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? 

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This is part 3 of a sales process series based on conversations with Insightly VP of Sales Mark Ripley.

Even after you’ve developed your ideal sales process and aligned it with the buyer journey, there are still challenges to overcome—both now and in the future. Unexpected changes in market conditions, new product launches, and rapid expansion or contraction of the sales team are just a few examples.

Is your sales process built to last?

Let’s explore tips for future-proofing your sales process.

Why some sales processes fail & tips to avoid failure

Here are five reasons why sales processes fall short—and some best practices for avoiding failure.

1. Sales process is too complex

Breaking down your sales process into clearly defined stages and steps is necessary and logical. After all, your sales team needs a general roadmap to ensure deals get done in a way that aligns with your business goals.

However, according to Mark Ripley, VP of Sales at Insightly, developing an overly complex sales process is a recipe for failure.

“One of the ways that a sales process falls down is when reps don’t follow it,” says Mark. “When sales leaders overcomplicate the sales process with too many stages, steps, scripts, assets, and questions, reps abandon it.”

How to avoid: Focus on two things: simplicity and buy-in. Go back and revisit your customer buying process and look for opportunities to reduce complexity in your sales process. Partner with leaders throughout the organization to ensure alignment and confirm their buy-in. Once management is fully on board with the finalized sales process, it’s time to roll it out to the entire team. If sales reps know that their managers believe in the sales process, they’ll be more likely to believe in it, too—and follow it.

2. Sales process is too vague

On the other end of the spectrum is a sales process that lacks meaningful details. Much like overcomplicating things, being too vague leads to a similar outcome: abandonment by reps.

“Your sales process has significantly diminished value if it’s haphazard,” says Mark. “You can’t measure anything, and there’s no consistency for the reps.”

How to avoid: If your sales process is overly complex, don’t overcompensate and go too far in the opposite direction. Instead, strive for a balanced approach that combines structure with the freedom for your reps to do what they do best.

“A high-impact sales process sits in the middle,” says Mark. “It gives people a framework for consistency, but it also lets each individual personality flourish based on their own strengths.”

3. “Set and forget” mentality

A sales process is not like an automated workflow that you build once, enable, and then rarely think about. Rather, a good sales process is a work in process that must be constantly measured, reevaluated, tweaked, and, in some cases, overhauled.

“The sales process is not something that you can set and forget,” says Mark. “It’s something that you establish, and then you keep looking for ways to improve in a never-ending evolution.”

How to avoid: Take a proactive approach in developing and maintaining an ideal sales process for your business. Launch a cross-functional team that meets regularly (at least twice a year) to discuss bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement. Use data from your CRM to go beyond gut feelings and set data-driven goals. For example, by the end of this year, you might aim to fully understand your MQL to SQL ratio for each of your industries. Understanding key ratios makes it easier to identify issues, support ongoing coaching sessions with reps, and continuously refine your sales process.

4. Inability to adapt

The COVID-19 pandemic upended most aspects of our personal and professional lives—and sales is no exception. Virtually overnight, sales teams that were accustomed to working in shared physical offices had no choice but to go remote. Companies that had future-proofed their sales processes found themselves at a competitive advantage to those who had not.

According to Mark, “The pandemic absolutely compounded the importance and impact of having a sales process.”

How to avoid: If your organization has never developed a sales process or your current sales process isn’t well documented, now is the time to take action.

“Documentation is more important than ever for organizations as they move to a remote work world,” says Mark. “You need that master sales process document so that each sales rep, even in a remote world, is creating the ideal customer buying experience and maximizing revenue.”

5. Right process, wrong technology

Simply having a master sales process document or diagram is not enough. Sales reps need the right tools and technology to perform their day-to-day jobs in alignment with your ideal sales process. However, when your process document and sales tools are misaligned, the net result is sales process abandonment.

How to avoid: Seek out systems that best align with your ideal sales process. If it means making a change, so be it. Do your homework and research the capabilities of other sales systems. In particular, look for a CRM that can be easily customized to fit your sales process—without requiring complex development or expensive CRM consultants.

Request a free CRM needs assessment and Insightly CRM product demo to learn how sales automation can help your reach your sales goals.

Request a demo

Don’t get lost in the weeds

Over the course of this three-part series, we’ve talked a lot about the sales process—what it is, why it’s important, how to align it with your customer buying process, and how to overcome challenges. With so much to consider, it can be easy to get lost in the weeds at the expense of the big picture.

As you work on improving your sales process, remember that maximizing revenue is the whole point of a sales process.

The post How to future-proof your sales process & avoid failure appeared first on Insightly.

This is part 2 of a sales process series based on conversations with Insightly VP of Sales, Mark Ripley.

The first part of this series covered the benefits of improving your sales process: richer data, better coaching, improved scalability, and revenue optimization.

Successful companies recognize that continuous improvement is not a matter of if. Rather, it’s a matter of how.

So, how do you go about improving your sales process?

According to Mark Ripley, VP of Sales at Insightly, the best way to improve your sales process is by focusing on the buyer. Here are five steps for building a sales process that mirrors your buyer journey.

1. Get buy-in from leadership

Before you make any major changes to your sales process, it’s important to communicate your vision and gain leadership’s buy-in.

“For something as mission critical as your sales process, it needs to start at the top,” says Mark Ripley, Vice President of Sales at Insightly. “Getting managers and leaders to buy-in to what you’re doing will increase your chances of gaining adoption.”

Getting buy-in from leadership may not be an easy task, especially when your sales and marketing teams are not aligned. After all, spending time to refine the sales process can seem counterproductive compared to other, more pressing matters—such as strategic product launches, time-sensitive advertising campaigns, or quarter-end reporting.

Your next move: Arm yourself with data from your CRM that supports the case for enhancing your sales process. Identify specific pain points, such as customer churn or waning customer satisfaction, that could be alleviated with a reimagined sales process. Revisit the tangible benefits of continuous improvement and be prepared to share them with leadership. Be ready to make your best sales pitch!

2. Understand your customer’s buying process

If you’ve already studied your ideal customer journey and built an accurate customer journey map, you’re ahead of the game. However, now might be a good time to revisit your assumptions and gain a fresh perspective about the customer’s buying process.

As Mark points out, “Fundamentally, all buyers go through three phases leading up to a decision.” The phases are:

Problem Awareness: The customer realizes that he or she has a problem.

Solution Identification: The customer considers his or her problem and creates a list of products or services that could provide a solution.

Cold Feet: The customer decides whether or not the problem is actually worth solving.

According to Mark, the “cold feet” stage is easy for sales teams to overlook, but it’s one that must be carefully considered.

“When buying anything of significant value, everyone goes through a cold feet stage—even after doing all of the research to find a solution,” says Mark.

Your next move: Dust off any customer journey maps that you’ve already created. Reevaluate your assumptions in the context of the three fundamental buying phases: problem awareness, solution identification, cold feet. Did you miss anything?

3. Think like a customer

Understanding your customer’s buying phases is a good start, but it’s not enough.

“You need to go a level deeper by looking at the world through the customer lens—not the sales lens,” says Mark.

Ask yourself these questions to begin thinking more like your customer:

• How does your customer decide that a problem actually exists?
• What mysteries must be solved before a purchase can be made?
• What information is necessary to make an informed decision?
• Which questions and concerns does your customer have?
• What is your customer’s process for gaining information?
• Is the customer more likely to watch an embedded video or read a technical whitepaper?
• Is there any information that might accelerate the decision-making process?

Avoid the temptation to jump to conclusions. If you don’t have enough historical data to answer these questions, send out a survey or invite customers to participate in brief, 20-minute interviews. Ask open-ended questions that help you understand their perspectives and the steps they went through to buy your product.

Your next move: Slow down and dive into what makes customers tick. Set aside your existing sales process for the moment and seek to understand customers on a whole new level. Get creative and use data to build a more complete picture of your typical customer.

4. Map your sales process to the customer’s buying process

With a data-driven understanding of your customer’s buying process and perspectives, it’s time to boil everything down into a simple diagram.

Map the customer buying process

Using diagramming software, a whiteboard, or even pen and paper, capture each stage of the customer buying process (step two) and related psychographic information (step three). Since you’re putting the customer first, this section should be documented at the top of the page.

Layer in your existing sales process

With your customer buying process clearly defined, use the space below to document the specific actions and workflows in your sales process. For starters, it may be wise to simply list out your existing process as it stands today (in the context of the buying process). You may be surprised how much sales effort fits into one stage—at the expense of another stage.

Begin developing an enhanced sales process

Examining your existing sales process next to the customer buying process is sure to identify gaps and bottlenecks. For example, you may realize that you need more resources in the “cold feet” buying stage. Brainstorm ways to create balance in your sales process and help the customer make an informed decision.

Your next move: Create your diagram and share it with key stakeholders. Start an internal discussion, look for misalignment between the customer’s needs and your existing process, and develop a list of opportunities for improvement.

5. Work with sales ops to implement your sales process

As you move toward a sales process that better aligns with the customer buying process, be sure to keep sales operations fully engaged in the conversation.

“Sales ops is usually the team that implements the process by adapting your CRM, setting up the measurement framework, and reporting the data,” says Mark. “It’s therefore really important to have a strong relationship between sales ops and the sales team.”

After collaborating with sales ops, you may realize that your current sales stack does not align with your optimal sales process. The good news is that there are plenty of systems on the market to help you accomplish your goal. Insightly’s intuitive UI and customizability make it a great option for adapting technology to your sales process—rather than force-fitting your vision into a subpar system.

“At Insightly, we’re very well known for having a high adoption rate,” says Mark. “It’s easy to use, which generates higher adoption and helps end users adhere to the sales process to maximize revenue.”

Your next move: Work with sales ops to adapt your tech stack for your ideal sales process. If that’s not easily done, consider evaluating other tools that meet your needs.

Future-proofing your sales process

Stay tuned for part three in this series about sales processes. We’ll be sharing tips for future-proofing your sales process in an era when most teams are still working remotely.

In the meantime, if you are ready to try or switch to a new CRM, reach out to the Insightly team to schedule a demo.

Request a demo

The post 5 steps to build a sales process that mirrors the buyer journey appeared first on Insightly.

This is part 1 of a sales process blog series based on conversations with Insightly VP of Sales, Mark Ripley.

If you sell something, you already have a sales process—even if you’ve never written it down.

Of course, some companies invest a lot of time and effort to create detailed flowcharts, diagrams, and work instructions for every stage of the sales process. Others do not formally define their sales processes, aside from allowing their sales reps to “do what they do.” Both approaches are examples of sales processes, yet a more formalized approach can be much more effective.

What’s the ideal sales process for your business?

To help you figure out, here are a few tips for defining and improving your sales process.

What is a sales process?

A sales process is a series of steps that your company takes to guide prospective buyers toward a purchase.

If you’re a cooking enthusiast, it may be constructive to compare your sales process to preparing your favorite recipe. Following the recipe allows you to enjoy the fruits of your labor. Deviating from the recipe—or ignoring it entirely—usually leaves a bad taste in your mouth and makes you feel like you wasted your time.

“Like any good recipe, a well-crafted sales process creates consistent results, time and time again,” says Mark Ripley, Vice President of Sales at Insightly. “As you start to grow your business, your sales process becomes even more important.”

Stop and think about your sales process as it stands today:

• What “steps” do you and your team go through to close a deal?
• Do these steps align with the pipeline stages in your CRM?
• Does everyone in your sales organization follow the same steps to close a deal?
• Or, do they just go through the motions and ignore your “recipe”?

Spend time studying your current sales process along with its strengths and weaknesses. Remember, you already have a sales process—good or bad! Now is the time to understand what is working and what’s not.

Benefits of developing a better sales process

If you’ve been in business for very long, your existing sales process has at least delivered some measurable results. Cut yourself some slack and be thankful for the success you’ve enjoyed.

That being said, there’s always room for improvement. And, as Mark points out, continuously refining your sales process puts your business in a better position to enjoy the following benefits.

More data for ongoing measurement & continuous improvement

Whether you realize it or not, you likely have a substantial amount of data at your fingertips. It might be messy and require some cleanup, but it’s a start. Analyzing historical deal data enables you to understand your future data needs, which creates a virtuous cycle for enhancing the sales process.

“Measuring conversion rates and everything else in your sales process provides a surgical approach to understanding what needs to be improved,” says Mark.

Key takeaway: Use data to take a snapshot of your existing sales process. Then, look for new measurement opportunities to generate more data for ongoing improvement.

Enhanced coaching for your sales team

Armed with reliable data about your sales process, you’re in a much better spot to anticipate challenges, provide actionable coaching to your team, and be the best leader that you can be.

“Data makes it easier to paint a vision of success and inspire your sales reps,” says Mark.

For example, closely monitoring your team’s average close rate on qualified opportunities should make it easier to identify reps who need specialized training or assistance with late-stage deals. Likewise, tracking the success of cold outreach efforts can help you predict acquisition costs and inform decisions about talent allocation.

Key takeaway: Simply telling your team to “try harder” is not a winning strategy. You need a transparent, data-driven sales process that provides the right insights for elevating sales rep performance.

Scalability

As you add additional sales reps, layers of management, geographic locations, product lines, and general complexity, a haphazard sales process turns into serious liability for your business.

“If you want to scale, that’s where a sales process becomes mission critical,” says Mark.

Key takeaway: If you have ambitions of growing your sales team beyond a handful of reps, you need a reliable, repeatable sales process.

Revenue optimization

No article about sales processes would be complete if it ignored a key topic: revenue optimization. Maximizing revenue is the whole point of a sales process.

When properly designed and implemented, a sales process makes it easier for your company to generate revenue—and do so without adding headcount.

“Your sales process can help you increase your revenue per rep in a number of different ways,” says Mark. “If you’re taking the right measurements, constantly tweaking things, and coaching effectively, you should start to experience more revenue per rep.”

Key takeaway: Think of your sales process as a tool that helps you drive more revenue in an increasingly efficient way.

Next up, model your sales process to the buying process

Stay tuned for our next article about sales processes, which will provide specific steps for modeling your sales process to the customer’s buying journey.

Check out more sales tips on the Insightly blog.

The post What is a sales process? Why is it important? appeared first on Insightly.

That being said, trying to do too much without the right mix of people and technology can cause deals to go to waste.

To help sales reps elevate productivity in today’s “socially distanced” selling environment, many companies are taking a fresh look at workflow automation. When used properly, workflow automation helps reps get more done with less effort, and close more deals.

Here are six best practices for using workflow automation to streamline your sales pipeline.

1. Avoid automation (for now) & shore up your pipeline

Workflow automation is defined as the use of technology to reduce or eliminate the manual aspects of a business process. It is not a magical solution to fix all of your sales problems. In fact, when used in tandem with a poorly constructed sales pipeline, workflow automation may make a bad situation even worse.

To illustrate my point, let’s assume that a company’s sales pipeline for its ideal customer profile (ICP) consists of four stages:

• Needs analysis
• Value proposition
• Price quote
• Closed won (or lost)

The company’s sales reps reliably move opportunities from stage to stage, but deals consistently get stuck in price quotes. Seeking to accelerate deal velocity, the sales manager designs a complex workflow that involves numerous tasks and emails so that reps perform their necessary follow-up activities. Despite even the best intentions, this approach will likely fail because it does not address the root issue. Reps don’t need more emails crowding their inboxes. Maybe they just have a hard time differentiating between deals that are being quoted and those that are already quoted and require follow-up. In this case, simply adding another stage to the pipeline (i.e., “quote follow-up”) might be more effective and help reps structure their work with fewer distractions.

Key question: Does the sales pipeline in your CRM accurately represent your sales process? If not, it’s time to make a few changes.

2. Collect a list of your sales pipeline bottlenecks

Let’s assume that your sales pipeline is aligned with your CRM. Now the automation can begin, right? Maybe not. Here’s why.

Although creating workflows in your CRM should be relatively easy, doing so consumes scarce resources. With sales teams leaner than ever, you don’t have unlimited time available for configuring an unlimited number of automations. You must be selective and only build automated workflows that will deliver tangible value to your business.

Slow down and make a list of the current bottlenecks in your pipeline. If you can’t think of any, look for these warning signs:

• Processes that require significant amounts of data entry
• Things that consistently get “stuck’ in the pipeline
• Processes that require manual coordination with third-party systems
• Data silos

Key takeaway: Create a shared document or kanban board to collect your sales pipeline bottlenecks. Share the list with everyone involved in the sales pipeline and crowdsource ideas.

3. Know what your CRM can do

You don’t need to hire an expensive CRM consultant to understand how your CRM’s automation works. Spend time reading your CRM vendor’s automation documentation (for example, check out Insightly’s automation guide). Ask yourself these questions as you dive in:

• Which CRM records (i.e., leads, contacts, etc.) can be used to trigger an automated workflow?
• Does my CRM allow me to use multiple criteria (i.e., bid amount, deal status, etc.) when building automated rules?
• Can actions be scheduled to occur on a future date rather than occurring immediately?
• What are the different types of actions (i.e., send an email, update a record, etc.) that are available?

Reminder: Don’t forget to check if workflow automation is included in your current CRM plan level. If it’s not included, perform a basic ROI analysis to determine if the cost of upgrading is worth it.

4. Sequence your biggest pain points

Now it’s time to sequence your bottlenecks to decide what you should automate first. Remember, you want to identify the one thing that will have the biggest impact on your sales pipeline but is also easy to implement (given your CRM’s capabilities as previously discussed). There are numerous ways to do this, but I suggest keeping it simple:

Impact

Large = 1 point

Medium = 2 points

Small = 3 points

Size

Small = 1 point

Medium = 2 points

Large = 3 points

If you’re using Insightly, you might use tags to assign an impact and size rating to each item. Then use your project kanban board to drag and drop cards into a logical order. Use a golf-like scoring methodology to give preference to cards with low scores (i.e., large impact, small size).

Bonus tip: If there’s a tie between two or more cards, ask for feedback from other stakeholders in the sales pipeline. After all, you want buy-in on the automation that you’re building.

5. Automate one sales workflow at a time

Notice that the headline says one workflow—and not several.

Don’t be tempted to automate too many things at once, especially if this is your first attempt at automation. There are enough decisions to make in building a single workflow. Distributing your focus will only lessen your ability to think strategically and clearly.

For the sake of discussion, let’s imagine that you’ve identified inbound lead automation as the highest impact, lowest effort initiative. Your SEO and paid promotion is paying off and generating more inbound inquiries; however, you lack a scalable system to deal with the influx. You’re looking to automate the following steps to engage more inbound leads and reduce manual effort:

• Immediately send a welcome email to the lead
• Assign a task to an SDR for follow-up
• Send a second email a few days later

If you’re an Insightly user, check out this helpful guide, How to configure an automated workflow. Before you start making any adjustments in your CRM, however, it’s wise to diagram your ideal workflow. Use descriptive words to explain exactly what you want to happen. Here’s a simple illustration:

Use your diagram as a guide for implementing workflow triggers and actions that help you achieve your goal. Refer back to it often—especially if you feel like you’re getting lost in the weeds when evaluating workflow criteria.

Suggestion: Test your workflow in a limited scope before rolling it out across your entire sales team. During testing, you might assign automated tasks to yourself instead of to your SDRs. This approach allows you to make any final adjustments and ensure everything is working as intended.

6. Use data to measure success & plan your next move

Workflow automation should have a measurable impact on your sales key performance indicators (KPIs). In an example with inbound lead automation, you can expect to see a noticeable improvement in one or more of the following areas:

• Email response rate from inbound leads
• SDR appointments with inbound leads
• MQL-to-SQL ratio for inbound leads

Use data from your CRM to track desired and actual outcomes. If, after a few months, you notice very little change (or a change for the worse), perhaps it’s time to make a few adjustments. Ask users for their input, too. What seems to be working? What makes their lives easier? What, if anything, has created new challenges? Look for opportunities to improve and continuously refine the workflows that you build.

Insightly tip: Insightly dashboards can help you visualize your data so you know what to tweak and what to automate next.

CRM automation helps you scale your sales pipeline

Automated CRM workflows play a pivotal role in helping you create a more scalable sales process. Shore up your existing CRM pipeline, understand your vendor’s capabilities, and use data at every step of the process to build workflow automations that make an impact.

Continue reading about CRM workflow automation to see what it can do for your business.

If you want to learn about Insightly CRM’s advanced workflow automation capabilities, request a free demo and see how you can better equip your sales team.

Request a demo

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The proliferation of CRM software today illustrates this point. The value of the global CRM market grew from $15.4 billion (USD) in 2016 to $40.2 billion in 2019. That’s a dramatic 260% increase in three years. Experts predict that growth to continue at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.2% between 2020 and 2027.(1)

We’re now seeing “unified CRM platforms” emerge as early CRM technology evolves. Unified CRMs incorporate additional business functions, such marketing automation, into a CRM platform without the need to manually sync sales and marketing data. This digitalization of previously-manual processes delivers extensive benefits to sales and marketing organizations. Plus, it’s forcing a shift in how B2B businesses conceptualize and approach sales.

However, the internal adoption of digital business technology remains a challenge for many businesses. In the case of B2B sales, managers, directors, and executives must champion digital tactics to support this transition. Below, we share five tips to streamline digital transformation in B2B sales.

5 Tips for B2B sales teams

Digital business models will inevitably dominate the near future of B2B sales, yet many businesses find the transformation difficult. Use the tips to minimize the challenges and successfully transition from analog to digital B2B sales processes.

1. Identify & adopt emerging technology

Spotting emerging technology and adopting it early on is key to a successful transformation. For example, the first companies that adopt unified CRMs almost certainly outpace their competition today.

It’s fairly simple to identify high-potential, emerging technology early enough to get a head start on the competition. But you need to understand existing technology and its gaps and be open to new ideas or ways of doing business in order to recognize it when you see it.

Adoption is the difficult part. You can invest in a software system and implement it in your company, but that’s not adoption. You achieve adoption across your company once your entire organization embraces and uses this new technology on a daily basis. And that takes some work.

Some employees push back because they’re happy with the way things are done and see no need to change. Some simply don’t use the new system and stick to their old ways. Others aren’t as technologically-savvy as you’d like them to be and challenged by learning new systems. All of this is true for senior management and executives as well as entry-level employees.

Fortunately, there are easy ways to surpass these hurdles, most of which are covered in the steps outlined below. And if you’re struggling with CRM adoption, there are plenty of tips to increase CRM adoption rates. Once employees see the benefits digital technology delivers and how it makes their lives easier, their concerns tend to disappear.

2. Prioritize internal training & onboarding

Because engaging in a digital transformation requires businesses to invest in new technologies, training is essential. The most powerful technology in the world is worthless unless users know how to leverage it properly. That’s why onboarding sales teams and investing in comprehensive training is essential. B2B companies shouldn’t undervalue the importance of having an effective success plan for CRMs or any other technology.

While initial training and onboarding of new users is critically important, user education shouldn’t stop there. Continued training on new features and capabilities ensures your initial investment maximizes your ROI. It also provides B2B sales teams with digital skills that will continue to benefit them throughout their careers. In Europe, the data from 2018 informs us that 90% of all jobs already require some level of digital skills.(2)

3. Educate users about the benefits

It’s hard to deny the efficiency and productivity gains that digital technology provides to businesses of all types. B2B companies and their sales teams are no exception. If B2B companies educate salespeople on the benefits digital technology can provide to them, they’re more likely to adopt it.

We can again use CRM software to illustrate this point. Because CRMs automate manual tasks, salespeople can spend more time on prospect interactions and building stronger relationships with customers. In a B2B setting, this equates to more new customer acquisitions and increased levels of cross-sell and upsell opportunities. Those, in turn, lead to more deals won and more commission earned by B2B salespeople.

4. Embrace data analysis & digital insights

Trusting data and its sources is a major roadblock on the journey to a successful digital transformation. However, the data and insights provided by digital technology are two of the key benefits of digital transformation.

First, B2B sales revolves around building trusted, long-term customer relationships. Building those relationships is easier when sales has access to digital insights around customer behavior, buying patterns, interests, challenges, etc.

Today’s CRM solutions capture extensive data that B2B salespeople can use to form rapport with customers. CRMs with marketing automation capabilities like customer journey mapping let sales reps maintain insight into where customers are in their decision-making and which resources they need at each stage of that journey.

Furthermore, B2B sales leaders and executives can leverage this data to make more informed, data-driven decisions. This is key because the right data gives decision makers insight into untapped opportunities for business growth. Indeed, 51% of companies that engage in digital transformations say identifying growth opportunities in new markets is the leading motivator behind their decision to start that transformation.(3)

5. Commit to & enforce digital sales processes

In order for a digital transformation to be successful, B2B sales managers must fully commit to supporting the effort. They also have to enforce new sales practices and consistent use of new technology when interacting with their teams. This may sound easy, but it can be a challenge.

There are tactics sales managers can use to smooth the transition to a digital business model. One of which is to clearly communicate to their teams that it is a priority for executive leadership. If sales reps realize that not adhering to new processes and consistently using new technology carries consequences, they’re more likely to fall in line.

Constant check-ins when first implementing new technology help sales managers ensure their teams are adhering to these changes. Plus, digital businesses have access to technology that can alert them when their reps don’t use the system. A unified CRM, where sales and marketing data are fully integrated, makes it easy to identify incomplete processes or data gaps.

Pulling it all together

Ultimately, B2B sales organizations have more than enough incentives to support digital transformation. Sales managers who are actively involved in a digitally-transformed business can attest to this. Survey data indicates that 32% of IT decision makers say that digital transformation has already helped them to achieve revenue growth. They go on to report that the growth they’ve experienced represents a 23% increase in annual company revenue, on average.(4)

Ready to start your digital transformation? Connect with Insightly for a free needs assessment and a unified CRM product demo.

Request a demo

Sources:

1. Customer Relationship Management Market Size, Share & Trends Analysis, Grand View Research, 2020
2. The Impact of Technological Innovation on the Future of Work, European Commission, 2019
3. The State of Digital Transformation, Altimeter, 2019
4. State of Digital Business Transformation, IDG Communications, 2018

The post Tips for digital transformation in B2B sales appeared first on Insightly.

Despite the compelling reasons to switch, organizations frequently settle for the status quo. The simple truth is that switching CRMs can feel risky and costly. And, without the right data, staying put usually feels like the safest choice. But is it the best choice?

Here are tips for using data to make an informed technology decision.

Use data to establish a baseline value of your current CRM

Before you can forecast the potential gains of switching CRMs, you must accurately assess the current situation. Your current CRM can be an excellent source of objective business intelligence.

User activity data

Activity reports provide transparency into how staff actually use your CRM. Email volume and task completion reports are common examples. Ideally, each user should consistently use the system on a daily basis, thereby generating a large amount of activity data across every department and role. However, if the majority of activity is linked to a single user (or handful of users), it’s possible that staff do not understand how to use your CRM. Or, perhaps users find the system cumbersome. Either way, activity reports make it easier to identify usage trends for further investigation.

Lead & contact volume data

One of the most common CRM use cases is relationship management. All things being equal, a healthy sales and marketing operation that proactively uses CRM technology should yield more customer data with each passing period.

However, when temporary downturns evolve into prolonged trends, you’re probably facing one of two situations. Either your lead generation efforts are not working, or you’re dealing with data integrity issues. If it’s the latter, your CRM may suffer from broken integrations or excessive manual data entry. Broken integrations send bad data (or no data at all). Excessive data entry causes fatigue, which produces missing or incomplete data.

Milestones data

Milestones are important future dates that serve as guideposts to keep projects on track. Does your team track milestones in your current CRM? If so, what percent of milestones are completed on time and to specification?

If your CRM contains minimal milestone data, team members might be tracking their work in data silos that are difficult to assess and overcome.

Revenue data

You can’t blame your CRM for sluggish revenue growth. That being said, a substandard CRM, low user adoption rate, or overpriced systems can all affect your business revenue.

If sales are down, perhaps it’s time to ask your users for input. A quick survey could yield eye-opening insights—especially if users spend more time on data entry than prospect engagement. Ask your SDRs and AEs to share their opinions. Find out their pain points and frustrations. How have these inefficiencies impacted revenue performance?

Ask the right questions to identify relevant data for objective decision-making

Switching CRMs is not like waving a magic wand. Substantial planning and research is necessary. Even then, there’s no guarantee that changing vendors will outweigh the costs of staying put. That’s why you need to back your decision with data, and lots of it.

To make an objective, data-driven evaluation for your business, consider these questions before switching.

What are the current & long-term costs of maintaining the status quo?

Calculate the subscription and support fees charged by your current vendor. Has this expense remained relatively constant over time? If it has increased, by what percent annually? Do you anticipate a similar increase each year going forward? What are the intangible opportunity costs of continuing to rely on this vendor?

How does total cost of ownership vary by vendor?

Now it’s time to gather cost data from other CRM vendors. Factor in obvious tangible costs such as software licenses, support fees, and ongoing consultant support. Also consider opportunities to reduce system overlap. For example, switching to a unified CRM and marketing platform could lower costs by eliminating third-party email and web analytics apps.

What is the cost of implementation & training?

If your data structure is relatively simple, switching CRMs might be a painless experience. However, if you have years of relationships and custom objects to map, things can get complicated. Someone must export, clean, and import your data. Do you have the in-house capacity and expertise to pull this off? Staff will also need upfront training and ongoing coaching. What is the opportunity cost for filling (or outsourcing) that role?

Some companies, like Insightly CRM, offer support and guidance throughout the switchover process, including tools to easily migrate all your CRM data.

What are your sunk costs?

One of the most painful parts of switching CRMs involves the time and money that’s been thrown at your legacy CRM. Staying put doesn’t help the matter, and at a first glance, switching may feel counterproductive. Spend time estimating your sunk cost if, for no better reason, to avoid such mistakes in the future.

How will switching impact revenue & productivity?

Obviously, answering this question may rely on educated guesses. However, even educated guesses should be backed by real-world data.

For example, let’s assume your legacy CRM does not easily integrate to your inbox. Based on a survey of your 25 sales reps, you estimate that integrated inboxes could save twenty minutes per day per user. Here’s how the math works out:

20 minutes per day x 25 sales reps x 260 work days = 130,000 minutes (2,100+ hours) saved per year

Now, apply that time savings toward more productive activities, such as prospect outreach, in-person visits, and online demos. In this context, estimating the revenue impact of a switch becomes more clear.

Make an informed data-driven decision

At the end of the day, there’s not an off-the-shelf formula to weigh all the pros and cons of switching CRMs. Rather, your business leaders must do the work, ask the right questions, gather all of the relevant data points, and synthesize the data in a way that makes sense for your unique situation. In doing so, they will lay the groundwork for objective decision-making that aligns with your long-term vision.

Ready to switch CRMs? Request a demo and get a free needs assessment and personalized product demo to see if Insightly CRM is the right match for you.

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The post Switching CRMs vs. staying put appeared first on Insightly.

Over the past decade, I’ve worked with numerous clients across multiple industries and sectors. Although most clients use a CRM, I have encountered a few who do not. Drawing from first-hand experience, here are seven downsides of running a business without a CRM.

1. No source of truth

Spreadsheets, inboxes, documents, and your brain. These are just a few of the data silos that exist in your business.

Data silos have many negative consequences on your operational efficiency and are difficult to overcome—especially when you’re not using a CRM. After all, where do your people go when they need timely and accurate information? Their inboxes? Your shared network drive? Or, do they just call each other and ask for help? Without a single source of truth, your team spends more time looking for data than actually using it.

Data should propel your business forward—not create new obstacles to success. Without a central source of truth, the obstacles are plentiful.

2. You can’t see the “big picture”

Successful business leaders effectively use data to inform their decision-making. They also regularly set time aside to ensure data is timely, accurate, and, most importantly, useful. From pipeline value to customer retention to website engagement, data-driven metrics form the basis of modern management.

Of course, it’s hard to gain the necessary insights when data is spread all over the place. As a result, organizations that do not use CRM technology tend to rely purely on gut feelings as opposed to real-world performance metrics and forecasts.

In short, you can’t see the “big picture” when you don’t know where to look—or what to look for.

3. Relationships are harder to understand

Stop and think about your ten most important client relationships.

How did you acquire these customers? Were they the result of a successful advertising campaign, or did they all come from word-of-mouth referrals? Now multiply the same questions across your entire customer base. Sure, it may be possible that you have all the answers, but does the rest of your team?

CRMs are built to help you track, understand, and strengthen business relationships. Features like record linking and advanced reporting help you and your entire team know—with certainty—the original source and impact of each relationship.

Without a CRM, you’re forced to rely on anecdotes, which become less reliable as you scale your business.

4. Less control over your data

Let’s assume that you track all of your customer data in a shared spreadsheet. Although better than nothing, spreadsheets have several shortcomings that limit the control of your data, including your ability to:

Restrict access to data

You may be able to protect certain tabs of a spreadsheet, but within the tab itself there is less control. This becomes problematic when you need to restrict customer data from specific users. Case in point, your sales rep in the northwest district does not need to see the leads from the southeast district. Unfortunately, making this work in a spreadsheet is difficult—if not impossible.

Ensure data integrity

What happens when a user accidentally deletes a row in your spreadsheet? Days or weeks may pass before anyone even notices. Once the issue is identified, how will you know who made the oversight or how many other accidental changes were made? It’s impossible to ensure data integrity with spreadsheets.

Maintain data compliance

We live in a world increasingly concerned about data privacy and security. Ensuring total compliance with regulatory and industry-specific guidelines is complex enough even when you have the right tech stack. Spreadsheets and homegrown databases are not built for data compliance. It’s just that simple.

5. Productivity issues

Your team can’t be productive unless they have a clear understanding of what they’re supposed to do. When delegations are spread across multiple inboxes, chat threads, and team collaboration platforms, staff become overwhelmed and feel unable to focus and make progress.

Centralizing all of your work into a CRM that’s built for project management alleviates this confusion, resulting in elevated productivity and motivated team members. And, since your CRM houses all of your customer relationship data, tasks and projects can be easily linked to relevant records, providing an additional layer of transparency and accountability.

6. Confusion about what’s actually going on

Speaking of transparency, do you know what staff are working on each day? Are they focused on the priorities that deliver the greatest impact?

Without the right technology, it’s difficult to know for sure.

Integrating all of your project management data into a CRM provides much-needed clarity for your leadership team. Data-driven productivity reports provide instant visibility into who is getting the most work done. Notes, tasks, and linked emails deliver detailed insights into the life of each project. Kanban-style project boards offer an intuitive and visually appealing format for collecting ideas, sequencing work, and accomplishing more goals.

7. Bad data

The only thing worse than no data is bad data.

Bad data comes in many shapes and sizes and from many sources. That’s why fixing and preventing bad data is not easy—even with a well-structured CRM. Without a CRM, you lack a consistent format for collecting and organizing data, which makes your job even more challenging.

Harkening back to our spreadsheet example, let’s consider your organization’s process for tracking lost deals. When a deal is lost, sales reps simply key in a freeform explanation of what happened. Over the course of dozens or hundreds of deals, however, making sense of countless paragraphs of unstructured text becomes untenable. As a result, sales managers stop reading the summaries and, eventually, sales reps stop providing feedback altogether.

By contrast, a CRM can be configured to display an intuitive picklist when deals are marked as lost. With the click of a mouse, sales reps simply select the reason and get back to work. No more long-winded paragraphs. No more typos and missing details. Just the facts. This approach standardizes the data entry process, reduces the potential for bad data, and enhances your ability to run meaningful reports and course-correct.

Time for a CRM?

Implementing a CRM may seem like a relatively low priority given all of the other moving parts in your business. But, maintaining the status quo can have lasting negative effects on your organization and hold back growth.

Take time to assess your business needs, then seek out platforms that can easily adapt to your unique needs and help you reach business goals.

Get started with a free needs assessment and a product demo from Insightly.

Request a demo

The post 7 downsides of running a business without a CRM appeared first on Insightly.

We were happy to receive feedback from our customers and in this release we’re introducing advanced reporting tools, new dashboard visualizations, and platform and productivity improvements that we’ve developed with our customers’ feedback in mind. We’re also unveiling Insightly’s new help center and community portal with user guides, FAQ section, and content for specific use cases and industries.

Watch the Q2 2019 Product Release Webinar where Insightly CEO Anthony Smith introduces new features.

Check out the new Insightly Help Center.

New Quotation & Product Reports

Our new advanced custom quotation and product reports allow you to select and filter opportunity products and quotation line records, group and sum them, and build reports that you can schedule and email straight to your inbox on a custom schedule.

You can also:

• Run these reports at anytime from within the reporting system
• Share these reports with other users
• Set custom user permissions

Availability: Enterprise Plan

Product & Price Book Dashboard Additions

You now have the power to drill into product and quotes data and visualize trends and spot patterns using over 75 different chart and map types. Chart and map both opportunity products and quotation line items with our new dashboard visualization capabilities.

For example, you can map out which of your products have sold best in different states or territories, or how many quotations have included specific products at different times of the year.

Availability: Enterprise Plan

Custom Fields in Tasks & Events

Better manage your time and projects with our new custom fields in Tasks and Events. Track exactly how much time it takes to perform different individual tasks and automatically roll up that info to see the calculated summary times for all tasks in a project or opportunity. To learn how to do this and to better understand calculated fields, check out this step-by-step tutorial in our help center.

This new feature makes a lot of our customers happy and is available on Insightly web app as well as on our Android and iOS apps.

Availability: All Plans

Drag and Drop Layout Editor

With our advanced layout editing you can easily organize all relevant and important information and declutter your view in both details and related tabs.

Use drag and drop tool to easily add and remove fields, change the order of fields on the page, and modify sections for different users in both details and related tabs. Choose which tables or grids you would like to see on the related tab and in which order.

Availability: All Plans

Flexible Multi-Column Layouts

This is another widely-requested feature from our customers that brings total flexibility in the page design and views. You can now customize individual sections on a page layout to be adapted to multi-column instead of single column. View all key information in small laptop displays and large external monitors at the same time, with the software switching to multiple columns if the screen is wide enough.

And because you can set the multi-column layout per section, you can preserve the single column layout where it makes sense for you.

Availability: All Plans

Improved Data Entry, Linking, and Lookup

Save time and clicks with our new data entry and productivity additions.

Add a record (contact) and simultaneously link other records to it (organization data) in the same motion. You can do the same with inline linked records for all forms in Insightly, including your custom objects and fields.

Gain more visibility and insights into the depth and scope of your relationships with any contact. Use new table in the related tab to view peers, co-workers, and other key connections of your primary contact. With our new page layout editor for the related tab, you can also choose where on the page you would like to see this new table.

Availability: All Plans

Notifications

Never miss an Insightly notification simply because you’re in another app or browser tab. This is great for multitaskers who are always switching between apps as well for users who keep lots of browser tabs open.

By default, on a Mac the notifications pop up in the top right and in Windows they appear in the bottom right. Both operating systems also keep a history of those notifications, so you can click to see prior notification from earlier in the day.

Availability: All Plans

Insightly Help Center

Our customer success and service teams have been hard at work improving the Insightly help center to make it easier for our customers to search for relevant content and learn new tips and insights.

Look up articles and videos with beginner guides, product tips, and best practices to make the most out of Insightly.

Check out the new Insightly Help Center.

Coming soon: Insightly Marketing

During the webinar, Insightly CEO Anthony Smith also previewed brand new Insightly Marketing! To get a sneak peek, watch the webinar.

The post Insightly’s reporting & productivity tools just got more powerful appeared first on Insightly.

We are excited to announce that Insightly has been recognized as an April 2019 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Sales Force Automation.

We take great pride in this distinction, as customer feedback continues to shape our products and services.

In its announcement, Gartner explains, “The Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice is a recognition of vendors in this market by verified end-user professionals, taking into account both the number of reviews and the overall user ratings.” To ensure fair evaluation, Gartner maintains rigorous criteria for recognizing vendors with a high customer satisfaction rate.

Here are some excerpts from the customer reviews that helped us earn this distinction:

• “Beast in WorkFlow Automation, will integrate with all major services you use. Go for it.” — Founder in the Education Industry Gartner Peer Insights (December 23, 2018)
• “Tracking contacts, managing projects, and sales all in one platform is everything I need. Perfect for almost any company size.”— Sales and Marketing Professional in Manufacturing Industry, Gartner Peer Insights (February 14, 2019)
• “The system is extremely user friendly and very customizable. We have a unique business model that requires a lot of custom fields and layouts, and Insightly had no issues accommodating to those custom fields. You can’t beat the price either! Half the price with twice the options as other big name CRM [softwares].”— Operations Supervisor in the Finance Industry, Gartner Peer Insights (October 17, 2019)

Learn more about this distinction!

Want to know what other Insightly customers have to say about our product and services? Read more reviews for Insightly on Gartner.

As Anthony Smith, our CEO and Founder, says, “As we execute on our product roadmap to meet the needs of our customers, we are always looking for ways to innovate even further, and welcome any and all feedback our customers share with us on Gartner Peer Insights.”

We thank all our customers for sharing their feedback with us. If you’re a customer and have an Insightly story to share, we encourage you to join the Gartner Peer Insights crowd and weigh in.

Not a customer yet? Request a free demo.

The Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice badge is a trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates, and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved. Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice constitute the subjective opinions of individual end-user reviews, ratings, and data applied against a documented methodology; they neither represent the views of, nor constitute an endorsement by, Gartner or its affiliates.

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