If you’ve never asked this question, now is the time. In today’s competitive and uncertain economic landscape, you can no longer afford to look at your CRM as a glorified contact database. Either your CRM helps you grow faster, or it doesn’t.

Here are three possible reasons why your legacy CRM might be slowing down your business and tips for using technology to accelerate growth.

1. You don’t have a complete view of the customer journey

The customer journey is the sum of all interactions that your organization has with each customer. Phone calls, sales and marketing emails, online product demos, webinars, website visits, and support tickets are just a few of the ways that customers interact with your brand.

Each interaction can have dozens of related data points to collect and manage. For example, consider the amount of data that is generated from a single onboarding call with a new customer:

• Contact record additions and updates
• Emails between the meeting organizer and attendees
• Calendar invitations
• Email opens, clicks, and forwards
• Tasks that keep your team on track leading up to the call
• Slide decks and related documentation that is provided to the customer
• A call record that captures the time and date of the conversation
• Notes about the outcome of the call
• Additional calendar invites for future calls
• More tasks so your team makes good on their promises

Now, multiply this example across all of the interactions with all of your customers. That’s a lot of data.

Effective use of customer data is time-consuming (or impossible) when your CRM fails to offer the right mix of features and usability. As a result, users fall back into old habits and rely on data silos—instead of keeping your CRM as their primary source of truth. Data integrity issues worsen, leading to more data silos and a fragmented view of the customer.

Key takeaway: If you want a more complete view of the customer journey, start by selecting a CRM that makes it easy to securely collect, centralize, use, and manage your business data.

2. Users spend too much time on data entry & non-value added activities

In order to obtain a better understanding of the customer journey, some companies overcompensate and create new bottlenecks for users. This is especially true when your CRM lacks the necessary integrations and built-in functionality to simplify data collection.

Here are several common situations that divert users’ attention away from prospecting, outreach, and other higher impact activities.

Keying in data that’s already in users’ inboxes

Email is still the most common form of business communication and so many business professionals continue to spend a lot of time manually transferring data between their inboxes and CRM. CRMs that offer inbox integrations reduce manual data entry by enabling users to save email messages and link them to the appropriate contact records.

Juggling multiple usernames, passwords, & user interfaces

One system for your sales pipeline. Another for your email newsletters and drip sequences. Still another for managing contracts. Maintaining multiple systems requires users to (securely) keep track of multiple sets of login credentials. They also have to gain a certain level of expertise to use each system efficiently. By contrast, a more scalable approach harnesses the power of a unified CRM, which dramatically reduces learning curves and centralizes data, processes, and workflows under one roof.

Requesting & sharing only anecdotal feedback

Traditionally, CRMs and marketing automation systems were two separate (yet integrated) databases. Leads in your marketing automation system only made it into your CRM after crossing a predetermined lead score threshold—and not a moment sooner. Once converted to an opportunity in your CRM, your marketing team lost visibility and relied primarily on anecdotal feedback for insights into the customer journey.

Key takeaway: Identify a CRM that allows you to align sales and marketing with a proper lead disposition process and frees up users to focus on growth-oriented activities instead of keying in data, jumping between systems, or coming up with CRM workarounds.

3. Data-driven decision-making is not possible

Data collection is not the only piece of the puzzle. Without the tools to convert the data into actionable insights, a massive database of emails, records, files, and interactions offers minimal value to your business. Ideally, your CRM should deliver a suite of visualization and reporting features to help staff use data in their decision-making.

But making data-driven decisions is difficult, if you’re constantly dealing with:

Broken data integrations

Relying on overlapping systems for sales, marketing, projects, and other business processes can present challenging technical issues. Sometimes integrations do not work as intended. Other times they stop working altogether. Either way, you’re now dealing with bad data that must be resolved before any meaningful data analysis can occur.

Remote accessibility challenges

Now more than ever, users need secure and remote access to timely business insights. If you’re relying on a legacy, on-premises CRM, I’m sure that you can relate to this point.

Lack of built-in BI & flexible reporting

Even if your data is fresh, clean, and accessible, it’s still relatively meaningless without the right set of analytical tools. Sure, there are many third-party business intelligence (BI) tools on the market today, but connecting your CRM creates another integration point that will require ongoing maintenance and oversight. Look for a CRM that bakes data visualization into its user interface. Insightly’s dashboards are worth a look.

Key takeaway: Data is a key asset for your business. Look for a CRM that solves your data headaches—instead of creating new ones—and makes it easier to use data to inform your decision-making.

Accelerate growth with a better CRM

Thinking about switching to a CRM that’s optimized for growth? Request a demo with an Insightly rep to receive a free business and data needs assessment.

Request a demo

The post 3 reasons your legacy CRM is slowing down growth appeared first on Insightly.

But, finding these folks doesn’t have to be difficult. With the use of customer relationship management (CRM) data, you can gain extensive insight into who calls the shots and who influences purchase decisions at a given prospect company.

Here is a list of recommendations that can alleviate the burden of finding and engaging with the right stakeholders in your B2B sales outreach.

Start with buyer personas

Buyer personas are hypothetical profiles of your ideal buyers. They outline this person’s role in the prospect organization, including whether they are a user with limited influence over the decision, a middle manager with significant influence, or the actual decision maker.

Buyer personas also include demographic information, challenges, goals, pain points, interests, etc. In the B2B sales, you need multiple buyer personas as there are several people involved in the decision-making process.

More people are involved in the decision than ever before

Research from 2017 indicates that the number of people involved in a B2B purchase decision is growing. In 2016, 5.2 people were involved on average. That rose to 6.8 people in 2017.(1) And, according to Gartner, “Today’s B2B buying involves more stakeholders than ever before. The median B2B buying group involves six to 10 decision makers.(2)

The importance of buyer personas

Buyer personas are critically important to a streamlined sales process. They help sales and marketing identify prospects that appear to be the best fit for your product or service.

Creating accurate buyer personas requires some legwork, but the end result is worth the effort. When you know your target buyers, it’s exponentially easier to identify and qualify them.

Use your CRM data to find the right decision-makers

CRM solutions like Insightly collect and store loads of data that can be referenced to make informed decisions. CRM data includes information and insight into previous won and lost opportunities. Use that data to find opportunities for similar organizations in your CRM solution and inspect the results and notes included for each respective opportunity.

Which contacts were added to that opportunity? How are they connected/related to other contacts in the same organization? How did each contact contribute to the decision-making process? Identify common reservations expressed by those contacts. If many of the contacts associated with a won opportunity align with the roles of your buyer personas, dig deeper into that opportunity to reveal additional insights.

Use your CRM data, and features like relationship linking, to gain a full picture of each opportunity and you’ll start to understand why some were won and others lost. Avoid mistakes made by reps who lost opportunities and focus instead on tactics that led to won opportunities. This will lead you to identify the contact roles that had the greatest influence on the company’s final decision, and ultimately who the key decision-makers were.

Know your target prospect before reaching out

It is important to conduct substantial research into a target prospect’s organization and its industry before you ever reach out. If your organization adheres to a strict data collection process, your CRM can provide important data about your prospect. This data can even indicate who the key decision-makers might be.

Social media research

Use social media to identify those in your prospect organization that fill the roles outlined in your buyer personas. Read up on them to see what makes them tick so you can more easily and quickly form rapport and trust with your initial outreach.

Look for common connections

LinkedIn is the best social platform for prospect research. As you conduct research and identify the contacts you wish to reach out to, look for shared connections. If you spot one, you can reach out to your contact and request an introduction. An introduction from a known contact is highly effective because it comes with a dose of trust by default.

Read customer reviews to augment what you already know

Look for company reviews on social media and sites like Google My Business to see what your prospect’s customers have to say. This can help you discover variables that are holding the company back so that you can address them in your outreach.

Identify primary pain points & explain how you’ll eliminate them

As you conduct your research, you will form a detailed profile of your prospect and its key decision-makers. Focus on what the organization needs but does not have. Identify key challenges and pain points that are stifling the company’s growth. Pinpoint the daily problems each relevant participant in the decision-making process faces on a daily basis. Do the same for the organization as a whole.

Zeroing in on those pain points, challenges, and problems provides a more accurate picture of the prospect’s needs. With this insight, you can tailor your outreach to explain how your product or service will eliminate those headaches. Educate the decision-makers—and those involved in the decision-making process—about a problem they potentially don’t know they have. Then form your outreach in a way that provides a solution to it. This is one of the best ways to capture a prospect’s attention.

Make a list of qualifying questions for your first conversation

Once you convince a contact to speak with you, use that initial conversation to qualify the company’s need for your offering. You can do this by asking pre-defined qualifying questions developed specifically for your prospect and its use case. These questions will vary depending on your industry, product, and the makeup of your target audience.

However, certain questions are relevant and important to ask in virtually every industry. For example:

1. What is the primary business challenge you’re trying to address?
2. What are your overarching goals and what is your ideal timeline for accomplishing them?
3. What are you looking for in a new partner?

PRO TIP: Use specific language when making first contact with a new prospect. Make it clear that you seek to be their partner in success. Personalize the conversation by speaking in terms of “you” and “I” rather than “we.” This makes the conversation more informal and interpersonal, which lets you develop trust and rapport much quicker.

To learn more about sales qualifying questions, take some insights from this article.(3)

Why qualifying questions are key to success

It’s crucial to quality a prospect’s need for your offering as early in your dialogue with them as possible. Qualifying questions help sales validate the purchase intent of each prospect and confirm that the company is a good fit for your product.

If you don’t qualify from the outset, you can waste hours of time courting a prospect that will never convert. Qualifying questions eliminate that risk and allow salespeople to focus their time on the prospects with the highest win probability.

Final point: Don’t forget the decision influencers

The person who gives the final green light for a B2B purchase decision typically holds an executive position. However, digging into all the nitty-gritty details of a particular product or service is often too far in the weeds for them. They typically don’t get involved at such a granular level. Instead, they rely on their team leaders and power users (of a product or service) to conduct evaluations and provide recommendations. B2B decision-making is a multistep process.

While a team manager or director may be a key decision influencer, the person behind the curtain, or the power user, may be driving the entire decision. If you can start your outreach with decision influencers and form a strong rapport, you can turn them into advocates for your product or service.

Read more like this:

• How to use buyer enablement to win more customers
• The new B2B purchase process
• How to use lead scoring to make faster sales
• Aligning personas with the buyer journey
• How to use a CRM for business development
• Why failing to follow up sends the wrong message to prospects

Sources:

1. “The New Sales Imperative,” Harvard Business Review, 2017

2. Gartner for Marketers “Marketing-Fueled Buyer Enablement**,” 2019

3. “25 Sales Questions to Qualify Your Leads Faster,” Neil Patel, 2020

The post How to find the right decision-makers for B2B sales outreach appeared first on Insightly.

Lead disposition helps you streamline your marketing and sales efforts, so that you spend the right amount of time trying to nurture or convert certain leads. There are a few tips to help you manage your lead disposition process, and one of them is having a clearly defined prospect scoring, or lead scoring, system.

In this post, we want to show you how to create a lead scoring system, so that you can better execute your existing lead disposition process.

Why use lead scoring

Let’s first take a look at why lead scoring is so integral to the lead disposition process, and the actual ways it can help you make faster sales from highly qualified leads.

Prioritizing leads

Use lead scoring to identify hot leads, or prospects that are most likely to convert into an actual sale. More specifically, use lead scoring to easily determine which of these leads have scored high enough in your matrix (more on this later in the post) to be moved into the next stage of your sales process.

On the other side of the spectrum are cold leads. Some of them may require additional nurturing, while others shouldn’t be disqualified and removed from the contact list. With lead scoring, you can effectively keep track of your recent interactions and attempts to re-engage or nurture any leads who show signs of dropping off or turning cold.

Identifying top subscribers and net promoters

One added benefit of lead scoring is being able to identify your top existing customers, who can become your net promoters or affiliates for your products.

Reviewing your net promoter score vis-à-vis your lead scoring matrix can tell you if any customer might be able to refer your products/services to other prospects or if they’re more likely to remain as passives (users who are satisfied with your product but are vulnerable to competitor offers) or detractors (unhappy users who may damage your brand and business growth with word-of-mouth).

Your lead scoring matrix can even tell you if your business is able to start implementing a referral or affiliate program. Determine how engaged and loyal your customers are, start predicting your net sales per product when you introduce affiliate earnings as expenses, and invite those loyal customers to be your first promoters.

How to start lead scoring for your business

1. Align your sales and marketing teams

The first prerequisite for your lead disposition process, and ultimately your lead scoring process, is to align your sales and marketing teams.

Marketing teams should know when exactly a lead is considered a SQL that’s ready to go through the next stage of the sales process. Sales teams can provide valuable insights about what makes leads convert to a sale, so marketing teams are able to tweak and improve their campaigns for lead generation and lead nurturing.

2. Revisit your buyer personas

Once you’ve aligned your sales and marketing teams, work together to revisit your buyer personas. At minimum, your personas should cover all these information:

• Name
• Demographics
• Pain points
• Goals
• Favorite features of your software or product
• Biggest concerns about your software or product
• Decision-making power
• Ability to buy

Revisit your existing customer profiles to update or change your buyer personas.

Having all the required minimum information plotted in your buyer personas can help you create a more accurate lead scoring system from the onset.

3. Create a lead scoring matrix or point system

A typical lead scoring point system goes from 0 to 100 points. But, of course, you’re free to design a matrix that makes more sense to your team and your business.

In this matrix, you will essentially be plotting specific behaviors or criteria that apply to a lead or customer, which is then awarded a specific number of points or score.

The most important thing to note while you brainstorm this matrix is to award specific behaviors—or criteria—that indicate a higher likelihood to purchase with higher points, and that these criteria or behaviors really do indicate higher interest to purchase.

Make sure to cover different criteria about your customer’s behaviors, then assign points based on each. Let’s look at a few specific examples.

Profile criteria

These include demographic information that apply to your customers. Businesses may assign a lead 1 point if they are a small local business earning X amount of annual revenue, but give them 2 if they are a medium-sized business earning Y annual revenue.

Leads may get 10 points if they are a sales manager but only 3 points if they are a junior salesman.

Behavioral criteria

Behavioral criteria are specific actions or behaviors your customers take to engage with your brand and may indicate interest to purchase or learn more about your product.

You will need to include behaviors that apply to specific campaigns, such as a webinar, for example. So leads are awarded 10 points if they signed up for a webinar and then receive 20 more points if they attended live.

Also consider any repeat behaviors that may indicate interest, including viewing a landing page or sales page multiple times or inquiring about a product via multiple channels.

For example, a possible lead scoring matrix for a website and domain host company may include “signed up for a free account,” “looked at current promo for hosting plan,” or “checked logo maker landing page 3 times” in their set of behavioral criteria.

Negative criteria

As best practice, include negative criteria in your matrix, which are those that tell you a lead is an unqualified lead and is not worth pursuing further. For example, they may be an intern or university student looking for general information or someone who is based in a country where you can’t do business.

This also covers behaviors like no email opens, clicks or other engagement with marketing campaigns for the past X months, unsubscribing from emails, or reporting your emails as spam.

4. Define consumer behaviors that point to interest

Create a range or threshold to indicate to your marketing team that a lead is hot enough to move into the next stage of the sales process. Anyone who doesn’t meet this criteria may require more nurturing, so your marketing team will be able to follow up with them.

Use your lead score to pinpoint several ideal scenarios that indicate a lead is now sales-qualified, then add up points for each to determine just what makes a sales-ready lead.

For example, perhaps a lead responded to a cold email campaign and asked for more information about your offer. Or another lead attended one of your webinars and clicked the link to your sales page.

5. Consult sales team for logic errors

Your sales team can provide valuable insights about your existing customers and the indicators that truly point to interest or require more lead nurturing.

Consult your sales team for errors in your assumptions, so your lead scoring matrix is as accurate as possible.

6. Connect with your CRM and other tools

Your next step is to plot your lead scoring system to your CRM. Wherever possible, integrate your tools together so that each behavior and criteria can be scored automatically, depending on your users’ actions. If you use a unified platform, like Insightly, you can streamline the entire lead management process and simplify sales and marketing integration.

7. Monitor and evaluate results

It’s best not to expect you’ll have the perfect lead scoring system in place right away. These tips are meant to help you create one as accurately as possible at the beginning. Over time, you will notice areas for improvement and update your system accordingly.

Keep monitoring your results. See if your assumptions about SQLs are reflected correctly in your lead scoring matrix. If not, adjust your point system to reflect the most accurate behaviors and criteria that point to SQLs being ready to purchase.

Start lead scoring to shorten your sales cycle

Speed up your sales cycle by targeting your warmest leads and spending time nurturing everyone else. Use the steps above to figure out exactly which leads are worth pursuing and which ones might require less effort, if any at all. Just be sure to keep monitoring your results to determine how to continually improve your systems.

Read more like this:

• What is lead disposition?
• 12 tips to generate qualified leads from a sales webinar
• Why use marketing automation?
• Lead generation vs. customer retention

The post How to use lead scoring to make faster sales appeared first on Insightly.

Businesses of all sizes—regardless of industry, product, or service—are facing an increasingly complex situation when it comes to managing all of their data. Customer data can be especially difficult to manage; yet, it’s the most important type of data that a business owns.

So, what should a modern organization do to effectively manage all of their customer data? Implementing a CRM is an essential step. That being said, simply signing up for a new piece of software (or switching CRMs) is no guarantee for success.

To reduce risk of failure and maximize the impact of customer data, forward-thinking companies take a strategic approach by proactively organizing and centralizing their customer data. In this post, we’ll discuss why customer data is so important, how a CRM can help, and best practices for structuring your CRM so that it provides clarity (and not confusion).

Why a structured approach to data is worth the effort

Before we dive into specifics about organizing your CRM, let’s briefly reflect on why doing so is worth the effort. After all, you’re a busy person. Your team is busy. Spending time on non-revenue producing activities, such as data organization, can feel like a major distraction.

On the other hand, failing to effectively manage customer data can have devastating consequences on your business. When data is spread across inboxes, spreadsheets, shared documents, and other data silos, your teams cannot perform at peak efficiency. They spend more time chasing down customer contact information than actually engaging the customers they aim to serve.

Organizing customer data in a central, shared database overcomes the inefficiencies of data silos by providing:

• Quick and easy access to relevant customer information
• A single source of truth for internal collaboration
• Transparent reporting for enhanced accountability
• Less confusion, fewer overlapping systems, and a lot less craziness

And, you have to keep in mind the growing concerns about data privacy and security—especially in light of recent regulations, such as GDPR. In today’s business environment, proactive data management has rapidly become an essential element of compliance and risk management.

How a CRM helps

One of the most challenging aspects of managing customer data is knowing the right way to structure it.

Sure, you could keep everything in a spreadsheet on a shared network drive. That’s certainly one approach to managing customer data (and, surprisingly, one that many companies still rely on). However, do-it-yourself solutions, like spreadsheets, have a number of obvious drawbacks—not the least of which includes a lack of structure.

To illustrate this point, let’s imagine that you’ve been tasked with building a spreadsheet to house all of your accounts, contacts, and leads. Where would you even begin? Should leads and contacts be maintained on separate tabs? Which column headers (data fields) would you create? What would be the best way to draw connections between organizations and their related contacts? Where will sales reps add their updates and notes? Organizing customer data in a spreadsheet is not as easy as it may seem. Too much flexibility, it turns out, creates nothing but confusion.

Compare this approach to that of using a CRM, like Insightly. Unlike a spreadsheet, most CRMs come with prebuilt data structures that help you bypass basic questions about data organization. As an example, Insightly’s standard record management structure looks like this:

Prospective customers are entered as lead records. Leads are converted to opportunities, organizations, and contacts. Once opportunities are won, they’re converted into projects. Each lead, opportunity, contact, and project has a set of standard fields that help to ensure consistency of data collection.

As a relationship advances, the entire customer journey remains perfectly intact. Nothing gets lost along the way, and there’s no time wasted building pivot tables for reports. Everything feeds into a customer data management system that’s already been tested by tens of thousands of customers who have gone before you. (Of course, you can always customize your CRM to your exact needs, if necessary.)

In short, a CRM provides an intuitive, out-of-the-box solution for collecting and managing data in alignment with your customer journey. After all, not every customer buys on day one.

Best practices for keeping data clean & organized in your CRM

Simply adopting a CRM will not solve all of your customer data management headaches. Yes, the standardized data structure will help; but, it’s also possible that new CRM-related issues can occur. To prevent such issues and elevate the usefulness of customer data in your CRM, consider these best practices.

Stay focused on adoption

Some companies fail to successfully implement their CRM. Failure has many causes, but lack of user adoption is certainly at the top of the list. Adoption is not a one-time project. Smart companies establish ongoing accountability measures and training programs aimed at maximizing system utilization—and, as a result, ensuring that users are collecting customer data as expected.

Integrate & consolidate systems where possible

Relying exclusively on manual data entry is not a fail-proof strategy. People forget and make oversights. Supplementing manual data collection with automated CRM integrations increases the flow of customer data and lessens the administrative burden on end users.

Better yet, look for ways to reduce the need for third-party integrations and simplify your tech stack. For example, with a unified CRM for sales and marketing, users no longer need to build data integrations to third-party email marketing automation systems.

Set guidelines, definitions, & naming conventions with accountability measures

What exactly is a “lead”? When should a lead be passed to your sales team for follow-up? Should operations use the customer’s name when naming project records? These are the types of questions you’ll frequently encounter without a well-defined set of guidelines, definitions, and naming conventions. Even then, you’ll still need a way to audit the system and proactively minimize bad data.

Limit user permissions

Members of your sales development rep (SDR) team probably do not need access to sensitive customer billing information. Likewise, a graphic design contractor who occasionally helps with email marketing campaigns may not need access to customer names or emails. Be selective about who can access and edit your data.

Be strategic about customizations

True, it would be nice to know each customer’s date of birth so that account executives can extend their birthday greetings. But is this data field actually necessary to the success of your business? Does it move the needle enough to impact your bottom line? Scrutinize every customization idea in light of its impact on business.

Customizations, when used strategically, can be helpful. When used flippantly, customizations can create clutter, distractions, and muddy your data.

Dispose of data when appropriate

Collecting and organizing customer data should not be confused with data hoarding. Not every record should be retained indefinitely. Developing an effective disposition strategy can keep data tidy and align with ongoing data security and compliance initiatives.

Elevate customer relationships with better data management

Data management processes and systems may not help you increase sales or decrease the cost of goods sold on day one. However, when done the right way, prudent use and collection of data can have a lasting impact on the long-term health of your company—especially as you scale your operations to serve even more customers.

Ready to organize your customer data? Request a demo with an Insightly rep to receive a free business and data needs assessment.

Request a demo

The post How to organize customer data in a CRM appeared first on Insightly.

Now let’s go over the basics of setting up a lead disposition process and how to clear common obstacles along the way.

Setting up a lead disposition process

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that you and your team see the benefits of lead disposition and want to implement it at your company. Where do you start?

According to Insightly’s CMO, Tony Kavanagh, a logical first step involves aligning sales and marketing around a shared set of definitions and processes.

Agree on definitions

The following terminology must be collectively defined by marketing and sales operations and understood and agreed to by everyone in marketing and sales.

• 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

Agree on the ground rules

Once basic terminology has been defined, sale operations should provide marketing with a clear explanation of how leads will be managed from acceptance through disposition. A well-defined prospect scoring mechanism (see next section) should expedite the handoff from MQL to SQL. The goal should be for sales to accept leads as quickly as possible, thereby minimizing the amount of time that a lead sits in your CRM queue.

When it comes to disposing of SQLs, there are only four possible outcomes:

1. SQL is converted to an opportunity
2. SQL is not ready and is reverted to a prospect for further marketing
3. SQL times out (i.e., after 30 days) and is reverted to a prospect for further marketing
4. SQL is not a real lead and is completely deleted from the system (rare, but possible)

Regardless of the outcome, the need for sales and marketing alignment cannot be understated. Marketing depends on a continuous flow of feedback from sales to understand why certain leads were converted, deleted, or reverted. Sales depends on marketing to effectively nurture converted and reverted leads so that the pipeline never dries up.

Lead disposition, when done correctly, elevates sales and marketing alignment by necessity.

Build, refine, and align your infrastructure

Clearly defined terminology and rules make it easier to identify technology and automated workflows that enable effective lead disposition. At a minimum, you’ll need:

• Prospect scoring and grading mechanism that leverages activity data (such as website interactions and email engagement) and aligns with the buyer journey from visitor to lead
• Comprehensive nurture programs that complement your lead disposition rules
• Shared set of reports and business intelligence dashboards that reflect the buyer journey and include performance and profitability data by customer segment
• Tightly coupled CRM and marketing systems (or, better yet, an all-in-one system or a unified platform, that provides a single source of truth)

Of these four elements, ensuring CRM and marketing system alignment might be the most important to tackle first. After all, it’s hard to align teams around a common objective when data is spread across multiple data silos.

“When marketing and sales applications are disparate systems sitting on separate databases, failure to implement robust lead disposition process rules is forgiven, as implementation is difficult,” says Tony. “Neither marketing nor sales are willing to step up and own the process, and both sides can hide behind the artificial walls that separately-implemented technologies create.”

Don’t waste your lead acquisition efforts

As you think about a lead disposition process at your company, consider all the efforts that go into lead acquisition. Regardless of their size, industry, geographic location, or product/service category, all businesses want more leads that convert to customers. You spend a lot of time strategizing how to create awareness with larger audiences, engage them with compelling content, and turn anonymous visitors into leads.

Lead generation is hard work

Building a conversion-friendly website is an art. Creating high-impact content requires a unique blend of writing talent and SEO knowledge. Designing click-worthy banners and social graphics is an iterative process that involves multiple stakeholders.

Lead acquisition costs money

Pay-per-click advertising provides an excellent way to reach a large number of potential customers at scale. Unfortunately, paying per click can get expensive—especially in highly competitive markets. Some companies pay as much as $25 per click in order to drive consistent traffic to their websites. Assuming even an optimistic visitor-to-lead conversion rate of 5%, you’re looking at a cost per lead of $500. Leads are expensive to acquire, and it only gets worse with new market entrants.

Gain clarity with lead disposition

Your sales team is looking for higher quality leads with less clutter. Marketing wants transparency into why some leads convert and others do not. The best way to keep both teams happy is through lead disposition.

Challenge your staff to stop thinking of your lead queue as a final destination. Leads either become your customers, or they don’t. It’s time to build systems and processes that support this mentality. Your sales reps, marketers, and customers will thank you.

Looking for ways to align sales and marketing and make the most out of every lead? Connect with one of our reps to see Insightly’s unified platform at work.

Request a demo

The post How to set up a lead disposition process appeared first on Insightly.

• Contaminated customer data
• Suboptimal marketing campaign performance
• Weakened sales effectiveness
• Low ROI on marketing investments and lost sales revenue

Simply put, lead disposition is a true point of intersection for marketing and sales and plays a crucial role in growing your business revenue.

According to Tony Kavanagh, CMO at Insightly, lead disposition is the single most important part of the demand generation funnel flow, from visitor to customer, and beyond.

Decluttering eliminates confusion and fosters a greater sense of alignment between sales and marketing teams.

“Keeping your lead queue clean provides a clear field of vision for the people who go out and close deals,” says Tony. “It also enables a continuous feedback loop so that marketing gets the data they need to improve lead quality.”

Lead disposition example

Before going any further, let’s look at a basic example to illustrate how lead disposition works in an ideal world.

1. A new prospect raises his hand

A prospective customer visits your website and requests more information by submitting a webform. He provides his name, email address, phone number, and company name, which is sent to your CRM via a web-to-lead form.

2. Your sales team engages with the lead

An account executive (AE) from your sales team follows up to learn more about the lead’s needs. After a brief discussion, the AE realizes that the lead submitted the form by mistake and/or does not actually fit your company’s ideal customer profile (ICP).

3. The AE disposes of the lead record

Considering that the lead mistakenly filled out the form/does not fit your ICP, and will not be a fit in the future, your AE deletes the lead from your CRM.

Although this example seems rather straightforward, the reality is that most lead disposition scenarios are not so cut and dry. Most leads do not mistakenly fill out forms. Many leads fit with your ICP but lack engagement. Others are highly engaged but do not directly align with your ICP, creating an overflowing list of quasi-qualified lead records.

In short, knowing when to dispose of a lead record is rarely obvious—especially without the right set of rules and processes.

“Disposing” of qualified lead records

Now, what about leads that actually fit my ICP and are ready to be sales-qualified?

Obviously, true leads should not be deleted from your system. That being said, their lead records should still be disposed of as quickly as possible.

“The lead queue should never be used as a permanent location to keep leads. The goal of any business should be to empty the lead queue as quickly as possible,” says Tony. “Think of it as the place where marketing and sales compete in a never ending race with opposing objectives: marketing to fill the queue; sales to empty it.”

What’s the difference between lead deletion and lead disposal? Here are two ways to dispose of lead records without deleting them.

1. Convert the lead to an opportunity in your CRM

The most common way to dispose of a qualified lead record is to simply convert it to an opportunity, contact, and organization. If you’re an Insightly customer, here’s how to convert a lead in a few clicks.

2. Revert the lead to a prospect in your marketing system

Perhaps the lead isn’t ready to move forward but wants to stay in the loop. Or, maybe the lead unexpectedly went ice cold. Having your sales team continuously reach out is a waste of time, and converting the lead to an opportunity does not make sense. If you’re using a marketing automation system that’s tightly coupled to (or is part of) your CRM, you may be able to dispose of the lead by moving the person back to “prospect” status. That way, the prospect will continue to receive your nurtures and communications without clogging up the lead queue.

Benefits of a lead disposition program

According to Tony, implementing a lead disposition program requires close alignment between sales and marketing along with buy-in from senior level staff. Agreeing on a shared set of definitions, rules, processes, data, and technology puts an organization in the best position to reap the full benefits of a lead disposition workflow. Such benefits include the following.

1. Data integrity

Effective use of customer data is increasingly important to companies of all sizes and business models. Lead disposition accelerates effective data use by ensuring sales and marketing activities match up with your buyer journey personas.

2. Marketing campaign performance

Marketers cannot guarantee ever-increasing levels of return on advertising spend without outcome-based feedback from sales. Disposing of lead records (either through qualification, reversion to prospect, or deletion) provides marketers with the data-driven intelligence that’s necessary for making prudent advertising decisions.

3. Sales performance

Your sales team wants to do what they do best—sell. Parsing through dozens of random lead records is not an effective use of their time. Lead disposition aligns with their desire to sell by overcoming unnecessary clicks and decluttering the workspace.

Why aren’t more companies doing this?

Clearly, lead disposition is an innovative approach to managing the middle of your lead generation funnel. But, if it’s so innovative, why aren’t more companies actively strategizing about their lead disposition workflow?

Stay tuned for our next post that explores why lead disposition rarely occurs in the real world and what does it take to set up a proper lead disposition.

In the meantime, explore other sales and marketing topics and best practices on the Insightly Blog.

The post What is lead disposition? appeared first on Insightly.

Although your chief marketing officer (CMO) is happy, not everyone in the organization loves the change in direction. Sales reps, in particular, seem skeptical. As a result, turf wars have started to develop between the various departments.

Why hasn’t your sales team embraced this new source of opportunities? What can be done to fully maximize the value of each web lead?

Let’s explore why your sales reps are skeptical of inbound web leads — and what to do about it.

1. Marketing doesn’t keep sales reps in the loop

To gain the level of online visibility that has been achieved, your marketing team implemented a multi-faceted tactical plan. Content creation, pay-per-click advertising, email promotions, social media engagement, and link building are just a few of the team’s ongoing endeavors.

With so many moving parts, it’s proven impossible to keep the sales team up to speed.

Take, for example, the white paper campaign that launched last month. In a perfect world, the sales team would have been provided advance copies prior to distribution. Instead, marketing went live with the program and promoted the landing page via email, social, and several paid channels. The campaign generated a ton of buzz and delivered dozens of qualified leads. Sadly, the sales team lacked the proper context to effectively follow up, resulting in subpar revenue performance.

If the goal is to generate as many web leads as possible, your company is winning. However, if the goal is to attract and convert leads into paying customers, your company is failing. Just ask the sales team.

2. Your sales reps are already too busy

Even if marketing did a better job of informing internal stakeholders, there’s still no guarantee that sales reps have the capacity to manage a flood of web leads. After all, most of their time is already accounted for with higher priority items, such as:

Following up with existing opportunities: If given the choice between a warm opportunity or an unvalidated web lead, most reps are going to spend time on the warm opportunity. Doing so makes perfect sense.

Upselling to current customers: It’s easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one. Your reps want to see the company succeed, but they also want to earn more commissions. Focusing on the needs of existing customers is an easy way to achieve both goals.

Manually preparing reports: Because your company’s current CRM lacks easily customizable reports and dashboards, sales reps spend a considerable amount of time preparing and updating pipeline reports. Your company can’t be successful without these reports, and someone has to prepare them. This duty falls on the shoulders of the sales team.

Simply put, every waking hour of your sales team’s day is already booked solid. Naturally, following up on a list of unverified leads isn’t very high on anyone’s priority list.

3. Small window of opportunity

Unlike “traditional” leads (such as those originating from trade shows), web leads have a much smaller window of opportunity for engagement. The more time that passes, the less engaged a web lead becomes. This makes the follow-up process even more frustrating for your sales reps.

Here’s why.

Websites don’t have business hours

Your website is (hopefully) always online. Prospective customers often assume that someone from your company is also online (or soon will be). Although this may seem like an unrealistic expectation, it’s an expectation nonetheless.

Limitless alternatives

Think about the last time you invested an hour of your time researching vendors or service providers. You likely clicked through several websites, read about their offerings, and possibly filled out a few web forms. Do you recall all of the websites you visited or interacted with? Probably not, unless the vendor was quick to respond (if responded at all).

Your competitors are faster to respond

The first company to respond is more likely to win the prospect’s trust (and business). For the reasons we’ve already discussed, web leads are already low on the sales team’s priority list, but delayed outreach only compounds the issue.

4. Web leads can be a source of distractions

It’s understandable why sales reps think that web leads are so distracting. Hours pass with no new leads. Then, out of nowhere, a dozen new alerts appear in your reps’ inboxes. How can they reasonably be expected to deal with such unpredictability with everything else on their plate?

Thankfully, there are some basic things your company can do to reduce distractions and boost lead engagement. Consider these ideas:

• Use web-to-lead forms to automatically collect lead information in your CRM, rather than filling your sales team’s inboxes with hundreds of email notifications.
• Create lead routing rules to reduce duplication of effort and lighten the load on everyone.
• Implement workflow automation triggers to ensure each lead receives a personalized, timely response to his or her inquiry.
• Integrate to an appointment scheduling software tool and empower leads to book time on their own terms.
• Maintain tight controls over duplicate records to avoid unnecessary confusion.
• Hire a freelancer or part-time consultant to answer incoming live chat sessions.

In summary, your company needs to implement systems and processes that streamline the management of incoming web leads. Doing so will reduce internal distractions and deliver an improved experience for prospects.

5. Web leads tend to be “information gatherers”

In the seemingly rare circumstances when web leads are actually followed up with, your sales reps are notorious for saying things like this:

“None of the web leads are interested in buying anything — they’re just looking for free information.”

True, web leads can be a mixed bag that includes those who have no intention of buying your products or services. Therefore, calling and emailing every person who downloads a whitepaper isn’t the best use of your sales team’s time. On the other hand, some web leads, especially those who engage through live chat or request pricing information, may turn out to be extremely viable. Classifying all web leads as mere “information gatherers” is unwise and could prove costly for the company’s bottom line. What’s the right balance?

Using your CRM’s tagging functionality could provide a much-needed solution to your lead management difficulties. For example, grouping web leads by interaction type could add clarity to an otherwise confusing situation:

• Requested contact
• Downloaded whitepaper

By grouping leads based on website action, you give your sales team the ability to quickly hone in on those who are truly interested. Furthermore, by integrating your CRM to a marketing automation system (or better yet, using a unified CRM), you could automatically engage “information gatherers” without bothering the sales team.

6. There’s not enough visibility

With lead data spread all over the place, your company’s current process offers minimal visibility into what is working (and what’s not). To keep sales reps motivated and marketing on track, you need a CRM that delivers intuitive business intelligence reports.

As you evaluate the feasibility of switching CRMs, look for a system that can help answer questions like these:

Questions from sales

• What percent of “information gatherers” ultimately become paying customers?
• How likely are live chat leads to convert into opportunities?
• Which web forms indicate that a lead is highly qualified?
• Which traffic sources send the most engaged leads?

Questions from marketing

• What percentage of web leads are never followed up with?
• How can we simplify the follow-up process for our sales team?
• Which marketing programs should be continued or discontinued?
• What types of nurture programs do we need to convert “information gatherers” into qualified leads?

An effective CRM not only provides answers to these questions, it more importantly empowers users to extract key insights without help from the IT department. Good data is of minimal use if only a select few can access it.

Less skepticism, more sales

Switching from a purely outbound sales organization to a hybrid inbound model isn’t always the smoothest journey. The good news is that you’re well aware of the problem and proactively seeking solutions to address the sales team’s concerns.

In the long run, with the right mix of technology and business processes, you’re likely to experience less skepticism and a greater harmony between sales and marketing.

Ready to get a free needs assessment and see an integrated CRM in action? Request a demo. No commitment required.

Request a demo

The post 6 reasons why your sales reps are skeptical of web leads appeared first on Insightly.

• Sales & marketing alignment: People, processes, systems (Part 1)
• Sales & marketing alignment: The sales blitz (Part 2)
• Sales & marketing alignment: 3 best uses of data (Part 3)
• Sales & marketing alignment: Leadership (Part 4)

Once your leaders have aligned around a shared marketing and sales strategy, it’s time to shift the focus and align the rest of the organization. After all, even the best strategy provides minimal value when your frontline staff feel disconnected and disengaged.

So, how can you ensure that staff at all levels align their actions with the company’s goals – not just the interests of their own departments?

Today we’ll explore how cross-functional teams can help achieve organization-wide alignment. We’ll also take a look at how Insightly’s sales department leverages cross-departmental teams to achieve its growth pipeline objectives.

Fostering relationships that transcend departments

The term “cross-functional team” is often used in business to describe a team that consists of people from different departments or functions. While this definition may be commonly accepted, the best cross-functional teams have more in common than mere membership to a group. Excellent teams aren’t just built on to-do lists, accountability charts, or productivity metrics; rather, they’re built on real human relationships.

“Relationships form the glue that connects cross-departmental teams,” says Mark Ripley, VP of Sales at Insightly. “To achieve greatness, an organization’s leaders must continuously encourage the formation and advancement of internal relationships.”

What can leaders do to encourage the development of healthy cross-departmental relationships? One way to encourage healthier and more collaborative cross-departmental relationships is to organize regular off-site team-building events and activities. Such events allow staff to momentarily step away from the daily grind of their jobs and network with colleagues from across the organization.

“At Insightly, social offsite events have helped us build more synergy among staff,” says Mark. “People feel more comfortable in a casual and relaxed setting, which makes it easier to form relationships that transcend department, job title, and seniority level.”

Structuring your team for success

As people get to know (and like) one another, they become more interested in each other’s lives and are able to better communicate with colleagues from other departments. But, cross-functional teams can’t become an extended version of your offsite social events. Clear objectives, roles, responsibilities, and expectations must be set to ensure the team achieves its goal.

How can you structure your cross-functional team for success? As Insightly learned with its cross-departmental growth pipeline initiative, you first have to appoint a team leader who can “own” success or failure.

After appointing his leader, Mark then worked closely with leadership from other departments to build the cross-functional team. They identified stakeholders who had the right mix of skills, experience, and expertise to align the various sources of pipeline.

“We assembled a cross-functional team that includes stakeholders from sales, marketing, product, and customer loyalty,” says Mark. “The team selected a point person from each department to work closely with the overall owner and serve as a liaison between the teams.”

Defining & measuring success

After team members and roles are clearly defined, the cross-functional group can start peeling back top-level objectives into more specific action items. Teams should develop their own data-centric goals that align with the overall goals of the company. The team leader should facilitate the creation of team-specific goals and incorporate candid feedback from each point person. At Insightly, the team defined the growth pipeline success with a specific number of opportunities from different sources.

In many cases, it may be necessary to develop secondary metrics that support the primary success indicator. That’s where a data-driven CRM, such as Insightly, proves to be particularly useful. Creating interactive business intelligence dashboards provides stakeholders with the data visualization they need to measure success in real-time.

For example, the Insightly growth pipeline team uses its own software to create dashboards that monitor primary and secondary KPIs, such as:

• Number of opportunities by quarter, month, and day
• Opportunity volume by source
• Current opportunity volume vs. prior periods
• Campaign contribution to opportunity volume

Business intelligence dashboards also make it possible for cross-functional teams to work smarter and remain focused on the most impactful activities. Instead of slicing and dicing spreadsheets or running complex SQL queries, team members gain instant access to reliable and actionable data from any web-enabled device. Easy access to key data frees up more time for collaboration, leading to more meaningful discussions, fresher ideas, and more alignment.

“Cross-functional teams can’t afford to waste time manually crunching data,” says Mark. “Dashboards bypass many of the administrative bottlenecks that are traditionally associated with data-driven decision making.”

Accelerate alignment with a better CRM

Whether you’re operationalizing at the team level or just starting the alignment conversation, one thing remains constant: achieving sales and marketing alignment is difficult, if not impossible, without a rock-solid CRM.

If your CRM is inhibiting organizational alignment, maybe it’s time to take a fresh look at the market. Download this free eBook from Insightly and find out if it’s time for you to make a change.

Download the guide

The post How to operationalize sales and marketing alignment appeared first on Insightly.

With your sales department playing such an instrumental role, you might want to consider giving them an extra special gift this holiday season. No, I’m not talking about a premium subscription to the ‘jelly of the month’ club. I’m talking about turbocharging your CRM. Give your sales reps the full suite of tools they’ve been asking for.

Here are a few CRM gift ideas that are sure to be a hit at this year’s company holiday party.

Gift Idea #1: Visually Appealing Pipeline Management

Sales reps spend most of their time following up on individual leads and opportunity records. To ensure that your sales team is always working on the most important deals, you’ve probably built custom views and reports in your CRM. This is a great start, but it’s easy for reps to feel overwhelmed. A never-ending list of names and organizations is hard to get excited about. It can also make it difficult (if not impossible) to see the bigger picture, which directly impacts their motivation.

A more engaging pipeline management could be exactly what your reps have always secretly hoped for. But, how can you deliver a more visually appealing pipeline? One option would be Insightly’s innovative Kanban-style sales board.

Unlike most pipeline management platforms, which offer nothing more than a “snapshot” of the status quo, Insightly’s Kanban view allows your team to create, edit, and convert deal cards on the fly. Instead of drilling down into each lead or opportunity, making adjustments, and then clicking “back,” records can be modified without leaving the master Kanban view. In addition, cards can be moved to the next (or prior) pipeline stage with a simple drag and drop.

A Kanban approach to sales offers several tangible benefits. At a practical level, record editing is significantly expedited. Perhaps even more importantly, it offers an at-a-glance overview of what should be worked on first. And, to be honest, it’s just more fun than a boring lead list report!

Gift Idea #2: A Conversion-Friendly Signature Line

Have you ever calculated the total number of emails sent by your sales staff each year? The numbers might be astounding.

Here’s a quick, back-of-the-napkin example. Let’s say that you have a dozen sales reps and each one sends 30 emails daily. Now, multiply this by 260 work days, and you’re rapidly approaching 100,000 emails. Check out my math:

12 sales reps

x 30 emails

x 260 work days

______________

= 93,600 emails

That’s 93,600 unique touchpoints with your best prospects. You’ve already invested significant effort perfecting your marketing newsletter templates – why not also give your reps a more consistent (and conversion-friendly) signature line for outbound sales emails?

Most CRMs offer customizable signature lines. For example, Insightly makes it easy for you to include staff photos, add custom hyperlinks, and modify the HTML code. Of course, it’s best to provide staff with a standardized template for making these edits (that’s where your gift comes in). If this sounds like something your reps would appreciate, think through these questions as a next step:

• Who would develop the HTML code for the signature line template?
• Do we need to bring in a professional photographer if we plan to use headshots?
• Is now also a good time to adopt an online appointment scheduling tool?
• Should we have a graphic designer mock this up before handing it off to be coded?
• Would incorporating our company logo into the signature line be beneficial?
• What special offers or programs (such as a referral program) should we link to?
• Which UTM parameters should we utilize so we can track signature line clicks?

Gift Idea #3: A Library of Vetted Email Templates

Working in sales can sometimes feel like the wild west. Everyone is digging for the same gold, and there isn’t a moment to lose.

Continuing with this analogy, your sales team wants to spend more time panning for gold; unfortunately, too much of their time is spent on other activities (such as responding to email and composing new pitches). How can you help them free up time and find more gold nuggets?

This gift idea might be the perfect solution for your situation: a library of vetted email templates.

Now granted, your longest tenured reps already have their “go to” email templates. But, what about the new hires you’ve onboarded in 2017? Chances are, they’ve had to reinvent the wheel and start from scratch.

With a CRM like Insightly, creating a library of sales templates is simple. Just click the big red button and add your template. Once created, each new email template is automatically shared with each user on your account.

For the sake of discussion, let’s imagine your team struggles to cross-sell existing customers. Give the gift of simplified cross-selling with an optimized series of email templates. Here’s how:

• Create a diagram with the optimal follow-up pattern.
• Identify how many emails are needed.
• Work with your top cross-selling team members to craft the ideal messaging.
• Run the content past your editorial manager or content team (grammar counts!).
• Create the email template(s) in your CRM (Tip: Use a logical category structure).
• Show your team how to make the most of your creative gift idea!

Want to know if your gift is being appreciated? If you’re using Insightly, you’ll be able to see how many times each template has been sent, delivered, opened, and clicked.

Gift Idea #4: Lead Assignment Rules (without Drama)

“Why does he get all the big leads?”

Ever heard one of your sales reps mutter something like this? It’s definitely an annoying question to deal with. You do your best to be fair, but there’s always someone there to question your judgment. Sadly, with a manual lead assignment workflow, it’s difficult to escape.

An automated lead assignment workflow can reduce turf wars and improve relationships among staff. As an added benefit, you’ll also remove one additional bottleneck from your sales pipeline. No more waiting on a manager to review and delegate leads. Let the power of AI (artificial intelligence) do the “thinking” for you.

For example, if you’re a Pro or Enterprise Insightly user, you can build lead assignment rules to immediately assign new leads. Mix and match (using “and/or” logic) a variety of criteria, such as:

• City
• State
• Zip code
• Company size
• Lead source

You could also go with a pure “round robin” rule that rotates lead assignments evenly over time. Either way, by automating your lead assignment rules, you’ll be out of the drama.

After all, who could blame a robot for being unfair?

(On second thought, maybe this gift idea is more intended for you!)

Gift Idea #5: Post-Order Automation

Your sales team loves selling. It’s what they do best.

Here’s what they don’t like: dealing with the many post-sale details.

Currently, after a deal closes, your order fulfillment team takes over and begins tracking delivery in a spreadsheet. This works to a certain extent, but your sales reps inevitably get pulled into countless internal discussions. Much of the information that is needed resides in your CRM, but your fulfillment team finds it easier to pester the sales staff.

It’s time to draw a line in the sand and expect greater post-sale efficiency. How? For starters, your fulfillment team needs to trade in its spreadsheet for a more robust project management system. If you’re already an Insightly user, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn that the system also offers a built-in project tracking tool. There’s no additional charge for using this feature, and, sales records can be seamlessly converted to “projects.”

Depending on your fulfillment model, your team can harness the power of milestones and pipelines to ensure an ideal customer experience. You could also consider mixing in workflow automation rules to further cut down on administrative back and forth.

Best of all, your staff will have access to the “full story” of each customer’s journey. Sales notes, emails, attachments, conversations, and other important information remain fully intact when the record is converted to a project. This allows your fulfillment team to get the answers they need – without bothering your reps!

Give the Gift of Efficiency this Holiday Season

Your sales reps have ambitious goals for 2018. To make this a reality, you must continuously find new opportunities for optimizing their time. Committing to a more streamlined CRM setup and workflow automation could be one viable path.

So, before you stock up on novelty mouse pads or coffee mugs this holiday season, consider the gift of a more efficient CRM. Your sales team will love you for it!

The post CRM gift guide for your sales reps appeared first on Insightly.

If you’re like most business owners, you probably think of the sales process. Leads, opportunities, and new customers are all top of mind.

Although sales pipelines are vital to any company, a “project pipeline” can be equally useful from an operations standpoint. If you’ve never configured a project pipeline in Insightly, think of it as a way to avoid re-creating the wheel. Pipelines are great for things that follow a predictable pattern. As a project advances from one stage to the next, Insightly can even auto-assign tasks to individual users

In this post, I’ll share ten ideas for putting project pipelines to good use

1. Hosting a Customer Appreciation Conference

Your customer base is growing. To show your appreciation and keep them informed, you’ve started hosting an annual conference. Pulling off this event requires a ton of coordination and planning. The first year had its share of bumps along the way. However, you’ve since developed a rhythm for organizing the conference.

Rather than keeping a handwritten checklist or spreadsheet, why not build a project pipeline? This way, when the conference rolls around next year, you can simply add the new event as a project and, magically, all of the necessary steps are preserved from the prior year. For example, your conference pipeline could have the following stages:

• Preliminary planning
• Venue planning
• Official announcement
• Event promotion
• Collateral
• Day-of priorities
• Post-event follow ups

As you complete all of the associated tasks for a particular phase, your project pipeline helps you know what to work on next. After all, there’s no point working on an official announcement until you know where the event will occur.

2. Scaling Your Content Marketing

To get found on the search engines, you need to regularly publish excellent content. This often sounds easier than it really is. Your subject matter experts are too busy to sit down and write 1,000-word posts. Even if they had unlimited time, each writer has a slightly different style. It’s therefore no wonder why so many companies fail to produce content. Too many moving parts, and not enough foresight.

A pipeline can be a great tool for structuring (and scaling) your content marketing efforts. Break the process down into bite-sized, repeatable chunks, such as:

• Topic pitch
• In-process
• Editing
• Approval
• Publishing
• Live

For added firepower, you might try adding activity sets to your content marketing pipeline. This will keep everyone on task and reduce unnecessary confusion.

3. Exhibiting at Trade Shows

Your company exhibits at a handful of important trade shows each year. Although the events are at different locations, they all follow the same general sequence:

• Reserving the booth space
• Paying the vendor
• Making travel arrangements
• Ordering swag and brochures
• Shipping the booth to the exhibit hall
• Traveling to the event
• Setting up the booth
• Exhibiting
• Tearing down the booth
• Traveling back
• Following up with leads
• Evaluating ROI

To deliver a more streamlined pipeline, it might make sense to break this sequence down into less specific phases:

• Event sign up
• Pre-event planning
• Day-of event
• Post-event priorities

Remember, you can always link tasks to stages for a more detailed event plan. Traveling back, following up with leads, and evaluating ROI would be logical tasks to associate with your post-event phase.

4. Creating Your Social Media Plan

Social media isn’t just for your middle school niece.

Smart businesses leverage social media to drive conversions and increase customer engagement. One strategy for achieving this goal is to routinely publish share-worthy content. Unfortunately, great content doesn’t fall from the sky.

Creating a social media production pipeline can help you optimize the process. If you aim to produce on a weekly cadence, consider these phases:

• Collect content
• Draft plan
• Approval
• Scheduling
• Reporting

Depending on your preferences, you might choose to reuse the same project for future social media plans. This would be beneficial if you want to centralize all social media-related chatter into a single record.

If that’s not important to you, just ask your social media manager to create a fresh project each week (incorporating the same pipeline, of course). Is your social media manager somewhat forgetful? Assign a recurring task with explicit instructions and due dates, ensuring no weeks go by without a new social plan.

5. Fulfilling Customer Orders

Order fulfillment is the perfect use case for an Insightly project – especially when combined with a pipeline.

Let’s say that your company offers a variety of handmade leather products. Your catalog offers a few dozen SKUs, and your customers are online retailers and brick-and-mortar shops. When customers place orders, they typically do so by submitting a purchase order for several dozen units.

Although each SKU is unique and has a slightly different lead time, it’s safe to say that production follows this general workflow:

• Material sourcing
• Production scheduling
• Manufacturing
• Quality assurance testing
• Packaging
• Shipping
• Payment

It’s also worth noting that as pending deals become orders, Insightly allows you to convert opportunities into projects. This provides a 360-degree view of each customer’s order. Doing so also preserves all related emails, notes, and files. As the order advances through the manufacturing process, your team will have fingertip access to everything they need to do their jobs. No more hunting for information – it’s all right there in the electronic project file.

6. Performing Routine Website Maintenance

The web presents countless opportunities for today’s business owner. However, opportunity is not without risk. The internet is no exception to this rule.

Some business owners falsely assume that websites are a “set it and forget it” proposition. Not so, especially from a web security standpoint. In an age when government agencies and well-known brands are hacked, prudent business owners take steps to protect their online assets. One important step involves keeping your content management system up to date.

A pipeline can help bring order to your web maintenance program. If you’re using an open source CMS, your pipeline stages might look something like this:

• Backups
• CMS update
• Plugin updates
• Testing
• Backups
• Documentation

7. Recruiting Freelancers

It’s easier than ever to hire freelancers. Millions of freelancers are available via virtual work platforms, such as Upwork.com. And, the benefits of hiring freelancers are quite obvious to your business: no long-term commitments, less paperwork, and better talent.

As you add more virtual team members, you’ll need a better way to recruit and onboard them. Project pipelines can help you automate your freelancer management. For example, you could build a pipeline with these stages:

• Job post
• Invitations
• Shortlist
• Interviews
• Hire
• Onboard

As you use your pipeline to bring on more freelancers, Insightly can also automate some of the administrative tasks, too. If you’re a Pro or Enterprise user, you’re able to harness workflow automation to your advantage. Why is this helpful? Well, let’s say you want to automatically send new hires a welcome email shortly after onboarding. Insightly can send emails on your behalf, taking one more task off your overloaded to-do list.

8. Closing Out Your Books

We’ve all heard the saying about the two certainties in life: death and taxes.

Depending on your business model, taxes come due at many different points in the year. Estimated taxes are usually due on a quarterly basis. Sales tax varies by the state you’re in. And, your annual tax returns, always come due on (or around) April 15th.

For the sake of discussion, let’s focus in on your annual tax returns. Although you pay your CPA to “close the books” each year, there’s a fair bit of coordination on your end:

• Collect 1099s / docs
• Reconciliations
• Summary for CPA
• CPA work
• Review & approve

Since this process only rolls around annually, you probably find yourself reinventing the wheel each year. Once again, a well-structured activity set can help you know exactly what to do next. For the “summary for CPA” stage, you might associate a task that contains links to your reporting template along with detailed work instructions.

Stop starting over each year – put last year’s knowledge to good use!

9. Evaluating Software

Cloud-based software is revolutionizing how business gets done. For every problem, it seems there’s at least several tools that offer a solution.

Some companies make the mistake of having no formal software selection process. Departments are free to define their own internal selection criteria – or, worse, use no criteria whatsoever. To provide a little more structure to your team’s software selection, build a basic pipeline like this:

• Needs analysis
• ID vendors
• Demos
• Shortlist
• Selection

Even a simple pipeline (like the one outlined above) can provide your team with just enough direction to make an informed decision.

10. Mining for New Leads

Let’s bring this discussion full circle.

As I stated at the beginning of the post, many people associate the word “pipeline” with the sales process. If you’re still having a hard time associating pipelines with projects, here’s an example that might bring it together: data mining for leads.

It’s quite common for sales reps to spend a few hours each week mining for leads. Web forums, social media groups, and industry directories can be excellent sources. Sadly, not every rep knows what to do when instructed to “do some lead research.”

Bring order to the lead mining process with pipelines. The pipeline phases could be as simple as:

• Check sites
• Add leads
• Done

Obviously, you’ll want to spend time building out the first stage and include helpful tips. Would it make sense to trigger an activity set for each site to check? Or, would a single task with detailed instructions make more sense? It really depends on your business, but either solution is better than nothing.

Get Creative with Project Pipelines

I hope that this article has gotten your creative juices flowing. As you can see, project pipelines can really be a game changer when it comes to creating a more systematized business. Now, go out there and get creative with pipelines!

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