not have direct access to CRM data. Manually logging into a separate system to search for records is not always feasible, especially in today’s fast-paced business environment.

Ideally, your team collaboration system should have a direct line into your CRM, thereby enabling data-driven conversations and avoiding the creation of new data silos.

Tip for Insightly users: Insightly for Slack allows users to quickly search for, find, and add notes to Insightly records without ever leaving Slack.

5. Everything else

Your CRM vendor cannot integrate to all of your mission-critical apps. That’s why integration platforms are so useful. For example Insightly AppConnect is a no-code integration tool that connects Insightly CRM with hundreds of applications you use across your entire organization. Learn more here.

Move faster with CRM integrations

In summary, connecting your CRM to mission-critical applications will help your company build a more data-centric culture that elevates efficiency, reduces data confusion, and, ultimately, helps your teams move faster.

Check out Insightly AppConnect to browse the complete list of integrations. Not a customer? Request a free product demo and CRM needs assessment with an Insightly rep.

Request a demo

Last updated in July 2021

The post 5 key CRM integrations in 2021 appeared first on Insightly.

Before you draft a marketing plan, do a competitive marketing analysis—a research initiative that will give you insight into how similar products are being marketed and help you to identify the best opportunities for your launch.

You may also want to complete a competitive analysis in marketing if you’re starting a new business, presenting to an investor, or need to refresh your marketing strategy.

Here’s how to write a competitive market analysis, and how you can use these competitive analysis methods to inform and improve your marketing.

Identify your competitors

Most marketers and salespeople talk about competitors often. When figuring out who else is in your space, you might compare similar companies based on product offerings, size, revenue, or number of customers. These types of product competitors are extremely useful when developing marketing programs, because you want to know how to position your product against your closest similar offering.

However, similar products are not your only competitor. In fact, they may not even be your main competitor. Sometimes, your biggest competitor is simply ‘doing nothing.’

Further, your company may be playing in someone else’s yard when it comes to marketing. Let’s say your project management tool is great for salespeople. Now, you’re not just competing for share of voice with other project management tools—you’re competing with every other sales tool as well.

When you identify your competitors, start by making a list of similar products. Then, expand. Who is each competitor competing with? And who else is playing in that space? What is every feasible alternative to someone buying your product? That’s your true place to start with a competitive analysis framework.

Understand competitors’ marketing strengths and weaknesses

Once you know who your competitors are, it’s time to give them a little credit. They wouldn’t be your competitors if they weren’t any good, right?

Analyzing your competitors’ strongest marketing programs

We tend to think of our competition as, well, competition. Instead, start to think of them as learning opportunities. What are they doing that’s working? You can find this out by:

• Analyzing their social media presence
• Noting how they talk and write about their product
• Analyze their paid media on Google Adwords
• Use SEO tools to see how they are ranking on different keywords
• Talk with their current or former customers about their experiences

Once you complete, see if you can carry out some of these programs at your company. If your competitors had a celebrity cameo at their multi-million dollar conference, you may not be able to capture that same marketing juice. However, if they’re competing on low-cost keywords and doubling down on a content or social strategy, your team can integrate these learnings into your own strategy.

Determine the competition’s weaknesses and your opportunities

You can learn just as much from what your competitors are not doing. Are there channels that they’ve ignored, or abandoned completely? This could mean that your target audience isn’t in these channels; or it could mean they are an untapped resource.

Often, B2B companies are the last to pursue trendy channels and tend to stick to what they’re used to. Because of this, the first-actors in these networks get to reap many benefits. They are able to quickly build more dedicated following and figure out if there’s potential to turn social media channels into lead sources. They also get to learn the ins and outs more quickly. Not every channel is a winner, but those who pursue them are able to determine this more quickly.

Your competition’s weaknesses are your chances either to capitalize on, or learn from. When you’re completing your competitor analysis framework, you can analyze the possibilities for your team to pursue these opportunities.

Examine your competitors’ approach to digital marketing

With digital marketing, we’re all playing in the same sandbox. There’s only one Google, one Twitter and one LinkedIn, so we have quite a bit of visibility into each others’ strategies.

By poking around, you can start to map your competitors’ digital marketing approach.

Here are some questions to get started, and some tips and tools for finding this information:

What networks are they using?

You can run their name through Namechk to get a list of which social media accounts they’ve created under their brand name.

Do they have an SEO strategy?

Use the ‘Site Explorer’ tool in Ahrefs to check their domain authority, which of their pages are ranking, and if they’ve had changes over time.

Do they use Google Adwords?

Tools like iSpionage allow you to take a look at what ads your competitors are running and how much they’re spending. This is a huge indicator of whether you’ll be able to financially compete with their marketing spend.

Digital is the easiest place to replicate, test, and measure. Using your competitors’ strategies, you can experiment to see if these items also improve your marketing metrics as well.

Analyze pricing and packaging

Marketing is a catch-all term for so many different programs. Yet, pricing and packaging is one of the most crucial marketing elements that does not typically fall under our umbrella. The price of your product, and what comes with it, are usually the most critical decision factor for attracting customers to your product.

When working on your competitor market analysis, you can assess which products cost the most and the least. When assessing price, it’s also important to consider what features are included in that price point. Special discounts? Lifetime customer support? Unlimited user seats?

These items are all part of your value proposition, which you can use to communicate your product to your target market.

Packaging and pricing is not a perfect science. When analyzing the value of each offer, work closely with your product and sales teams to determine what is actually being offered, and for how much. You’ll be able to get additional insight from these teams about how your product fits into this mix and if you’re competitive. Adjusting your pricing and packaging offerings can inform your market strategy.

Evaluate your competitors’ lead flow and customer acquisition

Marketing doesn’t stop after visitors land on your site. The alignment between marketing and sales is crucial to making sure your leads become customers. Examining your competitors’ lead flow can give you some insight into how the marketing and sales teams work together.

When creating your competitive market analysis, see if your competitors are:

• Collecting leads through web forms
• Employing a sales team (you can learn this from LinkedIn)
• Offering demos, free trials, or limited access to the product

By investigating these items, you’ll start to understand how your competitors are not only getting leads, but also acquiring customers. You can use this information to approximate their customer journey, which you can integrate into your greater strategy.

How to do a competitor analysis [TEMPLATE]

Conclusion

One of the many reasons to do a new competitive marketing analysis is to inform your own marketing strategy. Often, these analyses are significant to investors and senior leaders, and can remind them that you’re on the right path. The research phase of these analyses can take time. But, they pay off many times over when you can learn from your competitors’ successes and failures.

The post How to do a competitive market analysis appeared first on Insightly.

While sales is still the driving force behind most qualification efforts, organizations today need to work closely with marketing in order to properly qualify leads. One of the reasons for this shift is the need to adapt to the rapidly evolving customer journey.

In this post we cover the basics of sales qualification, why it’s important, and how to qualify leads in a way that makes sense for your business.

Sales qualification terminology

The first step in any lead management process is developing a shared terminology. The definitions presented in our previous article about lead disposition are probably a good starting point:

• Prospect: Anyone in your database who has ever expressed a basic level of interest in your product or service.
• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): Prospects whose activity indicates that they are more likely to become customers based on prospect scoring (as compared to other prospects).
• Sales qualified leads (SQLs): MQLs that have been reviewed and passed to sales for follow-up.
• Opportunities: Converted SQLs who have expressed a willingness and ability to buy.

For the purposes of this article, let’s add one more:

• Unqualified lead: Anyone who doesn’t show a clear need for your company’s products and/or services, or meet other sales qualification criteria.

Your definitions may differ from the ones above. The main point is to align your teams with a shared understanding of key definitions and their meaning. After all, it’s hard to qualify deals when no one speaks the same language.

Why is sales qualification important?

You might be wondering why sales qualification is even necessary. Isn’t the point of business to provide your goods or services to as many customers as possible?

Not every person who comes to your website or calls your business is a good fit. Prospective customers realize that they have wants and needs. However, they do not have perfect knowledge about how your solution can fulfill those wants and needs. Therefore, sales qualification is an essential process that helps you to:

Create order and avoid chaos

A good sales qualification process—especially one that effectively uses lead scoring—makes it easy for staff to identify prospective customers who are likely to convert. Instead of staring at a massive database of hundreds of raw contacts, sales qualification winnows the list to a manageable size to ensure your team is working on best-fit deals.

Increase return on advertising spend

Marketers spend a lot of time optimizing digital advertising campaigns and website content to maximize engagement. Downloading a whitepaper, requesting pricing, or subscribing to a newsletter are a few common ways that prospects may engage. However, not every person who provides an email address is ready to purchase—or ever will. Sales qualification provides marketers essential feedback for understanding the types of campaigns and initiatives that deliver high quality leads.

Provide a better customer experience

Put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Imagine that you have a need, and you come across a service that you think meets your needs. You ask to speak to a sales rep, who fails to ask any meaningful questions and then begins pressuring you to make a purchase. This doesn’t create a good customer experience. Therefore, sales qualification is a fair and prudent way to ensure a positive experience for everyone, especially for the customer.

Scale business

Processes help you scale and grow. Therefore, a sales process that qualifies prospects is vital for attracting and converting the right customers, even as your market share expands. Qualifying one customer is easy. Qualifying 10,000 customers is not easy, but a well-defined sales qualification process can make it more manageable.

Sales qualification frameworks

Sales qualification frameworks create a structured approach to qualifying prospective customers. One of the most widely-used approaches is the BANT framework, as pioneered by IBM in the mid-20th century.

BANT definition: A set of four criteria (budget, authority, need, time frame) that helps sales professionals objectively evaluate the viability of business opportunities.

With BANT, the prospect is evaluated across four key criteria:

Budget: Does the prospect customer have a budget, and does it fit with your pricing model?

Authority: Does this specific person have the authority to make the decision to move forward?

Need: Is there an actual need that your solution could fill?

Time Frame: By what specific date does the prospect hope to solve his or her problem?

Although BANT is arguably the most well-known sales qualification framework, there may be other frameworks that better fit your business. Spend time researching sales qualification frameworks and find one that makes sense for your industry and business model.

Sales qualification questions

So, how can you know that prospective customers have the right budget, authority, need, or time frame? Ask them.

Sales qualifying questions form the foundation for determining if a prospect is a good fit for your business. By asking the right questions at the right time, you put yourself in a better position to understand the person’s situation, challenges, goals, and objectives.

But, what types of questions should you ask? Should you ask them all at once? Email or phone call?

Although there are no one-size-fits-all answers to these questions, here are some recommendations to get your creative juices flowing.

Where to ask

Take a fresh look at your customer journey map. How do prospective customers typically interact with your company? Does every customer require an in-depth demo process, or do most customers just want to go through a self-service checkout process? Your business model, product or service type, and customer buying process will play a major factor in determining “where” to ask your sales qualification questions. Other than the obvious channels (such as phone and email), what are other ways to collect data about the prospect’s needs?

Here are a few ideas:

• Optional form fields, such as revenue size or number of employees
• Chatbot prompts that ask targeted questions
• Exit intent banners on your website
• Surveys that are powered by automated marketing emails

When to ask

As illustrated by the previous examples, the sooner you can begin to build a unified view of the prospect in your CRM, the better. However, some prospects are less willing to reveal information until a person from your sales staff proactively reaches out.

Developing an effective lead scoring program simplifies the decision to initiate outreach. Once a prospect has exhibited the proper level of “interest” by visiting certain webpages or engaging with a predefined number of emails, a lead scoring system will automatically adjust the prospect’s score to a higher level. Data enrichment integrations and social media discovery features in your CRM may provide additional context. Deals that reach a certain threshold are then flagged for further review and passed on to sales. In this model, data serves as the foundation for knowing when to ask.

What to ask

Questions asked via a chatbot could be quite different than those asked during a 30-minute phone call. It all goes back to the purpose of the question. Earlier in the process, you may just be looking for basic insights about the prospect. However, as the relationship advances, you may need to ask numerous open-ended questions that get to the heart of the situation.

Let’s use my marketing consulting business as an example. Using BANT framework as a guide, here are a few questions that I might ask a prospective client during an initial consultation:

Budget

• What types of marketing programs are you currently running?
• Are you working with another marketing consultant?
• Do you already have an established marketing budget?

Authority

• Who else at your company will be involved in this project?
• Do we need to include anyone else in these conversations?

Need

• What are the goals that you’re trying to achieve?
• What have you tried in the past?
• What is your vision of success for marketing?

Time Frame

• How quickly are you looking to move forward?
• Should we plan to kick things off next week?

It’s time to build a better sales qualification process

Implementing a scalable sales qualification process can be beneficial for both your company and the people that you serve. Your sales and marketing teams will find it easier to identify and convert likely customers into paying customers. And, the prospects who decide to convert will go into the relationship feeling confident that your solution adequately meets their needs.

Recommit to building a stronger sales qualification process. Your team and your customers will appreciate it.

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